Remember that at least 1528 US soldiers have died for nothing in the Bush cabal's foolish military adventure in Iraq. Remember, too, that their grieving families are forbidden to take photos of their flag-drapped caskets. Remember that this debacle in the desert has cost you over $150 billion dollars. Remember that the Italian journalist (rescued by an Italian secret agent who was killed by US forces *after* the two had reached safety) wrote on the use of napalm and the bombing of a hospital in Fallujah prior to being kidnapped in Iraq...Remember that Osama bin Laden has yet to be brought to justice for the mass murder of innocents on 9/11/01...Remember that the US presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen from you...Remember that the US mainstream news media is worse than complicit in the Bush abmonination's crimes against the US Constitution and against humanity, it is a full partner in a triad of special interests (e.g., energy, weapons, media, tobacco, pharmacueticals, etc.)...Yes, of course, let’s sell F16s to the Pakistanis. They have done such an excellent job: harboring Bin Laden and high level Al Qaeda, providing nuclear weapons secrets to North Korea and others (use your imagination), etc. But, of course, none of it makes any sense…April Fool's Day...The maximum leader of the minimum-minded says, ”err on the side of life.” Except, of course, if the life is that of a US Marine or a National Guardsman or an Italian secret agent or a journalist from anywhere who refuses to crawl "embed." The maximum leader of the minimum-minded says, ”err on the side of life.” Except, of course, if the life is that of a five-month-old child (Sun Hudson) who had the plug pulled on him (in Texas under a law signed by the maximum leader for the minimum-minded while he was Governor) because the child's condition was "hopeless" and because his family could not afford the cost of keeping on the life-sustaining machines. The maximum leader of the minimum-minded says, ”err on the side of life," yet obstinately refuses to acknowledge, despite the overwhelming preponderance of data and the indisputable consensus of scientific opinion, that global warming aggravated by the consumption of fossil fuels is not only a grim reality but that it will be responsible for far more deaths than terrorism in the next few decades...The maximum leader of the minimum-minded dispatched his brother Jeb, satrap of Fraudida (and next in line to the imperial throne), to seize the body of the brain-dead Terri Shiavo against the wishes of her husband and the will of courts, in order to stick feeding tubes back into it, but, local authorities resisted. Was this the first skirmish in the second civil war and did we (not just progressives, the judge who is resisting and had to resign from his own church is a conservative Republican) win that first skirmish…”Err on the side of life”? April Fool's Day...For the Bush Cabal, a brain-dead hospice patient is the perfect voter. Randall Terry can fill out her absentee ballot for her and receive White House funding for it as a faith based initiative. April Fool's? No, the Death of the Republic. Unless you remember and resist, unless you restore fair elections and a free press to the USA...
The April Fool's Day edition of the LNS Oceania Review is organized into ten sections of important op-ed pieces and news items. Please read them and share them with others. They are available on the LNS site archive, with its searchable database, for the sake of researchers and students.
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Remember, resist and restore fair elections and a free press in America..
Walter C. Uhler, www.walter-c-uhler.com: In fact, if Professor Lukacs is correct, I should drop the references to Fascism and focus, instead, on the similarities to be found when comparing America's National Socialism under Bush with Germany's National Socialism under Hitler (never forgetting, of course, that Bush's naked aggression comes nowhere near Hitler's psychopathic willingness to exterminate or enslave entire populations)…
In fact, according to Lukacs, President Bush has depended on nationalism more than Hitler: "President Bush and his advisers chose to provoke a war in Iraq well before the election of 2004, for the main purpose of being popular. This was something new in American history… Not even Hitler chose war in 1939 to enhance or reaffirm his popularity with the German people, not at all." [p. 211]
Nevertheless, Lukacs refuses to predict that the "new barbarism all around us…will inevitably overwhelm us." [p. 242] When in despair, he recalls Edmund Burke, who said: "He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one." [pp. 242-243] Thus, he concludes, "Hitler and Stalin are gone, and George W. Bush will soon be gone, too; but then so are their German National Socialism and their Communism and so will be his 'conservatism.'" [p. 243]
Yet, the question remains: "How much more damage will Bush's National Socialism inflict on America and the world before it is tossed on the trash heap of history?"
City Pages: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?
Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name.
And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.
CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?
Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't.
Paul Krugman, NY Times: Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself...
Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs.
And it won't stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation…
But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer…
America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.
Editorial, The Nation: Apologists for these egregious compromises would have us believe that Democrats, as a minority party, have little leverage. But the Social Security debate belies such claims; with Democrats sticking together against privatization, it is the Republicans who have found themselves under pressure to compromise. The same goes for the Democratic refusal to give ground on ethics issues, which has done so much to increase pressure on scandal-plagued House majority leader Tom DeLay. Unfortunately, shows of solidarity on Social Security and ethics issues represent the exception rather than the rule when it comes to checking and balancing the White House and its Congressional allies. Again and again Democrats have failed the basic tests of an opposition party. They couldn't muster the forty votes needed to mount a Senate filibuster against Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General, only twelve Democrats opposed the nomination of Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State and none opposed the nomination of Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security, despite concerns about Rice and Chertoff that were as troubling as those regarding Gonzales's role in approving torture.
House Democrats have been even less effective in their opposition than their Senate colleagues... Despite polls showing that the vast majority of Americans opposed federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, only fifty-three Democrats opposed DeLay's move to override Florida state law and judicial rulings in a rush to satisfy the demands of the GOP's most extreme constituencies. Only thirty-six opposed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which Representative Jan Schakowsky correctly identified as a move to "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is free speech." And just thirty-nine rejected the Administration's demand for another $81.4 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and related military misadventures.
Death of the Republic?
March 24, 2005
Bush's America: Not Fascist, but National Socialist
By Walter C. Uhler
Having enthusiastically embraced a grad school seminar on the "Origins of World War II," I've long since assumed that I understood the distinction between Italian "Fascism" and German "National Socialism." Unfortunately, having just read John Lukacs' provocative new book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, it appears that my assumption was incorrect.
No, I'm not referring to my occasional exaggerated use of "Fascist" as an epithet, as in "Every free country is entitled to one Fascist TV network, talk show and newspaper. And, God help us, America already has Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Times." Such usage simply stoops to the level of those three fonts of right-wing propaganda.
Instead, I'm talking about the serious warnings I commenced sending to editors of a few newspapers in late 2002, in which I mistakenly conflated fears about America (under President George W. Bush) becoming Fascist with comparisons of Bush and Adolf Hitler. Of special concern was Bush's propaganda about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda (both of which proved to be false). Like Hitler's equally false propaganda about Polish mistreatment of Germans living in Danzig, it was used to justify an immoral, illegal invasion of another sovereign state—the highest of war crimes. As with Hitler then, much of the world now wonders whether the Bush administration's naked aggression will ever end.
Rather than disabuse me of my mistaken conflation, however, I received either no response or answers such as this one (on January 13, 2004) from The Philadelphia Inquirer's Commentary Page Editor, John Timpane: "The use of Hitler in rhetoric is jejune, shallow, facile, inaccurate, and self-undermining." One might imagine how Mr. Timpane would respond today, given that two prominent and highly respected historians, John Lukacs and Fritz Stern, have issued harsher and more informed warnings than mine.
In fact, if Professor Lukacs is correct, I should drop the references to Fascism and focus, instead, on the similarities to be found when comparing America's National Socialism under Bush with Germany's National Socialism under Hitler (never forgetting, of course, that Bush's naked aggression comes nowhere near Hitler's psychopathic willingness to exterminate or enslave entire populations).
As an epithet, "Fascist," probably has its origins in the Soviet Union, where Stalin sought to distance his highly nationalistic socialism (remember his emphasis on building "socialism in one country?") from Hitler's National Socialism. But, according to Lukacs, there are two reasons why Fascism doesn't apply to Bush's America.
First, Fascists believed in the "primary importance of the state." [p.119] Thus, "in the Fascist Manifesto of 1932, Mussolini proclaimed: 'It is not the people who make the state but the state that makes the people.'" [pp.119-120] Few of America's conservatives or Republicans would make such a statement today. Second, after 1938, "Fascism had become absorbed by and subservient to National Socialism, nearly everywhere." [p. 124]
Unlike Mussolini, Hitler asserted that the "Volk" preceded the "Reich," and "religions are more stable than forms of states." [p. 120] Hitler's populism propelled him to power. And, as Lukacs notes, with the eventual expansion of democracy (and, thus, the welfare state) to the working classes, "we are, at least in one sense, all national socialists now." [p.41] But with Hitler's National Socialism, as with George Bush's today, "nationalism was a more important factor of his people's loyalty to him than were the various social improvements and institutions [of the Third Reich]." [p.131]
In fact, according to Lukacs, President Bush has depended on nationalism more than Hitler: "President Bush and his advisers chose to provoke a war in Iraq well before the election of 2004, for the main purpose of being popular. This was something new in American history… Not even Hitler chose war in 1939 to enhance or reaffirm his popularity with the German people, not at all." [p. 211]
But, perhaps most ominous is the similar role that religion formerly played in Hitler's National Socialist regime and currently plays in Bush's. According to Lukacs, "what is more significant—and worrisome—is how nationalism, including Hitlerian nationalism, coexisted with religion in the minds of many people; and in that coexistence their nationalism was, ever so often, stronger and deeper than was their religion." [p. 131]
Fritz Stern's recent speech about Nazism (at the 10th Annual Dinner of the Leo Baeck Institute) contains passages that eerily capture recent American right-wing political behavior. He notes, for example, "a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture." Sound familiar?
And although he didn't have the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh to assist him, Hitler was "a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany's savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader charged with executing a divine mission." [Nov. 14, 2004 Speech at Leo Baeck Institute] Do not our president and many of his supporters believe the very same thing?
And like Bush's supporters today, Stern notes, "people were enthralled by the Nazis' cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared: 'The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.'" [Nov. 14, 2004 Speech at Leo Baeck Institute]
According to Lukacs, "the predominance of nationalism and socialism has governed American politics during the entire [twentieth] century." [p. 139]. The Republican Party is more nationalist than socialist, the Democrats are more socialist than nationalist.
Nationalism, however, is distinct from patriotism. Patriotism is defensive, associated with love of one's land and traditions. Nationalism is aggressive and associated with the myth of the people, the Volk. A populist "is always a nationalist of sorts." Liberals can be patriots, but almost never nationalists. Which explains why, in Lukacs' view, liberals are losing their electoral appeal.
What's worse, in Lukacs' view, is the recent tendency of Republican electoral majorities to weaken American democracy and strengthen populism by simply ignoring the legal assurances of minority rights. "Majority rule is tempered by the legal assurance of the rights of minorities, and of individual men and women. And when this temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing more (or else) than populism." [p.5]
Thus as America's republic devolved into a democracy now threatened by populism, officials who formerly gained office due to their popularity now gain office by publicity. The Republican's post-World War II anti-Communism and McCarthyism, whatever their actual merits, were conscious publicity campaigns designed to manipulate and capture the xenophobic hate of populist nationalists.
And notwithstanding his electoral success in 2004, Bush may have reached a new moral low in presidential politics when he started a war in Iraq to ensure his reelection. After all, to generate the hatred and evil accompanying a war of choice is a moral weakness that ill becomes a truly great nation. Moreover, as Lukas notes, hatred was Hitler's "main characteristic." [p. 208]
After considering how many Americans infuse their nationalism with religion, xenophobic hatred, and Abraham Lincoln's belief the we are "the last best hope of mankind," Lukacs fears that "the fate of mankind indeed seems catastrophic if Americans do not free themselves from the hope that they are THE last hope on earth." [p. 145] Yet, his argument here would have been stronger and more ominous, had Lukacs paid greater attention to what Andrew Bacevich calls "the new American militarism."
Nevertheless, Lukacs refuses to predict that the "new barbarism all around us…will inevitably overwhelm us." [p. 242] When in despair, he recalls Edmund Burke, who said: "He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one." [pp. 242-243] Thus, he concludes, "Hitler and Stalin are gone, and George W. Bush will soon be gone, too; but then so are their German National Socialism and their Communism and so will be his 'conservatism.'" [p. 243]
Yet, the question remains: "How much more damage will Bush's National Socialism inflict on America and the world before it is tossed on the trash heap of history?"
Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The San Francisco Chronicle and Philadelphia Inquirer, among numerous other periodicals. His article, "Democracy or dominion?" will be republished in Annual Editions: World Politics 05/06 (McGraw Hill) scheduled for publication in April. He is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association.
waltuhler@aol.com
http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/bush_america.html
• • Vol 26 • Issue 1268 • PUBLISHED 3/23/2005
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/26/1268/article13085.asp
HOME: www.citypages.com
The Undoing of America
Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free elections, and the late, great U.S. Constitution.
by Steve Perry
For the past 40 years or so of Gore Vidal's prolific 59-year literary career, his great project has been the telling of the American story from the country's inception to the present day, unencumbered by the court historian's task of making America's leaders look like good guys at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal's series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC in 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and through his ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across the years. Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own annual State of the Union message, in magazines and on the talk circuit. His words were always well-chosen, provocative, and contentious: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved," he told an interviewer in 1972, "if people would simply do as I advise."
Though it's a dim memory now, Vidal and commentators of a similarly outspoken bent used to be regulars on television news shows. Vidal's most famous TV moment came during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when ABC paired him with William F. Buckley on live television. On the next to last night of the convention, the dialogue turned to the question of some student war protesters raising a Vietcong flag. The following exchange ensued:
Vidal: "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of proto- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I'll only say that we can't have--"
Buckley: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."
That was TV in the pre-Information Age for you. These days Vidal, who put his Italian villa on the market a few months ago and moved full-time to his home in Los Angeles, speaks mostly through his essay writing about the foreign and stateside adventures of the Bush administration. In the past five years he has published one major nonfiction collection, The Last Empire, and a book about the founding fathers called Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. But mainly he has stayed busy producing what he calls his "political pamphlets," a series of short essay collections called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (2002), Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2003), and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004). Last month at Duke University, he produced a short run of On the March to the Sea, an older play about the Civil War that he has rewritten entirely.
I spoke to Vidal, who will turn 80 this October, by phone from his home in Los Angeles on March 9.
City Pages: I'll start with the broadest of questions: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?
Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name.
And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.
CP: You've observed many times in your writing that the United States has elections but has no politics. Could you talk about what you mean by that, and about how so many people have come to accept a purely spectatorial relationship to politics, more like fans (or non-fans) than citizens?
Gore Vidal: Well, you cannot have a political party that is not based upon a class interest. It has been part of the American propaganda machine that we have no class system. Yes, there are rich people; some are richer than others. But there is no class system. We're classless. You could be president tomorrow. So could Michael Jackson, or this one or that one. This isn't true. We have a very strong, very rigid class structure which goes back to the beginning of the country. I will not go into the details of that, but there it is. Whether it's good or bad is something else.
We have not had a political party since that, really, of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the highest class, an aristocrat who had made common cause with the people, who were in the midst of depression, not to mention the Dust Bowl, which had taken so many farms in the '30s. We were a country in deep trouble, and he represented those in deep trouble. He got together great majorities and was elected four times to the presidency. And launched us on empire--somewhat consciously, too. He saw to it that the European colonial empires would break up, and that we would inherit bits and pieces, which we have done.
If we don't have class interests officially, then therefore we have no political parties. What is the Republican Party? Well, it used to be the party of the small-town businessman, generally in the Middle West, generally sort of out of the mainstream. Very conservative. It now represents nothing but the gas and oil business. They own it. And the people who go to Congress are simply bought. They are lawyers who are paid to represent Halliburton, big oil, big banking. So the very rich corporate America has a party for itself, the Republican Party. The Democrats don't have much of anything but a kind of wistful style. They just want everyone to be happy, and politically correct at all times. Do not hurt other people's feelings. They spend so much time on political correctness that they haven't thought of what to do politically about anything. Like say "no" to these preemptive wars, which are against not only the whole world's take on war and peace, but against United States history.
This is something new under the sun--that a president, just because he feels like it, can declare war on anybody. And Congress will go along with him, and the courts will support him. The founding fathers would be mortified if they saw what had happened to their handiwork, which wasn't very great to begin with but is now done for. When you have preemptive wars, and you have ambitious companies like Bechtel who will build up what, let us say, General Electric has helped to destroy with its weaponry--these interests are well-represented.
There is no people's party, and you can't even use the word. "Liberal" has been demonized. A liberal is a commie who's also a pedophile. Being a communist and a pedophile, he's so busy that he hasn't got time to win an election and is odious to boot. So there is no Democratic Party. We hope that something might happen with the governor of Vermont, and maybe something will or maybe it won't. But we are totally censored, and the press just follows this. It observes what those in power want it to observe, and turns the other way when things get dark. Then, when it's too late sometimes, you get some very good reporting. But by then, somebody's playing taps.
CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?
Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't.
CP: You wrote at the end of a 2002 essay that so-called inalienable rights, once alienated, are often lost forever. Can you describe what's changed about America during the Bush years that represent permanent, or at least long-term, legacies that will survive Bush?
Vidal: Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has ceded its power to declare war. That is written in the Constitution. It's the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately. And having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever he finds terrorism. Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it doesn't mean anything. It's an abstract noun. You can't have a war against an abstract noun; it's like having a war against dandruff. It's meaningless.
But you can terrify people. The art of government now, the art of control as practiced by the current junta, is: Keep the people frightened. It's exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did. Keep them frightened: The Russians are coming. The Poles are killing Germans who live within the borders of Poland. The Czechs are doing the same thing in the Sudetenland. These are evil people. We must go after them. We must save our kin.
Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the more they'll believe it. There's nothing the average American now believes (because he's been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true. Now how do you undo so much disinformation? Well, you have to have truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day. And we don't have them.
CP: I'd like to ask you to sketch our political arc from Reagan down to Bush II. It seemed to me that Reagan took a big step down the road to Bush when he was so successful in selling the ideology of the market, the idea that whatever the interests of money and markets dictated was the proper and even the most patriotic course--which was hardly a new idea, but one that had never been embraced openly as a first principle of politics. Is that a fair assessment?
Published on Friday, March 25, 2005 by The Nation
Democrats: MIA
Editorial
from the April 11, 2005 issue of The Nation
After giving George W. Bush far too easy a ride in his first term, the Democratic leadership in Congress promised that the second term was going to be different. "This is not a dictatorship," announced Senate minority leader Harry Reid. The new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, declared, "The President neither has the mandate he thinks he has nor a majority to make policy." But three months of watching the Democrats' stumbling, often incoherent responses to Administration appointments and initiatives shows clearly that the party is making the same mistakes that cost it so dearly in the 2002 and 2004 elections.
It's easy simply to blame the GOP majorities in the Senate and House when bad legislation passes those chambers. But too frequently it has been Democratic disorder rather than Republican treachery that has made possible the Bush White House's legislative victories. That's what happened with the mid-March Senate vote on a budget amendment that would have protected the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Seven Republican senators voted to protect ANWR from oil drilling. Had the Democratic caucus simply held firm in support of the amendment, it would have won by a 52-to-48 margin. But three Democrats--Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana--broke ranks to back the Administration. All three had their excuses, and if this had been the only bill on which Democrats failed to hold together, it might not be a cause for serious concern. But this is hardly an isolated example of Democrats doing the bidding of the President and the special interests that support him.
Consider the February Senate vote on tort "reform," another issue on which Democrats are supposed to be the defenders of the common good against the rapacious Republicans. The battle lines could not have been clearer: Bush and his allies wanted to limit sharply the ability of citizens to file class-action lawsuits against corporations that injure or defraud them. A united Democratic opposition in the Senate could have mounted a populist challenge that might well have won GOP allies for a fight to preserve the sovereignty of state courts, which will be lost under the legislation. Instead, Democrats helped give Bush the first major legislative victory of his second term. Only twenty-six Senate Democrats opposed the proposal, while eighteen--including serial compromisers Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh and some who ought to know better, like Charles Schumer and Jay Rockefeller--sided with the GOP. It was just as bad in the House, where fifty Democrats--including Rahm ("no mandate") Emanuel--backed the bill, handing Bush an easy win that provides momentum for an agenda that includes proposals to restrict asbestos litigation and curb medical malpractice suits.
Even more disappointing was the mid-March vote on legislation designed to make it harder for middle-class and poor Americans to declare personal bankruptcy, leaving crooked companies like Enron free to declare bankruptcy themselves and thus be protected from claims like those by employees who lost their pensions. The vote on the measure, which had been blocked for years by such progressive Democrats as the late Paul Wellstone and a timely veto from then-President Bill Clinton, passed by an overwhelming 74-to-25 vote. Eighteen Democrats--including Reid and key players like Joseph Biden of Delaware and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico--aligned themselves with the President and the credit card companies that wrote and promoted the bill.
Apologists for these egregious compromises would have us believe that Democrats, as a minority party, have little leverage. But the Social Security debate belies such claims; with Democrats sticking together against privatization, it is the Republicans who have found themselves under pressure to compromise. The same goes for the Democratic refusal to give ground on ethics issues, which has done so much to increase pressure on scandal-plagued House majority leader Tom DeLay. Unfortunately, shows of solidarity on Social Security and ethics issues represent the exception rather than the rule when it comes to checking and balancing the White House and its Congressional allies. Again and again Democrats have failed the basic tests of an opposition party. They couldn't muster the forty votes needed to mount a Senate filibuster against Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General, only twelve Democrats opposed the nomination of Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State and none opposed the nomination of Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security, despite concerns about Rice and Chertoff that were as troubling as those regarding Gonzales's role in approving torture.
House Democrats have been even less effective in their opposition than their Senate colleagues. Despite polls showing that the vast majority of Americans opposed federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, only fifty-three Democrats opposed DeLay's move to override Florida state law and judicial rulings in a rush to satisfy the demands of the GOP's most extreme constituencies. Only thirty-six opposed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which Representative Jan Schakowsky correctly identified as a move to "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is free speech." And just thirty-nine rejected the Administration's demand for another $81.4 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and related military misadventures.
In 2002 and 2003 the Democrats tried the strategy of giving the President blank checks for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and then criticizing how the President spent them. That strategy cost the Democrats any chance to frame the debate about the war and ultimately cost them at the polls. But while some individual Democrats, like California Representative Henry Waxman, have come to recognize the folly of such an approach, the party as a whole continues to cede too much ground to the President--on Iraq and on most other issues.
Perhaps being shamed publicly, and being pressured by the grassroots, will help Congressional Democrats get their act together. Toward that end, we've initiated a biweekly "Minority/Majority" feature that identifies--by name--Democrats who give succor to the GOP. (It also praises those who've helped the cause of Democrats becoming the majority party again.) If Democrats don't define themselves as an effective opposition soon, they could end up being an ineffective one for a long time to come.
© 2005 The Nation
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0325-28.htm
Rob Zaleski, Madison Capital Times: Brian Joiner wishes he could "just get over it." He wishes he could ignore the thousands of reported voting irregularities that occurred in the Nov. 2 election, accept the fact that George W. is going to be around another four years and just hope that we haven't created even more enemies or fallen even deeper into debt by the time 2008 rolls around.
"I'm sure the Republicans would like me to forget all that stuff, just like they wanted everyone to forget all the strange things that happened in the 2000 election," the retired 67-year-old UW-Madison statistics professor said this week.
Well, sorry guys, but he can't.
There were, Joiner says, too many things that occurred on Nov. 2 that "still don't smell right." He can't just pretend everything is rosy, he says, when he reads that Steven Freeman, a respected University of Pennsylvania professor, says the odds of the exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being so far off were about 662,000 to 1.
Thom Hartmann: "Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."
The two brothers Mrs. Kerry is referencing are, according to voting machine expert (and founder of www.BanVotingMachines.org) Lynn Landes, in an article for the Online Journal, Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, and Todd Urosevich, who was vice president for customer support of Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES&S.
Presumably the "mother machines" Teresa was talking about are the "central tabulator" computers, like the Windows-based Diebold central tabulator PC that Howard Dean hacked into and untraceably changed an election on - in 90 seconds - live on the "Topic A With Tina Brown" CNBC TV show late last year.
As Dean noted while hacking the Diebold machine on national television, "In 1998, only 7% of all U.S. counties used electronic voting machines." But, Dean noted of the 2004 race, "in the next presidential election, roughly 1 in 3 of us will use one
Theft of the 2004 Election
Published on Saturday, March 5, 2005 by the Madison Capital Times / Wisconsin
Voting Glitches Haunt Statistician
by Rob Zaleski
Brian Joiner wishes he could "just get over it."
He wishes he could ignore the thousands of reported voting irregularities that occurred in the Nov. 2 election, accept the fact that George W. is going to be around another four years and just hope that we haven't created even more enemies or fallen even deeper into debt by the time 2008 rolls around.
"I'm sure the Republicans would like me to forget all that stuff, just like they wanted everyone to forget all the strange things that happened in the 2000 election," the retired 67-year-old UW-Madison statistics professor said this week.
Well, sorry guys, but he can't.
There were, Joiner says, too many things that occurred on Nov. 2 that "still don't smell right." He can't just pretend everything is rosy, he says, when he reads that Steven Freeman, a respected University of Pennsylvania professor, says the odds of the exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being so far off were about 662,000 to 1.
And since no one in the mainstream media has yet to provide a plausible explanation for such discrepancies - "investigative reporting essentially is just dead in this country," he groans - Joiner and many of his colleagues are going to continue to speak out and demand that government leaders provide some answers.
So that, at the very least, we don't find ourselves in the same situation in 2008.
But if the irregularities are as suspicious and troubling as he claims, why aren't John Kerry and other top Democrats making similar demands?
"Boy, I wish I knew," says Joiner, who was a volunteer observer for the Ohio recount in early December. Because you can sure as heck bet that Republicans would be screaming and demanding an investigation if Kerry had won under similar circumstances, he says.
"I think the Democrats read the tea leaves and think that people don't want to make a big fuss over this stuff. They'd just rather be quitters and move on."
Joiner knows full well some people will roll their eyes while reading this and dismiss him as yet another shoot-from-the-hip conspiracy nut.
Not quite.
In fact, he's among a group of prominent statisticians and academicians who contributed to a recent study that refutes a report by exit pollsters Edison and Mitofsky that exit poll errors on Nov. 2 were responsible for the unprecedented 5.5 percent discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results.
The study, done on behalf of US Count Votes, a volunteer scientific research project, not only disagrees with the Edison/Mitofsky findings but concludes that "the possibility that the overall vote was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously" and urges a thorough investigation.
Does Joiner personally believe the election was stolen?
"I don't know, that's a very tough question," he says. "But it's not clear to me that it wasn't, so it's a question of where the burden of proof is."
At the same time, Joiner says, he does believe the country's making a big mistake by relying so heavily on electronic voting machines.
"It's just too easy to hack those machines," he says. "And if they are hacked, how would we ever know?"
Joiner, incidentally, isn't the least bit surprised that the study - which was released Jan. 28 - has been virtually ignored by the media. Neither is Bruce O'Dell, vice president of US Count Votes.
"I think the mainstream media - like most Americans brought up to be proud of our Democratic traditions - simply assume that elections are honestly counted in the United States," O'Dell says. "They discount anecdotal reports of election irregularities and refuse to believe that systematic corruption could occur - even though serious, systematic vulnerabilities both in voting equipment and in counting procedures have been well-documented."
He notes that when reports of widespread voting problems occurred in Ukraine last year, both local and international observers quickly concluded the election had been stolen.
"But when precisely the same scenario occurred here, not only were mainstream journalists not alarmed, they quickly labeled those who questioned the results as conspiracy theorists."
O'Dell says US Count Votes wants to develop "a single database of nation-wide precinct-level election results, along with matching U.S. Census demographic information and the type of voting equipment in use."
Its ultimate goal "is to be able to gather and analyze data as it comes in on election night, and to spot vote counting problems in time for candidates to request an investigation or recount - before they concede."
And it hopes to have such a system in place by 2006.
Kjell Doksum, another UW-Madison statistician, says that if US Count Votes accomplishes just one thing, it's that there's a "paper trail" for every vote cast in 2008.
"This is easy to achieve," he suggested in an e-mail.
"Start a rumor that the Democrats have the world's best hackers and are going to fix the machines the next time."
Copyright © 2005, Capital Newspapers.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0305-23.htm
Published on Thursday, March 10, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Teresa Heinz Kerry - Hacking the "Mother Machine"?
by Thom Hartmann
"Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."
The two brothers Mrs. Kerry is referencing are, according to voting machine expert (and founder of www.BanVotingMachines.org) Lynn Landes, in an article for the Online Journal, Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, and Todd Urosevich, who was vice president for customer support of Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES&S.
Presumably the "mother machines" Teresa was talking about are the "central tabulator" computers, like the Windows-based Diebold central tabulator PC that Howard Dean hacked into and untraceably changed an election on - in 90 seconds - live on the "Topic A With Tina Brown" CNBC TV show late last year.
As Dean noted while hacking the Diebold machine on national television, "In 1998, only 7% of all U.S. counties used electronic voting machines." But, Dean noted of the 2004 race, "in the next presidential election, roughly 1 in 3 of us will use one."
Dean added:
"But critics have found all sorts of flaws with these machines, from software security concerns, to the complete lack of a paper trail to verify votes. These machines cannot be recounted.
"In Riverside County, California, an incumbent mysteriously pulled ahead after the voting machine company employees stopped the tally to tinker with the machines.
"In Iowa [graphic shows 'Allamakee County, Iowa'], machines in one precinct returned 4 million votes-- when only 300 actual voters turned out.
"In San Diego, election officials reportedly turned to teenagers to reboot their malfunctioning machines.
"And in Florida, a computer crash erased the records from Miami-Dade's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines-- all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary is gone.
"There are two problems. One, there's no paper trail which means you can't verify your vote, and it can't be recounted. The other potentially serious problem: tampering and rigging of elections. We asked Diebold, one of the companies that makes these machines, and Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood to appear on this program. They both turned us down."
Democratic concern about electronic voting machines has floated around for several years, particularly since voting rights activist Bev Harris (of www.blackboxvoting.org) reported that she was Googling around the internet and stumbled across an FTP backdoor on Diebold's website that, just after the 2002 election, contained a folder titled "Rob Georgia." (Cleland's 2002 loss in Georgia helped hand control of the Senate back to the Republicans, who had lost it when Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the party to become an independent.)
In Georgia and Florida, where paper had been totally replaced by touch-screen machines in many to most precincts during 2001 and 2002, the 2002 election produced some of the nation's most startling precursors to the alarming shift from an "exit poll win" for Kerry to the "voting-machine win" for Bush in 2004.
USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them."
Just as amazing was the 2002 Georgia governor's race. "Similarly," the Zogby polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls predicted the upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points."
Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touch-screen computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever. Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in a Jan. 23, 2003 editorial titled "Gee Whiz, Voter Fraud?" "In one Florida precinct last November, votes that were intended for the Democratic candidate for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because of a misaligned touchscreen. How many votes were miscast before the mistake was found will never be known, because there was no paper audit." ("Misaligned" touchscreens also caused 18 known machines in Dallas to register Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed in 2002: it's unknown how many others weren't noticed.)
Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran, was, as Republican TV ads suggested, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate, even though his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had sat out the Vietnam war with a medical deferment.
Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly and inexplicably decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny Perdue.
Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates around the country really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles, but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading machines showed them winning.
Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.
As the Washington Post noted in a January 20, 2005 article by Richard Morin and Claudia Deane ("Report Acknowledges Inaccuracies in 2004 Exit Polls"):
"But 'there were 26 states in which the estimates produced by the exit poll data overstated the vote for John Kerry....' said Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research and Warren Mitofsky of Mitofsky International.
"Throughout election night, the national exit poll showed the Massachusetts senator leading President Bush by 51 percent to 48 percent. But when all the votes were counted, it was Bush who won by slightly less than three percentage points."
Mitofsky and Edison's work also showed that Ohio was one of the states where the discrepancies between the official tabulation and the exit polls were most noticeable. The Washington Post noted: "At the request of the media sponsors, Mitofsky and Lenski are continuing to examine exit polling in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two critical battleground states where the poll results were off."
When four attorneys in Ohio sued that state to discover details of how voting was conducted in that state, they report they were slapped with a massive and expensive lawsuit engineered by the State of Ohio's Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell (also co-chair of the Ohio Bush For President campaign) and Ohio Attorney General, Republican Jim Petro. The Ohio lawyer/activists have launched a legal defense fund (information available at http://freepress.org/store.php#donate) to help them fight both for an exposé of Ohio irregularities and to defend themselves against this attack by the Republican officials who control the voting systems in that state.
Oddly, though, as statistics experts Steven Freeman and Josh Mittledorf noted in an article for In These Times, analyzing the data provided by exit polling companies Mitofsky and Edison, "only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error." In those places where computers were used to count the vote, oddly the exit polls showed Kerry winning but the voting machines had Bush winning.
Mitofsky/Edison tried to explain this away with their "shy Republican" theory, suggesting that they'd hired young pollsters and older Republican voters were less willing to talk with them. Noted Freeman and Mittledorf:
"But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were slightly more likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of voters completed the survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53 percent cooperated in Kerry strongholds."
Thus, say these two university experts: "The exit polls themselves are a strong indicator of a corrupted election."
This analysis comes just as Bev Harris' organization www.blackboxvoting.org provided testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, as reported on their website:
"In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer experts and videographers, under the supervision of appropriate officials, proved that a real Diebold system can be hacked.
"This was not theoretical or a 'potential' vulnerability. Votes were hacked on a real system in a real location using the actual setup used on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004.
"In October, Black Box Voting published an article on this Web site about remote access into the Diebold system. After examining the Diebold software and related internal e-mails, local security professionals were able to demonstrate a hack into a simulated system.
"In February, we were allowed to try various hacking techniques into a real election system. To our surprise, the method used in our October simulation did not work.
"However, another method did work. The hack that did work was unsophisticated enough that many high school students would be able to achieve it. This hack altered the election by 100,000 votes, leaving no trace at all in the central tabulator program. It did not appear in any audit log. The hack could have been executed in the November 2004 election by just one person.
"This hack stunned the officials who were observing the test. It calls into question the results of as many as 40 million votes in 30 states. We are awaiting the response of the House Judiciary Committee to this new development for their investigation.
"In another real-world example, Black Box Voting obtained the actual files used in the Nov. 2 election in a specific county. In this situation, the local officials did not know how to run their Diebold system, so a Diebold tech ran the election in that county. Election officials remembered the Diebold tech's first name, but not his last name.
"The Diebold tech had gone home after the election, and no one in the county was able to access their own voting system, leading to some consternation because they could not provide our public records request.
"Because local officials could not access their logs, we were given permission to sit down and copy files. (We have since found that this is not an isolated problem -- many local officials are painfully unfamiliar with their own voting systems.)
"Local officials did not know their password, so Bev Harris asked if they would like her to hack the password. They said 'yes' (!)
"Later, to our even greater surprise, Bev Harris found that the password set by the Diebold tech on this real election file, used in the Nov. 2004 election was ... drum roll please ... the diabolically clever password: 'diebold.' (This took only two tries to guess.)"
So what to do? Here's a five-step process that Americans interested in clean elections - regardless of party affiliation - could start immediately, so it'll in place in time for the 2006 elections.
• 1. Organize and fund a national exit poll, using a non-partisan, professional organization like Zogby, or one built from the ground up.
• 2. Have detailed systems in place - using the internet and email, in particular - to release the results of those exit polls within an hour of the close of the polls on election eve in November, 2006.
• 3. Plan for vote fraud, and brand the plan. In the Ukraine, the slogan was "Time's up!" The logo was a ticking clock, and thousands of paper stencils were distributed so the logo could be spray-painted on sidewalks or buildings in the event evidence of vote-fraud showed up. The color was orange, and orange scarves and hats were mass purchased before election day.
• 4. Develop a corps of people committed to showing up and speaking out wherever the exit polls demonstrate the clear possibility of election fraud.
• 5. Have a relentless media strategy in place to keep the pressure on and bring people out into the streets.
If you think this isn't viable, it is. It's already been done, in Ukraine, Belarus, the former Soviet state of Georgia, and Serbia. In three of those four elections, this very strategy succeeded in getting "official" vote tabulations changed and elections reversed. And, irony of ironies, it was largely funded by the United States.
One would think that the United States Congress would be working for greater transparency in our elections. And, indeed, Congressman Rush Holt and Senator Hillary Clinton have introduced bills into the House and Senate that would call for that. But, inexplicably, Republicans in the House and Senate have blocked them from coming to a vote.
At the same time, computer programmer Clinton Curtis charged, in a sworn affidavit before a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee investigation in Ohio, that Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Florida participated in hiring Curtis to write "undetectable" (when compiled) voting-machine-rigging software. Republicans in the House have also blocked efforts to investigate this and other charges made during hearing held in Ohio by Congressman John Conyers.
In Ukraine, an entrenched political machine dedicated to single-party rule laughed off the possibility that exit polls, colored scarves, a catchy slogan, and spray-painted logos could force a change in a national election. As Peter Finn reported in The Washington Post on November 22, 2004:
"The [Russian-supported and "officially" winning] Yanukovych campaign said the exit polls, which were funded by the United States and other Western countries, and the demonstration were a calculated effort to preempt the official result....
"'These polls don't work,' said Gennady Korzh, a spokesman for Yanukovych. 'We will win by between 3 to 5 percent. And remember, if Americans believed exit polls, and not the actual count, John Kerry would be president.'"
According to a survey released the day before the November 2, 2004 election by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most respected and non-partisan groups to regularly take the pulse of the American electorate, "As of Election Eve, only 62 percent of registered voters are 'very confident' that their votes will be accurately counted."
Perhaps Teresa Heinz Kerry was one of the skeptical voters Annenberg surveyed. And, if the fears she candidly expressed this week have any basis, Americans - of all political persuasions - who believe in democracy, fairness, and open elections must be prepared to act in 2006.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, psychotherapist and licensed NLP Trainer, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?"
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0310-32.htm
Scott Galindez, www.truthout.org: If CNN had been in Fayetteville, North Carolina, they would have seen what could be a major turning point in the anti-war movement. The largest Anti-war protest ever in this heavily military town took place.The march was led by two banners carried by family members of soldiers who died or served in Iraq. The first banner said "The World Still Says No to War" and the second banner was "Bring the Troops Home Now." A few feet behind was a banner carried by Veterans of the Iraq War. One of those veterans, Sergeant Camillo Mejia, recently served 9 months in jail for refusing to return to Iraq after leave. Mejia told the crowd: "After going to war and seeing its ugly face, I could no longer be a part of it."
Following the Iraq Veterans was Military Families Speak Out. "I can't remain silent on these issues, slap a yellow ribbon on my car and call it supporting our troops," said Kara Hollingsworth, the wife of a soldier serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. "I support our troops by making sure they are not put in harm's way unless absolutely necessary."
CNN missed the boat … perhaps a good thing for them, since they were only prepared for a ripple and not the giant wave that formed in Fayetteville.
Editors & Publishers: Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired over "Rathergate,” has inked a deal to tell her side of the scandal, reportedly for a high six-figure sum.
The publisher, St. Martin's Press, beat out a reported half a dozen others. It announced today that the book would come out in the fall with a tentative title of “The Other Side of the Story.”
St. Martin's said that Mapes "will chronicle what really happened at CBS and reveal the corporate, political and ideological agendas that threaten the integrity of journalists and the news."
Mapes was fired Jan. 10 after an independent panel found CBS rushed the "Bush memo" story on the air without proving that documents were real. Mapes insists the story was accurate, and that the documents were not forged.
Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., MediaChannel.org: Sound the alarm! America, the land of the free, is now under attack, not by Al Qaeda, not by Iraqi "insurgents," not by an enemy confronted on foreign soil; not even by one that homeland security could ever stop. It is an insidious, invisible assailant, more hidden than a terrorist cell. It is one that invades virtually every American household on a daily basis without leaving a trace of its deceitful, dangerous nature. Its whores, draped in dignified apparel, sit in front of the American flag, speaking with an air of genuineness and concern for public welfare, while all along, their statements are empty rhetoric, politically motivated, aimed at distracting, misinforming, programming, and keeping Americans ignorant, all for the narrowest of self-interest based on pathological obsession with the bottom line.
The dangerous enemy of which I speak is a handful of colossal corporations that control the media -- such as General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Disney, and Time-Warner. The messengers of these monolithic media conglomerates are their model employees like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and Brit Hume, who have sold their journalistic souls to keep themselves on the air. General Electric wants a military contract to sell its jet engines to fight a war in Iraq. And it expects its corporate media division, NBC, and its front men like Chris Matthews, to help.
www.buzzflash.com: How could the Executive Editor of the New York Times be the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week? I mean after all, the Times endorsed Kerry and, as BuzzFlash has noted, generally posts traditionally liberal editorials.
And, BuzzFlash links to New York Times articles almost everyday.
So, is BuzzFlash.com being disingenuous for naming the Executive Editor of the New York Times our GOP Hypocrite of the Week?
No, not at all. Because, Bill Keller is a prime example of a mainstream newspaper editor who doesn't appear to read his own paper's editorials or learn much from its occasional news stories that point out the daily failures and lies of the Bush Administration.
As we noted in a recent BuzzFlash editorial, the United States citizens need an investigative reporter to break open the untold story of the subservience of the mainstream press to the Bush Administration...
Former Ambassador Joe Wilson noted that the mainstream media seems to think that presenting a fact from a critic, you need to balance it with a lie from the White House. The media pretends that they can't make a judgment between two competing claims to "facts," even when one side (the Bush "spin of the day") can easily be shown to be a lie.
Furthermore, the New York Times news pages don't in anyway take into account the unprecedented totalitarian-state-like manipulation of the media that has been undertaken by the Bush administration. On a daily basis, the New York Times news section tacitly participates in this propaganda machine, the likes of which hasn't been around since Goebbels or the former Soviet Union.
Editorial, Madison Capital Times: James Madison warned more than two centuries ago, "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."
…American media have become a cesspool of political spin, product placement and celebrity gossip. Popular information that matters, and the means of acquiring it, is being choked off by the handful of corporations that have come to control the vast majority of American broadcast and print communications. And the consolidation of media ownership - about which the founder of this newspaper, William T. Evjue, began warning in 1917 - is growing dramatically more problematic...
If America had better media, we would have a better president. And we would not be stuck in the quagmire that is Iraq.
Complicity of the Corporatist News Media
Media Downplay Historic Day of Protests
By Scott Galindez
t r u t h o u t | Report
Sunday 20 March 2005
Fayetteville, NC -- The second anniversary of the war was the impetus for major demonstrations throughout the world. In the United States, over 800 communities held events calling for an end to the occupation.
CNN, however, reported that in the United States "barely a ripple was made while large protests took place in Europe." The New York Times reported that protests in the United States ranged from 350 people in Times Square to thousands in San Francisco. Later in the same story, the Times reported that several thousand marched from Harlem to Central Park. If thousands marched in New York, why did the Times highlight the 350 in Times Square?
CNN's report was worse … nothing about US protests. While they only saw a ripple, a huge wave passed them by. If CNN had been in Fayetteville, North Carolina, they would have seen what could be a major turning point in the anti-war movement. The largest Anti-war protest ever in this heavily military town took place.
The march was led by two banners carried by family members of soldiers who died or served in Iraq. The first banner said "The World Still Says No to War" and the second banner was "Bring the Troops Home Now." A few feet behind was a banner carried by Veterans of the Iraq War. One of those veterans, Sergeant Camillo Mejia, recently served 9 months in jail for refusing to return to Iraq after leave. Mejia told the crowd: "After going to war and seeing its ugly face, I could no longer be a part of it."
Following the Iraq Veterans was Military Families Speak Out. "I can't remain silent on these issues, slap a yellow ribbon on my car and call it supporting our troops," said Kara Hollingsworth, the wife of a soldier serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. "I support our troops by making sure they are not put in harm's way unless absolutely necessary."
Many veterans of past wars were also among the ranks. Sections of the march resembled army units marching in formation calling cadence.
Speaker after speaker told stories of loved ones they had lost during the war and the now 2-year-old occupation of Iraq. Flag-draped mock coffins were carried by many.
Congresswoman Lynn Woosley of California called on the crowd to lobby Congress in support of House Concurrent Resolution 35, calling on the President to bring U.S. troops home.
The March was part of a series of events aimed at breathing new life into the anti-war movement. The first-ever Iraq Veterans Against the War national conference is also taking place, along with a Conference of Military Families Speak Out. A third major conference of Southern anti-war organizers is also taking place in Fayetteville.
CNN missed the boat … perhaps a good thing for them, since they were only prepared for a ripple and not the giant wave that formed in Fayetteville.
________________________________________
Scott Galindez is the Managing Editor of truthout.org.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/032005A.shtml
Mary Mapes, CBS Producer in 'Rathergate,' Inks Big Book Deal
By E&P Staff
Published: March 22, 2005 5:00 PM ET
NEW YORK Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired over "Rathergate,” has inked a deal to tell her side of the scandal, reportedly for a high six-figure sum.
The publisher, St. Martin's Press, beat out a reported half a dozen others. It announced today that the book would come out in the fall with a tentative title of “The Other Side of the Story.”
St. Martin's said that Mapes "will chronicle what really happened at CBS and reveal the corporate, political and ideological agendas that threaten the integrity of journalists and the news."
Mapes was fired Jan. 10 after an independent panel found CBS rushed the "Bush memo" story on the air without proving that documents were real. Mapes insists the story was accurate, and that the documents were not forged.
________________________________________
E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)
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http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000847743
Save Democracy, Shut Off Chris Matthews
By Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.
MediaChannel.org
NEW YORK, March 9, 2005 -- Sound the alarm! America, the land of the free, is now under attack, not by Al Qaeda, not by Iraqi "insurgents," not by an enemy confronted on foreign soil; not even by one that homeland security could ever stop. It is an insidious, invisible assailant, more hidden than a terrorist cell. It is one that invades virtually every American household on a daily basis without leaving a trace of its deceitful, dangerous nature. Its whores, draped in dignified apparel, sit in front of the American flag, speaking with an air of genuineness and concern for public welfare, while all along, their statements are empty rhetoric, politically motivated, aimed at distracting, misinforming, programming, and keeping Americans ignorant, all for the narrowest of self-interest based on pathological obsession with the bottom line.
The dangerous enemy of which I speak is a handful of colossal corporations that control the media -- such as General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Disney, and Time-Warner. The messengers of these monolithic media conglomerates are their model employees like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and Brit Hume, who have sold their journalistic souls to keep themselves on the air. General Electric wants a military contract to sell its jet engines to fight a war in Iraq. And it expects its corporate media division, NBC, and its front men like Chris Matthews, to help.
While the cardinal rule of media ethics has always been to avoid conflict of interest, the corporate media feeds on it. Their bottom line drives their "news." What passes as such is just what the highest bidder decrees, which is often the U.S. government. What Americans see and hear is therefore largely a paid political announcement. Lockstep journalism inside an intricate politico-corporate media web of quid pro quo, favor trading, and conflict of interest has turned our Fourth Estate into a docile lapdog of government.
You don't have to look at the blatant examples of "fake news" such as Armstrong Williams or Jeff Gannon (AKA Jim Guckert) or the contrived, infrequent press conferences the White House stages to see this. Even the New York Times has become an important trader in this media deception. After keeping up the pretense of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was no longer profitable, the New York Times printed an editorial note confessing its tendency to accept the word of official government sources about WMDs without carefully investigating them. Like a child caught with its hand in the cookie jar, it "came clean" -- a cheap, self-serving form of repentance buried in an editor's note instead of transparently plastered on its own front page. But what it didn't admit was its own corporate pressures to tread lightly on the government. The Times Corporation was, in fact, a major lobbyist before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), seeking further deregulation of media ownership. Far from being the watchful media eye on government, keeping the public up to speed on corruption in the Bush administration, it was trading favors with it.
And why did so many Americans believe there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden? Association psychology worked like a charm when Bush mentioned these names in the same breath. But the media did nothing to dispel the myth. Worse, it helped to propagate it by repeating official government sources -- like Cheney -- instead of doing its own investigative reporting. It was more "cost effective" to parrot official sources than to spend money to probe and investigate.
When CNN, "The most trusted name in news" presented the story of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, it reported that Bush was "concerned" about the abuses, not that he said he was concerned. If the abuses were ordered from the top, he would have surely been concerned, but primarily about protecting his own hide; but the press didn't look into that.
When Bush's back bulged with a cylindrical receiver-looking appearance, as caught in a photo taken by a Fox News photographer during the first presidential debate, the NY Times dismissed the story with a simple quotation from a Bush Campaign official denying any credibility. Again there was no follow up. Yet there was a vivid picture displaying the curious bulge along with an extended discussion on Salon.com. And, after the election, when a Berkeley study emerged with credible evidence that the exit polls could not have been so far off, the Times along with the rest of the mainstream media followed suit in dismissing the possibility of election fraud. In contrast, when the Ukraine, came up with such skewed election results, the election was declared invalid and a new one was conducted.
When Haiti's President Aristide phoned Maxine Waters and others and claimed that he did not resign but was instead kidnapped by the US and French forces, the media played it down. The New York Times buried the story on page 10 only to dismiss the allegations with an official White House rejection of the claim as "complete nonsense." Brit Hume on Fox, in his usual fashion, parroted back Colin Powell's comments, saying "he wasn't kidnapped… he went on the plane willingly, and that's the truth." And the rest is history.
Examples of media soft peddling government can be multiplied ad nauseam. There can be just one conclusion: the corporate media is succeeding in keeping Americans uninformed, and worse, misinformed. Censorship, government propaganda, parroting of official government sources, and media manipulation have replaced careful investigative reporting as the norm.
And things continue to worsen as the government finds ways (some more subtle than others) to relax media ownership rules to let fewer and fewer media giants control more and more markets. This trend toward government deregulation of corporate media ownership violates Constitutional safeguards on diversity, public interest and the capacity to self-govern. The popular rebuttal that we now have more stations so, therefore, more diversity, is a glaring fallacy. When these bountiful stations have but a few owners, a few very wealthy ones, it's not hard to see what side of the political divide they'll land on.
There is, of course, the Internet, the last bastion of free speech. When there is chatter on the Net, it's often hard for the mainstream media to ignore it. But corporate media presence on the Net is expanding and there is now a threat looming to the free access architecture of the Internet itself. Corporate media has increasingly been successful at controlling the cables that carry information. As more and more Americans switch from dial up modems to high-speed cable connections, they will inevitably be restricted to one ISP provider -- Comcast, Adelphia, or some other large corporation. The problem is that whoever controls the conduit can control the content. Unless corporate media is stopped, this last bastion of democracy will also topple.
So, the question is how to stop these dangerous, degenerative, media trends.
Currently, there is a burgeoning grass roots movement against media consolidation. Even the NRA has joined forces with NOW to oppose deregulation. Media activist organizations like the Free Press have organized grass roots campaigns resulting in literally millions of letters sent to Congress protesting deregulation, and over 700,000 letters were sent to the FCC.
Michael Powell has now resigned as chair of the FCC. He had been unwilling to listen to this growing public outcry against deregulation of the corporate media. As this movement builds there is a future opportunity for the FCC to heed the word, and stop this degenerative, media metastasis that is devouring free speech in the U.S.
So Americans need to fight back. The air waves are public property, not the private property of these corporate monsters. To slay these mighty dragons we need to stop patronizing them. Like Freddie Kruger, they can only exist as long as we stay tuned. They need us to survive, but we no longer need them.
The Internet is still a place to go to find out things about America and about the world. We can go on line to read the Guardian in London instead of the New York Times, and we can shut off CNN and go to Salon.com or MotherJones.com. We can shut off Chris Matthews and the other media whores and check out Znet or BuzzFlash. or Mediachannel.org. There is a "Media Reform Information Center" you can also visit to get a useful list of enlightened media outlets. BuzzFlash also publishes a list on their website. The corporate media is not transparent, but there are organizations like the Free Press and Common Cause that have taken on the cause of exposing the mainstream corporate media for the charlatans that they really are.
So long as the Internet remains a democratic forum, we need to avail ourselves of these resources. But our time is limited as corporate media in collusion with the most powerful, secretive government in U.S. history increases its control over information. This formidable enemy would like nothing better than to keep Americans ignorant and gullible. It is urgent that we arm ourselves with information. This is the proverbially stake through the heart of totalitarianism. Without a free press, that's just where we're heading! Unite, Americans, we have nothing to lose but our (corporate) chains!
-- Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. His most recent book on the dangers of corporate media is News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy (Prometheus Books, March 2005).
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert335.shtml
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/05/03/edi05035.html
BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week: Bill Keller
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Welcome back to the BuzzFlash.com GOP Hypocrite of the Week.
How could the Executive Editor of the New York Times be the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week? I mean after all, the Times endorsed Kerry and, as BuzzFlash has noted, generally posts traditionally liberal editorials.
And, BuzzFlash links to New York Times articles almost everyday.
So, is BuzzFlash.com being disingenuous for naming the Executive Editor of the New York Times our GOP Hypocrite of the Week?
No, not at all. Because, Bill Keller is a prime example of a mainstream newspaper editor who doesn't appear to read his own paper's editorials or learn much from its occasional news stories that point out the daily failures and lies of the Bush Administration.
As we noted in a recent BuzzFlash editorial, the United States citizens need an investigative reporter to break open the untold story of the subservience of the mainstream press to the Bush Administration.
In that editorial, we lay out some of our case as to why Keller is a Republican White House lackey and note: "If the role of journalism is to challenge authority by seeking out the truth behind the official statements, the New York Times fails miserably, with a few exceptions here and there. It in no way conveys the radicalism of the people in the White House, nor runs longer investigative pieces on their chronic deceptions and dishonesty. It pretty much accepts their news handouts at face value."
Former Ambassador Joe Wilson noted that the mainstream media seems to think that presenting a fact from a critic, you need to balance it with a lie from the White House. The media pretends that they can't make a judgment between two competing claims to "facts," even when one side (the Bush "spin of the day") can easily be shown to be a lie.
Furthermore, the New York Times news pages don't in anyway take into account the unprecedented totalitarian-state-like manipulation of the media that has been undertaken by the Bush administration. On a daily basis, the New York Times news section tacitly participates in this propaganda machine, the likes of which hasn't been around since Goebbels or the former Soviet Union.
Recently, Laurie Garrett, a courageous reporter resigned from Newsday, owned by the Tribune Corporation, because, "The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships."
Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize winner, made it clear that she was also including the New York Times in her lacerating criticism: "This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now."
And profits will be impaired by Bush Cartel retaliation if the New York Times upsets the White House by exposing the charade of this presidency and the radical extremism of the Republican Party.
Bill Keller shares an important attribute with Bush. He is deemed likable and amiable by the Eastern Establishment and the political poobahs. He's a salesman at heart, a guy whose job is to diffuse criticism of the New York Times as it deftly maneuvers between being a straw horse representative of the "liberal press" to the right wingers --(who know it represents no real threat to their Potemkin rule) -- and the pro-democracy movement that sees its news coverage as inherently biased in what it doesn't cover.
Laurie Garret said, "This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche."
Bill Keller, you've done your job well, giving off the congenial appearance of fairness, while leaving the betrayal of democracy beneath the Oval Office rug unexposed. Light and truth would be a threat to the bottom line.
Until next week, just remember our motto at BuzzFlash.com: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
Catch up with you soon.
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/05/03/edi05034.html
Published on Saturday, March 5, 2005 by the Madison Capital Times / Wisconsin
Media and Democracy
Editorial
James Madison warned more than two centuries ago, "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."
Madison wrote those words in the first years of the 19th century, but they still ring true in the first years of the 21st.
American media have become a cesspool of political spin, product placement and celebrity gossip. Popular information that matters, and the means of acquiring it, is being choked off by the handful of corporations that have come to control the vast majority of American broadcast and print communications. And the consolidation of media ownership - about which the founder of this newspaper, William T. Evjue, began warning in 1917 - is growing dramatically more problematic.
In other words, Madison is being proven right as we watch and listen and read media that serve the interests of the powerful and wealthy while denying the vast majority of American citizens the power that knowledge gives. The tragedy is evident in a war that was sold as both easy and necessary but that continues to claim Iraqi and American lives and that it emptying the public treasury of the funds that should pay for schools, health care and other basic needs. The farce is evident in the Bush presidency, which continues despite the evidence of deceit, mismanagement and a worldview so warped that it has made America a more hated country than at any time in her history.
If America had better media, we would have a better president. And we would not be stuck in the quagmire that is Iraq.
A growing number of Americans realize this fact. And they are not waiting for communications corporations to create those better media. They are seeking it out themselves. Many have discovered Amy Goodman's national news program, "Democracy Now," which airs locally on WORT/FM and WYOU Community Television.
Goodman and her staff refer to themselves as the exception to the rulers, and they boldly challenge the official spin from the White House and the corporate public relations agencies that has come to define so much of the news. You won't hear a lot about Michael Jackson's trial on "Democracy Now." Rather, you will hear the inside story of the war profiteering in Iraq, the Bush administration's scheming to privatize Social Security, and trade policies that put Americans out of work and impoverish developing countries.
oodman offers serious news about issues that matter - the kind of information that citizens need to arm themselves with for the serious work of governing themselves. And the response to her program - which is now broadcast on more than 300 stations nationwide - proves that Americans want more than government spin and gossip from their media. But Goodman isn't done working to build better media.
She'll be in Madison tonight at a 7'oclock event at the Barrymore Theater, 2090 Atwood Ave., to help spread the word about Free Speech TV, the nation's progressive television network. The event will benefit the Madison Campaign for Free Speech on Cable TV, which is currently working to get Free Speech TV added to the menu of local cable television offerings through Charter Communications. (For more information and to join the campaign, visit cable.freespeech.org.)
We welcome Amy Goodman as an ally in the struggle not merely to build an alternative to corporate media but to put an end to the tragedy and farce of this dark passage and to build a democracy where citizens armed with the power that knowledge gives - rather than the feudal serfs of corporate power - will define the discourse.
Copyright © 2005, Capital Newspapers
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0305-27.htm
Greg Palast, www.truthout.org: Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists."
"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
John Hooper, Guardian/UK: Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for the far-left daily Il Manifesto, was wounded as bullets ripped into the car taking her to Baghdad airport to be flown out of Iraq.
In a vivid account, written for her newspaper, she described how Nicola Calipari, the international operations chief of Italy's military intelligence service, was shot in the head as he tried to shield her.
"I heard his last breath as he died on top of me," she wrote.
Amid a growing sense of anger, disbelief and sorrow in Italy, about 10,000 people filed through Rome's Victor Emmanuel monument yesterday to pay respects to Mr Calipari, whose body lay in state. He will receive a state funeral today.
JERRY FRESIA, www.counterpunch.com: The top U.S. general in Iraq, Army gen. George Casey, has stated that the US had no indication that Italian officials gave advance notice of the route of the vehicle in which Giuliana Sgrena and slain officer Nicola Calipari were riding. As a former Air Force intelligence officer, I would argue that this statement is absolutely ludicrous. Based upon intelligence collection capabilities of even 3 decades ago, it is reasonable to assume that the US intercepted all phone communication between Italian agents in Iraq and Rome, monitored such traffic in real time and knew precisely where Sgrena's vehicle was at all times, without advanced notice being provided by Italian officials…
I also believe that a clear motivation for preventing Sgrena from telling her story is quite evident. Let us recall that the first target in the second attack upon the city of Fallujah was al-Fallujah General Hospital. Why? It was the reporting of enormous civilian casualties from this hospital that compelled the US to halt its attack. In other words, the control of information from Fallujah as to consequences of the US assault, particularly with regard to civilians, became a critical element in the military operation…
Information, based upon intelligence or the reporting of brave journalists, may be the most important weapon in the war in Iraq. From this point of view, the vehicle in which Nicola and Giuliana were riding wasn't simply a vehicle carrying a hostage to freedom. It is quite reasonable to assume, given the immorality of war and of this war in particular, that it was considered a military target.
Naomi Klein on “Democracy Now!” reporting on Giuliana Sgrena: One of the things that we keep hearing is that she was fired on on the road to the airport, which is a notoriously dangerous road…And I was on that road myself, and it is a really treacherous place with explosions going off all the time and a lot of checkpoints. What Giuliana told me that I had not realized before is that she wasn't on that road at all. She was on a completely different road that I actually didn't know existed. It's a secured road that you can only enter through the Green Zone and is reserved exclusively for ambassadors and top military officials. So, when Calipari, the Italian security intelligence officer, released her from captivity, they drove directly to the Green Zone, went through the elaborate checkpoint process which everyone must go through to enter the Green Zone, which involves checking in obviously with U.S. forces, and then they drove onto this secured road. And the other thing that Giuliana told me that she's quite frustrated about is the description of the vehicle that fired on her as being part of a checkpoint. She says it wasn't a checkpoint at all. It was simply a tank that was parked on the side of the road that opened fire on them. There was no process of trying to stop the car, she said, or any signals. From her perspective, they were just -- it was just opening fire by a tank. The other thing she told me that was surprising to me was that they were fired on from behind.
The War is Iraq is Worse than Immoral or Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031205Z.shtml
Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq's Oil
by Greg Palast
The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.
Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists."
"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant Falah Aljibury says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat.
Mr. Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.
Secret sell-off plan
The industry-favored plan was pushed aside by yet another secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan, crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.
The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr. Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, flew to the London meeting, he told Newsnight, at the request of the State Department.
Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.
"Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, your losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable," said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.
"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatization is coming."
Privatization blocked by industry
Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.
Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."
The chosen successor to Mr Carroll, a Conoco Oil executive, ordered up a new plan for a state oil company preferred by the industry.
Ari Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatize Iraq's oil fields. He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.
Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favored by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004, Harper's discovered, under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. Former US Secretary of State Baker is now an attorney. His law firm, Baker Botts, is representing ExxonMobil and the Saudi Arabian government.
View segments of Iraq oil plans at: www.GregPalast.com/opeconthemarch.html
Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatization. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.
Jaffe said "There is no question that an American oil company ... would not be enthusiastic about a plan that would privatize all the assets with Iraq companies and they (US companies) might be left out of the transaction."
In addition, Ms. Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec, "They [oil companies] have to worry about the price of oil."
"I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."
The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight, "Many neo-conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this that and the other. International oil companies without exception are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."
Greg Palast's film - the result of a joint investigation by BBC Newsnight and Harper's Magazine - will broadcast on Thursday, 17 March, 2005. You can watch the program online - available Thursday, March 17 after 7pm EST for 24hrs - from the Newsnight website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/default.stm. You can also read the story in greater detail in the latest issue of Harper's magazine - now available at your local newsstand.
###
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0317-23.htm
Italian hostage accuses US of trying to kill her as thousands mourn her rescuer
John Hooper in Rome
Monday March 7, 2005
The Guardian
The former Italian hostage who saw her rescuer shot dead at a US checkpoint in Baghdad said yesterday they might have been targeted because of US objections to Italy's policy of negotiating with kidnappers.
Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for the far-left daily Il Manifesto, was wounded as bullets ripped into the car taking her to Baghdad airport to be flown out of Iraq.
In a vivid account, written for her newspaper, she described how Nicola Calipari, the international operations chief of Italy's military intelligence service, was shot in the head as he tried to shield her.
"I heard his last breath as he died on top of me," she wrote.
Amid a growing sense of anger, disbelief and sorrow in Italy, about 10,000 people filed through Rome's Victor Emmanuel monument yesterday to pay respects to Mr Calipari, whose body lay in state. He will receive a state funeral today.
Sgrena flew home late on Saturday in the plane carrying Mr Calipari's coffin.
Italy's president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was at the airport and, in an effort to express the mixed sorrow and admiration Italians feel for the dead intelligence chief, he stood for a full two minutes with his hands on the coffin before allowing it to proceed.
In her account, Sgrena said she recalled her captors' last words: "Be careful because the Americans don't want you to return."
The Italian government has virtually admitted a ransom was paid, with the agriculture minister in Silvio Berlusconi's rightwing government, Giovanni Alemanno, saying it was "very likely".
He added it was "generally preferable to pay a financial price than the price of a human life or a political price consisting of [submitting to] blackmail by pulling out troops".
An Iraqi MP told Belgian state television on Saturday that a $1m (£520,000) ransom was paid. But Italian media reports spoke of a payment of up to $8m.
In an interview broadcast by Sky Italia, Sgrena said: "The United States does not approve of this policy and so they try to stop it in any way possible."
But the communications minister, Maurizio Gasparri, urged her to to show restraint: "I understand the emotion of these hours, but those who have been under stress in the past few weeks should pull themselves together and avoid talking nonsense."
The incident has strained relations between the Bush administration and one of its strongest allies in Europe, with Italian ministers openly expressing disbelief at Washington's account.
The US military said the car approached the checkpoint on Friday night at speed and soldiers used hand and arm signals, flashing white lights and warning shots to try to get it to stop.
However, according to the daily Corriere della Sera, the Italian intelligence officer who drove the car and who survived the attack insisted they were travelling at just 40 to 50 kilometres an hour (25 to 30 mph).
He was quoted as saying: "All of a sudden, a searchlight went on. Immediately afterwards, the shots began. The fire lasted for at least 10 seconds."
The team that fetched Sgrena had been in direct contact by telephone with the prime minister's office in Rome, where Mr Berlusconi, senior intelligence officers and the editor of Sgrena's newspaper were all celebrating her release with champagne. Corriere della Sera said that, after screaming at the Americans to stop, the intelligence officer called up again. "The Americans have shot at us," he shouted. "Nicola is dead. I have a machine gun pointing at me."
Mr Gasparri said the incident would make no difference to Italy's support for efforts to secure postwar Iraq. "The military mission must carry on because it consolidates democracy and liberty in Iraq," he said.
Italian prosecutors are working on the assumption they are investigating a murder.
White House counsellor Dan Bartlett, talking on CNN yesterday, called the shooting "a horrific accident" and pledged a full investigation. "In a situation where there is a live combat zone ... people are making split-second decisions, and it's critically important that we get the facts before we make judgments," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1432040,00.html
Former Intel Officer: The US Considered Her a Military Target
Targeting Guiliana
By JERRY FRESIA
Former US Air Force Intelligence officer
The top U.S. general in Iraq, Army gen. George Casey, has stated that the US had no indication that Italian officials gave advance notice of the route of the vehicle in which Giuliana Sgrena and slain officer Nicola Calipari were riding. As a former Air Force intelligence officer, I would argue that this statement is absolutely ludicrous. Based upon intelligence collection capabilities of even 3 decades ago, it is reasonable to assume that the US intercepted all phone communication between Italian agents in Iraq and Rome, monitored such traffic in real time and knew precisely where Sgrena's vehicle was at all times, without advanced notice being provided by Italian officials.
During the early 1970s, it was my job to monitor intelligence collected on the Korean peninsula. It was my responsibility to report serious anomalies to the White House by means of a secure phone.
At that time, satellite photographic collection capability was in its infancy; however, the joke, often told at briefings, was that while "we can identify a golf ball anywhere on planet earth, we cannot tell you the brand." In addition to satellite photography, I would assume, as in Korea, that there would be numerous other sources of photography from "manned" and "unmanned" aircraft that are regularly positioned over key areas, such as the airport in Baghdad, which are capable of providing real time imagery of vehicle traffic.
Work was also being conducted to monitor voice conversation, in real time, by detecting the vibrations that the human voice creates in window panes in a particular room or more easily, in an automobile. But most important, the US, by 1974, had the capability to intercept any and all ground to air phone conversations. It is inconceivable to me that the US would not be monitoring all conversations between Italian agents and Rome, particularly cell phone conversations in a hostile environment where cell phone communications are used to trigger explosives. Are we to believe that in an area near the airport, an area that is intensely hostile according to the US, that they would not be monitoring cell phone signals? Even if such conversations were electronically "scrambled," the position of such signals would be of enormous intelligence value.
One can only assume that the intelligence capability of the US during the past 28 years has improved significantly. Thus, the wrong questions are being asked. It is reasonable to assume that 1) satellite and aircraft intelligence (photographic and electronic) intelligence was being collected in real time and 2) that my contemporary counterpart in Iraq was monitoring this intelligence and vehicular traffic (and possibly the conversations within such vehicles) within a radius of several kilometers around the airport if not the entire city. Anomalies would be reported immediately to those in command. The question, then, becomes what communication occurred between those in command and those who fired upon Sgrena's vehicle.
I also believe that a clear motivation for preventing Sgrena from telling her story is quite evident. Let us recall that the first target in the second attack upon the city of Fallujah was al-Fallujah General Hospital. Why? It was the reporting of enormous civilian casualties from this hospital that compelled the US to halt its attack. In other words, the control of information from Fallujah as to consequences of the US assault, particularly with regard to civilians, became a critical element in the military operation.
Now, in a report by Iraq's health ministry we are learning that the US used mustard, nerve gas and napalm ¬ in the manner of Saddam ¬ against the civilian population of Fallujah. Sgrena, herself, has provided photographic evidence of the use of cluster bombs and the wounding of children there. I have searched in vain to find these reports in any major corporate media. The American population, for the most part, is ignorant of what its military is doing in their name and must remain so in order for the US to wage its war against the Iraqi people.
Information, based upon intelligence or the reporting of brave journalists, may be the most important weapon in the war in Iraq. From this point of view, the vehicle in which Nicola and Giuliana were riding wasn't simply a vehicle carrying a hostage to freedom. It is quite reasonable to assume, given the immorality of war and of this war in particular, that it was considered a military target.
Jerry Fresia is a former US Air Force intelligence officer. He now lives in Italy.
http://www.counterpunch.org/fresia03112005.html
Friday, March 25, 2005
Naomi Klein on Democracy Now! reporting on Giuliana Sgrena
From today's Democracy Now!, "Naomi Klein Reveals New Details About U.S. Military Shooting of Italian War Correspondent in Iraq."
Naomi Klein: She told me a lot about the incident that I had not fully understood from the reports in the press. One of the most – and at first, the other thing I want to be really clear about is that Giuliana is not saying that she's certain in any way that the attack on the car was intentional. She is simply saying that she has many, many unanswered questions, and there are many parts of her direct experience that simply don't coincide with the official U.S. version of the story. One of the things that we keep hearing is that she was fired on on the road to the airport, which is a notoriously dangerous road. In fact, it's often described as the most dangerous road in the world. So this is treated as a fairly common and understandable incident that there would be a shooting like this on that road. And I was on that road myself, and it is a really treacherous place with explosions going off all the time and a lot of checkpoints. What Giuliana told me that I had not realized before is that she wasn't on that road at all. She was on a completely different road that I actually didn't know existed. It's a secured road that you can only enter through the Green Zone and is reserved exclusively for ambassadors and top military officials. So, when Calipari, the Italian security intelligence officer, released her from captivity, they drove directly to the Green Zone, went through the elaborate checkpoint process which everyone must go through to enter the Green Zone, which involves checking in obviously with U.S. forces, and then they drove onto this secured road. And the other thing that Giuliana told me that she's quite frustrated about is the description of the vehicle that fired on her as being part of a checkpoint. She says it wasn't a checkpoint at all. It was simply a tank that was parked on the side of the road that opened fire on them. There was no process of trying to stop the car, she said, or any signals. From her perspective, they were just -- it was just opening fire by a tank. The other thing she told me that was surprising to me was that they were fired on from behind. Because I think part of what we're hearing is that the U.S. soldiers opened fire on their car, because they didn't know who they were, and they were afraid. It was self-defense, they were afraid. The fear, of course, is that their car might blow up or that they might come under attack themselves. And what Giuliana Sgrena really stressed with me was that she -- the bullet that injured her so badly and that killed Calipari, came from behind, entered the back seat of the car. And the only person who was not severely injured in the car was the driver, and she said that this is because the shots weren't coming from the front or even from the side. They were coming from behind, i.e. they were driving away. So, the idea that this was an act of self-defense, I think becomes much more questionable. And that detail may explain why there's some reticence to give up the vehicle for inspection. Because if indeed the majority of the gunfire is coming from behind, then clearly, they were firing from -- they were firing at a car that was driving away from them.
http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2005/03/naomi-klein-on-democracy-now-reporting.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/030805F.shtml
William O. Beeman, www.truthout.org: Iran's security chief, Hassan Rowhani proclaimed in October, 2004 that it was in Iran's best interest for George W. Bush to be re-elected over John Kerry. His comment left American commentators stunned in disbelief. However, it is now clear that Rowhani was right: the Bush administration has done more than any other American leader to advance the interests of Shi'a Islamic political leadership in Iran and indeed, in the rest of the Middle East. Some groups of religious supporters in Iran are beginning to call President Bush "the 13th Imam," an ironic reference to the 12 historical Imams sacred to the branch of Shi'ism dominant in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.
President Bush's support for Shi'ism may be unintentional, to be sure, but there is no doubt about the effects of his administration's policies in boosting Shi'ite power throughout the region.
The Bush administration has lent massive help to the Iranian economy by allowing U.S. corporations to circumvent the Clinton-era economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic…
Josh Meyer, LA Times: A federal criminal investigation has uncovered evidence that the government of Pakistan made clandestine purchases of U.S. high-technology components for use in its nuclear weapons program in defiance of American law.
Federal authorities also say the highly specialized equipment at one point passed through the hands of Humayun Khan, an Islamabad businessman who they say has ties to Islamic militants.
Even though President Bush has been pushing for an international crackdown on such trafficking, efforts by two U.S. agencies to send investigators to Pakistan to gather more evidence have hit a bottleneck in Washington, said officials knowledgeable about the case.
Robert Scheer, LA Times: Consider this dizzying series of Bush II-era actions:
We have thrown away thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars after crying wolf on Iraq's long-defunct nuclear weapons program and now expect the world to believe similar scary stories about neighboring Iran.
We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.
We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan.
Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president's father in reprisal for Pakistan's development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China.
The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan's strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Eric Lichtblau, NY Times: Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.
The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts because they said they were concerned for their safety in the wake of the attacks, and the F.B.I. - which was then beginning the biggest criminal investigation in its history - arranged to have agents escort them to their local airports, the documents show…
The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, which provided copies to The New York Times.
The material sheds new light on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it provides details about the F.B.I.'s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden.
Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security
George W. Bush - The 13th Shi'a Imam
By William O. Beeman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 07 March 2005
Iran's security chief, Hassan Rowhani proclaimed in October, 2004 that it was in Iran's best interest for George W. Bush to be re-elected over John Kerry. His comment left American commentators stunned in disbelief. However, it is now clear that Rowhani was right: the Bush administration has done more than any other American leader to advance the interests of Shi'a Islamic political leadership in Iran and indeed, in the rest of the Middle East. Some groups of religious supporters in Iran are beginning to call President Bush "the 13th Imam," an ironic reference to the 12 historical Imams sacred to the branch of Shi'ism dominant in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.
President Bush's support for Shi'ism may be unintentional, to be sure, but there is no doubt about the effects of his administration's policies in boosting Shi'ite power throughout the region.
The Bush administration has lent massive help to the Iranian economy by allowing U.S. corporations to circumvent the Clinton-era economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic. While the Treasury Department cracks down on insignificant infractions of the trade sanctions, such as prohibiting U.S. publishers from providing editorial services to Iranian authors, and restricting scholarly groups from holding meetings in Iran, it overlooks large American corporations operating in Iran through dummy subsidiaries operating out of Canada, Europe and Dubai. Oil service companies, including Halliburton, continue to conduct business in Iran on a pre-revolutionary scale, while the shops and bazaars are awash in American goods.
Additionally, by failing to exercise any control whatever over rising oil prices, the U.S. government has created massive windfall profits for the Iranian government. In the late 1990's Iran's economy was in disastrous shape. With oil selling at well over $50 a barrel, Iran is awash in money again.
However, the greatest benefits have been political. Nothing has done more to increase the popularity of Iran's Shi'ite leaders than the Bush administration's attack on Iran's nuclear development. Tehran's leaders are highly unpopular with the majority of Iran's youthful population because of their social policies, but Iran's right to develop its own nuclear industry is the one point on which virtually all Iranians are agreed. This strong national feeling has boosted the credentials of the mullahs, and will likely rocket former clerical President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani back into the presidency.
In Iraq, of course, the desperation of the Bush administration to demonstrate America's ability to conduct elections in by January 30 was effectively utilized by the majority Shi'ite community-especially its astute leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The result is that the Shi'ites are likely to emerge as the dominant power in Iraq.
Pressure on other Middle East regional powers to "democratize" has resulted in the emergence of Shi'ite power in minority communities throughout the region. The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia to liberalize its governmental system to allow the election of local leaders. The chief beneficiaries were the Shi'ites in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province. Long disadvantaged and downtrodden by the conservative Wahhabi-dominated Saudi government, the Shi'ites now will have their own local officials, and real political power for the first time in the history of the State. Qatar has established a separate legal court for the Shi'ites, and the Sunni rulers of Bahrain are on tenterhooks worrying about how U.S. pressure will translate into increased power for their country's Shi'ite majority population.
President Bush's insistence that Syria evacuate its troops from Lebanon is a godsend to the Shi'ites there. Hezbullah, the Shi'ite movement established more than 20 years ago to combat oppression from Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims is now the strongest, most organized political party in Lebanon, with an effective military wing. U.S. actions in that nation will eventually lead to Shi'ite domination of Lebanon, after a likely revival of the civil war that Syrian occupation quelled.
Even the Syrians are benefiting from President Bush's politics. Bashar al-Assad, Syria's current leader from the Alawite branch of Shi'ism, is a weak leader, dominated by shadowy figures left over from his father's heavy-handed rule. American assaults on the Syrian government have accomplished the almost impossible task of increasing Assad's popularity and the credibility of his government.
As the Bush administration must surely know, Shi'ite politicians favor the incorporation of Islamic Shari'a law into the governmental structures of their nations whenever possible. The realization of the Republican vision of "democracy breaking out all over" will give these religious-oriented politicians the best chance to realize this vision in more than a thousand years. This will truly earn President Bush the title of one of the greatest promoters of Islamic rule in all of history - a fitting legacy for America's 43rd President.
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William O. Beeman is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. This year he is Visiting Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. His forthcoming book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs:" How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-paknuke26mar26,0,7347311.story
Illegal Nuclear Deals Alleged
Officials say Pakistan has secretly bought high-tech components for its weapons program from U.S. companies.
By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2005
WASHINGTON — A federal criminal investigation has uncovered evidence that the government of Pakistan made clandestine purchases of U.S. high-technology components for use in its nuclear weapons program in defiance of American law.
Federal authorities also say the highly specialized equipment at one point passed through the hands of Humayun Khan, an Islamabad businessman who they say has ties to Islamic militants.
Even though President Bush has been pushing for an international crackdown on such trafficking, efforts by two U.S. agencies to send investigators to Pakistan to gather more evidence have hit a bottleneck in Washington, said officials knowledgeable about the case.
The impasse is part of a larger tug-of-war between federal agencies that enforce U.S. nonproliferation laws and policymakers who consider Pakistan too important to embarrass. The transactions under review began in early 2003, well after President Pervez Musharraf threw his support to the Bush administration's war on terrorism and the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan to oust Pakistan's former Taliban allies.
"This is the age-old problem with Pakistan and the U.S. Other priorities always trump the United States from coming down hard on Pakistan's nuclear proliferation. And it goes back 15 to 20 years," said David Albright, director of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, favors getting tougher with Pakistan.
U.S. and European officials involved in nonproliferation issues say they recently discovered evidence that Pakistan has begun a new push to acquire advanced nuclear components on the black market as it tries to upgrade its decades-old weapons program.
Current and former intelligence officials said the same elements of the Pakistani military that they suspected of orchestrating efforts to buy American-made products may also have worked with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani nuclear program who supplied weapons know-how and parts to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Abdul Qadeer Khan and Humayun Khan are not related.
The scheme U.S. investigators are trying to unravel involves Humayun Khan and Asher Karni, a South African electronics salesman and former Israeli army major.
Aided by Karni, who pleaded guilty to violating export control laws and began cooperating with U.S. authorities shortly after his arrest 15 months ago, investigators have traced at least one shipment of oscilloscopes from Oregon to South Africa and on to Humayun Khan.
The trail did not end there, however. According to recently unsealed Commerce Department documents, agents followed the shipment to the Al Technique Corp. of Pakistan, which had not been listed on any of the shipping or purchasing documents.
Al Technique describes itself as a manufacturer of precision lasers and other military-related products. But for federal investigators, "it was a big red flag," one U.S. official said.
"It's definitely a front for nuclear weapons, for their WMD project," the official said. The company is on a U.S. list of firms banned from buying equipment such as the special oscilloscopes that can be used to test and manufacture nuclear weapons.
Like others interviewed for this report, the American official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the political sensitivity of the case, the records of which have been sealed by a federal judge. The judge also has imposed a gag order on all participants.
U.S. officials suspect that the Pakistani government was the customer behind another purchase they say Humayun Khan made from Karni: 200 U.S.-made precision electronic switches that can be used in detonating nuclear weapons.
U.S. law prohibits the sale of equipment that can be used in nuclear weapons programs to Pakistan and some other countries as part of the effort to curb nuclear proliferation. Officials accuse Humayun Khan and Karni of conspiring to break those laws by concealing the nature of the transactions. Humayun Khan has not been charged with any crime, but the Commerce Department on Jan. 31 banned him from doing business in the U.S. for 180 days.
Halting illegal transfers of nuclear weapons components is a cornerstone of the administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, and the departments of Commerce and Homeland Security moved quickly to pursue leads after Karni's arrest.
His cooperation has allowed U.S. officials to significantly expand their investigation. As many as several dozen suspects are under scrutiny in Pakistan, India, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere, officials say.
Humayun Khan's involvement in the deal aroused concern because he has been linked to several militant groups, including the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, a Pakistani party that allegedly supports fighters in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Last year, federal prosecutors used Karni's ties to Humayun Khan to argue successfully against the South African being released on bail while awaiting trial.
"This case represents one of the most serious types of export violations imaginable," one prosecutor argued in a court filing.
U.S. agents began gearing up for an investigative trip to Pakistan in early 2004. They had recently completed a mission to South Africa that produced a wealth of evidence. They hoped to question Humayun Khan and others, locate missing components and pursue further leads.
But when the Commerce and Homeland Security departments asked the State Department to clear the investigators' trip, they did not get permission. Law enforcement officials complain that the delay has allowed the trail to grow cold.
Several senior officials said that the United States had made high-level requests to Islamabad for cooperation in the case, but that none was made forcefully or publicly. Two State Department officials dealing with nonproliferation said the Bush administration voiced concerns about Pakistan's ties to the nuclear black market, most recently during private meetings Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had with Musharraf and other Pakistani leaders last week.
Pakistan has refused to allow access to Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Gary Milhollin, a nuclear nonproliferation expert, said the Bush administration could apply enough pressure on Pakistan to gain access for the investigators reviewing Humayun Khan's activities, tying cooperation to the $3-billion U.S. aid package, for example, and to the sale of F-16 fighter jets that the White House announced Friday.
"But it seems bizarre that we are letting the Pakistanis get away with nuclear smuggling because we think they'll help fight terrorism," said Milhollin, who heads the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
Humayun Khan, in a telephone interview from Islamabad, denied any involvement with the recent shipments, saying that "someone else" ordered the oscilloscopes and the switches, had them shipped to his office, then snatched them somewhere along the way.
"It's very tragic," Humayun Khan said. "You don't know where these things are landing. They come through and they vanish."
He said Washington has allowed dozens of black market companies to flourish in Pakistan and elsewhere by selectively enforcing its nonproliferation laws.
"It's all about politics," Humayun Khan said. "If they don't want us to develop these things, they would do everything they can to stop it…. You [the American government] close one eye and open the other at particular times to these things that have been going on."
He said dozens of front companies throughout South Asia and the Middle East were procuring such components from U.S. firms for questionable purposes.
Humayun Khan said he had e-mailed detailed information to U.S. investigators about at least 10 Pakistani companies that he claimed routinely engaged in illicit schemes to buy goods from U.S. suppliers, including Tektronix Inc., the Oregon firm that allegedly sold him the oscilloscopes.
U.S. officials will say only that Humayun Khan has provided evasive and contradictory answers about the case. Although they have talked to him by telephone, they say it is crucial to confront him in Pakistan, where they can do follow-up investigations.
Humayun Khan said he assumed that, because U.S. investigators never showed up, they must have dropped him as a suspect. Pakistani authorities haven't questioned him, he said, because he and his father have done business with Islamabad's Defense Ministry for 40 years and would not do anything the government didn't approve of.
"Nobody came to me. Why? They didn't bother," Humayun Khan said. "They know us like we were relatives."
Alisha Goff, a spokeswoman for Tektronix said that the company was aware of the investigation, including the purchase of its oscilloscopes, but that it had not been implicated in any wrongdoing.
She said the company had stopped all shipments to Humayun Khan, pending the outcome of the investigation.
"Tektronix is cooperating fully with the government, and as such cannot provide any additional information on this matter," Goff said.
U.S. investigators say they have become increasingly frustrated by the lack of support from the State Department because they see rising indications of Pakistani involvement in the nuclear black market. They cite evidence suggesting that Pakistan has increased its already extensive network of agents operating in the global market for nuclear and missile components.
Foreign officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency say they believe Pakistan has set aside a huge budget for new black market components to upgrade its entire nuclear weapons program.
Some of the equipment is part of a large program to expand Pakistan's nuclear arsenal with plutonium-based weapons, which are smaller and far more destructive than weapons using uranium, diplomats and investigators say.
"Pakistan does need nuclear technology," said one European diplomat with ties to the South Asian country, noting that Islamabad's agents have been caught trying to make illicit purchases of specialized steel and aluminum, as well as nuclear triggers called krytrons.
"We have the names of the companies and we have been talking to them," another diplomat said.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly declined to discuss Karni's case and the investigation, and Al Technique did not return calls seeking comment. One senior Pakistani official said that his country did not intentionally violate U.S. nonproliferation laws, but it would continue to support and improve its nuclear weapons program as a deterrent to India, which he said also used the black market.
The departments of Commerce, Homeland Security and Justice would not permit its officials to discuss the criminal case on the record, and the White House and State Department also had no formal comment.
However, State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the administration believed it had few options for pressuring Musharraf when his cooperation was crucial on several other fronts.
"It's one thing for them to cooperate with us in efforts to stop [nuclear components] from going elsewhere, such as Iran," one said. "But they will never cooperate with us on efforts to stop things that they are trying to get. They've got their own program, which they're trying to keep."
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Times staff writer Douglas Frantz in Vienna contributed to this report.
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Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
A Con Job by Pakistan's Pal, George Bush
by Robert Scheer
Trying to follow the U.S. policy on the proliferation of nuclear weapons is like watching a three-card monte game on a city street corner. Except the stakes are higher.
The announcement Friday that the United States is authorizing the sale to Pakistan of F-16 fighter jets capable of delivering nuclear warheads -- and thereby escalating the region's nuclear arms race -- is the latest example of how the most important issue on the planet is being bungled by the Bush administration.
Consider this dizzying series of Bush II-era actions:
We have thrown away thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars after crying wolf on Iraq's long-defunct nuclear weapons program and now expect the world to believe similar scary stories about neighboring Iran.
We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.
We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan.
Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president's father in reprisal for Pakistan's development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China.
The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan's strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Yet Pakistan's ruling generals could be excused for believing that Washington is not seriously concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How else to explain invading a country -- Iraq -- that didn't possess nukes, didn't sell nuclear technology to unstable nations and didn't maintain an unholy alliance with Al Qaeda -- and then turning around and giving the plum prizes of U.S. military ingenuity to the country that did?
Even as the Bush administration continues to confront Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Islamabad has admitted that Pakistani nuclear weapons trafficker Abdul Qadeer Khan -- the father of his nation's nuclear bomb -- provided Iran with the centrifuges essential to such a program. Further, new evidence reveals that Khan marketed to Iran and Libya not only the materials needed for a nuclear bomb but the engineering competence to actually make one.
Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insists Khan was running his nuclear smuggling operation under the radar of the military government that brought Musharraf to power. And although this is a highly implausible claim given the reach of the military's power and the scope of the operation, the White House has found it convenient to buy it hook, line and sinker -- all the better to remarket Pakistan to the American people as a war-on-terrorism ally.
While Pakistan was receiving such heaping helpings of benefit of the doubt, North Korea became the Bush administration's scapegoat for the rapid nuclear proliferation happening on its watch, according to the Washington Post. "In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya," wrote the Post. "But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction." Sources told the paper that "Pakistan's role as both the buyer and the seller [of uranium hexafluoride] was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington's partner."
One result of the United States shortsightedly pulling this fast one has been the collapse of multilateral nonproliferation talks with Pyongyang. Yet in the long term, the cost is much greater: a dramatic erosion of trust in U.S. statements on nuclear proliferation.
From Iraq to Iran, North Korea to Pakistan, the Bush administration has pulled so many con jobs that it is difficult for anybody to take it seriously. Unfortunately, though, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is as serious as it gets.
Robert Scheer, a journalist with more than 30 years' experience, has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines.
© 2005 LA Times
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0329-26.htm
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March 27, 2005
New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
ASHINGTON, March 26 - The episode has been retold so many times in the last three and a half years that it has become the stuff of political legend: in the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded, dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, managed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights.
Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.
The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.
The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts because they said they were concerned for their safety in the wake of the attacks, and the F.B.I. - which was then beginning the biggest criminal investigation in its history - arranged to have agents escort them to their local airports, the documents show.
But F.B.I. officials reacted angrily, both internally and publicly, to the suggestion that any Saudis had received preferential treatment in leaving the country.
"I say baloney to any inference we red-carpeted any of this entourage," an F.B.I. official said in a 2003 internal note. Another F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week regarding the airport escorts that "we'd do that for anybody if they felt they were threatened - we wouldn't characterize that as special treatment."
The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, which provided copies to The New York Times.
The material sheds new light on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it provides details about the F.B.I.'s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden.
The Saudis' chartered flights, arranged in the days after the attacks when many flights in the United States were still grounded, have proved frequent fodder for critics of the Bush administration who accuse it of coddling the Saudis. The debate was heightened by the filmmaker Michael Moore, who scrutinized the issue in "Fahrenheit 9/11," but White House officials have adamantly denied any special treatment for the Saudis, calling such charges irresponsible and politically motivated.
The Sept. 11 commission examined the Saudi flights in its final report last year, and it found that no Saudis had been allowed to leave before national airspace was reopened on Sept. 13, 2001; that there was no evidence of "political intervention" by the White House; and that the F.B.I. had done a "satisfactory screening" of the departing Saudis to ensure they did not have information relevant to the attacks.
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, with major passages heavily deleted, do not appear to contradict directly any of those central findings, but they raise some new questions about the episode.
The F.B.I. records show, for instance, that prominent Saudi citizens left the United States on several flights that had not been previously disclosed in public accounts, including a chartered flight from Providence, R.I., on Sept. 14, 2001, that included at least one member of the Saudi royal family, and three flights from Las Vegas between Sept. 19 and Sept. 24, also carrying members of the Saudi royal family. The government began reopening airspace on Sept. 13, but many flights remained grounded for days afterward.
The three Las Vegas flights, with a total of more than 100 passengers, ferried members of the Saudi royal family and staff members who had been staying at Caesar's Palace and the Four Seasons hotels. The group had tried unsuccessfully to charter flights back to Saudi Arabia between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17 because they said they feared for their safety as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. documents say.
Once the group managed to arrange chartered flights out of the country, an unidentified prince in the Las Vegas group "thanked the F.B.I. for their assistance," according to one internal report. The F.B.I. had interviewed many members of the group and searched their planes before allowing them to leave, but it nonetheless went back to the Las Vegas hotels with subpoenas five days after the initial flight had departed to collect further information on the Saudi royal guests, the documents show.
In several other cases, Saudi travelers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials sought to determine how what seemed to be lapses had occurred, the documents show.
The F.B.I. documents left open the possibility that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigation.
"Although the F.B.I. took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/2001 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed," a 2003 memo said, "it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without F.B.I. knowledge."
The documents also show that F.B.I. officials were clearly riled by public speculation stirred by news media accounts of the Saudi flights. They were particularly bothered by a lengthy article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, which included charges that the bureau considered unfair and led to an internal F.B.I. investigation that the agency named "Vanitybom." Internal F.B.I. correspondence during the review was addressed to "fellow Vanitybom victims."
Critics said the newly released documents left them with more questions than answers.
"From these documents, these look like they were courtesy chats, without the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings," said Christopher J. Farrell, who is director of investigations for Judicial Watch and a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. "It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic success than investigative success."
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called for further investigation.
"This lends credence to the theory that the administration was not coming fully clean about their involvement with the Saudis," he said, "and we still haven't gotten to the bottom of this whole affair."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/politics/27exodus.html?ei=5070&en=288af352e9814761&ex=1112504400&pagewanted=print&position=
Jonathan Stempel, Reuters: Warren Buffett, the world's second-richest person, last year increased his bet against the U.S. dollar 78 percent to $21.4 billion, resulting in a $1.84 billion gain.
He also said he would be happy if his bet were to fail.
In his annual letter to shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) (BRKb.N: Quote, Profile, Research) holding company, the 74-year-old said Berkshire held $21.4 billion of foreign currency contracts spread among 12 currencies. A year earlier, Berkshire had $12 billion of contracts over five currencies.
Buffett is concerned that U.S. policies are causing trade and budget deficits to spiral higher and might cause non-U.S. investors to pull money out of the country. This, he said, will put downward pressure on the dollar, which already trades near lifetime or multi-year lows against several major currencies.
Last year, the U.S. trade deficit rose 24 percent to a record $617.7 billion.
Buffett bets $21.4 bln against the US dollar
Sat Mar 5, 2005 04:02 PM ET
By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK, March 5 (Reuters) - Warren Buffett, the world's second-richest person, last year increased his bet against the U.S. dollar 78 percent to $21.4 billion, resulting in a $1.84 billion gain.
He also said he would be happy if his bet were to fail.
In his annual letter to shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) (BRKb.N: Quote, Profile, Research) holding company, the 74-year-old said Berkshire held $21.4 billion of foreign currency contracts spread among 12 currencies. A year earlier, Berkshire had $12 billion of contracts over five currencies.
Buffett is concerned that U.S. policies are causing trade and budget deficits to spiral higher and might cause non-U.S. investors to pull money out of the country. This, he said, will put downward pressure on the dollar, which already trades near lifetime or multi-year lows against several major currencies.
Last year, the U.S. trade deficit rose 24 percent to a record $617.7 billion.
"The evidence grows that our trade policies will put unremitting pressure on the dollar for many years to come," Buffett said. "As W.C. Fields once said when asked for a handout: 'Sorry, son, all my money's tied up in currency.'"
Most of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire's portfolio in U.S. assets, but Buffett is hedging that exposure with the currency contracts.
Last year, that hedging was profitable. Berkshire reported a $1.84 billion pre-tax investment gain on the contracts, up from $825 million a year earlier. The gain was $1.63 billion in the fourth quarter alone.
"Unlike other investors, who pile into foreign stocks, Buffett is sticking with U.S. assets and hedging the currencies itself," said James Armstrong, president of Henry H. Armstrong Associates in Pittsburgh, which invests 18 percent of its $450 million of assets in Berkshire shares.
"Most investors are traders, even more so in currencies," he added. "Buffett is thinking in terms of decades."
BIG BET
Buffett said he never traded in currencies before March 2002. The greenback bought 36 percent fewer euros and 23 percent fewer Japanese yen on Dec. 31, 2004, the end of Berkshire's last fiscal year, that it did on March 31, 2002.
While saying the currency contracts in no way reflect doubts about America, Buffett faulted policymakers for leaning toward a "not-so-benign" neglect toward the trade deficit.
"Policymakers continue to hope for a 'soft landing,' meanwhile counseling other countries to stimulate (read 'inflate') their economies and Americans to save more," Buffett said. "These admonitions miss the mark."
He said the United States suffers from "deep-rooted structural problems" that will cause deficits to balloon unless trade policies are overhauled, perhaps through a new tariff plan, or a falling dollar unsettles financial markets.
Buffett said a prompt solution, which he wants, would likely cause currency losses for Berkshire. This, however, might be offset by the benefits of a strong dollar and low inflation to the company's big stake in dollar-based assets.
Berkshire said the fair value of its currency contracts was $1.76 billion at year end. This would rise to $6.67 billion if the dollar immediately and uniformly fell another 20 percent, but would decline to a negative $2.61 billion if the dollar rose 20 percent, the company said.
This is a large bet, but not an excessive one, said Keith Trauner, a portfolio manager at Fairholme Capital Management in Short Hills, New Jersey, which invests more than 20 percent of its $1.4 billion of assets in Berkshire.
"It certainly in no way can be characterized as betting the company," he said. "I have no idea whether Buffett is right or wrong. But I wouldn't want to be in the regular habit of taking the other side of one of his bets."
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Steve Connor, Independent/UK: One of Britain's most eminent scientists has attacked President Bush for acting like a latter-day Nero who fiddles while the world burns because of global warming.
Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said the Bush administration must accept the case has been made about the link between man-made pollution and climate change. Continuing to deny the impact of human activities on the environment may ultimately have catastrophic consequences for everyone on the planet, he said.
The Royal Society has calculated that the 13 per cent rise in greenhouse gas emissions from the United States since 1990 will dwarf the cuts resulting from all other countries that will follow the Kyoto protocol. In a speech to policy-makers in Berlin today, Lord May will also castigate elements within the British media who promote "misleading" opinions about the true nature of the scientific uncertainties surrounding climate change.
"If the public are misled into thinking climate change does not pose a serious potential threat, some policy-makers could more easily find an excuse not to act. The United States administration has shown that this is the case," Lord May said. "All countries must accept the case has been made ... We need to ensure our own leaders and opinion-formers in the media are not allowed to act as modern-day Neros over climate change, fiddling while the world burns," Lord May said.
Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security
Published on Monday, March 7, 2005 by the lndependent/UK
Bush Accused of 'Fiddling While World Burns' by Ignoring Climate Change
by Steve Connor
One of Britain's most eminent scientists has attacked President Bush for acting like a latter-day Nero who fiddles while the world burns because of global warming.
Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said the Bush administration must accept the case has been made about the link between man-made pollution and climate change. Continuing to deny the impact of human activities on the environment may ultimately have catastrophic consequences for everyone on the planet, he said.
The Royal Society has calculated that the 13 per cent rise in greenhouse gas emissions from the United States since 1990 will dwarf the cuts resulting from all other countries that will follow the Kyoto protocol. In a speech to policy-makers in Berlin today, Lord May will also castigate elements within the British media who promote "misleading" opinions about the true nature of the scientific uncertainties surrounding climate change.
"If the public are misled into thinking climate change does not pose a serious potential threat, some policy-makers could more easily find an excuse not to act. The United States administration has shown that this is the case," Lord May said. "All countries must accept the case has been made ... We need to ensure our own leaders and opinion-formers in the media are not allowed to act as modern-day Neros over climate change, fiddling while the world burns," Lord May said.
"There is a real problem and the solutions aren't easy but it doesn't help at all to have people, for one motive or another, running around misrepresenting what we do and don't know," he told The Independent.
"One thing we do know for sure is we are changing the composition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that is going to have effects unless, by some implausible miracle, everything cancels out," he said.
Lord May accused the Bush administration of doing much to undermine the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions the Kyoto treaty aimed to bring about.
"President Clinton signed up to the Kyoto treaty in 1998 and a target of reducing US emissions of greenhouse gases by 8 per cent between 1990 and 2008-2012," Lord May said.
"But President George W Bush indicated in March 2001 that his administration would renege on that commitment and would not ratify the protocol. Although there are inherent problems with the Kyoto treaty it still represents the best way for the world as a whole to stabilize and eventually reduce carbon emissions. It signified a crucial first step in our efforts to avoid dangerous climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
"Small actions now are disproportionately important. They are more important than bigger actions later because of the non-linearity of the process we are talking about," he said.
"We need a whole suite of actions that, in a sense, have to have an underlying embrace that there is a problem, and it is a big problem," he added.
In addition to urging America to ratify the Kyoto agreement, Lord May accused the Daily Mail of waging an undeclared propaganda war against the science of climate change.
He accused the newspaper of misleading its readers with a misinformed campaign.
"It appears to be conducting an undeclared campaign to deny the potential threat from climate change - in the past 15 months the Daily Mail, which attracts six million readers every day, has published six opinion pieces, including four from its science editor, that have used misleading arguments against the scientific evidence on climate change," Lord May said. "It brings to mind the ill-fated and disreputable campaign by The Sunday Times during the early 1990s to deny that HIV causes Aids. It seems that some parts of the media have not learnt the lessons of that unfortunate campaign."
Lord May, winner of the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent of a mathematics Nobel, said climate change was so potentially dangerous to the world that people needed to be fully informed of its future consequences as well as the genuine uncertainties of the science.
"Like The Sunday Times in the early 1990s, the Daily Mail gives undue prominence and support to the views of an extreme fringe, and misleads its readers about the state of our knowledge," Lord May said. "Nuclear power has to be considered as a viable alternative to fossil fuel that can generate sufficient power without adding to greenhouse gases."
"It has to be part of tomorrow's future. I've every sympathy with the attitude that sees it through the emotional haze of a mushroom cloud, and terrorism makes it even more problematic, but you can't approach the things in emotional ways. There are real problems with nuclear but it's hard to see it's not part of the mid-term solution, ultimately one hopes one can move beyond it. We've got to investigate it now because we're on the verge of losing a generation of competence in the area."
THE RICH WORLD'S TOP 10 POLLUTERS
Emissions of carbon dioxide in 1990 (the base year for the Kyoto protocol). All figures are in millions of tons of carbon
United States 1,348.2
Russia 647
Japan 306.7
Germany 276.6
Ukraine 190.9
UK 159
Poland 130
Canada 125.7
Italy 117.9
France 106.6
© Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0307-03.htm
Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian U.K.: In the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted.
Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were redoing the security council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world," Bolton once said. Lately, as undersecretary of state for arms control, he has wrecked all the nonproliferation diplomacy within his reach. Over the past two decades he has been the person most dedicated to trying to discredit the UN. George Orwell's clock of 1984 is striking 13.
The euphoria that Bush's European trip marked a conversion on the road to Brussels is fading. For it was Bush himself who decided to reward Bolton with a position where he could continue his crusade as a "convinced Americanist" against the "globalists," especially those at the UN and the EU.
Paul Krugman, NY Times: Dogmatic views about the universal superiority of free markets have been losing ground around the world.
Latin Americans are the most disillusioned...
Not long ago, the growing alienation of Latin America from the United States would have been considered a major foreign policy setback. So much has gone wrong lately that we've defined disaster down, but it's still not a good thing.
Where does Mr. Wolfowitz fit into all this? The advice that the World Bank gives is as important as the money it lends - but only if governments take that advice. And given the ideological rigidity the Pentagon showed in Iraq, they probably won't. If Mr. Wolfowitz says that some free-market policy will help economic growth, he'll be greeted with as much skepticism as if he declared that some country has weapons of mass destruction.
Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, says that the Wolfowitz nomination turns the World Bank into the American Bank. Make that ugly American bank: rightly or not, developing countries will see Mr. Wolfowitz's selection as a sign that we're still trying to impose policies they believe have failed.
Nathan Guttman, www.haaretz.com: Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin was reinstated a few weeks ago, after sitting at home for half a year and being barred from returning to his job on the Iranian desk in the Department of Defense's policy division. Franklin was at the center of a lengthy FBI investigation after suspicions arose that he transfered classified information about U.S. policy on Iran to members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
In the seven months since the affair made headlines on the CBS evening news, the investigation has been kept under tight wraps, but its ramifications are already being felt.
While Franklin is back at work, and, say well-placed sources, is expected to reach a plea bargain, the spotlight has moved to the AIPAC officials - two senior members were suspended for the duration of the case and four other senior officials were forced to testify at length before the special investigative jury in Virginia (whose proceedings are classified) appointed for the case
Illegitimate, Incompetent, Corrupt
The Enemy Within
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian U.K.
How an Americanist devoted to destroying international alliances became the US envoy to the UN.
In the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted.
Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were redoing the security council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world," Bolton once said. Lately, as undersecretary of state for arms control, he has wrecked all the nonproliferation diplomacy within his reach. Over the past two decades he has been the person most dedicated to trying to discredit the UN. George Orwell's clock of 1984 is striking 13.
The euphoria that Bush's European trip marked a conversion on the road to Brussels is fading. For it was Bush himself who decided to reward Bolton with a position where he could continue his crusade as a "convinced Americanist" against the "globalists," especially those at the UN and the EU.
Bolton made a play to become deputy secretary of state after the 2004 election, but was blocked by Condoleezza Rice, who understood that his love of bureaucratic infighting would have undermined her authority. Dick Cheney privately promised Bolton that if all else failed he would give him a job on his vice presidential staff, but that proved unnecessary when Bush nominated him to the UN post. Rice announced his appointment, symbolically demonstrating that he reports to her. But Bolton has deep support within the White House, and Rice is very much a work-in-progress. With Bolton's appointment, the empire strikes back.
Bolton is an extraordinary combination of political operator and ideologue. He began his career as a cog in the machine of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, helping his political action committees evade legal restrictions and federal fines. Helms, the most powerful reactionary in the Senate, sponsored Bolton's rise to Reagan's justice department. "John Bolton," Helms said, "is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, or what the Bible describes as the final battle between good and evil."
Bolton is often called a neoconservative, but he is more their ally, implementer and agent. His roots are in Helms's Dixiecrat Republicanism, not the neocons' airy Trotskyism or Straussianism.
Bolton is a specimen of the "primitives", as Truman's secretary of state Dean Acheson called the unilateralists and McCarthyites of the early cold war. Through his political integration into the neocon apparatus, Bolton might be properly classified a neoprimitive.
At the state department, Bolton was Colin Powell's enemy within. In his first year, he forced the US withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, destroyed a protocol on enforcing the biological weapons convention, and ousted the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He scuttled the nuclear test ban treaty and the UN conference on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. And he was behind the renunciation of the US signature on the 1998 Rome statute creating the international criminal court. He described sending his letter notifying the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, as "the happiest moment of my government service".
Bolton's meddling in diplomacy on nonproliferation with North Korea and Iran guaranteed that the allies had no unified position and encouraged the Koreans and Iranians to play the nuclear card. Bolton's response to these crises has been to lead the charge to remove the UN head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. In late November, Bolton denounced the Blair government and the Europeans negotiating with the Iranians as "soft" for attempting "diplomatic means".
Bolton might be granted the integrity of his primitivism, a true believer who imagines Fortress America besieged by the UN and Europeans - "Americanists find themselves surrounded by small armies of globalists, each tightly clutching a favourite new treaty or multilateralist proposal". But Bolton's coarse ideology is advanced by sophisticated campaigns of disinformation - and not only on Iraq and North Korea. His leaks of falsehoods that Syria and Cuba had developed weapons of mass destruction sparked internal revolts by intelligence professionals and the foreign service.
Like his allies the neoconservatives, for Bolton the ends justify the means. But unlike them he has no use for romantic rhetoric about the "march of freedom" and "democracy", as he demonstrated so effectively in Florida. And now he has the job he sought above all from the beginning.
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Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1434180,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/opinion/18krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
March 18, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Ugly American Bank
By PAUL KRUGMAN
ou can say this about Paul Wolfowitz's qualifications to lead the World Bank: He has been closely associated with America's largest foreign aid and economic development project since the Marshall Plan.
I'm talking, of course, about reconstruction in Iraq. Unfortunately, what happened there is likely to make countries distrust any economic advice Mr. Wolfowitz might give.
Let's not focus on mismanagement. Instead, let's talk about ideology.
Before the Iraq war, Pentagon hawks shut the State Department out of planning. This excluded anyone with development experience. As a result, the administration went into Iraq determined to demonstrate the virtues of radical free-market economics, with nobody warning about the likely problems.
Journalists who spoke to Paul Bremer when he was running Iraq remarked on his passion when he spoke about privatizing state enterprises. They didn't note a comparable passion for a rapid democratization.
In fact, economic ideology may explain why U.S. officials didn't move quickly after the fall of Baghdad to hold elections - even though assuring Iraqis that we didn't intend to install a puppet regime might have headed off the insurgency. Jay Garner, the first Iraq administrator, wanted elections as quickly as possible, but the White House wanted to put a "template" in place by privatizing oil and other industries before handing over control.
The oil fields never did get privatized. Nonetheless, the attempt to turn Iraq into a laissez-faire showpiece was, in its own way, as much an in-your-face rejection of world opinion as the decision to go to war. Dogmatic views about the universal superiority of free markets have been losing ground around the world.
Latin Americans are the most disillusioned. Through much of the 1990's, they bought into the "Washington consensus" - which we should note came from Clinton administration officials as well as from Wall Street economists and conservative think tanks - which said that privatization, deregulation and free trade would lead to economic takeoff. Instead, growth remained sluggish, inequality increased, and the region was struck by a series of economic crises.
The result has been the rise of governments that, to varying degrees, reject policies they perceive as made in America. Venezuela's leader is the most obstreperous. But the most dramatic example of the backlash is Argentina, once the darling of Wall Street and the think tanks. Today, after a devastating recession, the country is run by a populist who often blames foreigners for the country's economic problems, and has forced Argentina's foreign creditors to accept a settlement that gives them only 32 cents on the dollar.
And the backlash has reached our closest neighbor. Mexico's current president, Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive, is a firm believer in free markets. But his administration is widely considered a failure. Meanwhile, Mexico City's leftist mayor, Manuel López Obrador, has become immensely popular. And his populist rhetoric has raised fears that if he becomes president he will roll back the free-market and free-trade policies of the past two decades.
Mr. Fox is trying to use a minor violation of the law to keep Mr. López off the presidential ballot. If he succeeds, many Mexicans will believe that democracy was sacrificed on the altar of foreign capital.
Not long ago, the growing alienation of Latin America from the United States would have been considered a major foreign policy setback. So much has gone wrong lately that we've defined disaster down, but it's still not a good thing.
Where does Mr. Wolfowitz fit into all this? The advice that the World Bank gives is as important as the money it lends - but only if governments take that advice. And given the ideological rigidity the Pentagon showed in Iraq, they probably won't. If Mr. Wolfowitz says that some free-market policy will help economic growth, he'll be greeted with as much skepticism as if he declared that some country has weapons of mass destruction.
Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, says that the Wolfowitz nomination turns the World Bank into the American Bank. Make that ugly American bank: rightly or not, developing countries will see Mr. Wolfowitz's selection as a sign that we're still trying to impose policies they believe have failed.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
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Last update - 02:09 25/03/2005
FBI probe into leaked secrets takes aim at AIPAC
By Nathan Guttman
WASHINGTON - Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin was reinstated a few weeks ago, after sitting at home for half a year and being barred from returning to his job on the Iranian desk in the Department of Defense's policy division. Franklin was at the center of a lengthy FBI investigation after suspicions arose that he transfered classified information about U.S. policy on Iran to members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
In the seven months since the affair made headlines on the CBS evening news, the investigation has been kept under tight wraps, but its ramifications are already being felt.
While Franklin is back at work, and, say well-placed sources, is expected to reach a plea bargain, the spotlight has moved to the AIPAC officials - two senior members were suspended for the duration of the case and four other senior officials were forced to testify at length before the special investigative jury in Virginia (whose proceedings are classified) appointed for the case.
Even if the investigation is nowhere near completion, it has definitely reached a crossroads, at which investigators must decide on the suspects in the case - Larry Franklin alone; Franklin and two AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman; or whether, on top of those three, the entire AIPAC organization has acted unlawfully.
Sources close to the investigation suggested recently that it would end in a plea bargain. Franklin would plead to a lesser crime of unauthorized transfer of information, Rosen and Weissman would be charged with receiving classified information unlawfully, and AIPAC would remain unstained. Franklin's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, yesterday denied the reports, stating: "We have not entered any plea of defense with the Justice Department."
AIPAC refused to say anything about the possibility of a plea bargain.
As for Franklin's reinstatement, a Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergrosz, confirmed that "Dr. Franklin is still a U.S. government employee," bud declined to identify his position. Haaretz has learned that Franklin has been moved to a post different from the one he held previously and kept from handling classified information.
From AIPAC's standpoint, the issue at hand is containment: can the affair be limited to Rosen and Weissman, or is the investigation directed at the lobby as a whole? It is clear that the FBI has as its objective an extensive investigation against AIPAC. Investigators have been looking into AIPAC's entire manner of operating, not just in the Franklin instance. An official questioned twice by the FBI, as a witness, was astounded by investigators' intimate familiarity with AIPAC.
The intended breadth of the investigation is also evident from the FBI's dramatic moves - raiding AIPAC offices in December and issuing subpoenas to its four top executives. Executive Director Howard Kohr, Managing Director Richard Fishman, Research Director Rafael Danziger and Communications Director Renee Rothstein appeared before the investigative jury and were questioned at length.
Investigators also reportedly tried to use Franklin, after the affair erupted, to incriminate as many senior AIPAC officials as possible. The Jerusalem Post reported four months ago that investigators informed Franklin of the suspicions against him and asked for his cooperation. In a sting operation, he received information from the FBI agents that Iran was planning to attack Israelis operating in the Kurdish region in Iraq. Franklin, on the FBI's instructions, telephoned AIPAC's Rosen and Weissman and gave them the information, and they rushed to pass it on to Israeli diplomats, thereby falling into the FBI trap.
AIPAC refuses to comment on the case, saying, "We do not comment on personnel matters." A spokesman for AIPAC, Patrick Dorton, said yesterday that "it would not be appropriate for AIPAC to comment on issues that have to do with an ongoing federal investigation."
The suspension of the two AIPAC officials, though never officially explained, is certainly a key turning point in the case. According to one assessment, AIPAC understands that regardless of whether a plea bargain is reached, it will be tough to get those two off the hook, so AIPAC is keeping its distance for now. Their lawyer refused requests from Haaretz for a comment.
A source close to the case said that since the investigation began, AIPAC's ability to maintain good ties with U.S. administration officials has suffered.
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Laura Zuckerman, Reuters: Montana's Democratic governor has touched off a political fight with state Republicans after calling for the return of National Guard troops serving in Iraq to help out during what many fear will be a record-setting wildfire season.
Newly elected Gov. Brian Schweitzer infuriated Republican lawmakers -- the minority party in state government for the first time in more than a decade -- who see his request as a back-door way to criticize the Bush administration over Iraq.
"He's figured out how to use the wildfire season to protest the Iraq war," said Senate Minority Leader Bob Keenan said on Tuesday. "It's an anti-war statement and condemnation of Bush's actions."
The governor and his supporters deny those charges in a growing political battle that comes as weather experts say a seven-year drought and a severely reduced snowpack could lead to a devastating summer of wildfires.
Amy Feigenbaum, Weslyan Argus: Hersh forecasted a protracted war in Iraq, an obstinate president who will remain indifferent to anti-war sentiments, and an economic collapse. In his talk "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh criticized both Republicans and Democrats, stressing the need for new faces in Congress.
Hersh is one of America's most renowned investigative journalists, currently writing for The New Yorker on military and security matters. In 2004, Hersh helped expose the Abu Ghraib abuses…
Hersh's most recent articles in January 2005 revealed that the U.S. has been conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. While both the Bush administration and the Iranian government have denied these allegations, Hersh claims that the U.S. will not stand for Iran having nuclear power.
"We'll do something in Iran," Hersh said. "The Bush administration has long been planning it. This is the worst presidency and the worst war at the worst time in history that I can see. The Congress does not stand up to Bush. Their problem is that they're down 20 IQ points a man since the 1960's."
While his lecture gave a pessimistic view of the next four years, he did offer hope for the upcoming Congressional elections. In the last election, he noted an emerging pattern in the West, which he called community building. Our government needs new leadership, he said. The people need to support better politicians and than work to get these people elected.
LLOYD AXWORTHY, Open Letter to Condi Rice, Winnipeg Free Press: I invite you to expand the narrow perspective that seems to inform your opinions of Canada by ranging far wider in your reach of contacts and discussions. You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti-Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world.
These Canadians believe that security can be achieved through well-modulated efforts to protect the rights of people, not just nation-states.
To encourage and advance international co-operation on managing the risk of climate change, they believe that we need agreements like Kyoto.
To protect people against international crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, they support new institutions like the International Criminal Court -- which, by the way, you might strongly consider using to hold accountable those committing atrocities today in Darfur, Sudan.
And these Canadians believe that the United Nations should indeed be reformed -- beginning with an agreement to get rid of the veto held by the major powers over humanitarian interventions to stop violence and predatory practices.
On this score, you might want to explore the concept of the 'Responsibility to Protect' while you're in Ottawa. It's a Canadian idea born out of the recent experience of Kosovo and informed by the many horrific examples of inhumanity over the last half-century. Many Canadians feel it has a lot more relevance to providing real human security in the world than missile defence ever will…
There is also a very strong awareness on both sides of the border of how vital Canada is to the U.S. as a partner in North America. We supply copious amounts of oil and natural gas to your country, our respective trade is the world's largest in volume, and we are increasingly bound together by common concerns over depletion of resources, especially very scarce fresh water.
Daniel Ellsberg, www.commondreams.org: The fact that Israel has a large and growing nuclear arsenal - larger than Britain's - has been recognized by the rest of the world ever since Mordechai Vanunu revealed it conclusively nineteen years ago. For demolishing his country's policy of concealment, denial and "ambiguity" of its status as a nuclear weapons state, Vanunu served eighteen years in prison, including an unprecedented period of eleven and a half years of solitary confinement in a six-by-nine foot cell.
Meanwhile, not one of the harms that some feared might result from his revelations has materialized in the slightest degree. The notion that any further details he could disclose, nineteen years later, could harm Israel's national security is absurd. Why then, after he has served his full sentence, is the State of Israel invoking British Mandate Emergency Regulations of 1945, pre-dating its own independence, to threaten him with prison for exercising his fundamental human rights to speak to foreigners and foreign journalists? Why do its leaders still insist on suppressing any open discussion in Israel itself of its real military posture and its implications for their security?
John P. O’Neil Wall of Heroes
Montana call for Iraq troop return sparks debate
12 Mar 2005 00:59:16 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Laura Zuckerman
SULA, Mont., March 11 (Reuters) - Montana's Democratic governor has touched off a political fight with state Republicans after calling for the return of National Guard troops serving in Iraq to help out during what many fear will be a record-setting wildfire season.
Newly elected Gov. Brian Schweitzer infuriated Republican lawmakers -- the minority party in state government for the first time in more than a decade -- who see his request as a back-door way to criticize the Bush administration over Iraq.
"He's figured out how to use the wildfire season to protest the Iraq war," said Senate Minority Leader Bob Keenan said on Tuesday. "It's an anti-war statement and condemnation of Bush's actions."
The governor and his supporters deny those charges in a growing political battle that comes as weather experts say a seven-year drought and a severely reduced snowpack could lead to a devastating summer of wildfires.
They also worry that limited resources stretched thinner by National Guardsmen serving overseas could make it difficult to combat the kind of massive blazes that engulfed the state in 2000 when some 2,400 wildfires torched nearly 950,000 acres of mostly public land.
"Everything right now is pointing to the possibility of a large and damaging fire season," said Bruce Thoricht, meteorologist with the federal Northern Rockies Coordination Center in Missoula.
Gov. Schweitzer ignited the firestorm last week when he said Montana, which backed Bush's re-election, would disproportionately suffer the pain of proposed cuts in the federal budget, with money targeted for firefighting slashed in half.
Democrats also say the drought-plagued, fire-prone Western state about the size of Germany never has enough resources to fight summer blazes even with all the troops at home.
"I would be remiss as chief executive of Montana not to look at the cards I'm dealt and not recognize it's not a good hand and we need new cards," the governor told Reuters earlier this week.
As fire season approaches, about 1,500 of Montana's 3,500 National Guard troops have been deployed on federal active duty, said Montana Guard spokesman Maj. Scott Smith.
Smith declined to weigh in on the governor's position but a Pentagon spokesman Lt. Colonel Mike Milord said in an e-mail on Tuesday the state's Guard force was at 56 percent and that deals with neighboring states would provide for more troops during emergencies this summer.
And the bulk of the Guard's helicopters -- critical in shuttling fire crews and equipment to blazes -- are unavailable, either because they are in Iraq or their aviation officers are absent.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N11460046.htm
Hersh speech blasts Bush and war policy
By Amy Feigenbaum
News Editor
rebistalgn.com.ar
Seymour Hersh, one of America's most respected investigative journalists, criticizes contemporary politicians in speeches.
Seymour Hersh confirmed existing worries about Bush's next four years in office during a Tuesday night lecture in the Memorial Chapel.
Hersh forecasted a protracted war in Iraq, an obstinate president who will remain indifferent to anti-war sentiments, and an economic collapse. In his talk "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh criticized both Republicans and Democrats, stressing the need for new faces in Congress.
Hersh is one of America's most renowned investigative journalists, currently writing for The New Yorker on military and security matters. In 2004, Hersh helped expose the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Hersh began his lecture by describing Bush's vision of the war in Iraq and the effects his beliefs will have for the future of US intervention.
"Bush thinks he's doing the right thing in Iraq," Hersh said. "He's completely committed whether it's finishing his father's work, for divine reasons, or manifest destiny. Over 1,500 body bags have come back and another 1,000 or 2,000 body bags wouldn't stop him."
The justification for the U.S. invasion, he said, is not oil or Israel as many have thought; it is Bush's uncompromising beliefs.
"It's really terrifying," Hersh said. "Street marches and demonstrations wouldn't change what he's going to do. Even when Bush was asked by a high ranking government official if the US was losing the war in Iraq, Bush said 'you mean we're not winning?'"
Professor Martha Crenshaw from the Government department questioned Hersh's opinion of Bush.
"None of us know what motivates Bush," Crenshaw said. "There are some, Professor Gergen [at the Kennedy School of Government] at Harvard [who] see Bush as a good leader, someone who is flexible and pragmatic. You get a different picture of the president from different things you read."
According to Hersh, Bush's vision has presented several negative implications for the ear in Iraq. Bush has kept the American people in the dark about what is actually going on. There are no embedded journalists and few reporters in Iraq, which allow military activity to go unchecked.
The administration's use of the word "insurgents" in Iraq gives the wrong impression of militants, making them seem unorganized and barbaric. They in fact should be called "resisters," because they are simply resisting the US occupation.
These resisters are more methodical than Bush or the media have given them credit for.
"[The resisters] are letting the Americans have Baghdad," Hersh said. "Most of the Iraqis left the city before the U.S. invaded. And the attacks that occurred during that time seemed random to us. They were taking down their existing structures systematically."
According to Hersh, the insurgent violence, along with an upcoming presidential election, created the impetus for Abu Ghraib. Bush wanted to gain the most information he could in the shortest amount of time.
"While Americans value privacy, Arabs work on shame," Hersh said. "Men cannot see men naked, it's against the Koran. The photos that were taken could be used as blackmail against these prisoners.
The President and his administration knew what was going on, according to Hersh; they had inspected Abu Ghraib and praised its work.
According to Hersh, the American troops in Abu Ghraib were deeply affected by the torture they inflicted. He compared their actions to those of the US soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which he exposed in 1969.
"I gave them a good boy," Hersh quoted one mother of a soldier involved in the My Lai massacre. "And they gave me back a murderer."
Abu Ghraib is just one example of covert military behavior, Hersh said, but it goes deeper. In recent months, the military has even been hiding where U.S. troops are located. Most troops are being killed in Romady, not Baghdad.
The new plan of attack is to take over one city at a time with the goal of making Iraqis more afraid of U.S. troops than insurgents. The military believes that this is the best way to make Iraqi's safe. The marines, however, do not have the intelligence to make this mission successful and eventually, Hersh said, it will result in a civil war.
On the subject of Afghanistan, Hersh claimed that the violence was completely unnecessary.
"More than 70% of the Taliban didn't want bin Laden as a leader," Hersh said. "Meanwhile, we have declared victory when warlords control the military bases and a mafia society is in control."
Hersh's most recent articles in January 2005 revealed that the U.S. has been conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. While both the Bush administration and the Iranian government have denied these allegations, Hersh claims that the U.S. will not stand for Iran having nuclear power.
"We'll do something in Iran," Hersh said. "The Bush administration has long been planning it. This is the worst presidency and the worst war at the worst time in history that I can see. The Congress does not stand up to Bush. Their problem is that they're down 20 IQ points a man since the 1960's."
While his lecture gave a pessimistic view of the next four years, he did offer hope for the upcoming Congressional elections. In the last election, he noted an emerging pattern in the West, which he called community building. Our government needs new leadership, he said. The people need to support better politicians and than work to get these people elected.
Most students trusted Hersh's credibility but questioned his extreme negativity of the current political situation.
"It seems like he's well connected with very powerful people," said Josh Cohen '05. "He's credible--fame allows people to confide in him and so he becomes a great source of information."
"If anything good can come out of all of this mess, maybe it will be that people will develop a more critical perspective about those in power, and military recruiting will suffer," said Mark Bray '05.
Professor Philip Pomper of the History Department has been friends with Hersh since elementary school and invited him to speak at Wesleyan.
"You never can guess when you're playing softball with someone on the south side of Chicago, what they are destined to become," Pomper said. "But when you can balance advocacy with actuary, you can make a compelling case. And that's just the kind of man he is. A man of conviction."
http://www.wesleyanargus.com/article.php?article_id=923
Missile Counter-Attack
Axworthy fires back at U.S. -- and Canadian -- critics of our BMD decision in An Open Letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
By LLOYD AXWORTHY
Dear Condi,
I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.
I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.
But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.
As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we've had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we're going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.
Sure, that doesn't match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a "liberation war" in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.
Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government's role should be when there isn't a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.
Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such as missile defence can be made openly.
You might also notice that it's a system in which the governing party's caucus members are not afraid to tell their leader that their constituents don't want to follow the ideological, perhaps teleological, fantasies of Canada's continental co-inhabitant. And that this leader actually listens to such representations.
Your boss did not avail himself of a similar opportunity to visit our House of Commons during his visit, fearing, it seems, that there might be some signs of dissent. He preferred to issue his diktat on missile defence in front of a highly controlled, pre-selected audience.
Such control-freak antics may work in the virtual one-party state that now prevails in Washington. But in Canada we have a residual belief that politicians should be subject to a few checks and balances, an idea that your country once espoused before the days of empire.
If you want to have us consider your proposals and positions, present them in a proper way, through serious discussion across the table in our cabinet room, as your previous president did when he visited Ottawa. And don't embarrass our prime minister by lobbing a verbal missile at him while he sits on a public stage, with no chance to respond.
Now, I understand that there may have been some miscalculations in Washington based on faulty advice from your resident governor of the "northern territories," Ambassador Cellucci. But you should know by now that he hasn't really won the hearts and minds of most Canadians through his attempts to browbeat and command our allegiance to U.S. policies.
Sadly, Mr. Cellucci has been far too closeted with exclusive groups of 'experts' from Calgary think-tanks and neo-con lobbyists at cross-border conferences to remotely grasp a cross-section of Canadian attitudes (nor American ones, for that matter).
I invite you to expand the narrow perspective that seems to inform your opinions of Canada by ranging far wider in your reach of contacts and discussions. You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti-Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world.
These Canadians believe that security can be achieved through well-modulated efforts to protect the rights of people, not just nation-states.
To encourage and advance international co-operation on managing the risk of climate change, they believe that we need agreements like Kyoto.
To protect people against international crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, they support new institutions like the International Criminal Court -- which, by the way, you might strongly consider using to hold accountable those committing atrocities today in Darfur, Sudan.
And these Canadians believe that the United Nations should indeed be reformed -- beginning with an agreement to get rid of the veto held by the major powers over humanitarian interventions to stop violence and predatory practices.
On this score, you might want to explore the concept of the 'Responsibility to Protect' while you're in Ottawa. It's a Canadian idea born out of the recent experience of Kosovo and informed by the many horrific examples of inhumanity over the last half-century. Many Canadians feel it has a lot more relevance to providing real human security in the world than missile defence ever will.
This is not just some quirky notion concocted in our long winter nights, by the way. It seems to have appeal for many in your own country, if not the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal or Rush Limbaugh. As I discovered recently while giving a series of lectures in southern California, there is keen interest in how the U.S. can offer real leadership in managing global challenges of disease, natural calamities and conflict, other than by military means.
There is also a very strong awareness on both sides of the border of how vital Canada is to the U.S. as a partner in North America. We supply copious amounts of oil and natural gas to your country, our respective trade is the world's largest in volume, and we are increasingly bound together by common concerns over depletion of resources, especially very scarce fresh water.
Why not discuss these issues with Canadians who understand them, and seek out ways to better cooperate in areas where we agree -- and agree to respect each other's views when we disagree.
Above all, ignore the Cassandras who deride the state of our relations because of one missile-defence decision. Accept that, as a friend on your border, we will offer a different, independent point of view. And that there are times when truth must speak to power.
In friendship,
Lloyd Axworthy
Lloyd Axworthy is president of the University of Winnipeg and a former Canadian foreign minister.
2610442p-3026695c.html ________________________________________
© 2005 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/westview/story/
Published on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Daniel Ellsberg Statement on Vanunu
Statement by Daniel Ellsberg on the recent indictment of Mordechai Vanunu in Israel for his violation of restrictions banning him from speaking to foreigners or giving interviews to foreign journalists. Ellsberg has just returned from Israel, where he had been invited to testify against these restrictions on March 16 before a committee of the Knesset; the committee hearing was cancelled, evidently in secret anticipation of this indictment. Ellsberg is available for a limited number of interviews on this subject, through the Institute for Public Accuracy
The fact that Israel has a large and growing nuclear arsenal - larger than Britain's - has been recognized by the rest of the world ever since Mordechai Vanunu revealed it conclusively nineteen years ago. For demolishing his country's policy of concealment, denial and "ambiguity" of its status as a nuclear weapons state, Vanunu served eighteen years in prison, including an unprecedented period of eleven and a half years of solitary confinement in a six-by-nine foot cell.
Meanwhile, not one of the harms that some feared might result from his revelations has materialized in the slightest degree. The notion that any further details he could disclose, nineteen years later, could harm Israel's national security is absurd. Why then, after he has served his full sentence, is the State of Israel invoking British Mandate Emergency Regulations of 1945, pre-dating its own independence, to threaten him with prison for exercising his fundamental human rights to speak to foreigners and foreign journalists? Why do its leaders still insist on suppressing any open discussion in Israel itself of its real military posture and its implications for their security?
Here's one possible answer. This very month both Israel and the US are making open threats of armed attacks as early as this summer on Iran's nuclear weapons potential. For Israel to confirm openly Vanunu's revelations at this particular time - dramatically abandoning forty years of obfuscation - would attract unfavorable attention to the fact that such threats or attacks against Iran are aimed not at achieving a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East but at prolonging, indefinitely, Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region. That is an unstated aim for both the US and Israel, but a less than compelling justification for war. This may be a reason - but not a legitimate one - for returning Mordechai Vanunu to silence in solitary.
What the world needs of this prophet of the nuclear era is not his silence but his freedom to speak and travel, to inspire others to follow his example of truth-telling in their own countries, above all here in the United States.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0323-23.htm
###
Juan Cole, www.juancole.com: The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.
Carol Marbin Miller, Miami Herald: Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Herald has learned.
Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.
For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called ``a showdown.''
In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.
''We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,'' said a source with the local police.
www.mediamatters.com: In coverage of the Terri Schiavo case, CNN host Daryn Kagan and senior analyst Jeff Greenfield made sweeping assertions about public opinion of the case that are undermined by polling data.Following footage on the March 24 edition of CNN's Live Today of protestors urging the restoration of Schiavo's feeding tube, Kagan claimed that there are "a lot of people in this country agreeing with them that this would be a death without dignity." Kagan further claimed that there are "[s]trong, divided opinions across the country."
In a report on CNN's Live From... on the impact of the widely aired videotapes of Schiavo, Greenfield stated, "Whatever the medical facts, it is not hard to understand why the average person, looking at those images [of Schiavo], sees them as at least raising doubt." Greenfield's remark followed footage of one of the doctors hired by Schiavo's parents claiming that Schiavo is not in a persistent vegetative state.
…polls do indicate that on the case's central issue -- the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube -- the public is not as divided or as conflicted as Kagan and Greenfield suggest..
• In a March 22 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 52 percent of respondents agreed with that day's court decision to leave Schiavo's feeding tube unattached; 39 percent disagreed.
• In a March 21-22 CBS News poll, 61 percent of respondents thought Schiavo's feeding tube should have been removed, while 28 percent thought it should have remained in place. Further, 66 percent did not think the feeding tube should be restored while 27 percent thought it should. Asked if Congress and the president should intervene in the Schiavo case, 82 percent said no; 13 percent said yes. Even among evangelicals, 68 percent felt that the president and Congress should stay out of the matter.
In a March 20 ABC News poll, 63 percent of respondents said they support the March 18 court decision to remove Schiavo's feeding tube...
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: It's the hypocrisy, stupid. It goes on and on and on, and it is exhausting in the extreme to consider, much less address and attack. Lately, the hypocrisy needle has been pegged over into the red. Leave it to the Republican majority to take an important issue, an issue filled with questions about medical ethics, the rights of the disabled people, the rights of spouses, the place of federalism in a national debate and the simple value of human life, and transmogrify it into a ghoulish circus sideshow best used to score political points and do a little fundraising on the side…Consider:
• The Republicans, party of states rights, have bulldozed Florida law and the basic underpinnings of Federalism to take a hand in this matter. Florida law allows a spouse to stand surrogate when medical decisions of life and death are required, but since sticking to their states-rights guns would not give the conservatives the outcome they desire, they betrayed a central ethic of their political philosophy without batting an eye;
• The Republicans, party of the sanctity of marriage, have taken over the role of husband in the process of knocking over their Federalist principles. Gay people getting married is a horrid affront to the sanctity of marriage, but the United States Congress finds no problem elbowing itself into the kitchen-table decisions made between a husband and a wife;
• The Republicans, party of moral values, are enjoying an incredible fundraising opportunity in flogging the Schiavo story. One cannot swing one's cat by the tail without striking a plea for financial assistance from the far-right Republican-allied groups that have turned one family's plight into a river of cash;
• Republicans, party of the 'Culture of Life,' have not one word to say about Sun Hudson. Hudson was a five-month-old baby born in Texas with a genetic disorder that required him to be sustained on machines. Thanks to a law signed by then-Governor Bush in 1999, Texas hospitals are allowed to remove patients from machines if they deem there is no hope, and if the patient's family cannot afford to sustain care. Sun Hudson was removed from his machines two weeks ago, over the thunderous outrage of his mother, and he died. Congressional Republicans were nowhere to be found when the life left his little body;
• Republicans, party of Tom DeLay, have not one word to say about DeLay's staggering double standard in this matter. In 1988, DeLay's father was injured in an accident and left in a condition quite similar to that of Mrs. Schiavo. DeLay sat in private counsel with his family, heard the verdict of the doctors that his father would never recover, considered the stated wishes of his father that he did not want to be left to live sustained by machines should such a thing come to pass, and decided to let the man pass. Had a mob of self-righteous Congressional Democrats tried to batter their way into the decision-making process of the DeLay family in 1988, Tom would have likely attacked them with his bug-extermination equipment, and he would have been fully justified in doing so.
Kulchur War, Defense of Science, Separation of Church & State
http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/schiavo-case-and-islamization-of.html
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
The Schiavo Case and the Islamization of the Republican Party
The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.
The Muslim fundamentalists use a provision of Islamic law called "bringing to account" (hisba). As Al-Ahram weekly notes, "Hisba signifies a case filed by an individual on behalf of society when the plaintiff feels that great harm has been done to religion." Hisba is a medieval idea that had all but lapsed when the fundamentalists brought it back in the 1970s and 1980s.
In this practice, any individual can use the courts to intervene in the private lives of others. Among the more famous cases of such interference is that of Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in Egypt. A respected modern scholar of Koranic studies, Abu Zaid argued that, contrary to medieval interpretations of Islamic law, women and men should receive equal inheritance shares. (Medieval Islamic law granted women only half the inheritance shares of their brothers). Abu Zaid was accused of sacrilege. Then the allegation of sacrilege was used as a basis on which the fundamentalists sought to have the courts forcibly divorce him from his wife.
Abu Zaid's wife loved her husband. She did not want to be divorced. But the fundamentalists went before the court and said, she is a Muslim, and he is an infidel, and no Muslim woman may be married to an infidel. They represented their efforts as being on behalf of the Islamic religion, which had an interest in seeing to it that heretics like Abu Zaid could not remain married to a Muslim woman. In 1995 the hisba court actually found against them. They fled to Europe, and ultimately settled in Holland.
Likewise, a similar tactic was deployed against the Egyptian feminist author, Nawal Saadawi, but it failed and she was able to remain in the country.
One of the most objectionable features of this fundamentalist tactic is that persons without standing can interfere in private affairs. Perfect strangers can file a case about your marriage, because they represent themselves as defending a public interest (the upholding of religion and morality).
Terri Schiavo's husband is her legal guardian. Her parents have not succeeded in challenging this status of his. As long as he is the guardian, the decision on removing the feeding tubes is between him and their physicians. Her parents have not succeeded in having this responsibility moved from him to them. Even under legislation George W. Bush signed in 1999 while governor of Texas, the spouse and the physician can make this decision.
In passing a special law to allow the case to be kicked to a Federal judge after the state courts had all ruled in favor of the husband, Congress probably shot itself in the foot once again. The law is not a respecter of persons, so the Federal judge will likely rule as the state ones did.
But the most frightening thing about the entire affair is that public figures like congressmen inserted themselves into the case in order to uphold religious strictures. The lawyer arguing against the husband let the cat out of the bag, as reported by the NYT: ' The lawyer, David Gibbs, also said Ms. Schiavo's religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic were being infringed because Pope John Paul II has deemed it unacceptable for Catholics to refuse food and water. "We are now in a position where a court has ordered her to disobey her church and even jeopardize her eternal soul," Mr. Gibbs said. '
In other words, the United States Congress acted in part on behalf of the Roman Catholic church. Both of these public bodies interfered in the private affairs of the Schiavos, just as the fundamentalist Egyptian, Nabih El-Wahsh, tried to interfere in the marriage of Nawal El Saadawi.
Like many of his fundamentalist counterparts in the Middle East, Tom Delay is rather cynically using this issue to divert attention from his own corruption. Like the Muslim fundamentalist manipulators of Hisba, Delay represents himself as acting on behalf of a higher cause. He said of the case over the weekend, ' "This is not a political issue. This is life and death," '
Republican Hisba will have the same effect in the United States that it does in the Middle East. It will reduce the rights of the individual in favor of the rights of religious and political elites to control individuals. Ayatollah Delay isn't different from his counterparts in Iran.
________________________________________
Posted on Sat, Mar. 26, 2005
TERRI SCHIAVO CASE
Police 'showdown' averted
BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
cmarbin@herald.com
Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Herald has learned.
Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.
For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called ``a showdown.''
In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.
''We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,'' said a source with the local police.
''The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,'' said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. ``When the sheriff's department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off.''
The incident,known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday's events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge's order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge's order whenever an agency appeals it.
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
Participants in the high-stakes test of wills, who spoke with The Herald on the condition of anonymity, said they believed the standoff could ultimately have led to a constitutional crisis and a confrontation between dueling lawmen.
''There were two sets of law enforcement officers facing off, waiting for the other to blink,'' said one official with knowledge of Thursday morning's activities.
In jest, one official said local police discussed ``whether we had enough officers to hold off the National Guard.''
''It was kind of a showdown on the part of the locals and the state police,'' the official said. ``It it was not too long after that Jeb Bush was on TV saying that, evidently, he doesn't have as much authority as people think.''
State officials on Friday vigorously denied the notion that any ''showdown'' occurred.
''DCF directed no such action,'' said agency spokeswoman Zoraya Suarez.
Said Bush spokesman Jacob DiPietre: ``There was no showdown. We were ready to go. We didn't want to break the law. There was a process in place and we were following the process. The judge had an order and we were following the order.''
Tim Caddell, a spokesman for the city of Pinellas Park, declined to discuss Thursday's events.
SHELTER FOR SCHIAVO
The developments that set Thursday morning's events in motion began the previous afternoon, when the governor and DCF chief Lucy Hadi held an impromptu news conference to announce they were considering sheltering Schiavo under the state's adult protection law. DCF has been besieged, officials say, by thousands of calls alleging Schiavo is the victim of abuse or neglect.
Alerted by the Bush administration that Schiavo might be on her way to their facility, officials at Morton Plant Hospital went to court themselves Wednesday, asking Circuit Judge George Greer, who ordered the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube last week, what to do.
''It's an extraordinary situation,'' said Beth Hardy, a hospital spokeswoman. ``I don't think any of us has seen anything like it. Ever.''
Greer signed an order Wednesday afternoon forbidding DCF from ''taking possession of Theresa Marie Schiavo or removing her'' from the hospice. He directed ''each and every and singular sheriff of the state of Florida'' to enforce his order.
But Thursday, at 8:15 a.m., DCF lawyers appealed Greer's order to judges at the Second District Court of Appeal in Lakeland.
That created the window of time to seize Schiavo. When DCF filed its appeal, it effectively froze the judge's Wednesday order. It took nearly three hours before the judge found out and canceled the automatic stay, shortly before 11 a.m.
Administrators of the 72-bed hospice, who have endured a withering siege of their facility by protesters since Greer ordered Schiavo's feeding tube removed on March 18, declined to discuss Thursday morning's events in any detail.
''I don't really know, or pretend to know, the specifics of what is going on behind the scenes,'' said Mike Bell, a spokesman for Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, which operates Woodside.
DCF INTENTIONS
According to sources, DCF intended to take Schiavo to Morton Plant Hospital, where her feeding tube had been reinserted in 2003 following a previous judicial order allowing its removal. But hospice officials were aware that the hospital was not likely to perform surgery to reinsert the tube without an order from Greer.
''People knew that taking [Schiavo] did not equate with immediate reinsertion of the feeding tube,'' a source said. ``Hospital officials were working with their legal counsel and their advisors, trying to figure out which order superseded which, and what action they should take.''
Hardy, the hospital spokeswoman, said she does not believe the hospital was made aware Thursday morning that DCF and state police planned to bring Schiavo in. ''We were not aware of that three-hour period,'' she said. ``It's not a discussion we even had, really.''
George Felos, Michael Schiavo's attorney, said he does not think DCF officials knew of the window of opportunity they had created until well after they filed their appeal.
''Frankly, I don't believe when they filed their notice of appeal they realized that that gave them an automatic stay,'' Felos said. ``When we filed our motion to vacate the automatic stay . . . they realized they had a short window of opportunity and they wanted to extend that as long as they could.
``I believe that as soon as DCF knew they had an opportunity, they were mobilizing to take advantage of it, without a doubt.''
Herald staff writers Phil Long and Marc Caputo contributed to this story.
________________________________________
© 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/11233240.htm
Ignoring polls, CNN's Kagan, Greenfield assessed public opinion in Schiavo case
In coverage of the Terri Schiavo case, CNN host Daryn Kagan and senior analyst Jeff Greenfield made sweeping assertions about public opinion of the case that are undermined by polling data.
Following footage on the March 24 edition of CNN's Live Today of protestors urging the restoration of Schiavo's feeding tube, Kagan claimed that there are "a lot of people in this country agreeing with them that this would be a death without dignity." Kagan further claimed that there are "[s]trong, divided opinions across the country."
In a report on CNN's Live From... on the impact of the widely aired videotapes of Schiavo, Greenfield stated, "Whatever the medical facts, it is not hard to understand why the average person, looking at those images [of Schiavo], sees them as at least raising doubt." Greenfield's remark followed footage of one of the doctors hired by Schiavo's parents claiming that Schiavo is not in a persistent vegetative state.
Kagan and Greenfield might have given viewers a more complete picture had they noted that those who support Michael Schiavo's decision to remove his wife's feeding tube significantly outnumber those who oppose it. Public polls on the Schiavo case have not specifically addressed either assertion made by Kagan or Greenfield -- whether the public feels Schiavo's death would be "death with dignity" or believes that she is in a persistent vegetative state. But polls do indicate that on the case's central issue -- the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube -- the public is not as divided or as conflicted as Kagan and Greenfield suggest:
• In a March 22 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 52 percent of respondents agreed with that day's court decision to leave Schiavo's feeding tube unattached; 39 percent disagreed.
• In a March 21-22 CBS News poll, 61 percent of respondents thought Schiavo's feeding tube should have been removed, while 28 percent thought it should have remained in place. Further, 66 percent did not think the feeding tube should be restored while 27 percent thought it should. Asked if Congress and the president should intervene in the Schiavo case, 82 percent said no; 13 percent said yes. Even among evangelicals, 68 percent felt that the president and Congress should stay out of the matter.
• In a March 20 ABC News poll, 63 percent of respondents said they support the March 18 court decision to remove Schiavo's feeding tube while 28 percent were opposed.
From the March 24 edition of CNN's Live Today:
KAGAN: We've been listening in to both spokespeople and protestors there, outside the hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, where Terri Schiavo is right now, expressing some very strong views, views that are controversial. A lot of people in this country agreeing with them that this would be a death without dignity, also saying allegations that Michael Schiavo has abused his wife. We need to point out in the interest of fairness that those allegations have been presented in court a number of times and not accepted by the courts of Florida. Also, there are those who believe that Michael Schiavo is trying to give his wife death with dignity and carrying out her wishes. Strong, divided opinions across this country.
From the March 24 edition of CNN's Live From... :
GREENFIELD: If there's any doubt at all, the argument goes, you must resolve it on behalf of life. Whatever the medical facts, it is not hard to understand why the average person, looking at those images [of Schiavo], sees them as at least raising doubt.
— N.C.
Posted to the web on Friday March 25, 2005 at 2:03 PM EST
Copyright © 2004-2005 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200503250004
Shelter from the Storm
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 28 March 2005
I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail,
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm."
-- Bob Dylan
I attempted at the outset of the month to encapsulate the entire history of the Bush administration in one sentence. The frightening part isn't how long the sentence turned out to be, or how damnably infuriating the content of the sentence turned out to be. The frightening part is the simple fact that the sentence is incomplete. The online satire magazine 'The Onion' ran an article a few weeks ago titled “Liberals Suffer Outrage Overload." As with many Onion headlines, there was more truth than fiction in the words.
It's the hypocrisy, stupid. It goes on and on and on, and it is exhausting in the extreme to consider, much less address and attack. Lately, the hypocrisy needle has been pegged over into the red. Leave it to the Republican majority to take an important issue, an issue filled with questions about medical ethics, the rights of the disabled people, the rights of spouses, the place of federalism in a national debate and the simple value of human life, and transmogrify it into a ghoulish circus sideshow best used to score political points and do a little fundraising on the side.
Yes, I am talking about Mrs. Schiavo, again. We just can't seem to get away from this story, for in many ways, it encapsulates so much of what has gone so wrong in this country and with this government. Consider:
• The Republicans, party of states rights, have bulldozed Florida law and the basic underpinnings of Federalism to take a hand in this matter. Florida law allows a spouse to stand surrogate when medical decisions of life and death are required, but since sticking to their states-rights guns would not give the conservatives the outcome they desire, they betrayed a central ethic of their political philosophy without batting an eye;
• The Republicans, party of the sanctity of marriage, have taken over the role of husband in the process of knocking over their Federalist principles. Gay people getting married is a horrid affront to the sanctity of marriage, but the United States Congress finds no problem elbowing itself into the kitchen-table decisions made between a husband and a wife;
• The Republicans, party of moral values, are enjoying an incredible fundraising opportunity in flogging the Schiavo story. One cannot swing one's cat by the tail without striking a plea for financial assistance from the far-right Republican-allied groups that have turned one family's plight into a river of cash;
• Republicans, party of the 'Culture of Life,' have not one word to say about Sun Hudson. Hudson was a five-month-old baby born in Texas with a genetic disorder that required him to be sustained on machines. Thanks to a law signed by then-Governor Bush in 1999, Texas hospitals are allowed to remove patients from machines if they deem there is no hope, and if the patient's family cannot afford to sustain care. Sun Hudson was removed from his machines two weeks ago, over the thunderous outrage of his mother, and he died. Congressional Republicans were nowhere to be found when the life left his little body;
• Republicans, party of Tom DeLay, have not one word to say about DeLay's staggering double standard in this matter. In 1988, DeLay's father was injured in an accident and left in a condition quite similar to that of Mrs. Schiavo. DeLay sat in private counsel with his family, heard the verdict of the doctors that his father would never recover, considered the stated wishes of his father that he did not want to be left to live sustained by machines should such a thing come to pass, and decided to let the man pass. Had a mob of self-righteous Congressional Democrats tried to batter their way into the decision-making process of the DeLay family in 1988, Tom would have likely attacked them with his bug-extermination equipment, and he would have been fully justified in doing so.
Etc.
Ball all of that up with the fact that these are the same cretins whose respect for life in all forms does not extend to the 200,000 or so human beings, a number that includes 1,528 American soldiers, whose lives have been snuffed out in this illegal Iraq war. Add to the pile the tens of thousands of arms, legs, faces and hopes that have been blasted away in this thing, and you are left contemplating the Humvee-sized hole that sits in the center of any 'Culture of Life' argument they would dare put forth.
Every aspect of this Schiavo matter - the hypocrisy and doublespeak, the forgetfulness of casualties that do not help in a political argument, the betrayal of long-standing rhetorical ethics, the rank profiteering, the avoidance of discussion that is in any way meaningful - can be similarly found in the manner in which these people have conducted themselves in this invasion and occupation.
On most days, I would use this laundry list of wretchedness as a rallying cry. Take to the streets, I would say, make your voices heard, scream and shout, get on your feet and do something. This time, however, a different approach seems appropriate. Keeping track of all this stuff, listing the innumerable ways we have been betrayed singularly and en masse, finding ways to put a stop to it, can take a grievous toll.
The time has come, perhaps, to do something else.
Two years ago, on the 2nd of May 2003, George W. Bush donned a flight outfit and landed dramatically on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. He stood before the assembled personnel, quoted Scripture, and declared the war in Iraq to be all but over beneath a banner that proclaimed MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
The anniversary of that day is right around the corner, and a group called 'Mission NOT Accomplished' is organizing a way to mark the occasion. They wish to call attention to the passing of this dubious anniversary, and to keep what happened on that day in the forefront of our national consciousness. Their mission statement reads in part:
On May 2, 2005, We the People have a plan to remember that day, and to keep remembering it until we bring home our troops and begin to repair our damaged relationship with the rest of the world. So great is the magnitude of such an undertaking that many Americans have given in to despair, and many say that it is not possible to rouse the American public to needed action to take back our country. This day will mark a sabbatical from jobs, shopping, television programming, answering e-mail and surfing the Internet. No Walmart shopping, no eating at McDonalds, in fact, no shopping at all, except for absolute necessities.
While we are relaxing and remembering the significance of this day, we are not participating in supporting the corporate structure which feeds the regime currently occupying the White House. We will use this day to visit Veterans' Hospitals, take flowers, gifts, carrot cake, poetry to the people who have given their health and future wellbeing, in many cases, to what they believed was a good cause but turned out to be a lie. Even those who do not see it that way deserve our compassion, our love, and our practical assistance.
It's a good a day as any to take some shelter from the storm.
________________________________________
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.' Join the discussions at his blog forum.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/032805Y.shtml