At least 1,581 US soldiers have died in Iraq. That's 53 more deaths since the April Fool's edition of the LSN Oceania Review. You are not allowed to see photographs of the flag-drapped coffins, and the wholly complicit US mainstream news media will not aggregate the numbers for you in any meaningful way. One US soldier a day is dying in Iraq. 1,581 US soldiers and counting...For what? The neo-con wet dream of a Three Stooges Reich. Nothing more...Meanwhile, here in the USA, the Christo-Fascist brown shirts have been unleashed...Listen, the USA is NOT a "Christian Nation." George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were NOT Christians. They were Deists. They believed in a Divine Intelligence, they believed that it could be revealed through science and reason, they believed that Jesus was a great man, but NOT that Jesus was "only begotten Son of God," etc. Of course, Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, John Adams and yes, even that darling of true conservatives, James Madison were also Deists. But let's just focus on Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln: i.e., the man who lead the Revolutionary Army, the man who authored the Constitution and the man who saved the Union and abolished slavery -- all three of them were born into Christianity, but rejected it for Deism. These are historical facts. What would Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln say about "Justice Sunday"? What would they say about changing the US Senate rules to end the right to filibuster so that the federal bench can be packed with fundamentalist Christian judges? What would the say about the Bush abomination's ban on stem cell research? And what will the Cristo-Fascists do if the truth of America's origins is ever re-discovered by the populace? Will they do what the Taliban did to those thousand + year old Buddhas in Afghanistan and blow the faces of the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials? Will they topple the Washinton Monument? They would, of course. But they won't have to -- because the US mainstream news media (full partners in the triad of Special Interest with the Bush Cabal, their wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party) will make sure the populace never gets this information presented to them in context...Remember, 2+2=4. Remember and resist! Only you can save the Republic! Listen to Air America, participate in MoveOn.Org, subscribe to The Nation, support www.mediamatters.org, www.truthout.org, www.buzzflash.com and the other bastions of the Internet-based information rebellion, contribute to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! Remember and resist...
[NOTE: These are the highlights. To get the full text of the current issue of the LNS Oceania Review, click on the current month in the calendar field. Remember to also avail yourself of the searchable database which reaches back into our archives.]
Death of the Republic?
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: When I went to New York City this past summer to cover the GOP convention, I remember being awed by the degree of security surrounding Madison Square Garden…I saw the same thing when I went to DC to cover the Inauguration. The capitol was an armed camp, a sea of Bush supporters surrounded by tens of thousands of protesters…
All those fences. All those guns. All those cops. At first, it seemed like an arguably necessary precaution; these were, after all, the two cities to take the hit on 9/11. But the longer I stayed, the longer I looked around, and the closer I observed the behavior of Bush and his people, I came to a sad conclusion: This security was not about keeping us all safe from terrorists, but was about keeping Bush safe from his own people. The President of the United States is flatly terrified of the citizens he would supposedly lead to some supply-side promised land. He is scared to death of us.
Chalmers Johnson, In These Times: First, the United States faces the imminent danger of bankruptcy, which, if it occurs, will render all further discussion of foreign policy moot. Within the next few months, the mother of all financial crises could ruin us and turn us into a North American version of Argentina, once the richest country in South America…Second, our appalling international citizenship must be addressed. We routinely flout well-established norms upon which the reciprocity of other nations in their relations with us depends. This is a matter not so much of reforming our policies as of reforming attitudes…Third, if we can overcome our imminent financial crisis and our penchant for boorish behavior abroad, we might then be able to reform our foreign policies. Among the issues here are the slow-moving evolutionary changes in the global balance of power that demand new approaches. The most important evidence that our life as the "sole" superpower is going to be exceedingly short is the fact that our monopoly of massive military power is being upstaged by other forms of influence. Chief among these is China's extraordinary growth and our need to adjust to it. Latin America may be equally important.
Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: If the American people want to prevent another intelligence failure like the one that has sent more than 1,500 U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq, it will take more than just shaking up the CIA. Much of Washington’s political and media elites would need to be sacked as well.
Indeed, it is a sign of how deep the problem goes that neoconservative Republican Laurence Silberman chaired a presidential commission evaluating the CIA’s failures, since he also oversaw the Reagan-Bush intelligence transition team in 1980 that struck one of the first blows against the intellectual integrity of the CIA’s analytical division.
The commission’s co-chairman, former Sen. Charles Robb, represents another part of the problem: the go-along-to-get-along Democrats who did little to stop the Reagan-Bush-era politicization of U.S. intelligence.
But the crisis goes deeper still. The Silberman-Robb report, which faults the CIA for providing “dead wrong” intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, was delivered to George W. Bush, who has built his presidency on an unprecedented use of pseudo-facts over a wide range of issues, from the federal budget to global warming to the Iraq War…
Counterpunch, MATHABA NET NEWS: As I wrote in an article in CounterPunch two months ago, when I tried to go to one of those Bush "town meetings" that was set up at a community college a couple miles from my house, I found myself turned away by Republican Party goons barring the entrance-something that would never happen at a real town meeting. It turned out that, as with all the president's "public" meetings on this issue, you have to have a ticket to get in, and those tickets are being handed out only by Republican members of Congress…
What I'm really surprised at, though, is how passive the Democrats have been about this road show charade.
The huckster ¬in-chief, after all, is traveling the country not as a candidate for office, but as the President of the United States. He's making this tour at taxpayer expense, and he's holding his meetings in public buildings-in my case at an auditorium belonging to the Montgomery County Community College. But he's only talking to Republicans. Even people with tickets are being turned away if it appears they may have contrarian ideas, like several people who arrived at one such event in Colorado with tickets, but with a bumper sticker on their car saying "No Blood for Oil." The president's GOP goons apparently aren't just blocking the doors; they're spying in the parking lot, too.
Al Gore: This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place.
James Madison warned us in Federalist #10 that sometimes, "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction."
Unfortunately the virulent faction now committed to changing the basic nature of democracy now wields enough political power within the Republican party to have a major influence over who secures the Republican nomination for president in the 2008 election. It appears painfully obvious that some of those who have their eyes on that nomination are falling all over themselves to curry favor with this faction.
They are the ones demanding the destructive constitutional confrontation now pending in the Senate. They are the ones willfully forcing the Senate leadership to drive democracy to the precipice that now lies before us.
I remember a time not too long ago when Senate leaders in both parties saw it as part of their responsibility to protect the Senate against the destructive designs of demagogues who would subordinate the workings of our democracy to their narrow factional agendas.
Our founders understood that the way you protect and defend people of faith is by preventing any one sect from dominating. Most people of faith I know in both parties have been getting a belly-full of this extremist push to cloak their political agenda in religiosity and mix up their version of religion with their version of right-wing politics and force it on everyone else.
They should learn that religious faith is a precious freedom and not a tool to divide and conquer.
I think it is truly important to expose the fundamental flaw in the arguments of these zealots. The unifying theme now being pushed by this coalition is actually an American heresy -- a highly developed political philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of the United States of America.
Theft of the 2004 Election
Stephen Dyer, Akron Beacon Journal: There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday.
Exit polls in the November election showed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., winning by 3 percent, but President George W. Bush won the vote count by 2.5 percent.
The explanation for the discrepancy that was offered by the exit polling firm -- that Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polling -- is an ``implausible theory,'' according to the report issued Thursday by US Count Votes, a group that claims it's made up of about two dozen statisticians.
Twelve -- including a Case Western Reserve University mathematics instructor -- signed the report.
Instead, the data support the idea that ``corruption of the vote count occurred more freely in districts that were overwhelmingly Bush strongholds.''
NOAKI SCHWARTZ AND TERE FIGUERAS NEGRETE, Miami Herald: Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan resigned Thursday amid increasing pressure from county officials who had grown frustrated with a succession of problems that included several hundred votes being lost in the most recent election
Erica Werner, Associated Press: The first chairman of a federal voting agency created after the 2000 election dispute is resigning, saying the government has not shown enough commitment to reform. DeForest Soaries said in an interview Friday that his resignation would take effect next week…
"All four of us had to work without staff, without offices, without resources. I don't think our sense of personal obligation has been matched by a corresponding sense of commitment to real reform from the federal government," he said.
Soaries, a Republican former New Jersey secretary of state, was the White House's pick to join the Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help states enact voting reforms.
MIKE WILKINSON and JAMES DREW, Toledo Blade: The federal probe into whether local Republican fund-raiser Tom Noe was illegally funneling money to the Bush campaign had been ongoing for months. It reached a turning point Wednesday night.
FBI agents swept into Mr. Noe’s Maumee condo about 7:30 p.m., spending three hours scouring the home of one of the most prominent Republicans in northwest Ohio. They were looking for evidence of violations of federal campaign contribution laws.
The federal probe is studying Mr. Noe’s campaign contributions to the President, and specifically contributions made by others who may have received money from Mr. Noe, possibly allowing him to exceed the $2,000 spending cap.
Complicity of the Corporatist News Media
Norman Solomon, www.truthout.org: The first quarter of 2005 brought significant media dividends for the Bush-Cheney limited liability corporation.
Stakeholders received windfalls as mainstream news outlets deferred to consolidation of power from the November election.
A rollout of new "democracy" branding - kicked off by the State of the Union product relaunch - yielded at least temporary gains in psychological market share. For instance, repackaging of images in the Middle East implemented makeovers for several client governments. Actual democratic threats, inimical to Bush-Cheney LLC interests, remain low.
www.mediamatters.org: CNN political analyst Bill Schneider opined that President Bush's 48 percent approval rating, as measured by a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, "isn't too bad." But Schneider did not mention Gallup's own observation that "Bush's public support is significantly lower than support for all other two-term presidents at similar points in their second terms."
Reporting on the poll on the April 5 edition of CNN's Inside Politics, Schneider asserted: "Despite all the complaints, President Bush's overall job approval rating is 48 percent, which isn't too bad." But in contrast to Schneider's spin, USA Today's report on the poll was headlined "Poll finds Bush suffering from 'second-term-itis,' " based on a comment about Gallup's findings from Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
Amy Goodman & David Goodman, AlterNet: Americans believe these lies not because they are stupid but because they are good media consumers. The explosive effect of this propaganda is amplified as a few pro-war, pro-government media moguls consolidate their grip over the majority of news outlets. Media monopoly and militarism go hand in hand.
It's time for the American media to un-embed themselves from the U.S. government. We need media that are fiercely independent, that ask the hard questions and hold those in power accountable. Only then will government propaganda be seen for what it is and citizens be able to make choices informed by reality, not self-serving misinformation. Anything less is a disservice to the servicemen and women of this country and a disservice to a democratic society. Media' tour.
Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy: The ideologically driven majority on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) now has the perfect apparatchik to run its zealous campaign to promote conservative/GOP-approved public broadcasting programming. Ken Ferree is now its “acting president.” That spells trouble for those who care about the fate of PBS and NPR--with a capital F.
Ferree was the key aide to FCC Chairman Michael Powell on media policy. As head of the FCC’s Media Bureau until March of this year, Ferree delivered to Powell--as he will deliver to his new boss, CPB Chair Kenneth Tomlinson--whatever was required to advance ideological interests. Ferree helped engineer the Commission’s 2003 rules on media ownership that swept away what little was left of restraints on the conglomerates. More importantly, he supported policies that undermined the rights of viewers and listeners--and citizens--to a media system that fosters discourse, creative expression and democracy. It was Ferree’s plan for Powell that ignited unprecedented opposition to the FCC, with millions writing to Congress and the commissioners. Ultimately, the Powell/Ferree plan was undone--for now--by the courts (and in part by Congress).
F.A.I.R., www.fair.org: A week after she was praised in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" issue (4/18/05), the magazine went a step further by making far-right pundit Ann Coulter the subject of a lengthy April 25 cover story. Readers who might have looked for a critical examination of the overexposed, factually challenged hatemonger found something else: a puff piece that gave Coulter a pass on her many errors and vicious, often bigoted rhetoric.
Throughout the article, Time reporter John Cloud gave Coulter every benefit of the doubt. Her clear, amply documented record of inaccuracy was waved away. Coulter's notoriously vitriolic hate speech was alternately dismissed as a put-on or excused as "from her heart," while the worst Cloud could say about her was that she can "occasionally be coarse." Time readers learned that Coulter is an omnivorous reader (one of exactly two examples of her consumption being the Drudge Report website), and that she regards herself "as a public intellectual." Coulter, who writes a syndicated newspaper column and makes frequent cable news appearances, is dubbed "iconic" by Time because she "epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airways."
In reality, there are few who "discuss" politics the Coulter way-- by smearing opponents as traitors, calling for a renewal of McCarthyism and endorsing the killing of reporters.
The war in Iraq is worse than illegal or immoral, it is stupid, insanely stupid
Andrew Buncombe, Independent/UK: America's leading civil liberties group has demanded an investigation into the former US military commander Iraq after a formerly classified memo revealed that he personally sanctioned a series of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. The group claims that his directives were directly linked to the sort of abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib.
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Lt General Ricardo Sanchez authorised techniques such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, stress positions and disorientation. In the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Gen Sanchez admits that some of the techniques would not be tolerated by other countries.
When he appeared last year before a Congressional committee, Gen Sanchez denied authorising such techniques. He has now been accused of perjury.
Reuters: Tens of thousands of followers of a rebel Shi'ite cleric marched in Baghdad on Saturday to denounce the U.S. presence in Iraq and demand a speedy trial of Saddam Hussein on the second anniversary of his overthrow.
Chanting "No, no to the occupiers," men loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr streamed from the poor Shi'ite district of Sadr City to Firdos Square in central Baghdad where Saddam's statue was torn down two years ago, in a peaceful show of strength.
The square and side streets were quickly packed with crowds waving Iraqi flags and brandishing effigies of Saddam, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush. "No America! No Saddam! Yes to Islam!" many chanted. One group of demonstrators burned an American flag.
"We want a stable Iraq and this will only happen through independence," said a statement from Sadr's office read out at the rally. "There will be no security and stability unless the occupiers leave... The occupiers must leave my country."
Dr. Ian Rutledge, Financial Times: With US oil consumption in 2001 at an all-time high (19.7m b/d), import penetration at 53 per cent, and dependence on Arabian Gulf oil also at an all-time record (14.1 per cent of total US domestic and foreign supplies), the council stated that it was absolutely imperative that "political factors do not block the development of new oil fields in the Gulf" and that "the Department of State, together with the National Security Council" should "develop a strategic plan to encourage reopening to foreign investment in the important states of the Middle East".
But while the council argued that "there is no question that this investment is vitally important to US interests" it also acknowledged that "there is strong opposition to any such opening among key segments of the Saudi and Kuwaiti populations".
However, there was an alternative. In the words of ESA Inc (Boston), the US's leading energy security analysts: "One of the best things for our supply security would be liberate Iraq"; words echoed by William Kristol, the Republican party ideologist, in testimony to the House Subcommittee on the Middle East on May 22 2002 that as far as oil was concerned, "Iraq is more important than Saudi Arabia".
So when, according to the former head of ExxonMobil's Gulf operations, "Iraqi exiles approached us saying, you can have our oil if we can get back in there", the Bush administration decided to use its overwhelming military might to create a pliant - and dependable - oil protectorate in the Middle East and achieve that essential "opening" of the Gulf oilfields.
But in the words of another US oil company executive, "it all turned out a lot more complicated than anyone had expected". Instead of the anticipated post-invasion rapid expansion of Iraqi production (an expectation of an additional 2m b/d entering the world market by now), the continuing violence of the insurgency has prevented Iraqi exports from even recovering to pre-invasion levels.
In short, the US appears to have fought a war for oil in the Middle East, and lost it. The consequences of that defeat are now plain for all to see.
Kevin Danaher and Medea Benjamin, www.commondreams.org: On Saturday April 16, our colleague and friend, 28-year-old Marla Ruzicka of Lakeport, California, was killed when a car bomb exploded on the streets of Baghdad. We still don’t know the exact details of her death, which makes it all that much harder to deal with the utter shock of losing this bright, shining light whose work focused on trying to bring some compassion into the middle of a war zone.
Marla was working for a humanitarian organization she founded called CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), which documents cases of innocent civilians hurt by war. Marla and numerous other volunteers would go door-to-door interviewing families who had lost loved ones or had their property destroyed by the fighting. She would then take this information back to Washington and lobby for reparations for these families.
A case in point, taken from Marla’s own journal, as published November 6, 2003 on AlterNet:
“On the 24th of October, former teacher Mohammad Kadhum Mansoor, 59, and his wife, Hamdia Radhi Kadhum, 45, were traveling with their three daughters -- Beraa, 21, Fatima, 8, and Ayat, 5 years old -- when they were tragically run over by an American tank.
“A grenade was thrown at the tank, causing it to loose control and veer onto the highway, over the family’s small Volkswagen. Mohammad and Hamdia were killed instantly, orphaning the three girls in the backseat. The girls survived, but with broken and fractured bodies. We are not sure of Ayat’s fate; her backbone is broken.
“CIVIC staff member Faiz Al Salaam monitors the girls’ condition each day. Nobody in the military or the U.S. Army has visited them, nor has anyone offered to help this very poor family.”
Amy Goodman interviews Giuliana Sgrena on Democracy Now!: GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes, for the moment we have not an official result of the reports, but we have some rumors about the conclusion of the report, so I am very sad about that because I was – is words that I was waiting. I thought that maybe the Americans will spoke of accident or something like that, but now they say that the US military because they have no responsibility for what happened the 4th of March in Baghdad. They say that they respected all the engagement rules, and that is not true, because I was there and I can testify that they just shoot us without any advertising, any intention, any attempt to stop us before. So I think that it’s very bad this conclusion because they don’t want to assume any responsibility and they don’t mind about our testifying, my one and the one of the Italian intelligence agent that these are quite the same. We were there and we are in a position to testify what happened, so it’s not true that the Americans say, what the commission say. So we are very afraid, we are very worried about that, and also the Italian government for the moment, they doesn’t accept this conclusion, and those of the Italian members that were in the commission, so it is a very bad situation. They wanted to give a strike to the Italian government even if they are allied in the war in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Giuliana, the US military says your car was going very fast. GIULIANA SGRENA: That’s not true, because we were slow, and we were slowing down, because we have to turn. And before there was some water, so it’s not true that the car was going fast.
AMY GOODMAN: They say the soldiers used hand and arm signals, flashed white lights and fired warning shots to get the driver to stop.
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, they didn’t. No, no. No light, no air fire, nothing at all. They were beside the road. They were not on the street. They were away ten meters, and they didn’t give us any sign that they were there, so we didn’t saw them before they started to shoot.
AMY GOODMAN: Did they shoot from the front or from the back?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, on the back, not on the front. They shot on the back, because Calipari was on the back on the right and he was shot dead immediately, and I was injured on my shoulder, but I was shot by the back. So I am a proof that they were shooting on the back and not in front of the car. We can see by my injured where I was shot.
AMY GOODMAN: Did the Italians do this report with the US military?
GIULIANA SGRENA: There were two Italians in the commission, but they don’t accept the conclusion of the commission, so now there is some discussion between the Italian authorities and the American ambassador here in Rome. But the two members of the commission, they don’t accept the conclusion of the commission, so there is a problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Did the Italians -- were they able to inspect the car?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, we are expecting for the car tonight in Rome. We are supposed, the car will be in Rome tonight, and so the judges that they are doing the normal inquiry they can, they could see the car. I hope to see the car also, but we don’t know in which condition we will receive the car. And the Italian judges, they don’t know also the names of the soldiers that were involved in the shooting.
Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security
Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder: The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered…
Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."
"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.
"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."
John Brown, Tom Dispatch: If there's one thing the sad history of recent years has amply demonstrated, it's that the Bush White House is profoundly uninterested in ideas (even the superficial ones promulgated by the neocons). What concerns Dubya and his entourage is not thought, but power. They pick up and drop "ideas" at the tip of a hat, abandoning them when they no longer suit their narrow interests of the moment. (The ever-changing "justifications" for the war in Iraq are a perfect illustration of this attitude). The Bushies are short-term and savvy tacticians par excellence, with essentially one long-term plan, rudimentary but focused: Republican -- as they interpret Lincoln's party -- domination of the United States for years to come. Karl Rove's hero, after all, is William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president of the United States, who, some argue, was responsible for creating GOP control of American politics for decades…
So, after all the administration has done to ruin America's moral standing and image overseas -- "preemptive" military strikes that violate simple morality and the basic rules of war; searching in vain for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction; mindlessly rushing to implement "regime change" in a far-off Third-World country, an ill-planned effort that could result in the establishment of an anti-western theocracy harmful to American interests; brutally incarcerating "terrorists" with little, if any, respect for international law; arrogantly bashing "old Europe" just to show off all-American Manichean machismo; and insulting millions abroad by writing off their opinions -- Americans are now being told by Dubya and his gang what we've really been up to all this time across the oceans: We're democratizing the Middle East, and with great success thus far!
I don't believe a word of it.
Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, LA Times: Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA European Division, said he and other senior officials in his office — the unit that oversees spying in Europe — had issued repeated warnings about Curveball's accounts.
"Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening," said Drumheller, who retired in November after 25 years at the CIA. He said he never met personally with Tenet, but "did talk to McLaughlin and everybody else." Drumheller scoffed at claims by Tenet and McLauglin that they were unaware of concerns about Curveball's credibility. He said he was disappointed that the two former CIA leaders would resort to a "bureaucratic defense" that they never got a formal memo expressing doubts about the defector.
"They can say whatever they want," Drumheller said. "They know what the truth is …. I did not lie." Drumheller said the CIA had "lots of documentation" to show suspicions about Curveball were disseminated widely within the agency. He said they included warnings to McLaughlin's office and to the Weapons Intelligence Non Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, the group responsible for many of the flawed prewar assessments on Iraq.
"Believe me, there are literally inches and inches of documentation" including "dozens and dozens of e-mails and memos and things like that detailing meetings" where officials sharply questioned Curveball's credibility, Drumheller said.
Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch.com: As the United States gears up for an attack on Iran, one thing is certain: the Bush administration will never mention oil as a reason for going to war. As in the case of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be cited as the principal justification for an American assault. "We will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon [by Iran]," is the way President Bush put it in a much-quoted 2003 statement. But just as the failure to discover illicit weapons in Iraq undermined the administration's use of WMD as the paramount reason for its invasion, so its claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism. More important, any serious assessment of Iran's strategic importance to the United States should focus on its role in the global energy equation…
One further caveat: When talking about oil's importance in American strategic thinking about Iran, it is important to go beyond the obvious question of Iran's potential role in satisfying our country's future energy requirements. Because Iran occupies a strategic location on the north side of the Persian Gulf, it is in a position to threaten oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, which together possess more than half of the world's known oil reserves. Iran also sits athwart the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which, daily, 40% of the world's oil exports pass. In addition, Iran is becoming a major supplier of oil and natural gas to China, India, and Japan, thereby giving Tehran additional clout in world affairs. It is these geopolitical dimensions of energy, as much as Iran's potential to export significant quantities of oil to the United States, that undoubtedly govern the administration's strategic The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner…
"About 944bn barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764bn remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142bn of reserves are classed as 'yet-to-find', meaning what oil is expected to be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year," he says.
If he is correct, then global oil production can be expected to decline steadily at about 2-3% a year, the cost of everything from travel, heating, agriculture, trade, and anything made of plastic rises. And the scramble to control oil resources intensifies. As one US analyst said this week: "Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye."
…The study of "peak oil" - the point at which half the total oil known to have existed in a field or a country has been consumed, beyond which extraction goes into irreversible decline - used to be back-of-the envelope guesswork. It was not taken seriously by business or governments, mainly because oil has always been cheap and plentiful.
In the wake of the Iraq war, the rapid economic rise of China, global warming and recent record oil prices, the debate has shifted from "if" there is a global peak to "when".
The US government knows that conventional oil is running out fast. According to a report on oil shales and unconventional oil supplies prepared by the US office of petroleum reserves last year, "world oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but the re¬serves are not being fully replaced. Remaining oil reserves of individual oil companies must continue to shrink. The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to meet conventional oil demand will not be available."
It continues: "Although there is no agreement about the date that world oil production will peak, forecasts presented by USGS geologist Les Magoon, the Oil and Gas Journal, and others expect the peak will occur between 2003 and 2020. What is notable ... is that none extend beyond the year 2020, suggesting that the world may be facing shortfalls much sooner than expected."
According to Bill Powers, editor of the Canadian Energy Viewpoint investment journal, there is a growing belief among geologists who study world oil supply that production "is soon headed into an irreversible decline ... The US government does not want to admit the reality of the situation. Dr Campbell's thesis, and those of others like him, are becoming the mainstream." calculations.
Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security
John Vidal, Guardian: The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age.
They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.
"Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," the Oxford PhD told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh next week. "The issue is the long downward slope that opens on the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways," he says.
Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil - the kind associated with gushing oil wells - is approaching fast, perhaps even next year. His calculations are based on historical and present production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how the industry works.
Paul Krugman, NY Times: Last week fears of a return to stagflation sent stock prices to a five-month low. What few seem to have noticed, however, is that a mild form of stagflation - rising inflation in an economy still well short of full employment - has already arrived...
We shouldn't overstate the case: we're not back to the economic misery of the 1970's. But the fact that we're already experiencing mild stagflation means that there will be no good options if something else goes wrong.
Suppose, for example, that the consumer pullback visible in recent data turns out to be bigger than we now think, and growth stalls. (Not that long ago many economists thought that an oil price in the 50's would cause a recession.) Can the Fed stop raising interest rates and go back to rate cuts without causing the dollar to plunge and inflation to soar?
Or suppose that there's some kind of oil supply disruption - or that warnings about declining production from Saudi oil fields turn out to be right. Suppose that Asian central banks decide that they already have too many dollars. Suppose that the housing bubble bursts. Any of these events could easily turn our mild case of stagflation into something much more serious.
Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times: For the first time in 14 years, the American work force has in effect gotten an across-the-board pay cut.
The growth in wages in 2004 and the first two months of this year trailed the growth in prices, compounding the squeeze from higher housing, energy and other costs.
The effective 0.2-percentage-point erosion in workers' living standards occurred while the economy expanded at a healthy 4 percent, better than the 3 percent historical average. At the same time, corporate profits hit record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay raises down…
The squeeze is especially intense on the 47 percent of the work force whose employers don't directly provide their health insurance. For lower-income workers, who are more likely to be uninsured, the falling value of their wages is even more serious, because they're more likely to live paycheck to paycheck. And rising food and energy prices take a higher toll on the poor than on the rich.
Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security
Jean-Marcel Bouguereau, Le Nouvel Observateur: These aren't some granolas in Indian tunics and clogs. They are 1360 experts from 95 different countries, among the most highly qualified anthropologists, ecologists, biologists, and economists. They worked for five years to arrive at this frightening observation: forty years from now the planet will no longer be able to assure human well-being. Already, "60% of the ecosystems that support life on earth have been damaged," such as the tropical forests and the oceans. Damage that has become particularly acute during the last fifty years. More land, for example, has been converted to agricultural use since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even if man succeeds in nourishing
Kelpie Wilson, www.truthout.org: "I am a geo-green," says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has written a series of columns expounding his "geo-green" stance. Geo-greens, he says, combine geopolitics with green strategies - specifically in the context of the Middle East and terrorism…
On March 14th, ultraconservative congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) gave a presentation on the House floor on the topic of Peak Oil. Peak Oil is the theory that all of the significant petroleum reserves have already been located and that we have now used up about half of that 2000 gigabarrel legacy from the Earth's past. Because the last 1000 gigabarrels will be increasingly hard to extract, the era of cheap oil is over, starting now. Bartlett explained the dangers of the intersecting curves of rising demand and falling production. He even advanced the heretical notion that "… transition to sustainability will not happen if left to market forces alone."
So where are the Democratic voices linking energy conservation and national security? With awareness of Peak Oil rising along with prices at the pump, it's time for Democrats to make it clear they are leading the charge for the geo-green strategy. They might even want to call it "energy security."
Energy security is the big tent that the Dems desperately need, because energy security encompasses just about everything. For starters, take the economy, which is starting to bog down under escalating energy prices. Diverting money that would go to ayatollahs and sultans (as well as to oil company CEOs and wealthy investors, by the way) and pumping it into renewable energy programs would create jobs and lower future energy prices.
Steve Connnor, Independent/UK: Slow degradation is one thing but sudden and irreversible decline is another. The report identifies half a dozen potential "tipping points" that could abruptly change things for the worse, with little hope of recovery on a human timescale.
Even if slow and inexorable degradation does not lead to total environmental collapse, the poorest people of the world are still going to suffer the most, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which drew on 22 national science academies from around the world.
Walt Reid, the leader of the report's core authors, warned that unless the international community took decisive action the future looked bleak for the next generation. "The bottom line of this assessment is that we are spending earth's natural capital, putting such strain on the natural functions of earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," Dr Reid said.
"At the same time, the assessment shows that the future really is in our hands. We can reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently under way," he said.
Illegitimate, Incompetent, Corrupt
Robin Cook, Guardian: There is a breathtaking hypocrisy to the indictment of Kofi Annan over the oil for food programme for Iraq. It was the US and the UK who devised the programme, piloted the UN resolutions that gave it authority, sat on the committee to administer it and ran the blockade to enforce it. I know because I spent a high proportion of my time at the Foreign Office trying to make a success of it. If there were problems with it then Washington and London should be in the dock alongside the luckless Kofi Annan, who happened to be general secretary at the time. But there is a deeper level of perversity to the denigration of Annan by the American right wing. They have long clamoured for reform of the UN. Kofi Annan has just proposed the most comprehensive overhaul of the UN in its history and is the general secretary most likely to deliver support for it. If they persist in undermining him they are likely to derail his reform package. The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking, ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions.
BARRY SCHWEID, Associated Press: Challenging the White House, 59 former American diplomats are urging the Senate to reject John R. Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
"He is the wrong man for this position," they said in a letter to Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…
The ex-diplomats have served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, some for long terms and others briefly. They include Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to France and the Soviet Union under Presidents Carter and Reagan and assistant secretary of state for European affairs under President Nixon.
www.commondreams.org: Three women peace activists interrupted today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Bolton’s nomination as US Ambassador to the UN. They held up banners reading “NO Bolton, YES UN,” “Bolton = Nuclear Proliferation,” and “Diplomat, Not Bully, Please!” and urged Senators to reject Bolton as the worst possible choice for the job and for world peace.
“John Bolton is an inappropriate nominee for UN ambassador. His history shows us that the credibility of the US as a peacekeeping nation will be undermined if he is confirmed,” said Gael Murphy, one of the women who interrupted the hearing.
Murphy was kicked out of the hearing, as were two other CODEPINK women peace activists, Laurie Emrich, and Allison Yorra…
CODEPINK is known for its creative and bold approach to anti-war activism, and for its members’ success in interrupting prime time speeches three nights in a row during the Republican National Convention in New York City.
John Nichols, Capital Times: "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count." Those were the words John Bolton yelled as he burst into a Tallahassee library on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, where local election workers were recounting ballots cast in Florida's disputed presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Bolton was one of the pack of lawyers for the Republican presidential ticket who repeatedly sought to shut down recounts of the ballots from Florida counties before those counts revealed that Gore had actually won the state's electoral votes and the presidency.
The Dec. 9 intervention was Bolton's last and most significant blow against the democratic process.
The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a broad recount of ballots in order to finally resolve the question of who won the state. But Bolton and the Bush-Cheney team got their Republican allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to block the review. Fearing that each minute of additional counting would reveal the reality of voter sentiments in Florida, Bolton personally rushed into the library to stop the count.
Reuters: Democrats on the House of Representatives intelligence panel have asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to explain why no government officials have been charged in a federal probe into the 2003 disclosure of a CIA operative's identity.
A letter, dated April 14 and signed by the committee's nine Democratic members, expressed "grave concern" that no charges have resulted from the grand jury investigation into whether the Bush administration illegally leaked the CIA officer's name to the media.
Disclosing the identity of a clandestine intelligence officer is a crime.
The case is being handled by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who took over the investigation in December 2003.
Ray McGovern, www.commondreams.org: Thankfully, integrity is a virtue not altogether lost. The bright light of the past week came when, to everyone’s surprise, Senate Foreign Relations Committee member George Voinovich (R-Ohio) decided he simply could not follow his Republican colleagues who had decided to hold their noses and give Bolton a pass. That blocked the nomination from going forward to the Senate until additional information on Bolton can be assessed.
Cheney reacted quickly and forcefully against a suggestion by Senator Lincoln Chafee (R- R.I.) that the Republican committee members might consider whether to recommend that the nomination be withdrawn, and it appears the White House will use the coming weeks to pull out all the stops in harnessing the faithful. Already, well-financed hit squads are running radio spots in Ohio saying Voinovich has “stabbed the president and the Republicans right in the back.”
Asked why he wanted more time to weigh the charges against Bolton, Voinovich answered with a sentence not often heard in Washington political circles, “My conscience got me.”
Can conscience prevail over politics? Voinovich has proved it is still possible. Let us hope that he and his committee colleagues will approach the decision on Bolton with an open mind. For integrity in intelligence is now on life support. Approving the nomination of quintessential politicizer Bolton would pull the plug and ensure amateurish, cooked-to-taste intelligence analysis for decades to come.
John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes
Jennifer McKee, Gazette State Bureau: - Montana lawmakers overwhelmingly passed what its sponsor called the nation's most strongly worded criticism of the federal Patriot Act on Friday, uniting politicians of all stripes.
The resolution, which already galloped through the Senate and passed the House 88-12 Friday, must survive a final vote before it officially passes.
Senate Joint Resolution 19, sponsored by Sen. Jim Elliott, D-Trout Creek, says that while the 2005 Legislature supports the federal government's fight against terrorism, the so-called Patriot Act of 2001 granted authorities sweeping powers that violate citizens' rights enshrined in both the U.S. and Montanan constitutions.
The resolution, which does not carry the weight of a law but expresses the Legislature's opinion, encourages Montana law enforcement agencies not to participate in investigations authorized under the Patriot Act that violate Montanans' constitutional rights.
James Ridgeway, Village Voice: The unsettling story of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds took another twist on Thursday, as the government continued its seemingly endless machinations to shut her up. The US Court of Appeals here denied pleas to open the former FBI translator's First Amendment case to the public, a day after taking the extraordinary step of ordering a secret hearing.
Edmonds was hired after 9-11 to help the woefully staffed FBI's translation department with documents and wiretaps in such languages as Farsi and Turkish. She soon cried foul, saying the agency's was far from acceptable and perhaps even dangerous to national security. She was fired in 2002.
Ever since, the government has been trying to silence her, even classifying an interview she did with 60 Minutes.
Oral arguments in her suit against the federal government were scheduled for this morning, but yesterday the clerk of the appeals court unexpectedly and suddenly announced the hearing would be closed. Only attorneys and Edmonds were allowed in.
Gloria R. Lalumia, www.buzzflash.com: Seymour Hersh visited New Mexico State University (Las Cruces) on Tuesday, March 29 as part of his speaking tour for his newest book, “Chain of Command: the Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.” He opened his presentation by announcing that he intended to discuss “what’s on my mind” and “where we think we are.” The first thing on his mind was a chilling assessment of George W. Bush…. “Nothing I write” is likely to influence Bush, he said. “He is unreachable. I can’t reach him. He’s got his own world. This is really unusual and frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”
…How have we as a nation gotten to where we are today? Since the ‘80’s Wolfowitz, Feith, Gingrich and others have been pushing the neo-con idea that by spreading democracy, we can make the world safer for US interests. “It’s as if we’ve been taken over by a cult of 8 or 9 people who decided the road to stop international terrorism led to Baghdad,” according to Hersh. Hersh recalled how General Shinseki, who testified in February 2003 that we would need upwards of 250,000 troops to control Iraq, was denounced by Wolfowitz, because Shinseki’s answers didn’t conform to the neo-con mantra.
“That 8 or 9 people can change so much...Where was the military, the Congress, the press? What has happened raises the question about the thinness of the fabric of democracy.”
A couple of questions touched on opinions in the military/government toward Bush’s policies: According to Hersh, elite intel groups are troubled by the missions they are being ordered to carry out and they are questioning what they are doing. Hersh said that he is not a “pacifist” because there are people want to hurt us and we need to be able to protect ourselves. But, in Afghanistan, things could have been done differently. Hersh said he wants us to know that those who know the Constitution are very concerned. In particular, Navy Seals are suffering “massive resignations over disillusionment” over Bush’s policies. “Our President chose not to do things in ways that could have avoided this...he had other options available.” Hersh concluded by reiterating that “vast parts of government didn’t believe there were WMD’s” and that Bush’s neo-con policies are “a product of paranoid thinking and the Cold War.”
Vermont News, wwwvnews.com: For starters, Jeffords, who opposes the war in Iraq, predicted the Bush administration would start a war in Iran to help elect a third member of the Bush clan to the White House.
“I think it was all done to get oil,” Jeffords said of invading Iraq. “And the loss of life that we had, and the cost of it, was to me just a re-election move, and they're going to try to live off it. Probably start another war, wouldn't be surprised, next year. Probably in Iran.”
“Do you think that's likely?” VPR host Bob Kinzel asked.
“I probably shouldn't even talk on it, I just feel so bitter about the thinking that's gone on behind them, and the reasons they go to war and went to war,” Jeffords replied. “But I feel very strongly that they are looking ahead, and that there will be an opportunity to go into Iran and try to get their son elected president. I don't know, but you do it each time they (are) going to have a new president. I’m very, very (Jeffords chuckles). Oh, well, I better be quiet.”
In an interview this week, Jeffords spokesman Erik Smulson didn't back away from his boss's comments (which can be heard at vpr.net) and noted that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- the brother of the sitting president and son of former President George H.W. Bush -- is considered a possible 2008 GOP candidate for president.
“Certainly, this is a theory that has been pretty well discussed in numerous circles, that Iran potentially will be the next battleground, and that Jeb Bush is certainly considered a possibility in '08,” Smulson said.
Mark Egan, Reuters: The Bush administration helps the cause of Islamic terrorism by failing to engage in serious dialogue with the international community, author Salman Rushdie said on Tuesday.
Rushdie -- who lived for years under threat of death after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 pronouncement that his novel "The Satanic Verses" was blasphemous -- said he believes U.S. isolationism has turned not just its enemies against America, but its allies too.
"What I think plays into Islamic terrorism is ... the curious ability of the current administration to unite people against it," Rushdie told Reuters in an interview.
Rushdie said he found it striking how the "colossal sympathy" the world felt for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been squandered so quickly.
"It seems really remarkable that the moment you leave America ... you find not just America's natural enemies, but America's natural allies talking in language more critical than I, in my life, have ever heard about the United States," he said.
Robert Scheer, LA Times: It hardly honors the man to ignore his impassioned statements on what he considered to be a great moral crisis. And whether through divine inspiration or his own formidable instincts honed through a long life in a troubled and violent century, the pope got it right on Iraq when he said, "No to war!" President Bush has sloughed off the issue of the pope's anti-war stance as what you'd expect from a religious leader: "Of course he was a man of peace and he didn't like war," he said after the pope's death. But John Paul's assertion that the peaceful alternatives to a U.S.-British invasion of Iraq had not been exhausted went far beyond bland denunciations of violence. Like the millions of anti-war protesters around the world, he knew what the U.S. media and Congress refused to see: that Bush was rushing to war based on convenient distortions about weapons of mass destruction and the war on terrorism.
Kulchur War, Defense of Science, Separation of Church & State
Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat Gazette: Does it strike you as odd that persons calling themselves Christians are furious that the U.S. Supreme Court found executing juveniles unconstitutional? Do you find even odder that such individuals describe themselves, straight-faced, as adherents of the "culture of life"? Are you surprised to learn that people called conservatives would quote Joseph Stalin? Yes, that Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet dictator and mass murderer. And no, I am not making this up. It happened recently at a Washington conclave held by something called the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration…the real headline-maker was Edwin Vieira, allegedly an expert in constitutional law.
Vieira attacked the theological right’s latest whipping boy, Ronald Reagan-appointed Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy…
In so doing, Vieira insisted, Kennedy upheld "Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
And the solution? If not impeachment, Vieira said that his "bottom-line" solution for renegade judges was Stalin’s: "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘ No man, no problem. ’"
The audience reportedly didn’t gasp. They laughed. "‘ No man, no problem, ’" he repeated for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank supplied the full Stalin quote, which is quite famous: "Death solves all problems: No man, no problem." He speculated that Vieira couldn’t possibly be urging the killing of Supreme Court justices. But he put the remark in the context of recent threats by DeLay, who said that "the time will come for the men responsible for [Terri Schiavo’s death] to answer for their behavior," and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who mused that unpopular judicial decisions could lead people to "engage in violence." reserved.
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon.com: President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according to the National Catholic Reporter. He pleaded with the Vatican to pressure the bishops to step up their activism against abortion and gay marriage in the states during the campaign season.
About a week later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign, a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil."
In 2004 Bush increased his margin of Catholic support by 6 points from the 2000 election, rising from 46 to 52 percent. Without this shift, Kerry would have had a popular majority of a million votes. Three states -- Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico -- moved into Bush's column on the votes of the Catholic "faithful." Even with his atmospherics of terrorism and Sept. 11, Bush required the benediction of the Holy See as his saving grace. The key to his kingdom was turned by Cardinal Ratzinger.
With the College of Cardinals' election of Ratzinger to the papacy, his political alliances with conservative politicians can be expected to deepen and broaden. Under Benedict XVI, the church will assume a consistent reactionary activism it has not had for two centuries. And the new pope's crusade against modernity has already joined forces with the right-wing culture war in the United States, prefigured by his interference in the 2004 election…
Death of the Republic?
George W. Bush, the Frightened Man
By WilliamPitt,
Thu Mar 31st, 2005 at 09:49:49 AM EST :: The GOP ::
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. -Eric Hoffer
When I went to New York City this past summer to cover the GOP convention, I remember being awed by the degree of security surrounding Madison Square Garden. There were fences to control the fences, fifty cops on every corner, none of whom knew what the others were telling people to do, a half-dozen passes of needed to get twenty feet in any direction, and that was before you even got inside the door.
I saw the same thing when I went to DC to cover the Inauguration. The capitol was an armed camp, a sea of Bush supporters surrounded by tens of thousands of protesters. At one point, I stopped for 30 seconds next to a squad car to check my cell phone, and was immediately confronted by three cops asking me what I was doing. Amusingly, the security fences and cops decided not to give those protesters One Big Spot to congregate, and instead spread them out like butter across the entire route. The effect was to make the protests seem much larger than they were - and they were big - while forcing the Bush folk to elbow past them every six feet for the entire length of Pennsylvania Avenue.
All those fences. All those guns. All those cops. At first, it seemed like an arguably necessary precaution; these were, after all, the two cities to take the hit on 9/11. But the longer I stayed, the longer I looked around, and the closer I observed the behavior of Bush and his people, I came to a sad conclusion: This security was not about keeping us all safe from terrorists, but was about keeping Bush safe from his own people. The President of the United States is flatly terrified of the citizens he would supposedly lead to some supply-side promised land. He is scared to death of us.
Some positive proof of this came down the wires on Tuesday, when a report surfaced about three people who were removed from a supposedly 'public' town hall meeting with Bush. According to the report, the Secret Service hustled them out because their car had a "No Blood for Oil" bumper sticker on it. The three said they had obtained tickets to the event through the office of Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-CO), had passed through security and were preparing to take their seats when they were approached by a Secret Service agent who asked them to leave.
Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for Americans United, described the incident accurately: "They're screening the people who are allowed to come and then they're profiling them in the parking lot," he said. "It's quite extraordinary, and disappointing."
'Disappointing' is a mild word. 'Disgusting' would be a better one. George W. Bush is petrified of his own people, and his security goes to extraordinary and wildly expensive pains to make sure that only a hand-picked few, the elect, can get near him to shower him with love and affection.
Where is all this heading? This isolation of the President from the world, from his own people, from any information that does not jibe with his pre-formed opinions? Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower from the Nixon scandals, has some thoughts on the matter he shared in an interview with CommonDreams.org:
I think our democracy is going to be tested to the breaking point by some very dark days ahead and before long. I do expect there to be another major terrorist event. Ports, the nuclear power plants and the chemical factories are extremely vulnerable to an attack. To a considerable event, the war against terrorism has been a hoax because the president has not only spent so much money on the war in Iraq, but because the war in Iraq virtually subverts the war on terror. You cannot reduce the appeal and the strength of Al Qaeda while we occupy Iraq. You can only strengthen it, and strengthening it is what we've been doing steadily for the last couple of years. This is the worst public policy decision making, most antidemocratic and most inclined to be authoritarian, I would say, since the Nixon administration, but Nixon was confronting a Democratic House and Senate and a relatively liberal population in media 40 years ago. John Mitchell and John Connolly and Nixon himself had quite authoritarian instincts, but they weren't allowed to act on them, and to the extent that they did act on them -- it brought them down.
Virtually all the things Nixon did against me that were illegal to keep me from exposing his secret policy are now legal under the Patriot Act. Going into my doctor's office to get information to blackmail me with, wiretaps without warrants, overhearing me--all legal now. The CIA supplied the burglars in my doctor's office with disguises and with cameras and they did a psychological profile on me. That was illegal then, legal now.
I would have said that one thing that Nixon did against me was not yet legal and that was to bring a squad of a dozen Cuban-American assets of the CIA up from Miami to beat me up or kill me on May 3rd, 1973 on the steps of the Capitol. Right now there's at least one Special Forces team
under control of the White House operating in this country to take 'extra legal actions'. Now, that sounds to me like a White House-controlled death squad. And that is what the White House sent against me. It's not clear whether the intention was to kill me then, the words were to 'incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally'. When I asked their prosecutor, 'does that mean to kill me?'. He said, 'The words were 'to incapacitate you totally.' But he said, 'You have to understand these guys that were CIA assets never use the words 'kill'.'
I think that's the kind of thing we do have in our future, especially when there's another terrorist attack. In that case, I think we'll see enacted very quickly a new Patriot Act, which I'm sure has already been drafted which will make the first Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights will be a historical memory.
It is not terrorism that motivates George, or patriotism, or even profiteering. It is fear, pure and simple: Fear of the truth, fear of the world, fear of any data that collides with his faith-based bubble-encapsuled worldview, and fear most of all of the people he would represent.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. Now we know, and the knowledge is deeply and profoundly disturbing.
http://forum.truthout.org/blog/story/2005/3/31/94949/7464
Wake Up!
By Chalmers Johnson
In These Times
Thursday 31 March 2005
Washington's alarming foreign policy.
The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of Ravenna. During the prime of the Roman Republic, roughly the last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, Rome's most brilliant and successful general, stopped with his army at the Rubicon, contemplated what he was about to do, and then plunged south. The Republic exploded in civil war, Caesar became dictator and then in 44 B.C. was assassinated in the Roman Senate by politicians who saw themselves as ridding the Republic of a tyrant. However, Caesar's death generated even more civil war, which ended only in 27 B.C. when his grand nephew, Octavian, took the title Augustus Caesar, abolished the Republic and established a military dictatorship with himself as "emperor" for life. Thus ended the great Roman experiment with democracy. Ever since, the phrase "to cross the Rubicon" has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from which there is no turning back. It refers to the taking of an irrevocable step.
I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own Rubicon. Until last year's presidential election, ordinary citizens could claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, was George Bush's doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme Court. In 2004, he garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry. The result is that Bush's war changed into America's war and his conduct of international relations became our own.
This is important because it raises the question of whether restoring sanity and prudence to American foreign policy is still possible. During the Watergate scandal of the early '70s, the president's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. "John," he said, "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's very hard to get it back in." This homely warning by a former advertising executive who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly accurately describes the situation of the United States after the reelection of George W. Bush.
James Weinstein, the founding editor of In These Times, recently posed for me the question "How should US foreign policy be changed so that the United States can play a more positive role on the world stage?" For me, this raises at least three different problems that are interrelated. The first must be solved before we can address the second, and the second has to be corrected before it even makes sense to take up the third.
Sinking the Ship of State
First, the United States faces the imminent danger of bankruptcy, which, if it occurs, will render all further discussion of foreign policy moot. Within the next few months, the mother of all financial crises could ruin us and turn us into a North American version of Argentina, once the richest country in South America. To avoid this we must bring our massive trade and fiscal deficits under control and signal to the rest of the world that we understand elementary public finance and are not suicidally indifferent to our mounting debts.
Second, our appalling international citizenship must be addressed. We routinely flout well-established norms upon which the reciprocity of other nations in their relations with us depends. This is a matter not so much of reforming our policies as of reforming attitudes. If we ignore this, changes in our actual foreign policies will not even be noticed by other nations of the world. I have in mind things like the Army's and the CIA's secret abduction and torture of people; the trigger-happy conduct of our poorly trained and poorly led troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; and our ideological bullying of other cultures because of our obsession with abortion and our contempt for international law (particularly the International Criminal Court) as illustrated by Bush's nomination of John R. "Bonkers" Bolton to be US ambassador to the United Nations.
Third, if we can overcome our imminent financial crisis and our penchant for boorish behavior abroad, we might then be able to reform our foreign policies. Among the issues here are the slow-moving evolutionary changes in the global balance of power that demand new approaches. The most important evidence that our life as the "sole" superpower is going to be exceedingly short is the fact that our monopoly of massive military power is being upstaged by other forms of influence. Chief among these is China's extraordinary growth and our need to adjust to it.
Let me discuss each of these three problems in greater depth.
In 2004, the United States imported a record $617.7 billion more than it exported, a 24.4 percent increase over 2003. The annual deficit with China was $162 billion, the largest trade imbalance ever recorded by the United States with a single country. Equally important, as of March 9, 2005, the public debt of the United States was just over $7.7 trillion and climbing, making us easily the world's largest net debtor nation. Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India. This situation has become increasingly unstable, as the United States requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for its governmental expenditures. Any decision by Asian central banks to move significant parts of their foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro or other currencies in order to protect themselves from dollar depreciation will likely produce a meltdown of the American economy. On February 21, 2005, the Korean central bank, which has some $200 billion in reserves, quietly announced that it intended to "diversify the currencies in which it invests." The dollar fell sharply and the US stock market (although subsequently recovering) recorded its largest one-day fall in almost two years. This small incident is evidence of the knife-edge on which we are poised.
Japan possesses the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, which at the end of January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But China also sits on a $609.9 billion pile of US cash, earned from its trade surpluses with us. Meanwhile, the American government insults China in every way it can, particularly over the status of China's breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst William Greider recently noted, "Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly. ... American leadership has ... become increasingly delusional - I mean that literally - and blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it."
These deficits and dependencies represent unusual economic statistics for a country with imperial pretensions. In the 19th century, the British Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it to ignore the economic consequences of disastrous imperialist ventures like the Boer War. On the eve of the First World War, Britain had a surplus amounting to 7 percent of its GDP. America's current account deficit is close to 6 percent of our GDP.
In order to regain any foreign confidence in the sanity of our government and the soundness of our policies, we need, at once, to reverse President George W. Bush's tax cuts, including those on capital gains and estates (the rich are so well off they'll hardly notice it), radically reduce our military expenditures, and stop subsidizing agribusinesses and the military-industrial complex. Only a few years ago the United States enjoyed substantial federal surpluses and was making inroads into its public debt. If we can regain fiscal solvency, the savers of Asia will probably continue to finance our indebtedness. If we do not, we risk a fear-driven flight from the dollar by all our financiers, collapse of our stock exchange and global recession for a couple of years - from which the rest of the world will ultimately emerge. But by then we who no longer produce much of anything valuable will have become a banana republic. Debate over our foreign policy will become irrelevant. We will have become dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Ugly Americans
Meanwhile, the bad manners of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their band of neoconservative fanatics from the American Enterprise Institute dominate the conduct of American foreign policy. It is simply unacceptable that after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal Congress has so far failed to launch an investigation into those in the executive branch who condoned it. It is equally unacceptable that the president's chief apologist for the official but secret use of torture is now the attorney general, that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not resign, and that the seventh investigation of the military by the military (this time headed by Vice Admiral Albert Church III) again whitewashed all officers and blamed only a few unlucky enlisted personnel on the night shift in one cellblock of Abu Ghraib prison. Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a veteran of 23 years of service as an army officer, says in his book The New American Militarism of these dishonorable incidents: "The Abu Ghraib debacle showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills." Until this is corrected, a president and secretary of state bloviating about freedom and democracy is received by the rest of the world as mere window-dressing.
Foreign policy analysts devote considerable attention to the concept of "credibility" - whether or not a nation is trustworthy. There are several ways to lose one's credibility. One is to politicize intelligence, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did in preparing for their preventive war against Iraq. Today, only a fool would take at face value something said by the CIA or our other secret intelligence services. China has already informed us that it does not believe our intelligence on North Korea, and our European allies have said the same thing about our apocalyptic estimates on Iran.
Similarly, our bloated military establishment routinely makes pronouncements that are untrue. The scene of a bevy of generals and admirals - replete with campaign ribbons marching up and over their left shoulders - baldly lying to congressional committees is familiar to any viewer of our network newscasts.
For example, on February 3, 1998, Marine pilots were goofing off in a military jet and cut the cables of a ski lift in northern Italy, plunging 20 individuals to their deaths. The Marine Corps did everything in its power to avoid responsibility for the disaster, then brought the pilots back to the States for court-martial, dismissed the case as an accident and exonerated the pilots. The Italians haven't forgotten either the incident or how the United States treated an ally. On March 4, 2005, American soldiers opened fire on a civilian car en route to Baghdad airport, killing a high-ranking Italian intelligence officer and wounding the journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released by kidnappers. The US military immediately started its cover-up, claiming that the car was speeding, that the soldiers had warned it with lights and warning shots and that the Italians had given no prior notice of the trip. Sgrena has contradicted everything our military said. The White House has called it a "horrific accident," but whatever the explanation, we have once again made one of our closest European allies look like dupes for cooperating with us.
In its arrogance and overconfidence, the Bush administration has managed to convince the rest of the world that our government is incompetent. The administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds inconvenient but refuses to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions than any other country.) All of the United States' democratic allies continued to work on the treaty despite our boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding treaty so far endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of greenhouse gases.
Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included. The conference's final statement also produced an apology for slavery as a "crime against humanity" but did so without making slaveholding nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, our walkout seemed to be yet another display of imperial arrogance - a bald-faced message that "we" do not need "you" to run this world.
Until the United States readopts the norms of civilized discourse among nations, it can expect other nations - quietly and privately - to do everything in their power to isolate and disengage from us.
Future Reforms
If through some miracle we were able to restore fiscal rationality, honesty and diplomacy to their rightful places in our government, then we could turn to reforming our foreign policies. First and foremost, we should get out of Iraq and demand that Congress never again fail to honor article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution giving it the exclusive power to go to war. After that, I believe the critical areas in need of change are our policies toward Israel, imported oil, China and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, although the environment and relations with Latin America may be equally important.
Perhaps the most catastrophic error of the Bush administration was to abandon the policies of all previous American administrations to seek an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Bush instead joined Ariel Sharon in his expropriation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. As a result, the United States has lost all credibility, influence and trust in the Islamic world. In July 2004, Zogby International Surveys polled 3,300 Arabs in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. When asked whether respondents had a "favorable" or "unfavorable" opinion of the United States, the "unfavorables" ranged from 69 to 98 percent. In the year 2000 there were 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, some 22 percent of the global population; through our policies we have turned most of them against the United States. We should resume at once the role of honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians that former President Clinton pioneered.
The United States imports about 3.8 billion barrels of oil a year, or about 10.6 million barrels a day. These imports are at the highest levels ever recorded and come increasingly from Persian Gulf countries. A cut-off of Saudi Arabia's ability or willingness to sell its oil to us would, at the present time, constitute an economic catastrophe. By using currently available automotive technologies as well as those being incorporated today in new Toyota and Honda automobiles, we could end our entire dependency on Persian Gulf oil. We should do that before we are forced to do so.
China's gross domestic product in 2004 grew at a rate of 9.5 percent, easily the fastest among big countries. It is today the world's sixth largest economy with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. It has also become the trading partner of choice for the developing world, absorbing huge amounts of food, raw materials, machinery and computers. Can the United States adjust peacefully to the reemergence of China - the world's oldest, continuously extant civilization - this time as a modern superpower? Or is China's ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war like those of the last century? That is what is at stake. A rich, capitalist China is not a threat to the United States and cooperation with it is our best guarantee of military security in the Pacific.
Nothing is more threatening to our nation than the spread of nuclear weapons. We developed a good policy with the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which with its 188 adherents is the most widely supported arms control agreement ever enacted. Only India, Israel and Pakistan remained outside its terms until January 10, 2003, when North Korea withdrew. Under the treaty, the five nuclear-weapons states (the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom) agree to undertake nuclear disarmament, while the non-nuclear-weapons states agree not to develop or acquire such weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is authorized to inspect the non-nuclear-weapons states to ensure compliance. The Bush administration has virtually ruined this international agreement by attempting to denigrate the IAEA, by tolerating nuclear weapons in India, Israel, and Pakistan while fomenting wars against Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and by planning to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. Our policy should be to return at once to this established system of controls.
Finally, the most important change we could make in American policy would be to dismantle our imperial presidency and restore a balance among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. The massive and secret powers of the Department of Defense and the CIA have subverted the republican structure of our democracy and left us exposed to the real danger of a military takeover. Reviving our constitutional system would do more than anything else to protect our peace and security.
________________________________________
Chalmers Johnson is the author of the Blowback Trilogy. The first two books of which, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic - are now available in paperback. The third volume is being written.
------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040205F.shtml
CIA 'Reform' -- or Just Sack 'Em All
By Robert Parry
April 3, 2005
If the American people want to prevent another intelligence failure like the one that has sent more than 1,500 U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq, it will take more than just shaking up the CIA. Much of Washington’s political and media elites would need to be sacked as well.
Indeed, it is a sign of how deep the problem goes that neoconservative Republican Laurence Silberman chaired a presidential commission evaluating the CIA’s failures, since he also oversaw the Reagan-Bush intelligence transition team in 1980 that struck one of the first blows against the intellectual integrity of the CIA’s analytical division. [See below]
The commission’s co-chairman, former Sen. Charles Robb, represents another part of the problem: the go-along-to-get-along Democrats who did little to stop the Reagan-Bush-era politicization of U.S. intelligence.
But the crisis goes deeper still. The Silberman-Robb report, which faults the CIA for providing “dead wrong” intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, was delivered to George W. Bush, who has built his presidency on an unprecedented use of pseudo-facts over a wide range of issues, from the federal budget to global warming to the Iraq War.
Bush’s contempt for information that went against his preconceived notions was the chief warning from Bush’s first Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill as recounted to author Ron Suskind in the 2004 book, The Price of Loyalty.
O’Neill, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and later ran Alcoa, was startled to find Bush setting policies that “were impenetrable by facts” and based on little more than his ideological certainties. O’Neill also said the Bush administration had been planning a war with Iraq since Bush’s first days in office.
Tenet’s Role
Some mid-level CIA analysts may not have fully grasped this central reality about how the Bush administration functioned. But CIA Director George Tenet certainly did, explaining why he allegedly brushed aside warnings about dubious intelligence, such as the false claims about Iraqi mobile weapons labs from a source codenamed “Curveball.”
In February 2003, on the night before Secretary of State Colin Powell’s WMD speech to the United Nations, a senior intelligence officer warned Tenet that the source’s information was suspect, the Silberman-Robb report said. “Mr. Tenet replied with words to the effect of ‘yeah, yeah,’ and that he was ‘exhausted,’” according to testimony cited in the report. Tenet has denied receiving such a warning.
But regardless of exactly what was said about Curveball and other unreliable sources, the bigger hole in the commission’s 600-plus-page report is that Silberman and Robb failed to put Tenet’s purported reaction into the larger political context of a president who had his mind made up and had a low regard for countervailing information anyway.
The closest the report came to admitting this overriding reality was in an understated observation that “it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.”
But the Silberman-Robb commission, handpicked by Bush, didn’t delve further into how the president helped create and sustain the Washington “group think.”
Even after the invasion, Bush continued to freely misrepresent the facts about Iraq. In speech after speech, he revised the pre-war history by falsely claiming that he had no choice but to invade because Saddam Hussein wouldn’t let U.N. arms inspectors in, when the truth was Bush had forced the inspectors out.
Bush’s self-justifying distortion began in July 2003, just four months after the invasion, when he said about Hussein, “we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.” Bush continued to make similar assertions right through Campaign 2004, including in the Sept. 30 presidential debate. [See Consortiumnews.com “Bush: Deceptive or Delusional.”]
Deeper Problem
But the problem of corrupted information goes beyond the government, to a Washington press corps that credulously fell for Bush’s bogus case about Iraqi WMD. The journalists and columnists who joined in misleading the American people also benefit from the Silberman-Robb report because it lays most blame for the WMD mess at the CIA’s door. The journalists can claim they were just deceived, too.
The real story of the Iraq-WMD disaster, however, wasn’t just that the CIA fell down on the job. It’s that virtually the entire Washington political-media establishment failed the American people and particularly the U.S. military by buying into the pro-war “conventional wisdom” in 2002-2003, rather than thinking independently and asking tough questions
Given the pro-war hysteria – much of it generated by the Bush administration and the conservative news media – it certainly made career sense for journalists as well as politicians to go along. The few public figures who challenged Bush’s policies – such as former Vice President Al Gore – were pummeled and ridiculed. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Politics of Preemption.”]
The Silberman-Robb commission said it didn’t take a broader look at the political climate that surrounded the WMD intelligence because the panel was “not authorized” by Bush to do so.
But a truly serious examination of how the nation got to this place where American soldiers can be sent off to war for bogus reasons and because of “dead wrong” intelligence would require even a deeper look back at the crumbling of institutions that Americans count on for supplying accurate information.
That change began in earnest more than a quarter century ago when U.S. conservative leaders decided to invest heavily in building a new infrastructure of media outlets and think tanks that would shift Washington’s “conventional wisdom” to the right.
The conservatives called their strategy “the war of ideas,” but it was really a battle over the control of information. The principal targets were the Washington press corps – which was blamed for exposing Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and revealing the Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War – and the CIA’s analytical division.
By the mid-1970s, aging Cold Warriors and younger intellectuals known as “neoconservatives” banded together to argue that the CIA’s analytical division was grossly underestimating both Soviet power and Moscow’s determination to destroy the United States.
‘Team B’
In 1976, trying to appease this right-wing pressure, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush allowed these critics to review the highly classified CIA intelligence on the Soviet Union and present an alternative analysis, which became known as the “Team B” experiment. Though Team B found no hard evidence to support its alarmist theories, it still produced a report asserting that its dire Soviet assessments were correct.
The Team B analysis became the basis for a sustained assault on President Jimmy Carter’s arms control efforts during the late 1970s. By 1980, some Republican hardliners, including Laurence Silberman and William Casey, had convinced themselves that Carter had to be ousted to protect the future of the nation.
During Campaign 1980, Silberman and Casey both played roles in secretive back-channel contacts with Iranian emissaries at a time when Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government was holding 52 U.S. hostages, a crisis that was sapping Carter’s political strength.
Some witnesses – including former Iranian officials and international intelligence figures – have claimed the Republican contacts undercut Carter’s hostage negotiations, though others insist that the Silberman-Casey initiatives were simply ways to gather information about Carter’s desperate bid to free the hostages before the election.
[For the latest and most thorough account of this “October Surprise” mystery, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
Whatever the Republican intentions were – whether informational or conspiratorial – Carter did lose to Ronald Reagan, who then opened the doors of power to the neoconservatives. Silberman served as Reagan’s top intelligence adviser before the Inauguration and oversaw the Republican transition team that prepared a report on the alleged shortcomings of the CIA’s analytical division.
Accusing the CIA
Renewing the assault that had begun with the Team B analysis, Reagan’s transition team accused the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence of “an abject failure” to foresee a supposedly massive Soviet buildup of strategic weapons and “the wholesale failure” to comprehend the sophistication of Soviet propaganda.
“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.”
In other words, the Reagan-Bush transition team implied that CIA analysts who didn’t toe the neoconservative line must be Soviet agents. In reality, however, it was the transition team that wasn’t being objective. The evidence now is clear that the Soviet Union was in rapid decline, falling farther behind the West in technology and struggling just to maintain a modern military.
But the neoconservatives were learning an important lesson. By exaggerating an enemy’s strength and then questioning the patriotism of anyone who disagrees, they could win policy battles and silence any meaningful dissent.
Even anti-Soviet hardliners like the CIA’s Robert Gates recognized the impact that the incoming administration’s hostility had on the CIA analysts.
“That the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover was apparent in the most extraordinary transition period of my career,” Gates wrote in his memoirs, From the Shadows. “The reaction inside the Agency to this litany of failure and incompetence” from the transition team “was a mix of resentment and anger, dread and personal insecurity.”
Amid rumors that the transition team wanted to purge several hundred top analysts, career officials feared for their jobs, especially those considered responsible for assessing the Soviet Union.
According to some intelligence sources, Silberman expected to get the job of CIA director and flew into a rage when Reagan picked Casey instead. Silberman’s consolation prize was to be named a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, where he became known as one of the court’s most strident conservatives.
‘Politicized’ Intelligence
Under the leadership of Casey and Gates, CIA analysts found themselves under severe pressure to conform to the administration’s political desires, especially hyping the Soviet strategic threat and blaming virtually all acts of terrorism on Moscow.
Analysts also were punished when they pointed out other unhelpful information, such as Pakistan’s secret program to develop a nuclear bomb at a time when Casey considered Islamabad’s help in aiding the Afghan insurgency a higher priority.
By the late 1980s, the internal CIA taboo against noticing Soviet weakness was so ingrained that the CIA analytical division largely missed the Soviet Union’s collapse. Ironically, the CIA analysts got blamed for that intelligence failure, too.
The Reagan-Bush neocons used a similar strategy of intimidation to bring the Washington press corps to heel in the 1980s. Many American journalists who reported information that didn’t fit with the Reagan-Bush propaganda themes were discredited as “liberal” or “anti-American.” Many lost their jobs or learned to censor themselves. [For details on both the intelligence and media cases, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
In that Reagan-Bush climate of career intimidation, congressional intelligence staffers, including a young George Tenet, also learned that playing along with the neoconservatives was the safest route to advancement.
Tenet earned his spurs with the Bush Family in 1991 when he helped clear the way for Robert Gates to become CIA director, despite public complaints from former CIA analysts that Gates had “politicized” U.S. intelligence. Gates was also implicated in a string of national security scandals, including the Iran-Contra Affair and the secret arming of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
At the time, Tenet was a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer working for the panel’s Democratic chairman, Sen. David Boren, whom Gates thanked in his memoirs for pushing through his confirmation. Later, Tenet became Bill Clinton’s last CIA director and was kept on in that post by George W. Bush.
Staying Useful
A politically savvy player with renowned back-scratching skills, Tenet made himself useful to his new bosses – Bush and the neocons, who had returned to power and were obsessed with finishing off Saddam Hussein.
As the drums of war grew louder, Vice President Dick Cheney personally sat in at CIA meetings at Langley where rank-and-file analysts felt themselves under pressure to adopt the worst-case interpretations of Iraqi evidence.
By late 2002 and early 2003, the Washington “group think” was in full swing. Not only was the U.S. intelligence community giving the neocons the WMD intelligence product they wanted, but that faulty evidence was reverberating through the national news media, including leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Anyone who dared to raise questions got clobbered. When former U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter questioned the WMD evidence, he was labeled a traitor. When chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix asked for more time to search for the supposed weapons, he was called an incompetent.
After the U.S.-led invasion, the cable news networks eagerly declared that any 55-gallon drum of chemicals was proof of Iraq’s WMD and Bush’s vindication. Only gradually did it sink in that Hussein and other Iraqis had been telling the truth when they said before the war that they had destroyed their WMD stockpiles.
No Accountability
Still, even as the death toll of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis mounted, there was almost no accountability in Washington. That was, in large part, because almost the entire political-media establishment had been wrong.
Also, since most national Democrats – including Sen. John Kerry – hadn’t challenged Bush’s rush to war, they had trouble articulating a coherent case against Bush’s wartime leadership during Campaign 2004.
In the end, virtually no one was punished for leading the nation into the disastrous war. Bush got his second term; Tenet resigned but got the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the pro-war TV commentators and WMD-believing journalists kept their jobs, too.
Since then, the major recommendations for change have centered on structural reform within the intelligence community. Congress created a National Intelligence Director, who supposedly will work closely with the president in overseeing the intelligence community.
But adding just another box to the organizational chart doesn’t address what appears to be the core problem: the politicization of the U.S. intelligence product over the past quarter century, while honest intelligence analysts were driven out of the CIA. The problem is cultural, systemic, even ethical – not structural.
So the need is not to put the intelligence product more directly under Bush’s control, but rather to restore the CIA’s analytical commitment to professionalism and objectivity. The CIA’s ethos again must be to give the policymakers the unadorned truth, not the rouged-up versions that the neocons demanded in the Reagan-Bush years and again in George W. Bush’s first term. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocon Amorality.”]
The Future
But how could this cultural reform of the intelligence community – and the Washington Establishment – occur?
The hard answer is that many of the government officials and the journalists, who have thrived under this corrupt process, would need to go. They would then have to be replaced by people who stood up for what was right and suffered during this period, the likes of Melvin Goodman, a CIA Soviet specialist who testified against Gates in 1991.
The housecleaning would have to include both Republicans who have been most responsible for the distortion of intelligence and some Democrats who aided and abetted the process. The news media would also need to purge many of its top editors, prominent reporters and leading columnists for failing to perform their journalistic duties.
If a reform Congress were elected in 2006, accountability could be exacted, too, against President Bush and top officials in his administration. Given the egregious loss of life in Iraq and the international opprobrium that the misguided war has brought down on America’s reputation, firings would be in order; investigative hearings should be held; and potentially even an impeachment resolution against Bush could be considered.
Yet this accountability could only occur if there were an informed, energized and incensed American public. Democracy would have to find a fire that we haven’t seen in the United States for many years.
________________________________________
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/040205.html
MATHABA.NET NEWS
MAIN INDEX | PRINT THIS PAGE |
US Democracy Politics
________________________________________
Why Are the Democrats Silent?
Posted: 04/09
From: CounterPunch
Bush's Potemkin Town Meetings
President Bush claims he's holding "conversations" all around the country on his plans to "reform" or "save" Social Security. These purported dialogues with the public take place at gatherings which the president likes to characterize as "town meetings."
Now as a native of Connecticut, a New England state that prides itself for its town meeting form of local government, and as a reporter who got his start covering such exercises in real people's government, I have to say that I know town meetings and Mr. Bush, those are not town meetings.
Real town meetings, a form of direct democracy developed by the early settlers in New England in preference to the old European model of representative government that featured mayors and counselors, tend to be pretty freewheeling and rambunctious affairs, where any citizen can attend, speak out on an issue from the floor, and vote on the issue at hand.
As I wrote in an article in CounterPunch two months ago, when I tried to go to one of those Bush "town meetings" that was set up at a community college a couple miles from my house, I found myself turned away by Republican Party goons barring the entrance-something that would never happen at a real town meeting. It turned out that, as with all the president's "public" meetings on this issue, you have to have a ticket to get in, and those tickets are being handed out only by Republican members of Congress.
No wonder the crowds seem so friendly on TV!
What I'm really surprised at, though, is how passive the Democrats have been about this road show charade.
The huckster ¬in-chief, after all, is traveling the country not as a candidate for office, but as the President of the United States. He's making this tour at taxpayer expense, and he's holding his meetings in public buildings-in my case at an auditorium belonging to the Montgomery County Community College. But he's only talking to Republicans. Even people with tickets are being turned away if it appears they may have contrarian ideas, like several people who arrived at one such event in Colorado with tickets, but with a bumper sticker on their car saying "No Blood for Oil." The president's GOP goons apparently aren't just blocking the doors; they're spying in the parking lot, too.
Why aren't Democratic senators and representatives screaming bloody murder at this scam?
I asked my local representative, the recently elected Democratic Rep. Alyson Schwartz, when she led a teach-in on Social Security at Temple University.
"Shouldn't you Congressional Democrats be screaming about not being offered tickets to distribute at these presidential events?" I asked her.
"Well I guess maybe we should be," she agreed.
That was over a week ago.
I still haven't heard a word of complaint about it from either Rep. Schwartz or from other members of the so-called opposition in Congress.
Why are these people, who are supposed to be the opposition, so quiet? If Congresswoman Schwartz, for example, had stood outside the auditorium at Montco Community College decrying the inability of her Democratic constituents to get into the building and "dialogue" with the president, maybe the somnolent TV reporters who didn't even notice or remark on the packing of the hall would have actually reported on the president's deceit.
Instead, we got reports that evening about how supportive the public seems to be of the president, and how worried people at the event seemed to be about the viability of the Social Security system.
President Bush is a hypocrite of the first order in calling for democracy in the Islamic world and the states of the former Soviet Union while he creates a Potemkin democracy for himself to operate in. But the Democrats who assist him in this stage management effort by remaining silent as they and their constituents are shut out of the debate are perhaps even worse.
They have become a Potemkin opposition.
Click here for Comment or Discussion version of this item.
Support Alternative Media
Mathaba.Net
http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=181573
Wednesday, 27 April 2005
Remarks as prepared by former Vice President Al Gore
Washington, DC.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Four years and four months ago, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a bitterly divided 5 to 4 decision, issued an unsigned opinion that the majority cautioned should never be used as a precedent for any subsequent case anywhere in the federal court system.
Their ruling conferred the presidency on a candidate who had lost the popular vote, and it inflamed partisan passions that had already been aroused by the long and hard-fought election campaign. I couldn't have possibly disagreed more strongly with the opinion that I read shortly before midnight that evening, December 12, 2000. But I knew what course of action best served our republic.
Even though many of my supporters said they were unwilling to accept a ruling which they suspected was brazenly partisan in its motivation and simply not entitled to their respect, less than 24 hours later, I went before the American people to reaffirm the bedrock principle that we are a nation of laws, not men. "There is a higher duty than the one we owe to a political party," I said. "This is America and we put country before party." The demonstrators and counter-demonstrators left the streets and the nation moved on -- as it should have -- to accept the inauguration of George W. Bush as our 43rd president.
Having gone through that experience, I can tell you -- without any doubt whatsoever -- that if the justices who formed the majority in Bush v. Gore had not only all been nominated to the Court by a Republican president, but had also been confirmed by only Republican Senators in party-line votes, America would not have accepted that court's decision.
Moreover, if the confirmation of those justices in the majority had been forced through by running roughshod over 200 years of Senate precedents and engineered by a crass partisan decision on a narrow party line vote to break the Senate's rules of procedure then no speech imaginable could have calmed the passions aroused in our country.
As Aristotle once said of virtue, respect for the rule of law is "one thing."
It is indivisible.
And so long as it remains indivisible, so will our country.
But if either major political party is ever so beguiled by a lust for power that it abandons this unifying principle, then the fabric of our democracy will be torn.
The survival of freedom depends upon the rule of law.
The rule of law depends, in turn, upon the respect each generation of Americans has for the integrity with which our laws are written, interpreted and enforced.
That necessary respect depends not only on the representative nature of our legislative branch, but also on the deliberative character of its proceedings. As James Madison envisioned, ours is a "deliberative democracy." Indeed, its deliberative nature is fundamental to the integrity of our social compact. Because the essential alchemy of democracy -- whereby just power is derived from the consent of the governed -- can only occur in a process that is genuinely deliberative.
Moreover, it is the unique role of the Senate, much more than the House, to provide a forum for deliberation, to give adequate and full consideration to the strongly held views of a minority. In this case, the minority is made up of 44 Democratic Senators and 1 Independent.
And it is no accident that our founders gave the Senate the power to pass judgment on the fitness of nominees to the Judicial branch. Because they knew that respect for the law also depends upon the perceived independence and integrity of our judges. And they wanted those qualities to be reviewed by the more reflective body of Congress.
Our founders gave no role to the House of Representatives in confirming federal judges. If they had believed that a simple majority was all that was needed to safeguard the nation against unwise choices by a partisan president, they might well have given the House as well as the Senate the power to vote on judges.
But they gave the power instead to the Senate, a body of equals, each of whom was given a term of office -- 3 times longer than that of a representative -- in order to encourage a reflective frame of mind, a distance from the passions of the voters and a capacity for deliberation. They knew that the judges would serve for life and that, therefore, their confirmation should follow a period of advice and consent in which the Senate was an equal partner with the executive.
Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist # 78, wrote that the "independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill-humors which the arts of designing men... have a tendency, in the meantime, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community."
When James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights, he explained that "independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves... the guardians of [these] rights, ... an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislature or executive."
So, it is not as a Democrat but as an American, that I appeal today to the leadership of the majority in the Senate to halt their efforts to break the Senate's rules and instead protect a meaningful role in the confirmation of judges and justices for Senators of both parties. Remember that you will not always be in the majority, but much more importantly, remember what is best for our country regardless of which party is temporarily in power. Many of us know what it feels like to be disappointed with decisions made by the courts. But instead of attacking the judges with whose opinions we disagree, we live by the rule of law and maintain respect for the courts.
I am genuinely dismayed and deeply concerned by the recent actions of some Republican leaders to undermine the rule of law by demanding the Senate be stripped of its right to unlimited debate where the confirmation of judges is concerned, and even to engage in outright threats and intimidation against federal judges with whom they philosophically disagree.
Even after a judge was murdered in Atlanta while presiding in his courtroom, even after the husband and mother of a federal judge were murdered in Chicago in retaliation by a disgruntled party to a failed lawsuit -- even then -- the Republican leader of the House of Representatives responded to rulings in the Terri Schiavo case, by saying ominously: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to pay for their behavior."
When the outrage following this comment worsened Rep. DeLay's problems during the House Ethics scandal, he claimed that his words had been chosen badly, but in the next breath, he issued new threats against the same courts: "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse."
In previous remarks on the subject, DeLay has said, "Judges need to be intimidated," adding that if they don't behave, "we're going to go after them in a big way."
Moreover, a whole host of prominent Republicans have been making similar threats on a regular basis.
A Republican Congressman from Iowa added: "When their budget starts to dry up, we'll get their attention. If we're going to preserve the Constitution, we must get them in line."
A Republican Senator from Texas directly connected the "spate of courthouse violence lately" to his view that unpopular decisions might be the explanation. "I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions, yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds and builds to the point where some people engage in violence."
One of the best-known conservative political commentators has openly recommended that "liberals should be physically intimidated."
The spokesman for the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said: "There does seem to be this misunderstanding out there that our system was created with a completely independent judiciary." Misunderstanding?
The Chief of Staff for another Republican senator called for "mass impeachment" by using the bizarre right-wing theory that the president can declare that any judge is no longer exhibiting "good behavior," adding that, "then the judge's term has simply come to an end. The President gives them a call and says: 'Clean out your desk. The Capitol police will be in to help you find your way home.'"
The elected and appointed Republican officials who made these dangerous statements are reflecting an even more broadly-held belief system of grassroots extremist organizations that have made the destruction of judicial independence the centerpiece of their political agenda.
Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council, who hosted a speech by the Senate Majority Leader last Sunday, has said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench." Explaining that during his meeting with Republican leaders, the leaders discussed stripping funding from certain courts, Perkins said, "What they're thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and recreating them the next day, but also de-funding them." Congress could use its appropriations authority to just "take away the bench, all of its staff, and he's just sitting out there with nothing to do."
Another influential leader of one of these groups, James Dobson, who heads Focus on the Family, focused his anger on the 9th circuit court of appeals: "Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court. They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone."
Edwin Vieira (at the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference) said his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Stalin: "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem.'"
Through their words and threats, these Republicans are creating an atmosphere in which judges may well hesitate to exercise their independence for fear of Congressional retribution, or worse.
It is no accident that this assault on the integrity of our constitutional design has been fueled by a small group claiming special knowledge of God's will in American politics. They even claim that those of us who disagree with their point of view are waging war against "people of faith." How dare they?
Long before our founders met in Philadelphia, their forebears first came to these shores to escape oppression at the hands of despots in the old world who mixed religion with politics and claimed dominion over both their pocketbooks and their souls.
This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place.
James Madison warned us in Federalist #10 that sometimes, "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction."
Unfortunately the virulent faction now committed to changing the basic nature of democracy now wields enough political power within the Republican party to have a major influence over who secures the Republican nomination for president in the 2008 election. It appears painfully obvious that some of those who have their eyes on that nomination are falling all over themselves to curry favor with this faction.
They are the ones demanding the destructive constitutional confrontation now pending in the Senate. They are the ones willfully forcing the Senate leadership to drive democracy to the precipice that now lies before us.
I remember a time not too long ago when Senate leaders in both parties saw it as part of their responsibility to protect the Senate against the destructive designs of demagogues who would subordinate the workings of our democracy to their narrow factional agendas.
Our founders understood that the way you protect and defend people of faith is by preventing any one sect from dominating. Most people of faith I know in both parties have been getting a belly-full of this extremist push to cloak their political agenda in religiosity and mix up their version of religion with their version of right-wing politics and force it on everyone else.
They should learn that religious faith is a precious freedom and not a tool to divide and conquer.
I think it is truly important to expose the fundamental flaw in the arguments of these zealots. The unifying theme now being pushed by this coalition is actually an American heresy -- a highly developed political philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of the United States of America.
We began as a nation with a clear formulation of the basic relationship between God, our rights as individuals, the government we created to secure those rights, and the prerequisites for any power exercised by our government.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident," our founders declared. "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."
But while our rights come from God, as our founders added, "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed."
So, unlike our inalienable rights, our laws are human creations that derive their moral authority from our consent to their enactment-informed consent given freely within our deliberative processes of self-government.
Any who seek to wield the powers of government without the consent of the people, act unjustly.
Over sixty years ago, in the middle of the Second World War, Justice Jackson wrote: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion."
His words are no less true today.
The historic vulnerability of religious zealots to subordinate the importance of the rule of law to their ideological fervor was captured best in words given by the author of "A Man for All Seasons" to Sir Thomas More.
When More's zealous son-in-law proposed that he would cut down any law in England that served as an obstacle to his hot pursuit of the devil, More replied: "And when the last law was cut down and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"
The Senate leaders remind me of More's son-in-law. They are now proposing to cut down a rule that has stood for more than two centuries as a protection for unlimited debate. It has been used for devilish purposes on occasion in American history, but far more frequently, it has been used to protect the right of a minority to make its case.
Indeed it has often been cited as a model for other nations struggling to reconcile the majoritarian features of democracy with a respectful constitutional role for minority rights. Ironically, a Republican freshman Senator who supports the party-line opposition to the filibuster here at home, recently returned from Iraq with an inspiring story about the formation of multi-ethnic democracy there. Reporting that he asked a Kurdish leader there if he worried that the majority Shiites would "overrun" the minority Kurds, this Senator said the Kurdish leader responded "oh no, we have a secret weapon.... [the] filibuster."
The Senate's tradition of unlimited debate has been a secret weapon in our nation's arsenal of democracy as well. It has frequently serves to push the Senate-and the nation as a whole-toward a compromise between conflicting points of view, to breathe life into the ancient advice of the prophet Isaiah: "Come let us reason together"; to illuminate arguments for which the crowded, busy House of Representatives has no time or patience, to afford any Senator an opportunity to stand in the finest American tradition in support of a principle that he or she believes to be important enough to bring to the attention of the nation.
In order to cut down this occasional refuge of a scoundrel, the leadership would cut down the dignity of the Senate itself, diminish the independence of the legislative branch, reduce its power, and accelerate the decline in its stature that is already far advanced.
Two-thirds of the American people reject their argument. The nation is overwhelmingly opposed to this dangerous breaking of the Senate's rules. And, so the leadership and the White House have decided to call it a crisis.
In the last few years, the American people have been told on several occasions that we were facing a dire crisis that required the immediate adoption of an unusual and controversial policy.
In each case, the remedy for the alleged crisis was an initiative that would have been politically implausible at best -- except for the crisis that required the unnatural act they urged upon us.
First, we were told that the nation of Iraq, armed to the teeth as it was said to be with weapons of mass destruction, represented a grave crisis that necessitated a unilateral invasion.
Then, we were told that Social Security was facing an imminent crisis that required its immediate privatization.
Now we are told that the federal judiciary is facing a dire crisis that requires us to break the rules of the Senate and discard the most important guarantee of the de
Theft of the 2004 Election
Published on Friday, April 1, 2005 by the Akron Beacon Journal / Ohio
Analysis Points to Election 'Corruption'
Group Says Chance of Exit Polls Being So Wrong in '04 Vote is One-in-959,000
by Stephen Dyer
There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday.
Exit polls in the November election showed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., winning by 3 percent, but President George W. Bush won the vote count by 2.5 percent.
The explanation for the discrepancy that was offered by the exit polling firm -- that Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polling -- is an ``implausible theory,'' according to the report issued Thursday by US Count Votes, a group that claims it's made up of about two dozen statisticians.
Twelve -- including a Case Western Reserve University mathematics instructor -- signed the report.
Instead, the data support the idea that ``corruption of the vote count occurred more freely in districts that were overwhelmingly Bush strongholds.''
The report dismisses chance and inaccurate exit polling as the reasons for their discrepancy with the results.
They found that the one hypothesis that can't be ruled out is inaccurate election results.
``The hypothesis that the voters' intent was not accurately recorded or counted... needs further investigation,'' it said.
The conclusion drew a yawn from Ohio election officials, who repeated that the discrepancy issue was settled when the polling firms Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International disavowed its polls because Kerry voters were more likely to answer exit polls -- the theory Thursday's report deemed ``implausible.''
Ohio has been at the center of a voter disenfranchisement debate since the election.
``What are you going to do except laugh at it?'' said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who's responsible for administering Ohio's elections and is a Republican candidate for governor. ``We're not particularly interested in (the report's findings). We wish them luck, but hope they find something more interesting to do.''
The statistical analysis, though, shows that the discrepancy between polls and results was especially high in precincts that voted for Bush -- as high as a 10 percent difference.
The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not less accurate as the data indicate.
The report also called into question new voting machine technologies.
``All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,'' the report concludes.
However, LoParo remained unimpressed.
``These (Bush) voters have been much maligned by outside political forces who didn't like the way they voted,'' he said. ``The weather's turning nice. There are more interesting things to do than beat a dead horse.''
© 2005 Beacon Journal and wire service sources
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0401-06.htm
________________________________________
Posted on Fri, Apr. 01, 2005
GOVERNMENT
Dade election chief Kaplan resigns
Faced with questions over voting deficiencies, Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan suddenly resigned Thursday.
BY NOAKI SCHWARTZ AND TERE FIGUERAS NEGRETE
nschwartz@herald.com
Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan resigned Thursday amid increasing pressure from county officials who had grown frustrated with a succession of problems that included several hundred votes being lost in the most recent election.
County Manager George Burgess described the decision as mutual but acknowledged that he felt improvements could be made to the department. Kaplan, who could not be reached for comment, will be immediately replaced by her chief deputy, Lester Sola, pending County Commission approval.
This week Burgess launched an audit of the Elections Department and a review of six local elections after Kaplan reported that a faulty computer program did not count hundreds of votes in a March 8 referendum. Miami-Dade voters rejected the measure that would have allowed slot machines at local race tracks and jai-alai frontons. Broward County voters approved slots.
While Kaplan said the uncounted votes would not have changed the referendum's outcome in Miami-Dade, the parimutuel industry sent a letter to Burgess Thursday calling for a new election.
''We will pursue all remedies available under the law,'' said lobbyist Ron Book, who represents the parimutuels.
OTHER PROBLEMS
Burgess said the trouble with Kaplan wasn't confined to the March 8 election. That ''was part of a series of issues: differences on how we approach things,'' Burgess said. He said Kaplan had made some improvements to the department, pointing to the success of the high-stakes November presidential election.
Nonetheless, Kaplan's downfall was quick. A veteran Chicago elections official who had overseen voting in countries around the globe, Kaplan took the Miami-Dade job in June 2003 as the County Commission's choice to rescue the disaster-prone Miami-Dade elections process. Less than two years later, the one-time savior leaves with a tattered reputation.
County officials were desperate to shed the area's reputation for flubbing elections after the 1997 voter-fraud scandal and the 2000 presidential recount.
The county spent $24 million on new iVotronic voting machines, but in their first major test, the 2002 general election, poll workers fumbled with the machines, resulting in a countywide electoral meltdown.
Kaplan came in with 33 years on the Chicago board of elections, where she'd been the main elections troubleshooter. She also had successes and fond memories of consulting for elections in Kosovo, Zambia, Indonesia and China -- where she said she was mistaken for Madonna because she is blond.
Kaplan is still highly regarded in Chicago, said a former colleague who feared Miami politics contributed to his friend's swift fall from grace.
''They were fortunate to get someone of her talent,'' said Tom Leach, longtime spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which does not answer to a county manager or other politicians.
TROUBLE BEGINS
Kaplan beat out 120 other applicants for the $150,000-a-year job in Miami-Dade. But less than a year into her tenure, a flaw was discovered in the iVotronic machine's auditing system. County elections officials thought they had the glitch remedied, but instead they temporarily lost most of the data files from the 2002 elections.
By August 2004, then-County Commission Chair Barbara Carey-Shuler sent a memo to Burgess calling the county's elections Department ``the laughing stock of the nation.''
This February, county Inspector General Chris Mazzella issued a scathing report, accusing the department of poor oversight of campaign financing in the November election. Kaplan disagreed, saying there were ''many misstatements'' in the report.
The situation reached a boiling point this week when Kaplan alerted Burgess that a review showed unexpectedly high numbers of undervotes -- where ballots are cast but no choice is made -- in the March 8 referendum. The Elections Department found 1,246 electronic undervotes in comparison to 61 on absentee ballots.
Kaplan explained that about one-third of the electronic undervotes were caused by an election worker's miscoding a computer program.
The error affected cases in which voters made a selection but didn't push the red flashing ''vote'' button at the top of the machine. In such cases, poll workers are supposed to insert a cartridge that tells the machine to count the vote. But the bad coding instructed machines to ignore the votes.
Regarding the remaining two-thirds of the undercount, Kaplan said only that her staff found that some residents were confused by the ballot question and left without completing their vote.
She swiftly reassigned two supervisors in charge of the coding. Kaplan also blamed the Election Systems & Software, the company that makes iVotronic.
NOT RESPONSIBLE
The company responded in a statement: ``In this instance, the primary responsibility for this particular aspect of preparing for the election lies with the county.''
Burgess called her response ''inadequate'' and ''unacceptable.'' Mayor Carlos Alvarez agreed. ''To make excuses and assume a defensive posture doesn't solve anything,'' he said.
On Wednesday, Kaplan had a lengthy closed-door meeting in Burgess' office, followed by another on Thursday. The difference: At the second, she was followed in by the county's head of employee relations, there to finalize the details of Kaplan's departure.
________________________________________
© 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/politics/11282281.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Chairman of Voting Reform Panel Resigns
By Erica Werner
The Associated Press
Friday 22 April 2005
The first chairman of a federal voting agency created after the 2000 election dispute is resigning, saying the government has not shown enough commitment to reform.
DeForest Soaries said in an interview Friday that his resignation would take effect next week.
Though Soaries, 53, said he wanted to spend more time with his family in New Jersey, he added that his decision was prompted in part by what he called a lack of support.
"All four of us had to work without staff, without offices, without resources. I don't think our sense of personal obligation has been matched by a corresponding sense of commitment to real reform from the federal government," he said.
Soaries, a Republican former New Jersey secretary of state, was the White House's pick to join the Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help states enact voting reforms.
A Baptist minister, Soaries was confirmed by the Senate in December 2003 and elected the independent agency's first chairman by his three fellow commissioners. His term as chairman ended in January 2005 and since then he has stayed on as a commission member.
Soaries and the other commissioners complained from the beginning that the group was underfunded and neglected by the lawmakers who created it.
"It's bad enough to be working under extremely adverse circumstances, but what throws your thinking into an abyss, as it were, is why you would be doing that when, for instance, you have to beg Congress for money as if the commission was your idea," Soaries said.
White House spokesman Allen Abney said only, "We appreciate his service and we are working to fill the vacancy promptly."
Envisioned as a clearinghouse for election information that would make recommendations about technology and other issues and distribute $2.3 billion to states for voting improvements, the commission initially couldn't afford its own office space. The commissioners were appointed nine months later than envisioned by the Help America Vote Act, and of a $10 million budget authorized for 2004, the panel received just $1.2 million.
Soaries said the commission could claim some credit for last November's relatively smooth election, including recommending "best practices" to voting administrators and getting the election reform money to states faster than it otherwise would have gone. The commission has sent about $1.8 billion to states so far.
But the commission has failed to preside over the kinds of sweeping reforms some hoped for, with many counties still relying in November on the same punch-card and lever machines derided after the 2000 election. Soaries said the commission is making progress with improvements, including technical guidelines and centralized voter registration lists, that are supposed to be in place for the 2006 election.
"There is so much more work to do to bring federal elections to the standard I think that the citizens expect, and there doesn't seem to be a corresponding sense of urgency among the policy-makers in Washington," Soaries said. "Nor does there seem to be a national consensus among leaders of the states about what success looks like."
Soaries said election reform was on the front burner after the 2000 presidential recount, but it moved to the back burner - and stayed there - after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 House Democrat and a lead sponsor of the Help America Vote Act, said Soaries' resignation underscored a need to give the commission adequate resources.
"I hope this administration and Congress seriously consider Mr. Soaries' observations as we develop the fiscal year 2006 budget," Hoyer said.
The commission also has run into opposition from state officials accustomed to running their own elections and wary of federal involvement. Earlier this year, the National Association of Secretaries of State approved a resolution asking Congress to dissolve the Election Assistance Commission after 2006.
But Soaries said that despite his frustration and Congress' lack of engagement, he saw a lasting role for the Election Assistance Commission.
"Someone's got to wake up every morning with the mission of improving federal elections in a way that assures the voting public that they can have confidence in voting," he said.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042305Y.shtml
© 2005 The Blade. Privacy and Security Statement. By using this service, you accept the terms of our visitor agreement: Please read it.
To print this article, choose Print from the File menu.
advertisement
Back to: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050429/NEWS24/50429002
________________________________________
Article published April 29, 2005
FBI raids Noe's condo, seizes 'some property'
Investigators seek evidence of campaign-fund activity
FBI agents made a sweep of Tom Noe’s River Road condo in Maumee.
( THE BLADE/LISA DUTTON )
Zoom
By MIKE WILKINSON and JAMES DREW
BLADE STAFF WRITERS
The federal probe into whether local Republican fund-raiser Tom Noe was illegally funneling money to the Bush campaign had been ongoing for months. It reached a turning point Wednesday night.
FBI agents swept into Mr. Noe’s Maumee condo about 7:30 p.m., spending three hours scouring the home of one of the most prominent Republicans in northwest Ohio. They were looking for evidence of violations of federal campaign contribution laws.
The federal probe is studying Mr. Noe’s campaign contributions to the President, and specifically contributions made by others who may have received money from Mr. Noe, possibly allowing him to exceed the $2,000 spending cap.
Jon Richardson, Mr. Noe’s attorney, said the search was “very civilized” and that Mr. Noe’s wife, Bernadette, cooperated with agents who removed “some property” from the condo. Mr. Noe was not home at the time of the search.
The search warrant was signed by U.S. Magistrate Vernelis Armstrong. The affadavit that outlines why federal authorities are seeking the warrant has been sealed by the court.
On Wednesday, Gregory A. White, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, confirmed his office is looking into Mr. Noe, who was chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in northwest Ohio.
Mr. Richardson said he has advised Mr. Noe not to make any statement to authorities at this time.
Mr. Noe, 50, is a coin dealer and former chairman of the Lucas County Republican Party. He manages two rare-coin funds that have received $50 million from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation.
That investment arrangement is currently under a separate investigation being conducted by the Ohio inspector general.
Mr. Noe also is chairman of the Ohio Turnpike Commission and a member of the Ohio Board of Regents.
He also is chairman of the U.S. Mint’s Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee.
Yesterday, state Sen. Marc Dann, a Democrat from suburban Youngstown, asked federal, state, and county authorities to investigate whether there were any violations involving state and local campaign contributions.
“It’s becoming clear that Tom Noe has given large contributions to Republicans, while also obtaining state contracts in which he made millions of dollars investing in risky rare coins,” Mr. Dann said.
“Tom Noe has given thousands and thousands of dollars to Republican candidates. Now he’s at the center of a federal probe.
We deserve to know if Noe laundered state party, candidate, and caucus campaign monies to statewide Republicans.”
Mr. Dann made his request to Mr. White.
The federal government would have jurisdiction if “the mail was used to commit fraud and if big checks were drawn on federally-chartered banks,’’ Mr. Dann said.
Mr. Dann also sent his request to state Inspector General Tom Charles, Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates, and Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien.
Of particular interest to investigators is an Oct. 30, 2003, fund-raiser in Columbus where the Bush campaign raised $1.4 million.
Mr. Noe, who was one of several dozen Ohioans who helped to raise at least $100,000 each for the Bush campaign in the 2004 election, sponsored a table at the event, and invited a number of people to attend.
Among those whose donations have caught the attention of investigators are:
City Councilman Betty Shultz; former state representative Sally Perz, her husband, Joe, and her daughter, Allison; former county elections director Joe Kidd; county Auditor Larry Kaczala and his wife, Gina; County Commissioner Maggie Thurber and her husband, Sam; and two of Mr. Noe’s co-workers at Vintage Coins and Collectibles, partner Tim Lapointe and executive assistant Susan Metzger. Mr. Lapointe’s wife, Linda, also donated.
All of the above gave the campaign $2,000 except the Thurbers; each of them gave $1,950 to the campaign. The $23,900 in donations were made between Oct. 30 and Nov. 5, 2003.
Path of donations
At issue is whether Mr. Noe gave people money in order for them to give to the Bush campaign, allowing Mr. Noe to exceed federal spending limits, law-enforcement sources said.
By law, Mr. Noe would have been unable to contribute at the fund-raiser because he had already made a $2,000 donation in August, 2003.
An individual can give only $2,000 to a presidential candidate in the primary and another $2,000 in the general election, according to federal law.
Mr. Kidd’s attorney, Jerry Phillips, said Wednesday his client already has interviewed with the FBI about the matter.
Mr. Kidd declined additional comment.
In a faxed statement to The Blade, Mrs. Shultz said she was “unable to comment specifically on any ongoing investigation.” She said she has been a friend of Ms. Noe for 20 years, when both were Democrats.
Mrs. Shultz became a Republican in May, 2003, about seven months before announcing plans to run for county treasurer.
Contacted yesterday, Ms. Thurber said she knew of no details of the investigation.
“I don’t need Tom and Bernie to give me money to give to Bush,” she said.
She said the Noes are like “family” to her and Sam and she declined further comment.
Neither the Lapointes nor Ms. Metzger could be reached for comment yesterday.
The U.S. Attorney’s office has jurisdiction over criminal investigations of Federal Election Campaign Act violations. Knowing and willful violations of certain provisions in the Federal Election Campaign Act can lead to imprisonment.
The contributions to the Bush campaign became the subject of a criminal investigation after Bernadette Noe and Sam Thurber, two former GOP members of the county elections board, talked to the county prosecutor’s office about what they claimed was wrongdoing by Joe Kidd, the former director of the county elections office and a fellow Republican.
Investigators found nothing to validate their claims against Mr. Kidd, but the investigation quickly changed direction to focus on new allegations that Mr. Noe had routed campaign cash to the Bush campaign through other local Republicans.
Because the investigation involved federal election laws, Prosecutor Bates forwarded the information her investigators uncovered to federal authorities.
The governor’s reaction
Reached for comment yesterday after a Statehouse event, Gov. Bob Taft, who has strongly defended Mr. Noe in the past, said he was “certainly surprised” on Wednesday to learn of the federal investigation.
Mr. Taft said he did not plan to ask for Mr. Noe’s resignation from the Ohio Board of Regents or the Ohio Turnpike Commission.
“I think we need to let that investigation run its course, to see what happens before we make any decisions on a matter like that,” he said.
When asked if he still supports the state’s rare-coin investment with Mr. Noe, the governor replied:
“Well, I think that’s the purpose of the inspector general’s investigation. It obviously has achieved a return for the state of Ohio. It’s been part of the overall successful investment policy of the bureau.
“But if there are serious questions or concerns with regard to the appropriateness of the bureau investing in that particular investment, that is what the inspector general will be focusing on,” Mr. Taft said.
Staff writer Dale Emch contributed to this report.
Contact Mike Wilkinson at:mwilkinson@theblade.com or419-724-6104.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20050429&Category=NEWS24&ArtNo=50429002&SectionCat=&Template=printart
Complicity of the Corporatist News Media
A Quarterly Report from Bush-Cheney Media Enterprises
By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 01 April 2005
The first quarter of 2005 brought significant media dividends for the Bush-Cheney limited liability corporation.
Stakeholders received windfalls as mainstream news outlets deferred to consolidation of power from the November election.
A rollout of new "democracy" branding - kicked off by the State of the Union product relaunch - yielded at least temporary gains in psychological market share. For instance, repackaging of images in the Middle East implemented makeovers for several client governments. Actual democratic threats, inimical to Bush-Cheney LLC interests, remain low.
Our major domestic financial goal, the privatization of Social Security, is out of reach for the next several quarters. However, in view of the magnitude of potential profits, this massive effort will continue.
More problematic, in retrospect, was the March expenditure of political capital in the Schiavo gambit. Returns on media investment, as gauged by opinion poll data, have been disappointing. However, base earnings are likely to accrue to beneficial levels due to high volume from fundamentalist buy-ins.
Some media damage is inevitable, like the March 30 New York Times op-ed by John Danforth claiming that the Republican Party "has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement." But such refined GOP sensibilities are not a big part of our base. In fact, the further melding of religious and patriotic symbolism augurs well for investors. With the Cross in one hand and the Dollar Bill in the other, this limited liability corporation is moving forward to advance the interests of its various constituencies.
Unfortunately, the first quarter closed with a looming personnel problem on Capitol Hill. On balance, as indicated by a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, the House majority leader's baggage has approached the tipping point. Tom DeLay may need to be dumped before the fourth quarter.
On cable television, satisfactory trends continue. At MSNBC the process of imitating Fox News Channel is apparently secure. Other good news: The benign junk quotient on prime-time CNN continues to rise, with a welcome boost from the Michael Jackson trial. Overall, the ambient TV trajectory is edging toward our target, "No journalism is good journalism."
Negative impacts of the Armstrong Williams "payola" scandal continue to dissipate. Our in-house audit of the cost/benefit ratio indicates that such payments to media pundits amount to a short-term plus but long-term minus. In general, crass payoffs are inappropriate and unnecessary to curry favor with sycophant columnists.
Less problematic are the "video news releases" skewered by the New York Times. Taxpayer funding for some of our PR operations is a significant enhancement of perception management, and little ground need be given in this area. (If the Times were as scrupulous in avoiding stories we plant as it urges TV news departments to be with our videos, many of the paper's articles wouldn't exist.) Blow-over anticipated by end of third quarter.
Regarding the Iraq war: Despite occasional barbs from "the liberal media," they are largely taking cues from weak-kneed Democrats in Congress who ignore the significant opposition to the war that exists at grassroots as measured by opinion polling. With many stakeholders in Bush-Cheney LLC still receiving major financial benefits from war-related contracts, the status quo remains lucrative while the political hazards appear to be manageable over the next few quarters.
As in the past eight quarters, the spectacle of US servicemen and servicewomen in harm's way must be utilized to deflect criticism of the policies that put them in harm's way. CEO Bush will continue his Jimmy Stewart imitations during appearances with soldiers and their families, while CFO Cheney will further develop his persona of stern and slightly avuncular paternalism.
On the talk-radio front, the emergence of Air America as a liberal network, while troubling, does not currently threaten the airwave dominance of B-C LLC clients. Our proprietary echo chambers - with such booming amplifiers as Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times, the New York Post, Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page - provide a steady barrage of media blasts unmatched by anything the left-of-center can possibly offer.
Cautionary note: The interests of the Bush-Cheney limited liability corporation remain vulnerable to realization by a majority of the population that their financial interests and long-term security are being undermined by our policies.
________________________________________
Norman Solomon's latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, will be published in early summer. His columns and other writings can be found at: Norman Solomon.com.
-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040105H.shtml
CNN's Schneider claimed record-low Bush approval rating "isn't too bad"; Gallup disagrees
CNN political analyst Bill Schneider opined that President Bush's 48 percent approval rating, as measured by a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, "isn't too bad." But Schneider did not mention Gallup's own observation (subscription required) that "Bush's public support is significantly lower than support for all other two-term presidents at similar points in their second terms."
While Gallup made that statement based on an earlier poll, conducted March 21-23, that placed Bush's approval rating at 45 percent, the historical data Gallup presented indicates that 48 percent, Gallup's most recent figure, is still lower than the approval ratings of all other presidents since World War II at similar points in their second terms:
President Approval rating Date of poll
Truman 57% March 6-11, 1949
Eisenhower 65% March 15-20, 1957
Johnson 69% March 18-23, 1965
Nixon 57% March 30-April 2, 1973
Reagan 56% March 8-11, 1985
Clinton 59% March 24-26, 1997
Bush 45% March 21-23, 2005
Reporting on the poll on the April 5 edition of CNN's Inside Politics, Schneider asserted: "Despite all the complaints, President Bush's overall job approval rating is 48 percent, which isn't too bad." But in contrast to Schneider's spin, USA Today's report on the poll was headlined "Poll finds Bush suffering from 'second-term-itis,' " based on a comment about Gallup's findings from Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
Gallup noted that while 45 percent is the lowest approval rating of Bush's entire presidency, "there are some silver linings for him" because "other presidents' lowest approval ratings [at different points in their presidencies] were much lower" and because "Bush's average rating while in office remains among the most positive for recent presidents." But Gallup added that Bush's high average ratings are due "[i]n large part because of his response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks."
Reporting on Gallup's findings, an Editor & Publisher article remarked: "It's not uncommon to hear or read pundits referring to President George W. Bush as a 'popular' leader or even a 'very popular' one. Even some of his critics in the press refer to him this way. Perhaps they need to check the latest polls."
— J.C. & G.W.
Posted to the web on Wednesday April 6, 2005 at 5:15 PM EST
http://mediamatters.org/items/200504060006
Un-Embed the Media
By Amy Goodman and David Goodman, AlterNet. Posted April 8, 2005.
Government-supplied propaganda has become pervasive in mainstream media, from hiring journalists to write puff pieces to credentialing fake reporters to fawning reports from embedded reporters in Iraq. Where is independent media? Story Tools
EMAIL
PRINT
BUY
COMMENTS
This originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun on April 7.
Recent revelations that the Bush administration has been fabricating news stories, secretly hiring journalists to write puff pieces and credentialing fake reporters at White House news conferences has infuriated the news media.
Editorials profess to being shocked -- shocked! -- by the government's covert propaganda campaign in which, as The New York Times revealed March 13, at least 20 federal agencies have spent $250 million creating and sending fake news segments to local TV stations.
But the media have only themselves to blame for most people -- including TV news managers -- not being able to distinguish journalism from propaganda. The line between news and propaganda was trampled not only by the public relations agencies hired by the government but also by reporters in the deserts of Iraq.
The Pentagon deployed a weapon more powerful than any bomb: the U.S. media. Embedded journalists were transformed into efficient conduits of Pentagon spin. Before and during the invasion of Iraq, the networks conveniently provided the flag-draped backdrop for fawning reports from the field.
As if literally adopting the Pentagon's propagandistic slogan -- "Operation Iraqi Freedom" -- for their coverage weren't enough, the networks bombarded viewers with an unending parade of generals and colonels paid to offer on-air analysis. It gave new meaning to the term "general news."
If we had state-run media in the United States, how would it be any different?
The media have a responsibility to show the true face of war. But many corporate journalists, so accustomed by now to trading truth for access (the "access of evil"), can no longer grasp what's missing from their coverage. As CBS' Jim Axelrod, who was embedded with -- we would say in bed with -- the 3rd Infantry Division, gushed: "This will sound like I've drunk the Kool-Aid, but I found embedding to be an extremely positive experience. ... We got great stories and they got very positive coverage."
It should come as no surprise that the Bush administration, having found the media so helpful and compliant with their coverage of the Iraq war, would seek to orchestrate similarly uncritical coverage of other issues that they hold dear.
TV viewers nationwide have watched and heard about how the "top-notch work force" of the often-criticized Transportation Security Administration has led "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history," how President Bush's controversial Medicare plan will offer "new benefits, more choices, more opportunities," how the United States is "putting needy women back in business" in Afghanistan, and how Army prison guards, accused of torturing and murdering inmates in Iraq and Afghanistan, "treat prisoners strictly, but fairly."
Such crude government-supplied propaganda would be laughable were it not being passed off as news on America's TV stations. Even sadder, nothing about the sycophantic reports seems out of the ordinary.
The first casualty of this taxpayer-financed misinformation campaign is the truth.
Mr. Bush must have been delighted to learn from a March 16 Washington Post-ABC News poll that 56 percent of Americans still thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war, while six in 10 said they believed Iraq provided direct support to al Qaeda.
Americans believe these lies not because they are stupid but because they are good media consumers. The explosive effect of this propaganda is amplified as a few pro-war, pro-government media moguls consolidate their grip over the majority of news outlets. Media monopoly and militarism go hand in hand.
It's time for the American media to un-embed themselves from the U.S. government. We need media that are fiercely independent, that ask the hard questions and hold those in power accountable. Only then will government propaganda be seen for what it is and citizens be able to make choices informed by reality, not self-serving misinformation. Anything less is a disservice to the servicemen and women of this country and a disservice to a democratic society.
Amy Goodman, host of the radio and TV news show Democracy Now!, and David Goodman, a contributing writer for Mother Jones, are authors of The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them, just published in paperback by Hyperion. Amy is currently on a 50-city 'Un-Embed the Media' tour.
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21703/
American TV's information gap creates a new world of danger
James Robinson talks to veteran CBS correspondent Tom Fenton on the blinkering of US news by corporate bosses
Sunday April 10, 2005
The Observer
Anyone who has travelled to America knows how difficult it can be to find out what is happening back home, particularly if a TV set in a hotel bedroom is your main source of information; the US networks seem to regard foreign news as an expensive turn-off.
With hundreds of correspondents in Rome and Windsor this weekend to cover the Pope's funeral and Prince Charles's wedding, it may not be the most appropriate moment to bemoan the paucity of American foreign coverage. But veteran CBS foreign correspondent Tom Fenton, who retired earlier this year at the age of 74, believes that its virtual absence has had a devastating effect on the quality of public debate in America, with potentially disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
In his 34-year career at CBS, much of it based in London, Fenton has covered momentous events, including the fall of communism and numerous wars, winning eight Overseas Press Club awards and four Emmys. Now he has written Bad News , arguing that the slow but gradual relegation of foreign coverage to the bottom of the networks' news agendas needs to be reversed.
'There are parts of the world that just don't exist as far as the American media are concerned - especially the broadcast media,' Fenton says from his London home. More than 80 per cent of Americans cite the broadcast media as their main source of news, a far higher proportion than British consumers, so the network's blinkered approach to the world - the Arab-Israeli conflict aside - is potentially far more damaging.
Even 11 September didn't shake the networks from their torpor for long, he argues. 'There was a brief revival of reporting and money was no longer the object for some months. I went to Hamburg and Pakistan on the trail of al-Qaeda, but it didn't last'. Fenton argues that the 'dumbing down' of news in general, and foreign news in particular, can be explained by a confluence of events; the corporate takeover of American TV news and the Cold War's end.
The collapse of the Soviet Union gave the conglomerates which bought the major broadcasters an excuse to scale back expensive overseas operations. At the same time remote conflicts easily explained in the context of the ideological struggle with communism became harder to understand, allowing news editors to ignore complex foreign stories.
'At the end of the 1980s the American mainstream media began to demobilise. They closed bureaux, got rid of foreign correspondents, almost precisely the same thing that the intelligence agencies did. When the mainstream American media turned their backs on the rest of the world, I think the corporations assumed they could cash in on the peace dividend. They thought we were at peace. The problem was we weren't at peace. We were at war.'
The bombing of US embassies and military targets in Yemen, Kenya and elsewhere didn't go unreported, but the motivations of the perpetrators were not examined or properly understood, he says. 'It was almost impossible to get the gate-keepers interested in the story of al-Qaeda or the terrorism threat. In 1996 CBS weren't even interested in an interview with al-Qaeda when we set one up,' Fenton complains.
If Americans are less interested in news from abroad, it is also true that the cost of gathering it has proved prohibitive in an age when major networks are in the hands of large corporations. ABC is owned by Disney, NBC by General Electric and CBS by Viacom. CNN is part of Time Warner and Fox News is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
'The other, more impor tant, factor was money,' says Fenton. The strict regulatory controls designed to guarantee editorial impartiality, which were enforced by the FCC, the US media regulator, have gradually been eroded. 'Over the years, the corporations have successfully lobbied the government for their removal, so they can pursue the bottom line. It was incremental. You didn't notice it, but the networks began to concentrate almost solely on their responsibilities to shareholders. In the old days, news was considered a loss-leader. Now they are profit centres in their own right and they are required to meet the same profit targets.
'Foreign news is twice as expensive as domestic news [and] today to get out of the door you have to hand in a budget to New York for approval, and tell them what you're going to bring back.'
It was all very different when Fenton moved from newspapers to join CBS as a junior in its Rome bureau. 'The most important thing was beating the competition. If you needed a Lear jet, you got a Lear jet. When I first started, I was worried because I came from a newspaper background where you had to count every pencil. I sent a telex to the foreign editor [on ways to cut costs]. He said: "Fenton. You're in the news-gathering business, not the money-saving business".'
All this could be easily dismissed as the romantic musings of an old-timer pining for a golden era of TV journalism that never actually existed. But Fenton has wheeled out the most senior members of America's news establishment to back his argument, including legendary anchor Walter Cronkite and his successors, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather. 'They all felt [disturbed] at the cost-cutting. Rather and Jennings were so worried they offered to give back $1 million a year from their salaries.'
Fenton fears that the lack of foreign news may deter young journalists from travelling abroad. 'Foreign correspondents are no longer big names. Christiana Amanpour is one of the very few. We don't have an equivalent of John Simpson, for example. Working in the field is no longer seen as the highway to promotion, it's much better to do domestic stories. It's lost its allure. In fact, it's hard to get people to do it because it's difficult, it's dangerous and you don't get much airtime.'
The results of being badly informed are potentially catastrophic, he argues. 'A few months before 9/11, Mohammed Atta [who piloted one of the planes that hit the World Trade Centre] went to a US Department of Agriculture loan officer and applied for a loan to rent a commercial plane, convert it and use it as a crop-sprayer. He started to talk to her about an organisation called al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who would be a great world leader one day. None of this meant anything to her because so little had been written about it. It was only after she'd seen his picture in the paper she went to the FBI.'
Fenton believes that she may have done so earlier if the media had acted more responsibly. 'Now there's a "What if?"'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1455870,00.html
Conservative Coup at CPB Brings Anti-Public-Interest-Oriented Ken Ferree to Agency’s Head
Statement of Jeff Chester, executive director, Center for Digital Democracy
WASHINGTON -- April 9 -- The ideologically driven majority on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) now has the perfect apparatchik to run its zealous campaign to promote conservative/GOP-approved public broadcasting programming. Ken Ferree is now its “acting president.” That spells trouble for those who care about the fate of PBS and NPR--with a capital F.
Ferree was the key aide to FCC Chairman Michael Powell on media policy. As head of the FCC’s Media Bureau until March of this year, Ferree delivered to Powell--as he will deliver to his new boss, CPB Chair Kenneth Tomlinson--whatever was required to advance ideological interests. Ferree helped engineer the Commission’s 2003 rules on media ownership that swept away what little was left of restraints on the conglomerates. More importantly, he supported policies that undermined the rights of viewers and listeners--and citizens--to a media system that fosters discourse, creative expression and democracy. It was Ferree’s plan for Powell that ignited unprecedented opposition to the FCC, with millions writing to Congress and the commissioners. Ultimately, the Powell/Ferree plan was undone--for now--by the courts (and in part by Congress).
Moreover, Ferree was unwilling to engage in the kind of public dialogue that is essential when dealing with critical issues, such as the future of the First Amendment. As the new “go-to man” for the cabal on the CPB board, he will undoubtedly be the eager soldier in their pressure campaign on public broadcasting. The board’s majority is convinced that PBS and NPR are mired in “objectivity and balance” problems. Yet, study after study done by the board, we are told, shows there isn’t a problem. In this case, CPB isn’t really working for the American people. It’s a co-conspirator with the GOP leadership and establishment who think that Big Bird is a “card carrying Communist” and that too many “American Masters” failed to "name names."
The hasty departure yesterday of CPB President Kathleen Cox (done in a Nixonian “Saturday Night Massacre” style) is just the latest case of key employees disappearing. Unless one passes the right-wing litmus test there is no security of employment at CPB. It’s also no coincidence that in the same week CPB’s board created a new “thought police” division, naming two “ombudpersons” to review all programming on public radio and TV stations--even those not funded by CPB or the federal government.
Those who care about the future of PBS, NPR and noncommercial programming will need to watch Ferree, Tomlinson, and Co. closely. Under a spotlight, they are likely to reveal themselves as working to undermine the mandate of public broadcasting established almost 40 years ago.
Links:
CPB President Kathleen Cox Names Ken Ferree Chief Operating Officer, 14 Mar. 2005
CPB Establishes Ombudsmen Office, 5 April 2005
Joint Statement of Kathleen Cox, CPB president and CEO, and Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chair, CPB board of directors, 8 April 2005
http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0409-01.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0409-02.htm
Time Covers Coulter:
Magazine's Cover Story a Sloppy, Inaccurate Tribute to Far-Right Pundit
Action Alert (4/21/05)
A week after she was praised in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" issue (4/18/05), the magazine went a step further by making far-right pundit Ann Coulter the subject of a lengthy April 25 cover story. Readers who might have looked for a critical examination of the overexposed, factually challenged hatemonger found something else: a puff piece that gave Coulter a pass on her many errors and vicious, often bigoted rhetoric.
Throughout the article, Time reporter John Cloud gave Coulter every benefit of the doubt. Her clear, amply documented record of inaccuracy was waved away. Coulter's notoriously vitriolic hate speech was alternately dismissed as a put-on or excused as "from her heart," while the worst Cloud could say about her was that she can "occasionally be coarse." Time readers learned that Coulter is an omnivorous reader (one of exactly two examples of her consumption being the Drudge Report website), and that she regards herself "as a public intellectual." Coulter, who writes a syndicated newspaper column and makes frequent cable news appearances, is dubbed "iconic" by Time because she "epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airways."
In reality, there are few who "discuss" politics the Coulter way-- by smearing opponents as traitors, calling for a renewal of McCarthyism and endorsing the killing of reporters.
Coulter's Accuracy
"Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words 'Ann Coulter lies,' you will drown in result," wrote Cloud. "But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors."
That would depend on how one defines "many" or "outright." Websites like the Daily Howler, Tapped, Media Matters and Spinsanity have pointed out literally dozens of errors in Coulter's book Slander and other Coulter statements. Coulter directed Cloud to one error she now admits to making, about the New York Times supposedly ignoring the death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt (an error she lied about making when she appeared on FAIR's CounterSpin--8/9/02). Coulter managed to make yet another error in her explanation to Cloud, but this didn't seem to lead Cloud to dig any deeper. As Salon's Eric Boehlert pointed out (4/19/05), Slander's publisher made five corrections after its initial printing-- and should have made at least six more.
But it's important to acknowledge that Coulter is, in a sense, hard to "fact check" because she rarely makes arguments based on facts. Appearing on television programs to say that liberals "want there to be lots of 9/11s" (Fox News, 10/13/03) can either be treated as a serious argument for which she has no evidence, or explained away as "opinion." Such cheap and disgusting smears tend to be acceptable by mainstream media standards-- so long as they're coming out of Coulter's mouth.
Benefit of the doubt
Throughout the article, Cloud presented instances where Coulter was allegedly misunderstood or underappreciated. And in each case, Cloud either gave Coulter a pass, or concluded that her opponents were wrong. Cloud generously wrote that Coulter "likes to shock reporters by wondering aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to vote"-- as if she writes or speaks such things on national television only to get a rise out of journalists. Cloud also argued that Coulter can "write about gender issues with particular sensitivity," an odd trait to attribute to someone who recently claimed that women are "not that bright" (Fox News, 9/23/04).
Cloud also recalled a TV debate over environmentalism where Coulter offered her typical hyperbole: "God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas.... God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"
Unfortunately, wrote Cloud, "her rape-the-planet bit would later be wrenched from context and repeatedly quoted as Coulter nuttiness." The context, apparently, is that she was laughing when she said it-- and that, as Coulter put it, her critics "don't get the punch line"--which was that raping the Earth is preferable to "living like the Indians." Cloud admitted that maybe not everyone would find the slur funny-- but doesn't seem to understand that laughing about "raping" the Earth is no less offensive than making the suggestion with a straight face.
In recounting two of Coulter's more notorious TV appearances, Cloud found fault with everyone else. Recalling her firing from MSNBC for disdainfully telling a disabled Vietnam vet, "No wonder you guys lost," Cloud interjected that the veteran, Robert Muller, was incorrect when he claimed that 90 percent of U.S. landmine casualties in Vietnam came from "our mines" used by enemy forces. Cloud-- who had been unable to find many errors in Coulter's work-- rebutted Muller by saying that a 1969 Pentagon report found that "90 percent of the components used in enemy mines came from U.S. duds and refuse"-- a minor if not meaningless distinction. Cloud also recalled that the MSNBC incident "became an infamous--and oft-misreported--Coulter moment" because outlets like the Washington Post had misquoted Coutler as saying, "People like you caused us to lose that war." Cloud ignored the fact that the source of the paraphrase was Coulter herself (Extra!, 11-12/02).
Cloud also recounted a recent interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where Coulter, arguing that Canada should participate in the war in Iraq, claimed that "Canada sent troops to Vietnam." When CBC interviewer Bob McKeown said she was wrong about that, Coulter pledged to get back to them about it-- but never did. Cloud rushed to the rescue by noting that "Canada did send noncombat troops to Indochina in the 1950s and again to Vietnam in 1972." Cloud is making quite a stretch to prove that Coulter was correct-- Canada was officially neutral during the Vietnam War, so if any noncombat troops were sent (none are mentioned in a detailed 1975 U.S. Army history, Allied Participation in Vietnam), they would not have been sent to support U.S. forces there. Again, Cloud went out of his way to cast doubt on statements made by Coulter's critics, applying no such scrutiny to Coulter herself-- the ostensible subject of his article.
Coulter's Bigotry
Cloud downplayed Coulter's record of rank bigotry and racism. Recounting her defense of racial profiling, Cloud wrote, "It would be easier to accept Coulter's reasoning if a shadow of bigotry didn't attach to many of her statements about Arabs and Muslims." Cloud did not explain how this bigoted "shadow" mysteriously "attaches" itself to Coulter's words, but the strange metaphor does serve to distance Coulter from her obvious hatefulness. Ironically, in another part of the story, Cloud recalled that Coulter once wrote that school desegregation has led to "illiterate students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell." One wonders if the "shadow" of racism will find its way to that statement as well. Cloud also noted that Coulter once said in a speech, "Liberals are about to become the last people to figure out that Arabs lie"-- a comment Cloud dubbed "flagrantly impolitic," as if it's simply bad form to make a slanderous generalization about an entire ethnicity.
Misleading Graphics
To illustrate the left's reaction to Coulter, the article was accompanied by a photo of a demonstration where a poster labels Coulter a "neo-imperialist criminal" and an "enemy," and her mouth is covered by a censorious red X. "Protesters blast Coulter at the GOP Convention in New York City last year," the caption explained. What readers weren't told is that the poster was a right-wing satire, part of a pro-Republican counter-demonstration; Time cropped out the name of the organization responsible for the poster-- "Communists for Kerry"-- as well as another sign behind it promoting "Criminals for Gun Control." Does Time really pay so little attention to the graphics that it uses-- or was the cropping an attempt to make sure that readers wouldn't be in on the joke?
(The online version of Time, which ran an uncropped version of the photo, now identifies the sign-holders as "pro-GOP protesters" and appends a correction saying that "the original caption incorrectly stated that these protesters were blasting Coulter.")
Any Precedent?
Time readers who aren't aware of Coulter's work might wonder why a far-right TV pundit would be worth so much attention. Some media observers, like Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz (4/19/05), recalled that filmmaker Michael Moore made the magazine's July 12, 2004 cover.
Moore and Coulter share little in terms of tone or content; nonetheless, the comparison is worth exploring, since it reveals that Moore was held to a much different standard. The text on the Coulter cover asks, "Is she serious or just having fun?" For Moore, the release of his film Fahrenheit 9/11 led Time to ask on its cover, "Is this good for America?"
The Moore feature included a stand-alone sidebar that addressed his alleged inaccuracies, and gave ample space to critics who derided the movie. On top of that, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan was given a separate piece to savage Fahrenheit 9/11 along with Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," calling them "crude, boring, gratuitous," and charging Moore with using "innuendo, sly editing, parody, ridicule and somber voiceovers to give his mere assertions a patina of truth."
The point is not that Moore should be treated the same as Coulter. In fact, Moore's film was premiering across the country, smashing all box-office records for documentaries, and had won international acclaim, making his work of bonafide journalistic interest. By contrast, Coulter's latest book is a months-old collection of columns, and if not for a handful of cable news appearances this year she would be almost completely invisible in the national debate.
At one point, Cloud asked rhetorically: "How did such a flagrantly impolitic person become such a force in our politics?" The answer is obvious: The mainstream media has granted her the time and space to spread her message. And if Cloud's own credulous writing is any indication, that's not going to change anytime soon.
ACTION:
Please contact Time's John Cloud and tell him you were disappointed that his article played down Ann Coulter's bigotry and inaccuracy.
CONTACT:
Time Magazine
Phone: (212) 522-1212
letters@time.com
As always, please remember that your comments have more impact if you maintain a polite tone.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2496
The war in Iraq is worse than illegal or immoral, it is stupid, insanely stupid
Human rights group calls for criminal investigations of Rumsfeld, Tenet
April 23, 2005, 11:49 AM EDT
NEW YORK -- A human rights watchdog group has called for a criminal investigation of U.S. intelligence and military officials who it says condoned or ignored the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other locations.
The report, to be released Sunday by the Human Rights Watch, takes no stance on the ultimate culpability of the officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director George Tenet, but says an investigation is warranted by growing evidence against them.
It criticizes Rumsfeld and Tenet for trying to pass blame for the abuse to military subordinates and individual soldiers.
"This pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules," Reed Brody, special counsel for the group, said in a statement. "It resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials to bend, ignore, or cast rules aside."
The report says coercive questioning techniques authorized by Rumsfeld for use at Guantanamo Bay spread not only to Abu Ghraib, but to sites throughout Iraq, Afghanistan and other "secret locations."
The techniques included using guard dogs to frighten prisoners, putting prisoners in stressful positions and removing their clothes, the report said.
HRW also accused Tenet of dispatching al-Qaida suspects to undisclosed locations where they were questioned and tortured.
The report also calls for investigations of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former senior U.S. commander in Iraq, and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the Guantanamo Camp.
The Army announced this week that it had cleared Sanchez of all allegations of wrongdoing in connection with Abu Ghraib and said he would not be punished.
___
On the Net:
http://www.hrw.org
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--prisonabuse-human0423apr23,0,3196500,print.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork
Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top
Classified documents show the former US military chief in Iraq personally sanctioned measures banned by the Geneva Conventions. Andrew Buncombe reports from Washington
03 April 2005
America's leading civil liberties group has demanded an investigation into the former US military commander Iraq after a formerly classified memo revealed that he personally sanctioned a series of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. The group claims that his directives were directly linked to the sort of abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib.
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Lt General Ricardo Sanchez authorised techniques such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, stress positions and disorientation. In the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Gen Sanchez admits that some of the techniques would not be tolerated by other countries.
When he appeared last year before a Congressional committee, Gen Sanchez denied authorising such techniques. He has now been accused of perjury.
The ACLU says the documents reveal that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was the result of an organised and co-ordinated plan for dealing with prisoners captured during the so-called war on terror that originates at the highest levels of the chain of command. It says that far from being isolated incident, the shocking abuse at Abu Ghraib that was revealed last year was part of a pattern.
"We think that the techniques authorised by Gen Sanchez were certainly responsible for putting into play the sort of abuses that we saw at Abu Ghraib," Amirit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, told The Independent on Sunday. "And it does not just stop with Sanchez. It goes to [Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, who wrote memos authorising these sorts of techniques at Guantanamo Bay."
In the September 2003 memo, Gen Sanchez authorised the use of 29 techniques for interrogating prisoners being held by the US. These included stress positions, "yelling, loud music and light control" as well as the use of muzzled military dogs in order to "exploit Arab fear of dogs". Some of the most notorious photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib scandal showed hand-cuffed, naked Iraqi prisoners cowering from snarling dogs.
Six weeks after Gen Sanchez issued his memo, a subsequent directive banned the use of dogs and several of the other techniques following concerns raised by military lawyers. The ACLU says that at least 12 of the techniques listed in the memo went beyond the limits for interrogation listed in the US Army's field manual.
"Gen Sanchez authorised interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards," said Ms Singh. "He and other high-ranking officials who bear responsibility for the widespread abuse of detainees must be held accountable."
The Abu Ghraib scandal sent shockwaves around the world and further undermined US credibility in the Arab world. In the immediate aftermath, insurgents who captured and beheaded a US engineer, Nick Berg, said they had done so in retaliation for the abuse at the infamous prison west of Baghdad, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and tortured.
A number of low-ranking reservists have been charged over the abuse. An alleged ringleader, Charles Graner, 36, was convicted last January and sentenced to 10 years in jail. At his trial his lawyer, Guy Womack, claimed his client was being used as a scapegoat. "The government is asking a corporal to take the hit for them," he said. "The chain of command says, 'We didn't know anything about this stuff'. You know that is a lie."
When he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004, Gen Sanchez flatly refused approving such techniques in Iraq, and said that a news article reporting otherwise was false. "I never approved any of those measures to be used ... at any time in the last year," he said under oath. The ACLU accuses him of committing perjury and has asked the Attorney General to investigate. In a letter to Alberto Gonzales, the group said: "Gen Sanchez's testimony, given under oath before the Senate Armed Services committee, is utterly inconsistent with the written record, and deserves serious investigation. This clear breach of the public's trust is also further proof that the American people deserve the appointment of an independent special counsel by the Attorney General."
A number of investigations have been carried out into the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. While some have referred to a break-down in the chain of command, none have placed responsibility with senior officers or politicians.
Kathy Kelley, a spokeswoman for the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, said the new documents obtained by the ACLU showed a pattern of abuse by US forces. "It saddens me but I am not shocked," she said.
Gen Sanchez is currently commanding general of the US V Corps based in Germany. He has yet to comment on the release of the memo. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment.
The Pentagon originally refused to release the memo on national security grounds, but passed it to the ACLU after the group challenged it in court. Mr Rumsfeld last week dismissed suggestions that it had been withheld to save the Pentagon's embarrassment.
But the ACLU said the reason for the delay in delivering the more than 1,200 pages of documents in which the memo was contained was "evident in the contents", which included reports of brutal beatings and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the fuck out of" prisoners.
Also in Americas
Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top
Jackson witness is linked to America's most infamous child sex claims
New York Stories: Condomania is gripping the city (and leaves me green with envy)
America's religious right lashes out at judges over Schiavo
WMD verdict: 'Dead wrong'
________________________________________
Legal | Contact us | Using our Content | © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=625909
Published on Saturday, April 9, 2005 by Reuters
Iraqis Protest on Anniversary of Saddam's Fall
by Mussab al-Khairalla
BAGHDAD - Tens of thousands of followers of a rebel Shi'ite cleric marched in Baghdad on Saturday to denounce the U.S. presence in Iraq and demand a speedy trial of Saddam Hussein on the second anniversary of his overthrow.
Chanting "No, no to the occupiers," men loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr streamed from the poor Shi'ite district of Sadr City to Firdos Square in central Baghdad where Saddam's statue was torn down two years ago, in a peaceful show of strength.
The square and side streets were quickly packed with crowds waving Iraqi flags and brandishing effigies of Saddam, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.
"No America! No Saddam! Yes to Islam!" many chanted. One group of demonstrators burned an American flag.
"We want a stable Iraq and this will only happen through independence," said a statement from Sadr's office read out at the rally. "There will be no security and stability unless the occupiers leave... The occupiers must leave my country."
Iraqi security forces shut down central Baghdad ahead of the march and were keeping a tight watch. U.S. forces, around 135,000 of whom remain in Iraq, were out of sight. Most protesters were searched for weapons before reaching the square.
"I came from Sadr City to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation," said Abbas, a young, bearded protester sitting on the grass in the square. "Every Iraqi has a right to demand his freedom. The Americans wanted time and we gave them time, now we want to rule ourselves."
Followers of Sadr from the southern Shi'ite cities of Basra, Amara and Nassiriya traveled hundreds of miles to join the protest, showing the appeal the young cleric, who has led two uprisings against U.S.-led forces, can command.
By early evening, most protesters had dispersed. There were no reports of violence.
MASS TURNOUT
The protest was the largest since the Jan. 30 election and the first since a new government began forming.
U.S. forces last year pledged to arrest Sadr, a low-ranking cleric in his mid-30s, and destroy his Mehdi Army militia. But as part of a peace deal to end his uprising in August, he was not detained and he pledged to renounce violence.
Firdos Square has become a central rallying place for Iraqis since Saddam's overthrow two years ago. U.S. forces last year shut down the square, sealing it off with razor wire, to prevent people massing on the first anniversary.
Saturday's protest taps into the growing frustration among large swathes of the Iraqi population against the U.S. presence in the country. Armed insurgents continue to target U.S. soldiers and Iraqi security forces they regard as collaborators.
A U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bomb blast north of Baghdad on Friday, raising to at least 1,543 the number of U.S. troops who have lost their lives in Iraq.
On Saturday, the bodies of 15 Iraqi soldiers were found in the lawless area just south of Baghdad, Iraqi police said. Police said the soldiers were in a truck that was stopped by insurgents the previous day. All the men had been shot.
In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide car bomber killed two policeman and a child, and wounded several, police said.
GOVERNMENT IN WORKS
Even many Iraqis who would not take up arms against the Americans still want U.S. and foreign troops, together numbering around 160,000, to leave. U.S. commanders say they will withdraw only once Iraqi forces are strong enough.
Scandals such as the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the deaths of Iraqi detainees in U.S. custody have exacerbated tensions.
There is also anger that more than two years since the war, Saddam and his senior lieutenants have still not been tried. Trials are expected to begin later this year, although Saddam is unlikely to be one of the first to appear in court.
"We want to try Saddam and his men ourselves with no foreign interference," said Baghdad protester Murtatha al-Yaqubi.
The demonstration came as efforts continued to complete a the formation of a government 10 weeks since the election.
A president, two vice presidents and a prime minister have been named, but the prime minister, Islamist Shi'ite leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was still working on his cabinet and has said it could take up to two weeks before it is finalized.
Iraqi officials have cautioned that the longer it takes to form a government the more it will play into the hands of insurgents, who will view authorities as weak and indecisive.
Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny
© Copyright 2005 Reuters Ltd
US appears to have fought war for oil and lost it
By Ian Rutledge
Published: April 11 2005 03:00 | Last updated: April 11 2005 03:00
From Dr Ian Rutledge.
Sir, Your recent report that oil prices have reached an all-time nominal high and that Goldman Sachs has suggested the possibility of a "super spike" in prices to as high as $105 per barrel ("Crude at all-time high despite Opec's efforts", April 5) should be of no surprise to anyone who has studied the informed opinions of US energy experts in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Nor, for that matter, to anyone who has seen my own observations on future world oil prices in my recent book Addicted to Oil.
In a crucial report to President George W. Bush by the US Council on Foreign Relations in April 2001, the president was warned that: "As the 21st century opens, the energy sector is in a critical condition. A crisis could erupt at any time . . . Theworld is currently close to utilising all of its available global oil production capacity, raising the chances of an oil supply crisis with more substantial consequences than seen in three decades."
With US oil consumption in 2001 at an all-time high (19.7m b/d), import penetration at 53 per cent, and dependence on Arabian Gulf oil also at an all-time record (14.1 per cent of total US domestic and foreign supplies), the council stated that it was absolutely imperative that "political factors do not block the development of new oil fields in the Gulf" and that "the Department of State, together with the National Security Council" should "develop a strategic plan to encourage reopening to foreign investment in the important states of the Middle East".
But while the council argued that "there is no question that this investment is vitally important to US interests" it also acknowledged that "there is strong opposition to any such opening among key segments of the Saudi and Kuwaiti populations".
However, there was an alternative. In the words of ESA Inc (Boston), the US's leading energy security analysts: "One of the best things for our supply security would be liberate Iraq"; words echoed by William Kristol, the Republican party ideologist, in testimony to the House Subcommittee on the Middle East on May 22 2002 that as far as oil was concerned, "Iraq is more important than Saudi Arabia".
So when, according to the former head of ExxonMobil's Gulf operations, "Iraqi exiles approached us saying, you can have our oil if we can get back in there", the Bush administration decided to use its overwhelming military might to create a pliant - and dependable - oil protectorate in the Middle East and achieve that essential "opening" of the Gulf oilfields.
But in the words of another US oil company executive, "it all turned out a lot more complicated than anyone had expected". Instead of the anticipated post-invasion rapid expansion of Iraqi production (an expectation of an additional 2m b/d entering the world market by now), the continuing violence of the insurgency has prevented Iraqi exports from even recovering to pre-invasion levels.
In short, the US appears to have fought a war for oil in the Middle East, and lost it. The consequences of that defeat are now plain for all to see.
Ian Rutledge, Chesterfield S40 4TR
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a0bb7970-aa25-11d9-aa38-00000e2511c8.html
Published on Monday, April 18, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Remembering a Friend Killed in Iraq, Marla Ruzicka
by Kevin Danaher and Medea Benjamin
Just about every day we hear of bombs going off in Iraq, and perhaps we pause for a moment and think what a tragedy it is, and then we go back to our daily routine. But when someone close to you is killed by one of those bombs, the world stops spinning.
On Saturday April 16, our colleague and friend, 28-year-old Marla Ruzicka of Lakeport, California, was killed when a car bomb exploded on the streets of Baghdad. We still don’t know the exact details of her death, which makes it all that much harder to deal with the utter shock of losing this bright, shining light whose work focused on trying to bring some compassion into the middle of a war zone.
Marla was working for a humanitarian organization she founded called CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), which documents cases of innocent civilians hurt by war. Marla and numerous other volunteers would go door-to-door interviewing families who had lost loved ones or had their property destroyed by the fighting. She would then take this information back to Washington and lobby for reparations for these families.
A case in point, taken from Marla’s own journal, as published November 6, 2003 on AlterNet:
“On the 24th of October, former teacher Mohammad Kadhum Mansoor, 59, and his wife, Hamdia Radhi Kadhum, 45, were traveling with their three daughters -- Beraa, 21, Fatima, 8, and Ayat, 5 years old -- when they were tragically run over by an American tank.
“A grenade was thrown at the tank, causing it to loose control and veer onto the highway, over the family’s small Volkswagen. Mohammad and Hamdia were killed instantly, orphaning the three girls in the backseat. The girls survived, but with broken and fractured bodies. We are not sure of Ayat’s fate; her backbone is broken.
“CIVIC staff member Faiz Al Salaam monitors the girls’ condition each day. Nobody in the military or the U.S. Army has visited them, nor has anyone offered to help this very poor family.”
Marla first came to the Global Exchange office when she was still in high school in Lakeport. She had heard a talk by one of staff members about Global Exchange’s work building people-to-people ties around the world—and she wanted to do something to help. She was a quick study and took to the work with a passion and energy that were inspiring to us older activists. She later chose a college (Friends World College) that allowed her to travel to many countries and learn from diverse cultures. She quickly develop “big love”—love of the human race, in all its joy, frailties and exotic permutations.
Marla worked with AIDS victims in Zimbabwe, refugees in Palestine, campesinos in Nicaragua. Following the US invasion of Afghanistan, Marla traveled to Afghanistan with a Global Exchange delegation and she was so moved by the plight of the civilian victims that she dedicated the rest of her too short life to helping innocent victims of war. She was on a similar mission in Iraq when she met with her untimely death.
Marla was once asked by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter if she would ever consider doing work that was safer. Marla answered: “To have a job where you can make things better for people? That’s a blessing. Why would I do anything else?”
We are somewhat consoled by the fact that Marla died doing what she really wanted to do: help people less fortunate than herself. Many of us believe that character trait to be the most beautiful quality a human being can possess. And Marla had an abundance of it.
It is so difficult to think of this lively young woman as not being alive any more. Marla seemed to have one speed: all-ahead-full. She had more courage than most people we know. She loved big challenges and she took them on with a radiant smile that could melt the coldest heart.
One of the things we can do to honor Marla Ruzicka is to carry on her heartfelt work to build a world without hunger, war and needless suffering. And every time we start to get depressed about the state of the world, we should take inspiration from Marla’s boundless energy and throw ourselves back into the work of global justice with the same kind of passion that was Marla’s most endearing quality.
Kevin Danaher, Veteran Human Rights Activist and co-founder of Global Exchange, will discuss long term responses to terrorism and grassroots ways to respond to global economic forces. Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of Global Exchange. For over twenty years, Medea has supported human rights and social justice struggles around the world.
###
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0418-20.htm
Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
Giuliana Sgrena Blasts U.S. Cover Up, Calls for U.S. and Italy to Leave Iraq
Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream Read Transcript
Help Printer-friendly version Email to a friend Purchase Video/CD
________________________________________
In her most extended interview to date in the U.S., Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena blasts a Pentagon report that clears the U.S. soldiers who opened fire on her car, wounding her and killing one of Italy's highest ranking intelligence officials. Sgrena says, "It is important that the Americans press their government to tell the truth. Because it is in the interest of Americans, the truth. Not only of Italians." [includes rush transcript]
________________________________________
We begin today with the ongoing controversy over the killing of one of Italy's highest-ranking intelligence officials by US soldiers last month in Baghdad. On Monday, a US Army official reported that a military investigation has cleared the soldiers who shot dead Nicola Calipari on March 4 after US troops opened fire on the car that was also carrying Giuliana Sgrena - the Italian journalist who had just been freed from captivity. Sgrena has publicly rejected the U.S. claims that the shooting was justified. The leaking of that report sparked outrage in Italy.
The Italian officials on the US-led commission are reportedly refusing to endorse the U.S. Army's findings. Italy maintains that that car carrying Calipari and Sgrena had been driving slowly, received no warning and that Italy had advised U.S. authorities of their mission to evacuate Sgrena from Iraq.
Yesterday, Giuliana Sgrena blasted the results of the investigation at a press conference in Rome.
• Giuliana Sgrena, Rome, Italy, April 26, 2005.
The U.S government has said it will not comment on the report until it is officially released. Here is Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chief of Staff, Richard Myers speaking at a press conference at the Pentagon yesterday.
• Pentagon news conference, April 26, 2005.
Italian judges are conducting a separate investigation into the killing. The report comes at bad time for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who was forced to resign last week in the wake of his center-right coalition's defeat in recent regional elections. The defeat was blamed in a large part on Berlusconi's unpopular decision to send troops to Iraq. He quickly put together a new Cabinet, hoping to cling to power through elections due next spring.
Yesterday I spoke with Giuliana Segrena by telephone from Rome where she is recovering from the injuries she suffered as a result of the shooting.
• Giuliana Sgrena, she joins us on the line from Rome, Italy.
AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, Giuliana Sgrena blasted the results of the investigation at a news conference in Rome.
GIULIANA SGRENA: [translated] Sgrena says, “I didn't have great confidence in this inquiry given the past experiences of similar incidents and inquiries. Obviously, if what leaked today as the result of the inquiry, then it’s even worse than what I had anticipated, because earlier the Americans have spoken about a tragic mistake and they had somehow taken on some responsibilities. Now they seem unwilling to accept responsibility,” she says.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Giuliana Sgrena. The U.S. government has said it will not comment on the report until it is officially released. This is Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chief of Staff, Richard Myers, speaking at a news conference at the Pentagon yesterday.
DONALD RUMSFELD: My latest information is that they have not come to a final agreement on a joint report, and the -- it will -- whatever is issued will be issued in the period ahead and we'll know when it's issued. It's an investigation. It was done together intimately, and I think that we'll just have to wait and see what they come out with.
RICHARD MYERS: I would say it will most likely be announced in Baghdad. That's the plan right now, when they come to their final conclusions.
REPORTER: Has the report essentially found that American troops will not be punished in this --
RICHARD MYERS: It's not final yet, so we cannot say.
REPORTER: So it hasn’t determined whether or not --
RICHARD MYERS: We haven't seen the report. General Casey, he’s still got the report.
REPORTER: Is there the possibility it that it might be two separate reports?
RICHARD MYERS: Don't know. We'll have to wait and see, and it will be announced in Baghdad.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Meanwhile, Italian judges are conducting a separate investigation into the killing. The report comes at a bad time for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was forced to resign last week in the wake of his center-right coalition's defeat in recent regional elections. The defeat was blamed in large part on Berlusconi's unpopular decision to send troops to Iraq. He quickly put together a new cabinet, hoping to cling to power through elections due next spring.
Yesterday, I spoke with Giuliana Sgrena by telephone from Rome, where she is recovering from the injuries she suffered as a result of the shooting. I began by asking her reaction to the Pentagon report.
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes, for the moment we have not an official result of the reports, but we have some rumors about the conclusion of the report, so I am very sad about that because I was – is words that I was waiting. I thought that maybe the Americans will spoke of accident or something like that, but now they say that the US military because they have no responsibility for what happened the 4th of March in Baghdad. They say that they respected all the engagement rules, and that is not true, because I was there and I can testify that they just shoot us without any advertising, any intention, any attempt to stop us before. So I think that it’s very bad this conclusion because they don’t want to assume any responsibility and they don’t mind about our testifying, my one and the one of the Italian intelligence agent that these are quite the same. We were there and we are in a position to testify what happened, so it’s not true that the Americans say, what the commission say. So we are very afraid, we are very worried about that, and also the Italian government for the moment, they doesn’t accept this conclusion, and those of the Italian members that were in the commission, so it is a very bad situation. They wanted to give a strike to the Italian government even if they are allied in the war in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Giuliana, the US military says your car was going very fast.
GIULIANA SGRENA: That’s not true, because we were slow, and we were slowing down, because we have to turn. And before there was some water, so it’s not true that the car was going fast.
AMY GOODMAN: They say the soldiers used hand and arm signals, flashed white lights and fired warning shots to get the driver to stop.
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, they didn’t. No, no. No light, no air fire, nothing at all. They were beside the road. They were not on the street. They were away ten meters, and they didn’t give us any sign that they were there, so we didn’t saw them before they started to shoot.
AMY GOODMAN: Did they shoot from the front or from the back?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, on the back, not on the front. They shot on the back, because Calipari was on the back on the right and he was shot dead immediately, and I was injured on my shoulder, but I was shot by the back. So I am a proof that they were shooting on the back and not in front of the car. We can see by my injured where I was shot.
AMY GOODMAN: Did the Italians do this report with the US military?
GIULIANA SGRENA: There were two Italians in the commission, but they don’t accept the conclusion of the commission, so now there is some discussion between the Italian authorities and the American ambassador here in Rome. But the two members of the commission, they don’t accept the conclusion of the commission, so there is a problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Did the Italians -- were they able to inspect the car?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, we are expecting for the car tonight in Rome. We are supposed, the car will be in Rome tonight, and so the judges that they are doing the normal inquiry they can, they could see the car. I hope to see the car also, but we don’t know in which condition we will receive the car. And the Italian judges, they don’t know also the names of the soldiers that were involved in the shooting.
AMY GOODMAN: The other person in the car.
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Did the two of you testify?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes, he did the same testifying as mine, but the American, the commission didn’t take in account our testifying. It seems to be like that, because they didn’t mention about our testifying.
AMY GOODMAN: After they shot you and killed Calipari, what happened to the other man?
GIULIANA SGRENA: The other man left the car and was shouting that we were Italian and of the embassy, and he was speaking on the telephone with the Italian government. And we have, my husband, for example, he was there listening the call. And at a certain moment the soldiers, they imposed to these agents because these are agents of the Italian intelligence, and they imposed him to cut the call with the weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: Say that again. What did they do?
GIULIANA SGRENA: They stopped him to -- he was talking by telephone with the Italian member of the government. It was Berlusconi there and the -- it was his advisor Letta, there was the chief of the intelligence and also my husband and the director of my newspaper, because they were there waiting for our news of the liberation. And they was talking about the shooting and at a certain moment the soldier, the American soldier stopped him and with the weapon they imposed him to cut the communication.
AMY GOODMAN: And then what happened?
GIULIANA SGRENA: And then what happened I don’t know, because I was injured, so they brought me to the hospital, and I don’t know what happened to the other man, to the other agent.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you get permission, did Calipari get permission to drive on the road to the airport?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Of course, I was there when they called. They called the Italian, because there is an official that is linked to the Americans. And this Italian general spoke to the Captain Green, that is the American one, telling him that we were on this road and that they were aware that we were on that road. And this happened at least 20-25 minutes before the shooting.
AMY GOODMAN: This road…
GIULIANA SGRENA: They knew that we were on this road.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know that they knew?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I know because I was there when the agent called the Italian one, the general that is in charge for the communication with the Americans, and this general did a testifying, telling that he was there with the Captain Green, and Captain Green was immediately informed about our traveling to the airport. And the Captain Green didn’t say no, so I think that he’s right. And he’s a general. I don’t think that this general made a wrong, false testifying.
AMY GOODMAN: So you’re saying Calipari spoke to -- this was an Italian or US general?
GIULIANA SGRENA: The Italians, they can’t speak to the Americans directly. There is a man, a special man, a general that is in charge for the communication with the American commanders. It’s impossible for an agent, an Italian agent, to speak with the Americans directly. I knew the rules because I was there many times. And I know that every time always in Iraq there is an Italian that is in charge for the communication with the Americans. And in this time, in this moment, was a general that was there speaking with the Commander Green that was the correspondent, American one. So I knew about that. And in all the newspaper, Italian newspaper, was published that. So there is no problem of communication. Commander Green knew about our presence on that road. If he didn’t inform the mobile patrol, we don’t know. But he knew, the commander, the American commander knew about it.
AMY GOODMAN: And where did the conversation take place? Was it in the Green Zone?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Which one?
AMY GOODMAN: The one where Calipari talked to the Italian general.
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t follow the general, because they are the places in the Green Zone I don’t know where, I can’t know where are the general. You know is a secret place. Because it is very dangerous in Baghdad, they don’t say where they meet.
AMY GOODMAN: Giuliana Sgrena, can you explain the road? This wasn’t the regular Baghdad -- the road to the airport that you traveled on? This was a special road?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes. It was a special road for people that are working in embassies, or they are Americans, or they are contractors. Special people that go to the airport.
AMY GOODMAN: And did Calipari inform the Americans when he arrived in Iraq what he was doing?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know. This I don’t know. I can’t testify about it. But I think that the intelligence has the possibility to do -- anyway, he got a badge from the US commanders, because he has to go around with weapons and so. But I didn’t know what he told to the Americans he wanted to do. I can’t say.
AMY GOODMAN: You mean a badge he got, like permission to go?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes. I don’t know. To go around in Iraq you need a badge. And Calipari got a badge from the American commanders in the airport. And they knew that he was there with a car, with weapons, and with another agent, and all these kind of things, because if not, he couldn’t go around. But what he really said to the Americans, I can’t say. I can’t know. They are intelligence. They don’t say to other people like me what they say, what they are doing. You know?
AMY GOODMAN: Giuliana, did you encounter any other US military on that road before you were shot?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No. No, we didn’t.
AMY GOODMAN: And where did Calipari pick you up? How did you get rescued?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know, but I was not -- I was covered.
AMY GOODMAN: Right now, do you think that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is doing enough in your case?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think your prime minister, Berlusconi, is doing enough in your case?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes, because I am free. I think that he did before. Now I don’t know what he is doing? But before, he did, because I am free now, you know? And I am happy to be free.
AMY GOODMAN: What do think should happen right now, Giuliana Sgrena?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you calling for?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I am calling for the withdrawal of the troops.
AMY GOODMAN: From Iraq?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes, of course. The Italian troops from Iraq, and also the Americans. But for the moment, as I am Italian, I ask for the withdrawal of the Italian ones. But my situation will be the withdrawal of all the troops from Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you satisfied with Berlusconi saying they will come out by the end of the year?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: Are you satisfied that Berlusconi has said they will pull out the troops by the end of the year?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I am not so sure they will, so before, I want to wait if they will really withdraw all the troops.
AMY GOODMAN: And in terms of your report right now, the US military is saying the Italians don’t want to sign off on it. Will the Italian commissioners sign this report?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know. How can I know? I don’t know. I can’t meet the Italian members. I don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel like a fair investigation has been done?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, I don’t think so.
AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think should be held responsible?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know. I wanted to know, but if there is no further inquiries, it’s impossible to know.
AMY GOODMAN: Right now, you are calling for the troops to come out. Are you now continuing to write about Iraq? How are you feeling?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Now I am very bad, because my physical situation is very bad, so I can’t work for the moment. This is my problem. I am not well, I am very sick. Still I am still very sick, so I can’t work for the moment. I am going every day to the hospital. I am very tired, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Where did the bullet lodge in your body?
GIULIANA SGRENA: The bullet was in the shoulder, but some pieces reached the lung, so I am very, very sick.
AMY GOODMAN: And your time in captivity, do you know who held you? And how were you treated?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I was treated normally, treated from the material point of view. But I was prisoner, so I was without freedom. And this is very terrible. But I didn’t know where I was. I was in Baghdad, but I don’t know where.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you know who held you?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No.
AMY GOODMAN: We all saw the videotape. What were the circumstances of the videotape?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Of course when you hostages, they tell you what you have to do, what you have to say, you know? But I don’t like so much to speak about my period of kidnapping, because I spoke so much about it that every time that I think about that I am so sick. That is bad for my health, you know? I always go back to these things and I prefer it, if possible, don’t to speak so much about that, because it is very bad for my health.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush. Do you have a demand of the US President, the American President?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No. I want only the truth. But they don’t seem to be interested to find the truth about what happened in Baghdad that night.
AMY GOODMAN: Will you go back to Iraq?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No.
AMY GOODMAN: What will you do?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: What will you do?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know. For the moment, I don’t know. I have to take care of my health, you know? I am very bad -- in very bad situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel like there is a cover-up here?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel like there is a cover-up? Do you feel that the investigation has been covered up?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes, of course. They don’t want the truth. They don’t want to tell the truth.
AMY GOODMAN: What would make them tell the truth?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t really know. Maybe if the Americans, they press the American government to tell the truth. Because, if the Americans, they don’t mind; we are small, we are Italians, we are few Italians, what we can do? I think that it is important that the Americans, they press their government to tell the truth, because it’s in the interest also of Americans, the truth. Not only of Italians, I think. So if you make actions with press on the government, you, maybe you can do something for us.
AMY GOODMAN: And when you were in Iraq, as a reporter, before you were captured, what do you think was the most important story for us all to understand?
GIULIANA SGRENA: I was looking around to see what the people were thinking about. And overall, I was interested in Fallujah. But when I went to interview some people from Fallujah, I was kidnapped. Some people were not interested in my story about Fallujah, I think.
AMY GOODMAN: What did you have to say about Fallujah? What did you discover?
GIULIANA SGRENA: Just stories. I have not a scoop about Fallujah, just stories.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did you go to Iraq to begin with? It was a dangerous place. You knew that.
GIULIANA SGRENA: Yes, I knew. But I am a journalist. I went to Somalia. I went to Afghanistan. I went to Algeria. I went every places. And I went to Iraq also. I can’t go only where the places are not dangerous. It is our work that is dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you regret having gone to Iraq?
GIULIANA SGRENA: No, I don’t regret.
AMY GOODMAN: And in the car, before you were shot and Calipari was killed, what did he say to you? What did you talk about?
GIULIANA SGRENA: About the liberation, about experiences. About I don’t remember, really. I was very happy to be free. But I was happy only for 20 minutes, and then it’s finished. And now I am very sad. I am very painful, I am very tired. I am very…
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
GIULIANA SGRENA: Okay. Thank you.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/27/1350235
Kulchur War, Defense of Science, Separation of Church & State
A wake-up call for the Sane Majority
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, April 13, 2005
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/story/adg/113393
Does it strike you as odd that
persons calling themselves Christians
are furious that the U.S. Supreme Court found executing juveniles unconstitutional? Do you find even odder that such individuals describe themselves, straight-faced, as adherents of the "culture of life"? Are you surprised to learn that people called conservatives would quote Joseph Stalin? Yes, that Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet dictator and mass murderer. And no, I am not making this up. It happened recently at a Washington conclave held by something called the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. If not household names, many in attendance were familiar controversialists, representing right-wing groups like the Family Research Council, the American Conservative Union, etc. Catholic anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly spoke, along with unsuccessful GOP Senate nominee Alan Keyes and Alabama’s Judge Roy" Ten Commandments" Moore. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, having fled the jurisdiction—er, left town to attend the pope’s funeral, addressed the group on TV. But the real headline-maker was Edwin Vieira, allegedly an expert in constitutional law.
Vieira attacked the theological right’s latest whipping boy, Ronald Reagan-appointed Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. True, Kennedy supplied the swing vote in Bush vs. Gore, the 5-4 decision that gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush. But he also wrote recent majority opinions invalidating Texas’s anti-sodomy law and forbidding the execution of juveniles.
In so doing, Vieira insisted, Kennedy upheld "Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
And the solution? If not impeachment, Vieira said that his "bottom-line" solution for renegade judges was Stalin’s: "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘ No man, no problem. ’"
The audience reportedly didn’t gasp. They laughed. "‘ No man, no problem, ’" he repeated for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank supplied the full Stalin quote, which is quite famous: "Death solves all problems: No man, no problem." He speculated that Vieira couldn’t possibly be urging the killing of Supreme Court justices. But he put the remark in the context of recent threats by DeLay, who said that "the time will come for the men responsible for [Terri Schiavo’s death] to answer for their behavior," and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, RTexas, who mused that unpopular judicial decisions could lead people to "engage in violence."
Assuming Vieira’s not actively delusional, however, what would be the point of invoking one of the 20 th century’s great monsters if not to sanction violence? The avowed goal of this outfit is "Christian Reconstructionism," the notion that the U.S. government derives its ultimate authority not from "the consent of the governed," as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, but from the Bible as interpreted by Puritan divines.
The U.S. Constitution forbids Congress from establishing an official faith. If these people get their way—and Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Sam Brownback, RKan., a recent convert to Opus Dei, an authoritarian Catholic sect, have introduced a bill to strip federal courts of the power to rule on religious issues—an established church would be exactly what we’d get.
What kind of church? Well, the late R. J. Rushdoony, spiritual father of Christian Reconstructionism, favored a Taliban-like, Old Testament moral code, with homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of "unchastity" put to death.
No, that’s not going to happen. Even so, such rhetoric should be a wake-up call to what it’s tempting to call the Sane Majority. "True Believers" are an enduring human type. Zealous theocrats afflict every society from Afghanistan to Arkansas. They always know the absolute truth and strive to inflict it on others. Their obsessions usually revolve around sex, like those zealots in Saudi Arabia’s religious police who prevented 15 teen-aged girls from fleeing a school fire because they were improperly dressed. For years now, the national discourse has been driven by persons whose moral/theological views are somewhere between childish and insane. Most others either tend toward partial agreement on "wedge issues" like gay marriage or are too polite in the ecumenical sense to argue. Instead, they wait quietly for the metaphorical pendulum to swing toward the center. Hence, politicians like DeLay and Bush never pay the price for consorting with extremists. It’s time to remind these jokers that regardless of how "devout" they claim to be, this is the United States of America and the rest of us are not obliged to pretend that their political opinions are sanctioned by God, nor even that they are sane.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Copyright © 2001-2004 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved. Contact: webmaster@nwanews.com
Holy Warriors
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com
Thursday 21 April 2005
Cardinal Ratzinger handed Bush the presidency by tipping the Catholic vote. Can American democracy survive their shared medieval vision?
President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according to the National Catholic Reporter. He pleaded with the Vatican to pressure the bishops to step up their activism against abortion and gay marriage in the states during the campaign season.
About a week later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign, a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil."
In 2004 Bush increased his margin of Catholic support by 6 points from the 2000 election, rising from 46 to 52 percent. Without this shift, Kerry would have had a popular majority of a million votes. Three states -- Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico -- moved into Bush's column on the votes of the Catholic "faithful." Even with his atmospherics of terrorism and Sept. 11, Bush required the benediction of the Holy See as his saving grace. The key to his kingdom was turned by Cardinal Ratzinger.
With the College of Cardinals' election of Ratzinger to the papacy, his political alliances with conservative politicians can be expected to deepen and broaden. Under Benedict XVI, the church will assume a consistent reactionary activism it has not had for two centuries. And the new pope's crusade against modernity has already joined forces with the right-wing culture war in the United States, prefigured by his interference in the 2004 election.
Europe is far less susceptible than the United States to the religious wars that Ratzinger will incite. Attendance at church is negligible; church teachings are widely ignored; and the younger generation is least observant of all. But in the United States, the Bush administration and the right wing of the Republican Party are trying to batter down the wall of separation between church and state. Through court appointments, they wish to enshrine doctrinal views on the family, women, gays, medicine, scientific research and privacy. The Republican attempt to abolish the two-centuries-old filibuster -- the so-called nuclear option -- is only one coming wrangle in the larger Kulturkampf.
Joseph Ratzinger was born and bred in the cradle of the Kulturkampf, or culture war. Roman Catholic Bavaria was a stronghold against northern Protestantism during the Reformation. In the 19th century the church was a powerful force opposing the unification of Italy and Germany into nation-states, fearing that they would diminish the church's influence in the shambles of duchies and provinces that had followed the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire. The doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 was promulgated by the church to tighten its grip on Catholic populations against the emerging centralized nations and to sanctify the pope's will against mere secular rulers.
In response, Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, launched what he called a Kulturkampf to break the church's hold. He removed the church from the control of schools, expelled the Jesuits, and instituted civil ceremonies for marriage. Bismarck lent support to Catholic dissidents opposed to papal infallibility who were led by German theologian Johann Ignaz von Dollinger. Dollinger and his personal secretary were subsequently excommunicated. His secretary was Georg Ratzinger, great-uncle of the new pope, who became one of the most notable Bavarian intellectuals and politicians of the period. This Ratzinger was a champion against papal absolutism and church centralization, and on behalf of the poor and working class -- and was also an anti-Semite.
Joseph Ratzinger's Kulturkampf is claimed by him to be a reaction to the student revolts of 1968. Should Joschka Fischer, a former student radical and now the German foreign minister, have to answer entirely for Ratzinger's Weltanschauung? Pope Benedict's Kulturkampf bears the burden of the church's history and that of his considerable family. He represents the latest incarnation of the long-standing reaction against Bismarck's reforms -- beginning with the assertion of the invented tradition of papal infallibility -- and, ironically, against the positions on the church held by his famous uncle. But the roots of his reaction are even more profound.
The new pope's burning passion is to resurrect medieval authority. He equates the Western liberal tradition, that is, the Enlightenment, with Nazism, and denigrates it as "moral relativism." He suppresses all dissent, discussion and debate within the church and concentrates power within the Vatican bureaucracy. His abhorrence of change runs past 1968 (an abhorrence he shares with George W. Bush) to the revolutions of 1848, the "springtime of nations," and 1789, the French Revolution. But, even more momentously, the alignment of the pope's Kulturkampf with the U.S. president's culture war has also set up a conflict with the American Revolution.
For the first time, an American president is politically allied with the Vatican in its doctrinal mission (except, of course, on capital punishment). In the messages and papers of the presidents from George Washington until well into those of the 20th century, there was not a single mention of the pope, except in one minor footnote. Bush's lobbying trip last year to the Vatican reflects an utterly novel turn, and Ratzinger's direct political intervention in American electoral politics ratified it.
The right wing of the Catholic Church is as mobilized as any other part of the religious right. It is seizing control of Catholic universities, exerting influence at other universities, stigmatizing Catholic politicians who fail to adhere to its conservative credo, pressing legislation at the federal and state levels, seeking government funding and sponsorship of the church, and vetting political appointments inside the White House and the administration -- imposing in effect a religious test of office. The Bush White House encourages these developments under the cover of moral uplift as it forges a political machine uniting church and state -- as was done in premodern Europe.
The American Revolution, the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were fought for explicitly to uproot the traces in American soil of ecclesiastical power in government, which the Founders to a man regarded with horror, revulsion and foreboding.
The Founders were the ultimate representatives of the Enlightenment. They were not anti-religious, though few if any of them were orthodox or pious. Washington never took Communion and refused to enter the church, while his wife did so. Benjamin Franklin believed that all organized religion was suspect. James Madison thought that established religion did as much harm to religion as it did to free government, twisting the word of God to fit political expediency, thereby throwing religion into the political cauldron. And Thomas Jefferson, allied with his great collaborator Madison, conducted decades of sustained and intense political warfare against the existing and would-be clerisy. His words, engraved on the Jefferson Memorial, are a direct reference to established religion: "I have sworn eternal warfare against all forms of superstition over the minds of men."
But now Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay threatens the federal judiciary, saying, "The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them." And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will participate through a telecast in a rally on April 24 in which he will say that Democrats who refuse to rubber-stamp Bush's judicial nominees and uphold the filibuster are "against people of faith."
But what would Madison say?
This is what Madison wrote in 1785: "What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not."
What would John Adams say? This is what he wrote Jefferson in 1815: "The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?"
Benjamin Franklin? "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
And Jefferson, in "Notes on Virginia," written in 1782: "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desireable? No more than of face and stature. Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there is danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
The Republican Party was founded in the mid-19th century partly as a party of religious liberty. It supported public common schools, not church schools, and public land-grant universities independent of any denominational affiliation. The Republicans, moreover, were adamant in their opposition to the use of any public funds for any religious purpose, especially involving schools.
A century later, in 1960, there was still such a considerable suspicion of Catholics in government that the Democratic candidate for president, John F. Kennedy, felt compelled to address the issue directly in his famous speech before the Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12.
What did Kennedy say? "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."
Now Bush is attempting to create what Kennedy warned against. He claims to be conservative, but he seeks a rupture in our system of government. The culture war, which has had many episodes, from the founding of the Moral Majority to the unconstitutional impeachment of President Clinton, is entering a new and far more dangerous phase. In 2004, Bush and Ratzinger used church doctrine to intimidate voters and taint candidates. And through the courts the president is seeking to codify not only conservative ideology but religious doctrine.
When men of God mistake their articles of devotion with political platforms they will inevitably stand exposed in the political arena. When politicians mistake themselves for men of God, their religion, however sincere, will inevitably be seen as contrivance.
As both president and pope invoke heavenly authority to impose their notions of tradition, they have set themselves on a collision course with the American political tradition. In the name of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, democracy without end. Amen.
________________________________________
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of The Clinton Wars, is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042105H.shtml
Posted on Sun, Apr. 24, 2005
Injustice Sunday
Radical right's anti-filibuster show an assault on truth
By Larry Dale Keeling
HERALD-LEADER EDITORIAL WRITER
Welcome to Injustice Sunday.
Today, if all goes as planned, Kentucky will play host to a well-scripted immorality play in which political and religious extremists pummel truth beyond recognition and twist Christianity into an ugly caricature of itself in their crusade to give Dubya the opportunity to perform an extreme makeover on the federal courts, packing their benches with enough "faith first, law last" judges to tilt our legal system dangerously toward the model of the Spanish Inquisition.
To achieve their goal, they will pull a couple of pages from the Neo-con Republicans Political Playbook.
So, expect someone, perhaps Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (he of the long-distance medical diagnosis who once again is reaching out from afar to kiss up to the religious extremists) to repeat the hogwash he and others have been spreading lately: that Senate Democrats' threat to filibuster some of Dubya's more controversial appellate nominations is unprecedented.
You don't have to go back to 1968, when Senate Republicans led a successful filibuster against the nomination of then-Justice Abe Fortas for chief justice of the Supreme Court, to expose that falsehood.
You need only go back to 2000, when Frist himself cast one of the votes against cloture in the filibuster of Richard Paez's appeals court nomination. That was one of 14 filibusters of appeals court nominations that resulted in cloture votes between 1980 and 2000.
Unprecedented? Unmitigated bull.
Expect also to hear some tripe about Senate Democrats filibustering against "people of faith and moral conviction." To buy into that malarkey, you must believe that the 204 judicial nominees approved during Dubya's first term (only 10 of the most controversial were blocked by the Democrats) are lacking in "faith or moral conviction." I suspect some of those folks might take exception to such an assertion.
So, you may hear Focus on the Family's James Dobson, another of the pettifoggers scheduled to star in this immorality play, repeat his comments likening the black robes of Supreme Court justices to the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
Or some other member of the cast might reiterate House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's assertion: "The time will come for (the judges involved in the Terri Schiavo case, whom he accused of running 'amok') to answer for their behavior."
Such inflammatory remarks, uttered with reckless disregard for the violence they might incite against judges, tell me all I need to know about how far out on the fringe these zealots reside.
Only extremists would slobber so rabidly over the prospect of undoing 200 years of Senate tradition. True conservatives wouldn't rush so hastily to change the rules of the game in that chamber.
Of course, neo-cons are not true conservatives. They never have been, and they never will be. They are radical activists pushing an extreme agenda that promotes an unholy mixture of theocracy and plutocracy, perhaps more accurately defined as loot-ocracy.
Ironically, Frist and company claim filibusters are unconstitutional in regard to judicial nominations but are hunky-dory when it comes to legislative issues.
A filibuster is a filibuster. Either it's good, or it's bad. Frist's hypocritical argument to the contrary just provides further proof that he and his fellow neo-cons aren't real conservatives because real conservatives don't advocate situational ethics.
Mainstream religious groups such as the National Council of Churches have denounced the exploitation of "faith" in today's Injustice Sunday theatrics. And traditional conservatives such as syndicated columnist George Will and former senator and GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole reject Frist's "nuclear option" of changing Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster in regard to judicial nominations.
"Think down the road," Dole has urged his fellow Republicans. And they should, because the political pendulum stays in constant motion.
Someday, the pendulum will swing back toward the Democrats, giving them control of the White House and Senate. When that day comes, Republicans will be powerless to stop a Democratic president from packing the courts with liberal judges if they follow Frist's lead now.
But one defining trait of the political and religious extremists who lead the radical right is an arrogance so strong that it does not allow for the possibility that their current reign will ever end. It is this arrogance that leads them to ignore negative poll numbers and continue their quest to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations so that Dubya will be free to do his extreme makeover of the federal judiciary.
Thus, we in Kentucky get the "privilege" of hosting Injustice Sunday, with its assault on truth, mainstream Christianity and the concept of a fair and impartial system of justice.
Better if we had been spared that dubious honor.
Reach Larry Dale Keeling at (859) 231-3249 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3249, or lkeeling@herald-leader.com.
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/editorial/11469057.htm
John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes
Published on Saturday, April 2, 2005 by the Billings Gazette (Montana)
House Condemns Patriot Act
by Jennifer McKee
Gazette State Bureau
HELENA - Montana lawmakers overwhelmingly passed what its sponsor called the nation's most strongly worded criticism of the federal Patriot Act on Friday, uniting politicians of all stripes.
The resolution, which already galloped through the Senate and passed the House 88-12 Friday, must survive a final vote before it officially passes.
Senate Joint Resolution 19, sponsored by Sen. Jim Elliott, D-Trout Creek, says that while the 2005 Legislature supports the federal government's fight against terrorism, the so-called Patriot Act of 2001 granted authorities sweeping powers that violate citizens' rights enshrined in both the U.S. and Montanan constitutions.
The resolution, which does not carry the weight of a law but expresses the Legislature's opinion, encourages Montana law enforcement agencies not to participate in investigations authorized under the Patriot Act that violate Montanans' constitutional rights. It requests all libraries in the state to post a sign warning citizens that under the Patriot Act, federal agents may force librarians to turn over a record of books a person has checked out and never inform that citizen of the request.
The resolution asks Montana's attorney general to review any state intelligence information and destroy it if is not tied directly to suspected criminals. It also asks the attorney general to find out how many Montanans have been arrested under the Patriot Act and how many people have been subject to so-called "sneak and peaks," or government searches of a person's property without the person's knowledge.
Elliott, a Democrat and rancher from northwestern Montana, sponsored the resolution, but it garnered support from Republicans on the far right of the political spectrum.
"Sometimes we just take liberty for granted in the country," said Rep. Roger Koopman, R-Bozeman, who keeps a plant called "the Liberty Tree" on his legislative desk.
Koopman said his Liberty Tree was "blooming for this bill."
"Frankly, what it says to me is that civil liberties are a bipartisan issue in Montana," said Rep. Rick Maejde, R-Trout Creek, who led the House debate for the resolution.
Elliott said he was "very, very pleased" the resolution had such support.
"Montana isn't the first state that passed a resolution, but this resolution is the strongest statement against the constitutional violations of the Patriot Act of any state and almost every city or county," he said.
Twelve representatives - all Republicans - voted against the measure, including Rep. Bob Lake, R-Hamilton.
"I don't like resolutions because they do absolutely nothing," he said in an interview after the vote. He also said the resolution was too vague. Is it a sacrifice of personal liberty to not be able to take a gun on an airplane? he asked. Is that the kind of thing this resolution objects to?
"So, they're going to get this thing back in D.C. and say, 'O.K., Montana doesn't like what we're doing. So what?,' " he said. "It has no meaning to it."
On the Net: Bill of Rights Defense Committee
© Copyright 2005 The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0402-02.htm
The Silencing of Sibel Edmonds
By James Ridgeway
The Village Voice
Thursday 21 April 2005
Court won't let public hear what FBI whistleblower has to say.
Washington, DC - The unsettling story of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds took another twist on Thursday, as the government continued its seemingly endless machinations to shut her up. The US Court of Appeals here denied pleas to open the former FBI translator's First Amendment case to the public, a day after taking the extraordinary step of ordering a secret hearing.
Edmonds was hired after 9-11 to help the woefully staffed FBI's translation department with documents and wiretaps in such languages as Farsi and Turkish. She soon cried foul, saying the agency's was far from acceptable and perhaps even dangerous to national security. She was fired in 2002.
Ever since, the government has been trying to silence her, even classifying an interview she did with 60 Minutes.
Oral arguments in her suit against the federal government were scheduled for this morning, but yesterday the clerk of the appeals court unexpectedly and suddenly announced the hearing would be closed. Only attorneys and Edmonds were allowed in.
No one thought the three-judge appeals court panel would be especially sympathetic to the Edmonds case. It consists of Douglas Ginsburg, who was once nominated for the US Supreme Court by President Reagan. He withdrew after it was revealed he had smoked pot as a college student; he later joined the appeals court. Another member, David Sentelle, was chair of the three-judge panel that appointed Ken Starr to be the special prosecutor investigating Clinton. Karen LeCraft Henderson was appointed a federal judge during the Reagan period, then put on the appeals court by the elder President Bush.
In making a plea to open the Edmonds hearing, the ACLU noted appellate arguments normally are accessible to the public.
Taking her protests to Congress, she won support from the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who exchanged letters with the Justice Department’s Inspector General's office, which said it was making an investigation. In the midst of all this, then attorney general John Ashcroft stepped in and threw down a gag order by invoking the arcane states secrets privilege, under which the government can classify whatever materials it wishes in the interests of national security. Last year, the Edmonds case was dismissed by a federal district court judge. The government had never even bothered to file an answer to her complaint.
The case that was argued this morning concerned a complaint by Edmonds that the government was denying her First Amendment rights. Only after she was fired did Edmonds go to the Congress. She is saying she played by the rules and was squashed by the government without cause or explanation. And when she went outside the official channel to reveal what was going on within the bureau, the government responded by classifying her previous attempts to speak out, including press accounts written before the classification came down. One of them was a 60 Minutes segment.
"The federal government is routinely retaliating against government employees who uncover weaknesses in our ability to prevent terrorist attacks or protect public safety," said Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU. "From firing whistleblowers to using special privileges to cover up mistakes, the government is taking extreme steps to shield itself from political embarrassment while gambling with our safety."
-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042305X.shtml
Seymour Hersh: Bush is "Unreachable"
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Gloria R. Lalumia, BuzzFlash Columnist
Seymour Hersh visited New Mexico State University (Las Cruces) on Tuesday, March 29 as part of his speaking tour for his newest book, “Chain of Command: the Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.” He opened his presentation by announcing that he intended to discuss “what’s on my mind” and “where we think we are.” The first thing on his mind was a chilling assessment of George W. Bush.
“The President,” Hersh sighed. “Bush is as absolutely convinced he’s doing the right thing,” just as journalists are who think of themselves as white knights think they are doing the right thing. “Even if we have another thousand body bags, it won’t deter him.”
“This is where he is. He believes he won’t be measured by today, but in 5 or 10 years” in terms of the Mideast. With regard to Iraq, “he thinks it’s going well.” Iran, according to Hersh’s contacts, is “teed up.” “This is his mission,” he continued. “What does it mean?”
And then he delivered the most chilling comments of the evening. “Nothing I write” is likely to influence Bush, he said. “He is unreachable. I can’t reach him. He’s got his own world. This is really unusual and frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”
From this point on, Hersh offered a compendium of the Bush policy failures, misjudgments, and out-of-touch convictions that have fueled his fears.
Iraq
First, Hersh brought the audience of nearly 2,000 up to date on conditions in Iraq. He torpedoed Bush’s rosy assessment of the recent elections. “Everything came to a stop for this election. Satellites were moved over the country. All assets were dragged over. In Afghanistan, where we really have a war going on…those guys stood down for three weeks because the drones which pick up signals were all dragged to Iraq. Nobody knew who they were voting for. If this had happened in Russia during the Cold War, it would have been laughed at.”
Assessing the current situation, Hersh remarked that the Iraqis “can’t agree on what language to speak--it’s zoo time. We’re nowhere, we’re probably not going to win the war; probably, it will be a Balkanized country. The Turks want Kirkuk, the city with oil, and they may invade, they may not. Here it’s spin city. In the European and Mideastern press, there’s a reality that you don’t get over here.”
Hersh described how he thought Bush treats Americans by retelling an old Richard Pryor story in which a man comes home to find his wife in bed with another man. “What you’re seeing isn’t happening,” the husband is told. “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”
Hersh charged that the American people are not getting a true picture of the status of the war. He reflected on the fact that “there are no embedded reporters now and the bombing continues” even though there are no air defenses. “We don’t know how many sorties are being flown or the tonnage involved because there are no reporters. We do know that Navy pilots are doing most of the flying.” Hersh made a point of saying that many in the military, FBI, and CIA have as much integrity as most academics, and within these institutions “there are people who respect the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody.” The Marine Corps personnel are the most skeptical even as they continue to do most of the heavy lifting. Hersh reports that many are very bitter, but they are loyal to the principle of civilian control and are continuing to do their job, but “they are going through hard times now.”
The bombing of Fallujah, according to Hersh, marked a major escalation of the “very careful urban bombing” campaign. Fallujah is “an incredibly important city in Iraq. It led the resistance against the British, it has mosques, it is a fabled place.” When Fallujah was bombed, an urban bombing planner told Hersh, “Welcome to Stalingrad, we took it block by block.” Hersh said that it was amazing that Fallujah was largely not on the table in America for discussion.”
“The Thinness of the Fabric of Democracy”
How have we as a nation gotten to where we are today? Since the ‘80’s Wolfowitz, Feith, Gingrich and others have been pushing the neo-con idea that by spreading democracy, we can make the world safer for US interests. “It’s as if we’ve been taken over by a cult of 8 or 9 people who decided the road to stop international terrorism led to Baghdad,” according to Hersh. Hersh recalled how General Shinseki, who testified in February 2003 that we would need upwards of 250,000 troops to control Iraq, was denounced by Wolfowitz, because Shinseki’s answers didn’t conform to the neo-con mantra.
“That 8 or 9 people can change so much...Where was the military, the Congress, the press? What has happened raises the question about the thinness of the fabric of democracy.”
These days, said Hersh, we hear about the “insurgency” when in truth, “we’re fighting the Ba’athists, the Sunni, the tribal people. They decided to let us have Baghdad and fight the war on their terms. It’s not an insurgency—that implies that we’ve put in a government and they’re fighting against that government. We haven’t accomplished our objective on that score,” according to Hersh.
The US is fighting cells of 10-15 people and can’t find them because it has no intelligence. So the goal now is to make the people who protect the resistance more afraid of US/Iraqi forces than they are of the resistance so they will turn and provide information. Fallujah had too much press coverage, so now everything is being done “off camera.” Hersh describes the situation once one leaves Baghdad as “cowboys and Indians” since “we control very little.” Hersh noted that Shia cleric Sistani did nothing as Shia Iraqi Guards and Americans took down the Sunni in Fallujah. The same thing is now going on in Ramadi. This long-standing enmity between Shia and Sunni is why, Hersh believes, civil war is probably in Iraq’s future.
“The Chronology”
Hersh then launched into his chronology of how we went from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Post-9/11, there were voices in the U.S. government that were not pushing the policy of “payback” since some Taliban had been dealing with U.S. oil companies, were largely mercantile and many were not happy with bin Laden. These voices in the government wanted a more nuanced approach. There was also disagreement with Bush’s plans to go into Iraq, but these people were deemed “traitors.” He described how the Bush Administration pressured people to come around to their view. Basically, they exploited human nature. People with experience who disagreed noticed that junior officials supporting the White House got the face time with the President, the meetings, and the big end of the year bonuses. So it was only a matter of time before those who did not favor Bush’s policies, people with kids and mortgages, decided they had to “join the team” to survive. (See the section on the Q & A below for more insights on what people in the government and military have been thinking.)
Bush elected to rout the Taliban, but pulled out the most elite units in early 2002 for redeployment to the Mideast for the coming war in Iraq. Although Bush says we’ve “won” in Afghanistan, “the ‘bad guys’ are still there, the elections have been delayed for a second time, crime is up, they are the largest producers of heroin in the world, and at one point, 700 kids were dying of hypothermia and malnutrition every day” during the hard winter.
Following Bush’s victory show on the carrier in May 2003, the reality of Iraq became clearer. During the invasion, “6,000-12,000 people disappeared overnight. Most elite units had been ready to fight; sandbags and armed soldiers were on every corner.” All the people who ran the bureaucracy of running the country were gone...the people who ran the water, oil ministry and hospitals. Some of the looting was done randomly by Shiites, but most of the government records—real estate, marriage licenses, etc.—were looted and burned systematically. Saddam’s plan was to dismantle the operating units of government and to fight later. To this day, according to Hersh, the “people who didn’t fight are now fighting.”
The August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters and the subsequent attack on the Jordanian Embassy, which Hersh describes as the psyops center for CIA and other espionage, sent a key message: “that the resistance was hitting facilities that would take out other facilities”—in other words, the hitting of key facilities would create a ripple effect, undermining other functions down the line.
At this point, about a year before the Presidential election, Karl Rove got involved. With a desperate need for intelligence, the push was on to squeeze prisoners for information. Hersh said that most of the prisoners “had nothing to do with anything.” Most were caught at roadblocks or any male under 30 was grabbed if he was in the area after an ambush.
At Abu Ghraib, many of the guards were simply traffic police who had been give two weeks of training before being sent to the prison. In September 2003 the abuse of prisoners had begun. The attempts to gain intelligence were based on what Hersh called a “most acute form of torture,” the shaming of prisoners by using pictures of frontal nudity of males and posing prisoners as if they were performing homosexual acts, knowing that if photographs were shown in their communities, this would be death for them. This threat of distribution didn’t get very far because the situation we have today is that we still have no intelligence from inside the resistance or as Hersh puts it, “We don’t know jack.”
From September to December 2003, torture was going on at night and all the top generals were coming in and out of Abu Ghraib. With the release of the Darby CD in January 2004, Rumsfeld appeared before Congress admitting things were “bad” but the extent of the abuse was still secret until Hersh and CBS broke the story open.
“How does Abu Ghraib play out in the real world?”
For the first and only time during his talk, Hersh raised his voice and boomed this question into the mike: “The President, what did he do between January and May? They prosecuted a few low-level kids when these pictures came out. These pictures were a shock to their (Arab) culture, they viewed America as being sexually perverse. When it hits the paper, Bush says ‘I’m against torture.’” But instead of a real investigation, Hersh says all we got were hearings and inquiries about “rules and regulations.” Hersh, in talking to a lot of GIs involved in the abuse, has concluded that soldiers were told “Just don’t kill ‘em, do what you want.”
Hersh recalled how after the My Lai incident in Viet Nam, the mother of a soldier who took part in the massacre told him that “I gave them a good boy, they sent me back a murderer.” Hersh believes the military has a responsibility to the young people they send off to war. He is concerned about the psychic damage of our troops and told one story about a woman back from Iraq who is getting big black tattoos everywhere on her body. Her mother believes that she wants to be in someone else’s skin. Hersh believes that when this is all over, we’ll be hearing things about the war that we won’t want to hear.
Touching on the situation at Guantanamo Bay, Hersh said that of the 600 people there, about half have had nothing to do with terrorism. But, he warns, if they aren’t Al-Qaeda already, they will be. And the government now faces the difficulty that many detainees can’t even be released because they’ve now become more of a threat as a result of their imprisonment than they were before they were sent to Gitmo.
According to his contacts in military/intelligence circles, the debate over whether 9/11 was part of a deep-seated Al-Qaeda presence in the US or was the equivalent of a “pick-up team” has been largely resolved. Most experts have come down on the side of the latter. So, the US will have to come to terms with what we’ve done eventually, and in Hersh’s view, “there’s no good news in this, folks.”
Q & A: Oil and How Our Military/Government Feels about Bush’s Policies
Most of the Q & A was spent on oil and what people in our military and government are thinking about Bush’s policies.
1) A question about oil as Bush’s real reason for the Iraq war was raised:
Hersh said that his best guess is that oil was not “the real thing he wanted to do.” The neo-con mantra, ‘all roads lead to Baghdad’ and ‘democratization,’ the latter concept which goes all the way back to Jean Kirkpatrick, were the major ideas behind the war. Bush couldn’t have sold “democratization” on it’s own, so WMD’s were used as the reason. “If we had known there was no WMD, there would have been no vote.”
Hersh warned that when the price of oil reaches $68-$69 a barrel, this will be the crunch point in terms of real economic decline. If Bush wants to move against Iran, which is pumping about 3.9 barrels a day, he’s heading for trouble. According to Hersh, Iran will scuttle every ship in the Straights of Hormuz and the Malaca Straits in Indonesia. It will take months of dredging and salvaging to approach normalcy.
If oil is Bush’s top priority, “Bush is just not behaving as someone who is managing an oil crisis” and has already been “mismanaging oil in Iraq.”
Hersh passed along a comment he had picked up that illustrates the level of Bush’s awareness. “You could call Wolfowitz a ‘Trotskyite,’ a permanent revolutionary. Wolfowitz would know what you are talking about. But Bush wouldn’t.”
2) A couple of questions touched on opinions in the military/government toward Bush’s policies:
According to Hersh, elite intel groups are troubled by the missions they are being ordered to carry out and they are questioning what they are doing. Hersh said that he is not a “pacifist” because there are people want to hurt us and we need to be able to protect ourselves. But, in Afghanistan, things could have been done differently. Hersh said he wants us to know that those who know the Constitution are very concerned. In particular, Navy Seals are suffering “massive resignations over disillusionment” over Bush’s policies. “Our President chose not to do things in ways that could have avoided this...he had other options available.” Hersh concluded by reiterating that “vast parts of government didn’t believe there were WMD’s” and that Bush’s neo-con policies are “a product of paranoid thinking and the Cold War.”
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Copyright 2005, Gloria R. Lalumia
BACK TO TOP
Interested in contributing an article to BuzzFlash? Click here for more info.
Articles in the BuzzFlash Contributor section are posted as-is. Given the timeliness of some Contributor articles, BuzzFlash cannot verify or guarantee the accuracy of every word. We strive to correct inaccuracies when they are brought to our attention.
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/03/con05117.html
Published 4/7/05
Jeffords' Theory
U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords, the Vermont Independent, may face a clear field right now in a 2006 re-election bid, but his March 22 performance on Vermont Public Radio's Switchboard program raised a few eyebrows.
For starters, Jeffords, who opposes the war in Iraq, predicted the Bush administration would start a war in Iran to help elect a third member of the Bush clan to the White House.
“I think it was all done to get oil,” Jeffords said of invading Iraq. “And the loss of life that we had, and the cost of it, was to me just a re-election move, and they're going to try to live off it. Probably start another war, wouldn't be surprised, next year. Probably in Iran.”
“Do you think that's likely?” VPR host Bob Kinzel asked.
“I probably shouldn't even talk on it, I just feel so bitter about the thinking that's gone on behind them, and the reasons they go to war and went to war,” Jeffords replied. “But I feel very strongly that they are looking ahead, and that there will be an opportunity to go into Iran and try to get their son elected president. I don't know, but you do it each time they (are) going to have a new president. I’m very, very (Jeffords chuckles). Oh, well, I better be quiet.”
In an interview this week, Jeffords spokesman Erik Smulson didn't back away from his boss's comments (which can be heard at vpr.net) and noted that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- the brother of the sitting president and son of former President George H.W. Bush -- is considered a possible 2008 GOP candidate for president.
“Certainly, this is a theory that has been pretty well discussed in numerous circles, that Iran potentially will be the next battleground, and that Jeb Bush is certainly considered a possibility in '08,” Smulson said.
There's been bad blood between Jeffords and the White House since at least 2001, of course, when the three-term incumbent left the Republican Party after a falling out with the Bush administration. But his statements on Bush's motivation in going to war drew the ire of Vermont Republican Party Chairman Jim Barnett.
“That is the highest level of irresponsibility to suggest that the president has taken the nation to war and put thousands of lives at risk for political purposes,” Barnett said. “It's really outrageous, and reason enough that we ought to question Sen. Jeffords' ability to serve Vermonters in a way that makes us proud.”
Meanwhile, Jeffords told several callers on the Switchboard program that he would talk about the issues they raised with his staff, rather than offering specific answers, re-igniting chatter from Republicans and Democrats alike that the veteran Vermont lawmaker, who turns 71 next month, has slowed down.
Randolph resident James Dwinell, a former executive director of the Vermont Republican State Committee and the author of a political newsletter spiced with Republican red meat, wrote that Jeffords' health is the “elephant in the corner” and predicted he won't run again. (Dwinell, a distant cousin of former New Hampshire Gov. Lane Dwinell, also worked for Democrat Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign and ran for state auditor as a Republican in 1998).
But two local officials who met with Jeffords in his statewide swing last month said he seemed fine to them.
“I think that he's certainly getting older. Other than that, he appeared to have a good handle on everything,” said Brattleboro Town Manager Jerry Remillard. “As always, he's very interested in what's going on in Brattleboro.” And Mark Redmond of Spectrum Youth and Family Services in Burlington said Jeffords, whom he was meeting for the first time, seemed “robust” and was “great with the kids.”
Smulson dismissed Dwinell's prediction and said efforts to question Jeffords' health are motivated by Republicans still bitter over Jeffords' decision to leave the party.
“‘Turncoat Jeffords' clearly did not work for them. Now they've sunk even lower,” Smulson said. “Sen. Jeffords is in excellent health, and he's looking forward to waging a spirited campaign.”
http://www.vnews.com/04072005/2345097.htm
Rushdie Says Bush Policies Help Islamic Terrorism
By Mark Egan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Bush administration helps the cause of Islamic terrorism by failing to engage in serious dialogue with the international community, author Salman Rushdie said on Tuesday.
Reuters Photo
Rushdie -- who lived for years under threat of death after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 pronouncement that his novel "The Satanic Verses" was blasphemous -- said he believes U.S. isolationism has turned not just its enemies against America, but its allies too.
"What I think plays into Islamic terrorism is ... the curious ability of the current administration to unite people against it," Rushdie told Reuters in an interview.
Rushdie said he found it striking how the "colossal sympathy" the world felt for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been squandered so quickly.
"It seems really remarkable that the moment you leave America ... you find not just America's natural enemies, but America's natural allies talking in language more critical than I, in my life, have ever heard about the United States," he said.
The novelist, born in India and raised in Britain, attributed the shift in sentiment toward the United States to the Bush administration's "unilateralist policies" and its "unwillingness to engage with the rest of the world in a serious way."
"This go-it-alone attitude gets people's backs up," he said of President Bush's foreign policy.
LACK OF LISTENING
As president of the PEN American Center, a writers group, Rushdie helped organize an international literary festival this week in New York -- an event he hopes will help restore global dialogue.
"There seems to have been a breach in our ability to listen to each other," he said.
"It's really important at this particular moment in the history of the world that ordinary American people should get as broad a sense of how the world is thinking."
Such dialogue, he said, is "crucial, especially if at the political level there is a relative uninterest in maintaining that global dialogue."
The PEN World Voices festival, from April 16-22, is set to bring more than 100 international authors to New York to participate in more than 40 events, including readings and discussions on topics from politics and literature to erotica.
The event is the first international gathering organized by PEN since 1986, when Norman Mailer headed the group.
Rushdie, who wrote an op-ed in March syndicated by The New York Times calling for less religion in politics, took Bush to task on that issue too.
"It worries me more when religious discourse becomes the language of politics," he said. "I think it is happening a lot more here than it used to."
Rushdie said his latest novel, "Shalimar the Clown," will be published in September.
"I decided to murder an American ambassador," he said of its plot, in which a U.S. envoy to India is killed after he retires to America. "It seems to be a political murder, but actually it turns out to be completely personal."
Reuters/VNU
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050413/ts_nm/people_rushdie_dc
The Pope pleaded, we didn't listen
Robert Scheer - Creators Syndicate
04.12.05 - OK, I get it, the pope was a really important guy. So why, during weeks of fawning coverage of his humanity and the elaborate Vatican funeral rituals, did American journalists and politicians ignore the pontiff's passionate opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq?
Pope John Paul II's critique of the Bush doctrine of unilateral preemptive war couldn't have been clearer, more heartfelt or more vigorously argued.
He once showed anger on the topic in a private audience with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and firmly rejected the direct appeals of Catholic neoconservatives to support the invasion. He used not just his bully pulpit but the full political machinery of the Vatican to try to stop what he saw as an act that did not meet the Christian definition of "just war" -- and was rather "a defeat for humanity."
"War cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations," John Paul proclaimed on Jan. 13, 2003, even as he was sending his emissaries to Iraq, the U.S. and the United Nations to lobby for peaceful negotiations. "War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations."
It hardly honors the man to ignore his impassioned statements on what he considered to be a great moral crisis. And whether through divine inspiration or his own formidable instincts honed through a long life in a troubled and violent century, the pope got it right on Iraq when he said, "No to war!"
President Bush has sloughed off the issue of the pope's anti-war stance as what you'd expect from a religious leader: "Of course he was a man of peace and he didn't like war," he said after the pope's death.
But John Paul's assertion that the peaceful alternatives to a U.S.-British invasion of Iraq had not been exhausted went far beyond bland denunciations of violence. Like the millions of anti-war protesters around the world, he knew what the U.S. media and Congress refused to see: that Bush was rushing to war based on convenient distortions about weapons of mass destruction and the war on terrorism.
The Bush administration was concerned enough with the pope's stance that a crack team of Catholic neoconservative ideologues was sent to lobby his holiness. In February 2003, hawkish columnist Michael Novak and self-appointed morals czar William J. Bennett were dispatched to a Rome meeting with Vatican officials arranged by the State Department to explain why the invasion of Iraq would be a "just war" of self-defense. Novak warned Vatican officials that there was no time for peaceful initiatives because Saddam Hussein had empowered Iraqi scientists "to breed huge destruction in the United States and Europe."
The pope pointedly rejected such alarmist arguments and instead, on the eve of the invasion, endorsed the European proposal to rely on U.N. inspectors in Iraq and to provide a greater role for U.N. peacekeepers as an alternative to U.S. occupation of a crucial Muslim nation. "At this hour of international worry, we all feel the need to look to God and beg him to grant us the great gift of peace," he said, rejecting a rush to war.
After he was ignored, the pope continued to strongly oppose what he saw as a dangerous escalation in tension between the Islamic and Christian worlds. "War must never be allowed to divide the religions of the world," he said.
John Paul was particularly scathing after the revelations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, telling Bush on a visit to the Vatican that those "deplorable events" had "troubled the civic and religious conscience of all." And remember: This was not a man raised in the confines of the Holy See, but rather a tough old bird who had witnessed the Holocaust and struggled against Soviet tyranny and communist oppression for decades. He did not come to his anti-war views lightly.
Various bipartisan investigations have shown us the truth behind the Iraq war: Its rationales were fabricated by a Western intelligence community under enormous pressure to provide the Bush and Blair administrations with support for a decision they already had made. That makes it all but impossible to question the wisdom of John Paul's positions on the war and on American arrogance. Instead, the Bush administration and an acquiescent media have found it best to simply ignore them.
(c) 2005 Creators Syndicate
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=18879
Illegitimate, Incompetent, Corrupt
Comment
________________________________________
Why American neo-cons are out for Kofi Annan's blood
The US is determined to derail the secretary general's progressive reforms
Robin Cook
Friday April 1, 2005
The Guardian
The debate on Darfur in the UN security council last night is a salutary reminder that the only hope for peoples abandoned by their own governments is an effective international community.
It was a Labour government that hosted the conference in postwar London that gave birth to the UN. Now this Labour government has the opportunity to modernise it by taking up the challenge of Kofi Annan's blueprint for a UN for this century.
The UN was founded in an era when most of its present members were not independent states, and even fewer were industrialised nations. Nearly all permanent members got there because they were the victors of the second world war. To this day Germany and Japan have never overcome their initial exclusion as the losers, and the new industrialised giants such as Brazil or India remain in the waiting room.
Not one permanent member represents the Muslim world, although developing a positive, tolerant relationship between the west and Islam is one of the most pressing security issues of our time. The obvious solution is for Egypt or Indonesia to take one of the four new permanent seats that the Annan package proposes for Africa and Asia.
New permanent members will not qualify for a veto, which begs the question: what happens to the veto of the existing five? In truth the British veto is already vestigial. When I first went to the UN I caused consternation by asking when we had last deployed the British veto. After much phoning round retired diplomats, it was established that we had last cast our veto a dozen years before, bizarrely on a matter relating to the Panama Canal, although I never found anyone who could remember what exactly had been so important in Panama that it merited a British veto.
The problem is that to Americans their veto in the UN occupies the same talismanic role as our veto in the European Union. The best hope is a self-denying commitment by the permanent five that they will each cast their veto only on matters of immediate national interest. Britain could start the log rolling by making such a unilateral statement on its own, which should not be difficult as we now do not use our veto at all.
The economic and social council of the UN has never achieved the same status as its security council. The Annan report cogently points out the perversity of this imbalance, as so much of the agenda of the security council is taken up with violent conflicts that have their roots in the failure to promote peaceful development.
This lack of authority on the part of the economic and social council produces a failure to coordinate the UN agencies competing against each other in the same field. It is striking testimony to the difficulty of the UN in exercising leadership on development that in the controversy over the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz it is rarely mentioned that the World Bank is technically a UN body. No one is asking for Kofi Annan to be given a veto over whether Wolfowitz gets the job, but it does not seem unreasonable to demand stronger coordination at the centre to stop the World Bank pursuing neo-liberal policies that are in flat conflict with the development agendas of other UN agencies.
This brings us to the solid concrete roadblock in the path of the Annan reforms. The world is confronted with a choice between two competing models of global governance. The direction signposted by Kofi Annan is to a regenerated UN with new authority for its collective decisions. However, collective decision-making is only possible if there is broad equivalence among those taking part. And there is the rub. The neocons who run the US administration want supremacy, not equality, for America and hanker after an alternative model of global governance in which the world is put to right not by the tedious process of building international consensus, but by the straightforward exercise of US puissance.
There are ways in which this power can be displayed more subtly than by dispatching an aircraft carrier. Over the past six months their influence has been deployed in heavy press briefing against Kofi Annan, to their shame faithfully taken up by rightwing organs in the British press.
There is a breathtaking hypocrisy to the indictment of Kofi Annan over the oil for food programme for Iraq. It was the US and the UK who devised the programme, piloted the UN resolutions that gave it authority, sat on the committee to administer it and ran the blockade to enforce it. I know because I spent a high proportion of my time at the Foreign Office trying to make a success of it. If there were problems with it then Washington and London should be in the dock alongside the luckless Kofi Annan, who happened to be general secretary at the time.
But there is a deeper level of perversity to the denigration of Annan by the American right wing. They have long clamoured for reform of the UN. Kofi Annan has just proposed the most comprehensive overhaul of the UN in its history and is the general secretary most likely to deliver support for it. If they persist in undermining him they are likely to derail his reform package. The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking, ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions.
The eccentric selection of John Bolton as Bush's ambassador to the UN is consistent with such a strategy of sabotage rather than reform. His hostility to any constraint on US unilateralism is so deep, (and his life so sad), that he described his "happiest moment" signing the letter to Kofi Annan telling him that the US would have nothing to do with the international criminal court. His relish in the gesture is all the more revealing as the issue was not within the remit of his job, and he pleaded to be allowed to sign as a special favour.
Ironically the first confrontation the US has faced since his appointment was the vote last night on the proposal to refer the war crimes in Darfur to the international criminal court. The problem for Washington unilateralists in trying to stop it was that the brutality and genocide in Darfur is a classic case for enforcement of international law through multilateral process.
To its credit the British government had long made it clear that regardless of what the US did, they would support the French resolution invoking the international criminal court. Such a stand is welcome not only as the right policy for Darfur, but as a demonstration that Britain backs the Annan model of a modern, multilateral system of global governance and this time at least has declined to accept US supremacy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1449863,00.html
News Home - Help
________________________________________
59 American Ex-Diplomats Oppose Bolton
Mon Mar 28,11:09 PM ET
By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON - Challenging the White House, 59 former American diplomats are urging the Senate to reject John R. Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
"He is the wrong man for this position," they said in a letter to Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Indiana Republican has scheduled hearings on Bolton's nomination for April 7.
"We urge you to reject that nomination," the former diplomats said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press and dated Tuesday.
The ex-diplomats have served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, some for long terms and others briefly. They include Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to France and the Soviet Union under Presidents Carter and Reagan and assistant secretary of state for European affairs under President Nixon.
Others who signed the letter include James F. Leonard, deputy ambassador to the U.N. in the Ford and Carter administrations; Princeton N. Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration.
Their criticism dwelled primarily on Bolton's stand on issues as the State Department's senior arms control official. They said he had an "exceptional record" of opposing U.S. efforts to improve national security through arms control.
But the former diplomats also chided Bolton for his "insistence that the U.N. is valuable only when it directly serves the United States."
That view, they said, would not help him negotiate with other diplomats at the United Nations.
Adam Ereli, the State Department's deputy spokesman, responded: "He is a great nominee. We hope he will be confirmed. And we look forward to his getting to New York to do the nation's business."
Bolton, who rarely muffles his views in diplomatic nuance, was nominated March 7. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described him as "a tough-minded diplomat" with "a proven track record of effective multilateralism."
Bolton promised to work closely with members of Congress to advance President Bush's policies and said his record demonstrates "clear support for effective multilateral diplomacy."
Approval of the nomination requires a majority vote from the Senate committee, which has 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats.
In the letter, the former diplomats praised Bush's efforts at the start of his second term to improve relations with European allies and with the United Nations.
It is for that reason, they said, "we write you to express our concern" with Bolton's selection.
They ticked off a number of treaties they said Bolton had opposed and said he had made "unsubstantiated claims" that Cuba and Syria were working on biological weapons.
Also, they said Bolton had worked as a paid researcher for Taiwan and supported recognition of it as a sovereign state, and said he was skeptical of U.N. peacekeeping operations.
"Given these past actions and statements, John R. Bolton cannot be an effective promoter of the U.S. national interest at the U.N.," the former diplomats concluded. "We urge you to oppose his nomination."
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=5&u=/ap/20050329/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_un_ambassador&sid=84439559
Women Peace Activists Interrupt Bolton Nomination Hearing
Members of CodePink: Women for Peace Unfurl Banners and Speak Out Against Bolton Nomination During Senate Confirmation Hearing
WASHINGTON -- April 11 -- Three women peace activists interrupted today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Bolton’s nomination as US Ambassador to the UN. They held up banners reading “NO Bolton, YES UN,” “Bolton = Nuclear Proliferation,” and “Diplomat, Not Bully, Please!” and urged Senators to reject Bolton as the worst possible choice for the job and for world peace.
“John Bolton is an inappropriate nominee for UN ambassador. His history shows us that the credibility of the US as a peacekeeping nation will be undermined if he is confirmed,” said Gael Murphy, one of the women who interrupted the hearing.
Murphy was kicked out of the hearing, as were two other CODEPINK women peace activists, Laurie Emrich, and Allison Yorra. None of the three were arrested. CODEPINK is a national women’s peace group, which has 90 chapters throughout the United States and the world. CODEPINK is known for its creative and bold approach to anti-war activism, and for its members’ success in interrupting prime time speeches three nights in a row during the Republican National Convention in New York City.
CODEPINK opposes the nomination of John Bolton, who is an advocate of unilateral U.S. military action, an opponent of arms control, and previously an advocate for withdrawal of US funds from the UN.
“The "go it alone" Bush administration is working hard to pull the US out of every international agreement and treaty in its effort to dominate rather than collaborate on global issues--and John Bolton exemplifies this attitude. Someone so disdainful of the UN should NOT be our UN representative. In this time of major armed conflict and nuclear proliferation, we need the UN more than ever. The US should be taking the lead in strengthening international cooperation, NOT killing it,” Murphy said.
###
http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0411-16.htm
war stories Military analysis.
John Nichols: Bolton worked to stop Florida recount
By John Nichols
April 16, 2005
"I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count."
Those were the words John Bolton yelled as he burst into a Tallahassee library on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, where local election workers were recounting ballots cast in Florida's disputed presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Bolton was one of the pack of lawyers for the Republican presidential ticket who repeatedly sought to shut down recounts of the ballots from Florida counties before those counts revealed that Gore had actually won the state's electoral votes and the presidency.
The Dec. 9 intervention was Bolton's last and most significant blow against the democratic process.
The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a broad recount of ballots in order to finally resolve the question of who won the state. But Bolton and the Bush-Cheney team got their Republican allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to block the review. Fearing that each minute of additional counting would reveal the reality of voter sentiments in Florida, Bolton personally rushed into the library to stop the count.
Bolton was in South Korea when it became clear that the Nov. 7, 2000, election would be decided in Florida. At the behest of former Secretary of State James Baker, who fronted the Bush-Cheney team during the Florida fight, Bolton winged his way to Palm Beach, where he took the lead in challenging ballots during that county's recount. Then, when the ballots from around the state were transported to Tallahassee for the recount ordered by the state Supreme Court, Bolton followed them.
It was there that he personally shut down the review of ballots from Miami-Dade County, a populous and particularly contested county where independent reviews would later reveal that hundreds of ballots that could reasonably have been counted for Gore were instead discarded.
Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy argued at the time that 2,257 voters had apparently attempted to mark ballot cards for Gore or Bush but had not had them recorded because they had been improperly inserted into the voting machines. A hand count of those ballots revealed that 302 more of them would have gone for Gore than Bush. That shift in the numbers from just one of Florida's 67 counties would have erased more than half of Bush's 537-vote lead in the state.
But attempts to conduct a hand count were repeatedly blocked by the Bush-Cheney team, culminating with Bolton's Dec. 9 announcement, "I'm here to stop the count." A few days later, the U.S. Supreme Court would stop the count permanently, with a pro-Bush ruling in which five Republican-appointed justices, in the words of noted attorney Vincent Bugliosi, "committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law."
Bolton was a key player in the fight to delay the Florida count long enough to allow for the Supreme Court's intervention, and he got his reward quickly. Despite his record of making controversial and sometimes bizarre statements regarding international affairs, he was selected by the Bush administration in 2001 to serve as undersecretary of state for arms control. And he is now in line to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Before he is given that position, and charged with the job of promoting the spread of democracy around the world, however, senators would do well to consider the disregard John Bolton showed for democracy in Florida.
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/nichols/index.php?ntid=36007
Published on Wednesday, April 27, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
More At Stake In Bolton Nomination Than Meets the Eye
by Ray McGovern
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are casting the trials of John Bolton, their nominee for ambassador to the U.N., as a partisan political squabble. It is much more than that. It is rather a matter of life and death for the endangered species of intelligence analysts determined to “tell it like it is,” no matter what the administration’s policies may be. For them the stakes are very high indeed.
The Bush administration strongly resists the notion that the intelligence on Iraq, for example, was cooked to the White House recipe. And with the president’s party controlling both houses of Congress and the president appointing his own “independent” commission to investigate, Bush and Cheney have until now been able to prevent any meaningful look into the issue of politicization of intelligence.
But the Bolton nomination has brought it very much to the fore, and there will be serious repercussions in the intelligence community if, despite his flagrant attempts to intimidate intelligence analysts, Bolton is confirmed by the Senate.
For many, the term "politicization" is as difficult to understand as it is to pronounce. Indeed, it is impossible to understand, when one assumes, as most do, that all institutions in Washington, DC have a political agenda. Suffice it to say here that, in order to do their job properly, intelligence analysts must at one and the same time be aware of what is going on at the policy level but be insulated from political pressure to conform intelligence to policy. That way, intelligence analysis can be based on fact (as in “We have no good evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”), rather than fiction (as in, “Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose a grave threat requiring immediate action”). Helpful insight into politicization can be found in John Prados’ article of last Thursday, "Boltonized Intelligence."
L’ Affaire Bolton
For those who may have tuned in late, in February 2002 then-Under Secretary of State John Bolton sought intelligence community clearance for his own home-grown analysis regarding Cuba’s pursuit of biological weapons and the possibility it might share them with rogue states. (One can only speculate on his purpose in exaggerating the threat.)
Small problem: Bolton's intended remarks went far beyond what U.S. intelligence would support. Christian Westermann of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and counterparts from other agencies refused to let Bolton represent his views as those of the intelligence community and proposed instead some alternative, less alarming language. At this Bolton became so dyspeptic that he summoned Westermann to his office for a tongue-lashing and then asked top INR officials to remove him.
For those wondering if this constitutes politicization, a recently declassified email message made available to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the New York Times should dispel any doubt. On February 12, 2002, after a run-in with Westermann, Bolton’s principal aide Frederick Fleitz, sent Bolton this email:
"I explained to Christian that it was a political judgment as to how to interpret this data (emphasis added) and the I.C. [intelligence community] should do as we asked."
Fleitz added that Westermann "strongly disagrees with us."
Good for Westermann, we can say as we sit a comfortable distance from Bolton. But more than seven months later, Westermann was still paying the price for his honesty and courage. In an email of September 23, 2002 to Tom Fingar, deputy to then-INR director Carl Ford, Westermann complained that "personal attacks, harassment, and impugning of my integrity [are] now affecting my work, my health, and my dedication to public service." Fingar replied that he was “dismayed and disgusted” by the “unwarranted personal attacks.”
Bolton and the Cheney/Rumsfeld School of Intelligence
Were it not for the numbing experience of the past four years, we intelligence professionals, practicing and retired, would be astonished at the claim that how to interpret intelligence data is a “political judgment.” But this is also the era of the Rumsfeld maxim: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and the Cheney corollary: "If you build it, they will come"—meaning that intelligence analysts will come around to any case that top administration officials may build. All it takes is a few personal visits to CIA headquarters and a little arm-twisting, and the analysts will be happy to conjure up whatever “evidence” may be needed to support Cheneyesque warnings that “they”—the Iraqis, the Iranians, it doesn't matter--have "reconstituted” their nuclear weapons development program. Cheney is Bolton’s patron; Bolton is well tutored.
But how could Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other senior administration officials be assured of the acquiescence of the intelligence community (except for mavericks like analysts from INR) on issues like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? True, former CIA director, “Slam-Dunk” George Tenet, proved entirely malleable, but he could not have managed it alone. Sadly, he found willing collaborators in a generation of CIA managers who put career above objectivity and bubbled to the top under directors William Casey and his protégé Robert Gates. In other words, Tenet was the "beneficiary" of a generation of malleable managers who benefited from the promotion policies of Casey and Gates starting in the early eighties.
How the Corruption Began
Casey, who saw a Russian under every rock and could not be persuaded that Mikhail Gorbachev was anything but a dirty Commie, started the trend by advancing those—like Gates—who pretended to be of like mind. (With a degree in Russian history and experience as a Soviet analyst, Gates knew better.) But as chief of analysis under Casey, he towed the line and made sure that others did too. Casey eventually made Gates his principal deputy, but the young protégé’s role in the Iran-Contra affair prevented him from becoming director when Casey died. Nonetheless, Gates’ meteoric career became an object lesson for those willing to make the compromises necessary to make a swift ascent up the career ladder.
Why dwell on Gates? Because (1) he is the one most responsible for institutionalizing political corruption of intelligence analysis; and (2) John Bolton’s confirmation hearing provides an eerie flashback to the ordeal Gates went through to get confirmed as CIA director. The parallels are striking.
The dust from Iran-Contra had settled sufficiently by 1991, when President George H. W. Bush nominated Gates to head the CIA. Then all hell broke loose. Playing the role discharged so well earlier this month by former INR director Carl Ford in critiquing Bolton, a former senior Soviet analyst and CIA division chief, Mel Goodman, stepped forward and gave the Senate intelligence committee chapter and verse on how Gates had shaped intelligence analysis to suit his masters and his career. Goodman was joined at once by several other analysts who put their own careers at risk by testifying against Gates’ nomination. They were so many and so persuasive that, for a time, it appeared they had won the day. But the fix was in.
With a powerful assist from George Tenet, then staff director of the senate intelligence committee, members approved the nomination. In his memoir Gates makes a point of thanking Tenet for greasing the skids. Even so, 31 Senators found the evidence against Gates so persuasive that, in an unprecedented move, they voted against him when the nomination came to the floor.
The First Mass Exodus and Those Who Stayed
The result? Many bright analysts quit rather than take part in cooking intelligence-to-go. In contrast, those inspired by Gates’ example followed suit and saw their careers flourish. So much so that when in September 2002 Tenet asked his senior managers to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate parroting what Cheney had been saying about the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat from Iraq, they saluted and fell to the task. Several of them traced their career advancement to Robert Gates.
Folks like John McLaughlin, who now "doesn't remember" being told about the charlatan source code-named "Curveball" in time enough to warn Colin Powell before he made a fool of himself and his country at the U.N., while the whole world watched. Folks like National Intelligence Officer Larry Gershwin, who gave a pass to Curveball’s drivel and similar nonsense; and Alan Foley, who led the misbegotten analytical efforts on the celebrated but non-nuclear-related aluminum tubes headed for Iraq, and fictitious Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger. Folks like the CIA Inspector General, John Helgerson, who bowed to pressure from the White House and from McLaughlin to suppress the exhaustive IG report on 9/11, which is a goldmine of names—of both intelligence officials and policymakers—who bungled the many warnings that such an attack was coming. Folks like the senior intelligence official who told me last month, “We were not politicized; we just thought it appropriate to ‘lean forward,’ given White House concern over Iraq.”
The cancer of politicization spreads quickly, runs deep, and—as we have seen on Iraq—can bring catastrophe.
And that is precisely why the stakes are so high in re Bolton. When Gates became CIA director, the honest analysts who left were replaced by more inexperienced, pliable ones. It is no exaggeration to say that recent intelligence fiascos can be traced directly to the kinds of people Gates created in his image and promoted to managerial positions.
Redux Before a Senate Committee
And now? Never in the history of U.S. intelligence has there been a more demoralized corps of honest intelligence analysts. Leaders with integrity are few and far between. So when a Carl Ford throws down the gauntlet in defense of a Christian Westermann, we need to sit up and take notice. If “serial abuser” (Ford’s words) John Bolton wins confirmation, there will be an inevitable hemorrhage of honest analysts at a time when they are sorely needed. It will be open season for politicization.
Does the White House care? Not at all. With more docile intelligence analysts in place, Bolton and others will be even freer to apply “political judgment” to interpreting intelligence, with no second-guessing by recalcitrant experts. It will certainly be easier to come up with the desired “evidence” on, say, weapons of mass destruction in Iran.
And Then There Was Voinovich
Thankfully, integrity is a virtue not altogether lost. The bright light of the past week came when, to everyone’s surprise, Senate Foreign Relations Committee member George Voinovich (R-Ohio) decided he simply could not follow his Republican colleagues who had decided to hold their noses and give Bolton a pass. That blocked the nomination from going forward to the Senate until additional information on Bolton can be assessed.
Cheney reacted quickly and forcefully against a suggestion by Senator Lincoln Chafee (R- R.I.) that the Republican committee members might consider whether to recommend that the nomination be withdrawn, and it appears the White House will use the coming weeks to pull out all the stops in harnessing the faithful. Already, well-financed hit squads are running radio spots in Ohio saying Voinovich has “stabbed the president and the Republicans right in the back.”
Asked why he wanted more time to weigh the charges against Bolton, Voinovich answered with a sentence not often heard in Washington political circles, “My conscience got me.”
Can conscience prevail over politics? Voinovich has proved it is still possible. Let us hope that he and his committee colleagues will approach the decision on Bolton with an open mind. For integrity in intelligence is now on life support. Approving the nomination of quintessential politicizer Bolton would pull the plug and ensure amateurish, cooked-to-taste intelligence analysis for decades to come.
Ray McGovern spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, during which he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared and briefed to senior White House officials the President's Daily Brief. He is a founding member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and now works at Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.
This article appeared first on TomPaine.com.
###
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0427-32.htm
Carlyle Drains Billions from Disappointed Stock Market Investors
By Nicolas Cori
Libération
Friday 01 April 2005
The American investment fund raises ten billion dollars, an absolute record.
Will we have to stop complaining about the pension funds' dictatorship and fulminate over that of investment funds? If the former, which manage the money of future American retirees, are already well established in the financial world, the power of investment funds keeps expanding. If we are not careful, they'll end up buying the whole CAC 40 [Paris Stock Exchange industrial stock index].... This week, the American Carlyle, the largest global actor, announced it had raised ten billion dollars. That broke the preceding record of 6.5 billion, obtained by Blackstone in 2002. And equivalent fund-raising is expected by competitors. Such activity has never before been seen in the private equity markets, money invested outside of the stock exchanges.
Leverage Effect
This manna comes from the traditional actors in the finance world - pension funds, banks, insurance companies, and large fortunes - which entrust their money and hope for a large return on their investment. Most private equity funds have earned annual returns of over 30% in recent years. Their secret? They buy companies, make them fructify by unceremoniously squeezing costs, including via mass layoffs, and then resell them after five or six years, receiving a solid capital gain. Profitability is also assured by financial montage: the funds bring only 30% of the businesses' capital, the rest is supplied by banks as debt. Financiers call that leveraged buying-out, or the leverage effect.
The system is not new, but it wins over more and more adherents. "Ten years ago, institutional investors put only 1 to 2% of their money in private equity," deliberates Jean-Pierre Millet, Carlyle Europe director. "Today some American precursor funds place up to 10% of their managed funds in private equity." Explanation: the Stock Exchange, which has stagnated the last five years, disappoints investors. And company heads are sick of seeing their share prices massacred while they work to improve results. Since the private equity funds have lost some of their reputation as predatory dismantlers of companies in managers' eyes, some have allowed themselves to be convinced to go partway with these new partners.
Alliances
Suddenly, in this way, the market grows. "Previously, the biggest operations would be 150 million Euros, now, a billion is the norm," confides an actor in the sector. A billion was the amount of the check the French PAI Partners signed in December to take over Saur, the service subsidiary of the Bouygues Group. And when the prey is fat, the funds don't hesitate to act together. In February, the British funds Cinven and BC Partners launched a Public Stock Offering of 4.3 billion Euros for the Spanish company Amadeus, the world leader in travel reservations. And Monday, all records were broken: the American SunGard Data Systems, an information services group, was purchased for 11.3 billion dollars by a consortium that brought together the cream of American funds: Silver Lake Partners, Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Texas Pacific Group....
Yet this stream of money could have perverse consequences. "The number of targets is limited, and some will be tempted to bid too high, which will reduce the profitability of operations," analyzes Jean-Pierre Millet. Banks are also fingered: they lend to all comers in order to receive juicy commissions, but don't worry about the risks - a situation identical to the one that obtained in the early 1990s real estate market. In short, all the conditions are there for a bubble to form ... and to burst. In finance, miracles never last forever.
________________________________________
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040405I.shtml
Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security
Question of Survival
By Jean-Marcel Bouguereau
Le Nouvel Observateur
Friday 01 April 2005
These aren't some granolas in Indian tunics and clogs. They are 1360 experts from 95 different countries, among the most highly qualified anthropologists, ecologists, biologists, and economists. They worked for five years to arrive at this frightening observation: forty years from now the planet will no longer be able to assure human well-being. Already, "60% of the ecosystems that support life on earth have been damaged," such as the tropical forests and the oceans. Damage that has become particularly acute during the last fifty years. More land, for example, has been converted to agricultural use since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even if man succeeds in nourishing himself better thanks to this agriculture - the production of which has, for the first time, outstripped population - even if malnutrition has been reduced and health considerably improved, the negative impact of this growth in human activity is alarming: woods and tropical forests in danger, fishing stocks dried up, species varieties declining, infectious disease on the rise.
The destruction of 35% of mangroves, those trees that plunge their raised roots along the banks of tropical seas, has already had an impact in the recent tsunami, in the sense that they had previously been there to soften this kind of catastrophe. What is most serious, however, is the largely irreversible character of these transformations, nature's inability to regenerate itself - as, for example, fish stocks - and the consequent impossibility of reestablishing the broken equilibria, a situation which amplifies the effects of global warming on the environment. We understand that under these conditions the United Nations' objectives - to reduce by half the proportion of the global population that lives in extreme poverty - not only cannot be achieved, but also aggravate this situation. These experts invite us to radically change our perspectives. Not only must we downshift, but also undoubtedly, as a matter of survival, go into reverse.
________________________________________
Jean-Marcel Bouguereau is Editor-in-Chief of the "Nouvel Observateur." He is also an editorialist at the "République des Pyrénées," for which this article was written.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040105I.shtml
Going Geo-Green
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 31 March 2005
"I am a geo-green," says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has written a series of columns expounding his "geo-green" stance. Geo-greens, he says, combine geopolitics with green strategies - specifically in the context of the Middle East and terrorism.
Friedman says that Bush's failure to advocate conservation and renewable energy results in a "no mullah left behind" policy. By refusing to conserve, America ensures high oil prices that keep the regimes of Iran and Saudi Arabia flooded with cash and resistant to democratic reform.
What Friedman neglects to say is that these same windfall profits are also landing in the laps of western oil companies. Look at Exxon-Mobil: now valued at more than $400 billion, it is the world's most profitable corporation. Friedman also continues to spin the fantasy that Bush's Iraq invasion has helped to bring democracy to the Middle East, but his geo-green idea, at least, makes perfect sense.
Friedman has addressed his plea to Bush and the neocons, and some neocons are already with him. Former CIA director James Woolsey owns a Prius and has been outspoken about the need to promote energy independence as a national security strategy.
Woolsey is not the only conservative who is going geo-green. Here's some news for my friends in the biodiesel movement: the Red State folks are fascinated by your veggie mobiles. See this blog post at Redstate.com. They detect a whiff of the French about you that goes beyond your French fry oil, they laugh at your goatees and wonder if you wash, but they are intrigued. Some of them are even brave enough to consider Friedman's idea of a dollar a gallon gas tax to help wean us from petroleum.
On March 14th, ultraconservative congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) gave a presentation on the House floor on the topic of Peak Oil. Peak Oil is the theory that all of the significant petroleum reserves have already been located and that we have now used up about half of that 2000 gigabarrel legacy from the Earth's past. Because the last 1000 gigabarrels will be increasingly hard to extract, the era of cheap oil is over, starting now. Bartlett explained the dangers of the intersecting curves of rising demand and falling production. He even advanced the heretical notion that "… transition to sustainability will not happen if left to market forces alone."
Friedman has called for "making energy independence our generation's moon shot." He's not the only one with this idea. A non-profit group called the Apollo Alliance has already built the launch pad. They propose a renewable energy investment program of $30 billion a year for ten years that would create more than 3.3 million jobs and produce $284 billion in net energy cost savings.
Apollo has teamed up with Set America Free, a group headed by right-wingers like Richard Perle protégé Frank Gaffney. Set America Free advocates a crash program of alternative fuels development centered on the 500 mpg car - a plug-in hybrid vehicle that fills up both at the gas pump and the wall plug. It could easily run on ethanol or biodiesel as well.
Gaffney and his neocon colleagues at Set America Free are clearly worried about more than the Islamists. In a recent column, Gaffney said, "… we are likely to find increasing competition from China for limited oil will become a flash point for future conflict, if not an actual causus belli."
So where are the Democratic voices linking energy conservation and national security? With awareness of Peak Oil rising along with prices at the pump, it's time for Democrats to make it clear they are leading the charge for the geo-green strategy. They might even want to call it "energy security."
Energy security is the big tent that the Dems desperately need, because energy security encompasses just about everything. For starters, take the economy, which is starting to bog down under escalating energy prices. Diverting money that would go to ayatollahs and sultans (as well as to oil company CEOs and wealthy investors, by the way) and pumping it into renewable energy programs would create jobs and lower future energy prices.
And saving the economy through energy security might well be the REAL salvation of social security.
There is no doubt that the environment is much better served by achieving long-term energy security. Eventually we will have to give up fossil fuels altogether, and if we can make the transition sooner rather than later, we may be able to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Drilling, spilling, mining, refining and burning oil, coal and gas also take a hefty toll on our health. Fetal brain damage from mercury pollution, asthma, heart disease and cancer are the wages of our sin. Religion, too, fits under this big tent. Some Christians have started a "What Would Jesus Drive" (WWJD) campaign to encourage us to make a deeper commitment to earth stewardship. Many faiths have a green core that will embrace geo-green ideas.
Every time I hear John Kerry talk about dipping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to ease gas prices, I cringe. Democrats need to get over their fear of asking for a national sacrifice. How can Americans be willing to send our young people to die in Iraq but refuse to sacrifice one bit of our comfort and convenience to help the cause? Jimmy Carter's cardigan hangs over the Democrats like a shroud. But times are different now. When Reagan turned the thermostat back up at the White House and ripped the solar panels off the roof, the oil boom of the 1980s was about to begin. There will never be another oil boom.
Next week, when Congress returns from Easter recess, it will begin to take up the President's energy bill. There is no indication at this point of any significant change from last year's version, which devoted two dollars out of every three to oil, coal, gas and nuclear subsidies.
The Democrats need to stand tall for energy security. And along with any conservatives who, living up to their name, believe in conservation, they can point the way to a green future that just maybe, if we are blessed with a bit of foresight and courage, awaits us all.
________________________________________
Kelpie Wilson is the t r u t h o u t environment editor. A veteran forest protection activist and mechanical engineer, she writes from her solar-powered cabin in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon.
-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/033105B.shtml
The State of the World? It is on the Brink of Disaster
An Authoritative Study of the Biological Relationships Vital to Maintaining Life has Found Disturbing Evidence of Man-made Degradation
by Steve Connor
Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should The report does not make jolly reading. The academics found that two-thirds of the delicately-balanced ecosystems they studied have suffered badly at the hands of man over the past 50 years.
The dryland regions of the world, which account for 41 per cent of the earth's land surface, have been particularly badly damaged and yet this is where the human population has grown most rapidly during the 1990s.
Slow degradation is one thing but sudden and irreversible decline is another. The report identifies half a dozen potential "tipping points" that could abruptly change things for the worse, with little hope of recovery on a human timescale.
Even if slow and inexorable degradation does not lead to total environmental collapse, the poorest people of the world are still going to suffer the most, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which drew on 22 national science academies from around the world.
Walt Reid, the leader of the report's core authors, warned that unless the international community took decisive action the future looked bleak for the next generation. "The bottom line of this assessment is that we are spending earth's natural capital, putting such strain on the natural functions of earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," Dr Reid said.
"At the same time, the assessment shows that the future really is in our hands. We can reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently under way," he said.
The assessment was carried out over the past three years and has been likened to the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - set up to investigate global warming - for its expertise in the many specialisms that make up the broad church of environmental science.
In summary, the scientists concluded that the planet had been substantially "re-engineered" in the latter half of the 20th century because of the pressure placed on the earth's natural resources by the growing demands of a larger human population.
"Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than at any time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber and fibre," the reports says.
The full costs of this are only now becoming apparent. Some 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital for life on earth have been seriously degraded or used unsustainably - an ecosystem being defined as a dynamic complex of plants, animals and micro-organisms that form a functional unit with the non-living environment in which the coexist.
The scale of the changes seen in the past few decades has been unprecedented. Nearly one-third of the land surface is now cultivated, with more land being converted into cropland since 1945 than in the whole of the 18th and 19th centuries combined.
The amount of water withdrawn from rivers and lakes for industry and agriculture has doubled since 1960 and there is now between three and six times as much water held in man-made reservoirs as there is flowing naturally in rivers.
Meanwhile, the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that has been released into the environment as a result of using farm fertilizers has doubled in the same period . More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used on the planet has been used since 1985.
This sudden and unprecedented release of free nitrogen and phosphorus - important mineral nutrients for plant growth - has triggered massive blooms of algae in the freshwater and marine environments. This is identified as a potential "tipping point" that can suddenly destroy entire ecosystems. "The Millennium Assessment finds that excessive nutrient loading is one of the major problems today and will grow significantly worse in the coming decades unless action is taken," Dr Reid said.
"Surprisingly, though, despite a major body of monitoring information and scientific research supporting this finding, the issue of nutrient loading barely appears in policy discussions at global levels and only a few countries place major emphasis on the problem.
"This issue is perhaps the area where we find the biggest 'disconnect' between a major problem related to ecosystem services and the lack of policy action in response," he said.
Abrupt changes are one of the most difficult things to predict yet their impact can be devastating. But is environmental collapse inevitable?
"Clearly, the dual trends of continuing degradation of most ecosystem services and continuing growth in demand for these same services cannot continue," Dr Reid said.
"But the assessment shows that over the next 50 years, the risk is not of some global environmental collapse, but rather a risk of many local and regional collapses in particular ecosystem services. We already see those collapses occurring - fisheries stocks collapsing, dead zones in the sea, land degradation undermining crop production, species extinctions," he said.
Between 1960 and 2000, the world population doubled from three billion to six billion. At the same time, the global economy increased more than six-fold and the production of food and the supply of drinking water more than doubled, with the consumption of timber products increasing by more than half.
Meanwhile, human activity has directly affected the diversity of wild animals and plants. There have been about 100 documented extinctions over the past century but scientists believe that the rate at which animals and plants are dying off is about 1,000 times higher than natural, background levels.
"Humans are fundamentally and to a significant extent irreversibly changing the diversity of life on earth and most of these changes represent a loss of biodiversity," the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment says.
The distribution of species across the world is becoming more homogenous as some unique animals and plants die out and other, alien species are introduced into areas in which they would not normally live, often with devastating impact.
For example, the Baltic Sea contains 100 non-native species, of which about one-third come from the Great Lakes of North America. Meanwhile, a similar proportion of the 170 non-native species found in the Great Lakes come from the Baltic.
"In other words, the species in any one region of the world are becoming more similar to other regions.... Some 10 to 30 per cent of mammals, birds and amphibians are currently threatened with extinction. Genetic diversity has declined globally, particularly among cultivated species," the report says.
Agricultural intensification, which brought about the green revolution that helped to feed the world in the latter part of the 20th century, has increased the tendency towards the loss of genetic diversity. "Currently 80 per cent of wheat area in developing countries and three-quarters of all rice planted in Asia is now planted to modern varieties," the report says. Dr Reid said that the authors of the assessment were most worried about the state of the earth's drylands - an area covering 41 per cent of the land surface and home to a total of two billion people, many of them the poorest in the world.
Drylands are areas where crop production or pasture for livestock is severely limited by rainfall. Some 90 per cent of the world's dryland regions occur in developing countries where the availability of fresh water is a growing problem.
One-third of the world's people live in dryland regions that have access to only 8 per cent of the world's renewable supply of water, the scientists found. "We were particularly alarmed by the evidence of strong linkages between the degradation of ecosystem services in drylands and poverty in those regions," Dr Reid said.
"Moreover, while historically, population growth has been highest in either urban areas or the most productive ecosystems such as cultivated lands, this pattern changed in the 1990s and the highest percentage rate of growth is now in drylands - ecosystems with the lowest potential to support that growth.
"These problems of ecosystem degradation and the harm it causes for human well-being clearly help set the stage for the conflict that we see in many dryland regions including parts of Africa and central Asia," he said.
Poor people living in dryland regions are at the greatest risk of environmental collapse. Many of them already live unsustainably - between 10 and 20 per cent of the soil in the drylands are eroded or degraded.
"Development prospects in dryland regions of developing countries are especially dependent on actions to slow and reverse the degradation of ecosystems," the Millennium Assessment says.
So what can be done in a century when the human population is expected to increase by a further 50 per cent?
The board of directors of the Millennium Assessment said in a statement: "The overriding conclusion of this assessment is that it lies within the power of human societies to ease the strains we are putting on the nature services of the planet, while continuing to use them to bring better living standards to all.
"Achieving this, however, will require radical changes in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making and new ways of co-operation between government, business and civil society. The warning signs are there for all of us to see. The future now lies in our hands," it said.
Asked what we should do now and what we should plan to do over the next 50 years, Dr Reid replied that there must be a fundamental reappraisal of how we view the world's natural resources. "The heart of the problem is this: protection of nature's services is unlikely to be a priority so long as they are perceived to be free and limitless by those using them," Dr Reid said.
"We simply must establish policies that require natural costs to be taken into account for all economic decisions," he added.
"There is a tremendous amount that can be done in the short term to reduce degradation - for example, the causes of some of the most significant problems such as fisheries collapse, climate change, and excessive nutrient loading are clear - many countries have policies in place that encourage excessive harvest, use of fossil fuels, or excessive fertilization of crops.
"But as important as these short-term fixes are, over the long term humans must both enhance the production of many services and decrease our consumption of others. That will require significant investments in new technologies and significant changes in behavior," he explained.
Many environmentalists would agree, and they would like politicians to go much further.
"The Millennium Assessment cuts to the heart of one of the greatest challenges facing humanity," Roger Higman, of Friends of the Earth, said.
"That is, we cannot maintain high standards of living, let alone relieve poverty, if we don't look after the earth's life-support systems," Mr Higman said.
"Yet the assessment hasn't gone far enough in specifying the radical solutions needed. At the end of the day, if we are to respect the limits imposed by nature, and ensure the well-being of all humanity, we must manage the global economy to produce a fairer distribution of the earth's resources," he added.
THE TIPPING POINTS TO CATASTROPHE
NEW DISEASES
As population densities increase and living space extends into once pristine forests, the chances of an epidemic of a new infectious agent grows. Global travel accentuates the threat, and the emergence of SARS and bird flu are prime examples of diseases moving from animals to humans.
ALIEN SPECIES
The introduction of an invasive species - whether animal, plant or microbe - can lead to a rapid change in ecosystems. Zebra mussels introduced into North America led to the extinction of native clams and the comb jellyfish caused havoc to 26 major fisheries species in the Black Sea.
ALGAL BLOOMS
A build up of man-made nutrients in the environment has already led to the threshold being reached when algae blooms. This can deprive fish and other wildlife of oxygen as well as producing toxic substances that are a danger to drinking water.
CORAL REEF COLLAPSE
Reefs that were dominated by corals have suddenly changed to being dominated by algae, which have taken advantage of the increases in nutrient levels running off from terrestrial sources. Many of Jamaica's coral reefs have now become algal dominated.
FISHING STOCKS
Overfishing can, and has, led to a collapse in stocks. A threshold is reached when there are too few adults to maintain a viable population. This occurred off the east coast of Newfoundland in 1992 when its stock of Atlantic cod vanished.
CLIMATE CHANGE
In a warmer world, local vegetation or land cover can change, causing warming to become worse. The Sahel region of North Africa depends on rainfall for its vegetation. Small changes in rain can result in loss of vegetation, soil erosion and further decreases in rainfall.
© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0330-04.htm
Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security
The end of oil is closer than you think
Oil production could peak next year, reports John Vidal. Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye
Thursday April 21, 2005
The Guardian
The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age.
They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.
"Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," the Oxford PhD told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh next week. "The issue is the long downward slope that opens on the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways," he says.
Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil - the kind associated with gushing oil wells - is approaching fast, perhaps even next year. His calculations are based on historical and present production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how the industry works.
"About 944bn barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764bn remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142bn of reserves are classed as 'yet-to-find', meaning what oil is expected to be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year," he says.
If he is correct, then global oil production can be expected to decline steadily at about 2-3% a year, the cost of everything from travel, heating, agriculture, trade, and anything made of plastic rises. And the scramble to control oil resources intensifies. As one US analyst said this week: "Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye."
But the Campbell analysis is way off the much more optimistic official figures. The US Geological Survey (USGS) states that reserves in 2000 (its latest figures) of recoverable oil were about three trillion barrels and that peak production will not come for about 30 years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that oil will peak between "2013 and 2037" and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, four countries with much of the world's known reserves, report little if any depletion of reserves. Meanwhile, the oil companies - which do not make public estimates of their own "peak oil" - say there is no shortage of oil and gas for the long term. "The world holds enough proved reserves for 40 years of supply and at least 60 years of gas supply at current consumption rates," said BP this week.
Indeed, almost every year for 150 years, the oil industry has produced more than it did the year before, and predictions of oil running out or peaking have always been proved wrong. Today, the industry is producing about 83m barrels a day, with big new fields in Azerbaijan, Angola, Algeria, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere soon expected on stream.
But the business of estimating oil reserves is contentious and political. According to Campbell, companies seldom report their true findings for commercial reasons, and governments - which own 90% of the reserves - often lie. Most official figures, he says, are grossly unreliable: "Estimating reserves is a scientific business. There is a range of uncertainty but it is not impossible to get a good idea of what a field contains. Reporting [reserves], however, is a political act."
According to Campbell and other oil industry sources, the two most widely used estimates of world oil reserves, drawn up by the Oil and Gas Journal and the BP Statistical Review, both rely on reserve estimates provided to them by governments and industry and do not question their accuracy.
Companies, says Campbell, "under-report their new discoveries to comply with strict US stock exchange rules, but then revise them upwards over time", partly to boost their share prices with "good news" results. "I do not think that I ever told the truth about the size of a prospect. That was not the game we were in," he says. "As we were competing for funds with other subsidiaries around the world, we had to exaggerate."
Most serious of all, he and other oil depletion analysts and petroleum geologists, most of whom have been in the industry for years, accuse the US of using questionable statistical probability models to calculate global reserves and Opec countries of drastically revising upwards their reserves in the 1980s.
"The estimates for the Opec countries were systematically exaggerated in the late 1980s to win a greater slice of the allocation cake. Middle East official reserves jumped 43% in just three years despite no new major finds," he says.
The study of "peak oil" - the point at which half the total oil known to have existed in a field or a country has been consumed, beyond which extraction goes into irreversible decline - used to be back-of-the envelope guesswork. It was not taken seriously by business or governments, mainly because oil has always been cheap and plentiful.
In the wake of the Iraq war, the rapid economic rise of China, global warming and recent record oil prices, the debate has shifted from "if" there is a global peak to "when".
The US government knows that conventional oil is running out fast. According to a report on oil shales and unconventional oil supplies prepared by the US office of petroleum reserves last year, "world oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but the re¬serves are not being fully replaced. Remaining oil reserves of individual oil companies must continue to shrink. The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to meet conventional oil demand will not be available."
It continues: "Although there is no agreement about the date that world oil production will peak, forecasts presented by USGS geologist Les Magoon, the Oil and Gas Journal, and others expect the peak will occur between 2003 and 2020. What is notable ... is that none extend beyond the year 2020, suggesting that the world may be facing shortfalls much sooner than expected."
According to Bill Powers, editor of the Canadian Energy Viewpoint investment journal, there is a growing belief among geologists who study world oil supply that production "is soon headed into an irreversible decline ... The US government does not want to admit the reality of the situation. Dr Campbell's thesis, and those of others like him, are becoming the mainstream."
In the absence of reliable official figures, geologists and analysts are turning to the grandfather of oil depletion analysis, M King Hubbert, a Shell geologist who in 1956 showed mathematically that exploitation of any oilfield follows a predictable "bell curve" trend, which is slow to take off, rises steeply, flattens and then descends again steeply. The biggest and easiest exploited oilfields were always found early in the history of exploration, while smaller ones were developed as production from the big fields declined. He accurately predicted that US domestic oil production would peak around 1970, 40 years after the period of peak discovery around 1930.
Many oil analysts now take the "Hubbert peak" model seriously, and the USGS, national and oil company figures with a large dose of salt. Similar patterns of peak discovery and production have been found throughout all the world's main oilfields. The first North Sea discovery was in 1969, discoveries peaked in 1973 and the UK passed its production peak in 1999. The British portion of the basin is now in serious decline and the Norwegian sector has levelled off.
Other analysts are also questioning afresh the oil companies' data. US Wall street energy group Herold last month compared the stated reserves of the world's leading oil companies with their quoted discoveries, and production levels. Herold predicts that the seven largest will all begin seeing production declines within four years. Deutsche Bank analysts report that global oil production will peak in 2014.
According to Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, a monthly magazine published by the Energy Institute in London, conventional oil reserves are now declining about 4-6% a year worldwide. He says 18 large oil-producing countries, including Britain, and 32 smaller ones, have declining production; and he expects Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India all to reach their peak in the next few years.
"We should be worried. Time is short and we are not even at the point where we admit we have a problem," Skrebowski says. "Governments are always excessively optimistic. The problem is that the peak, which I think is 2008, is tomorrow in planning terms."
On the other hand, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome, Chad and Angola are are all expected to grow strongly.
What is agreed is that world oil demand is surging. The International Energy Agency, which collates national figures and predicts demand, says developing countries could push demand up 47% to 121m barrels a day by 2030, and that oil companies and oil-producing nations must spend about $100bn a year to develop new supplies to keep pace.
According to the IEA, demand rose faster in 2004 than in any year since 1976. China's oil consumption, which accounted for a third of extra global demand last year, grew 17% and is expected to double over 15 years to more than 10m barrels a day - half the US's present demand. India's consumption is expected to rise by nearly 30% in the next five years. If world demand continues to grow at 2% a year, then almost 160m barrels a day will need to be extracted in 2035, twice as much as today.
That, say most geologists is almost inconceivable. According to industry consultants IHS Energy, 90% of all known reserves are now in production, suggesting that few major discoveries remain to be made. Shell says its reserves fell last year because it only found enough oil to replace 15-25 % of what the company produced. BP told the US stock exchange that it replaced only 89% of its production in 2004.
Moreover, oil supply is increasingly limited to a few giant fields, with 10% of all production coming from just four fields and 80% from fields discovered before 1970. Even finding a field the size of Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, by far the world's largest and said to have another 125bn barrels, would only meet world demand for about 10 years.
"All the major discoveries were in the 1960s, since when they have been declining gradually over time, give or take the occasional spike and trough," says Campbell. "The whole world has now been seismically searched and picked over. Geological knowledge has improved enormously in the past 30 years and it is almost inconceivable now that major fields remain to be found."
He accepts there may be a big field or two left in Russia, and more in Africa, but these would have little bearing on world supplies. Unconventional deposits like tar sands and shale may only slow the production decline.
"The first half of the oil age now closes," says Campbell. "It lasted 150 years and saw the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade, agriculture and financial capital, allowing the population to expand six-fold. The second half now dawns, and will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital."
So did the Swiss bankers comprehend the seriousness of the situation when he talked to them? "There is no company on the stock exchange that doesn't make a tacit assumption about the availability of energy," says Campbell. "It is almost impossible for bankers to accept it. It is so out of their mindset."
Crude alternatives
"Unconventional" petroleum reserves, which are not included in some totals of reserves, include:
Heavy oils
These can be pumped just like conventional petroleum except that they are much thicker, more polluting, and require more extensive refining. They are found in more than 30 countries, but about 90% of estimated reserves are in the Orinoco "heavy oil belt" of Venezuela, which has an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels. About one third of the oil is potentially recoverable using current technology.
Tar sands
These are found in sedimentary rocks and must be dug out and crushed in giant opencast mines. But it takes five to 10 times the energy, area and water to mine, process and upgrade the tars that it does to process conventional oil. The Athabasca deposits in Alberta, Canada are the world's largest resource, with estimated reserves of 1.8 trillion barrels, of which about 280-300bn barrels may be recoverable. Production now accounts for about 20% of Canada's oil supply.
Oil shales
These are seen as the US government's energy stopgap. They exist in large quantities in ecologically sensitive parts of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah at varying depths, but the industrial process needed to extract the oil demands hot water, making it much more expensive and less energy-efficient than conventional oil. The mining operation is extremely damaging to the environment. Shell, Exxon, ChevronTexaco and other oil companies are
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1464050,00.html
Week in economics: New oil shock
By Friederike Tiesenhausen Cave, Economics Reporter
Published: April 7 2005 20:56 | Last updated: April 7 2005 20:56
A series of stark warnings about risks to the world economy - particularly from higher oil prices - added spice to an otherwise relatively quiet week in which interest rates stayed unchanged in Japan, South Korea, Europe and the UK.
Risks
The world economy needed to adjust to sustained high oil prices in the next two decades, the International Monetary Fund warned on Thursday. Demand from emerging countries was set to accelerate and production outside the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries might peak in the next five years. Expressed in today’s money, the price of oil could rise to $65-$95 by 2030.
This followed a warning by the World Bank, the IMF’s Washington-based sister organisation, that developing countries which have built up large US dollar reserves face large potential losses as the dollar declines. A potential collapse in the dollar could expose weaknesses in banking and financial sectors in poor countries, hampering their capacity to manage their economies.
The IMF had already reached out on Tuesday by warning investors of complacency about the resilience of the world’s financial system. Even though the climate for investors had improved in the past six months, nasty surprises lay ahead because the economic and credit cycles had advanced, it said. While the system would cope with a single event, the combination of several shocks could lead to herd behaviour and declining asset prices.
Rates and data
Meanwhile, interest rates stayed unchanged in Europe and Japan as concerns about the sustainability of growth led to a cautious attitude among policy-makers across different continents.
The European Central Bank left interest rates unchanged at 2 per cent for the 22nd consecutive month as its president warned soaring oil prices were partly responsible for the failure of the eurozone economy to gather pace. Jean-Claude Trichet, ECB chief, also urged consumers to become “good energy savers”.
His comments came after the European Commission earlier in the week substantially cut its forecast for eurozone growth this year from 2 per cent in October to 1.6 per cent.
Among the more dramatic downgrades, the Commission expected growth of only 0.8 per cent this year in Germany, compared with 1.5 per cent forecast previously, and 1.2 per cent in Italy, compared with an earlier 1.8 per cent.
The Bank of England also kept its repo rate at 4.75 per cent, marking the eighth month of no change. The move follows disappointing manufacturing output in February and comes amid growing concerns that private consumption in the UK is slowing.
The Bank of Japan held interest rates at almost zero after its Tankan survey revealed confidence among large Japanese manufacturers fell to its lowest in a year due to pressure on profits from rising oil prices. South Korea too kept the cost of borrowing unchanged.
The only exception was the Philippines’ central bank, which raised rates for the first time in more than four years to dampen inflation.
Economists in the US enjoyed one of the quietest seven days in a long time with hardly any new data. The only fodder to keep markets busy was Thursday’s news that the number of new claims for jobless insurance had dropped by 19,000 last week, largely offsetting an unexpected spike the previous week.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/5e5758e8-a77c-11d9-9744-00000e2511c8.html
Higher Prices, Stagnant Wages Produce Pay Cut for US Workers
By Nicholas Riccardi
The Los Angeles Times
Monday 11 April 2005
For the first time in 14 years, the American work force has in effect gotten an across-the-board pay cut.
The growth in wages in 2004 and the first two months of this year trailed the growth in prices, compounding the squeeze from higher housing, energy and other costs.
The result is that people such as Victor Romero are finding themselves falling behind.
The 49-year-old film-set laborer had to ditch his $1,100-a-month Los Angeles apartment because his rent kept rising while his pay of $24.50 an hour stayed flat.
"There's no such thing as raises anymore," Romero said. This is the first time that salaries have increased more slowly than inflation since the 1990-91 recession. While salary growth has been relatively sluggish since the 2001 downturn, inflation had stayed relatively subdued until last year, when the consumer price index rose 2.7 percent. But average hourly wages rose only 2.5 percent.
The effective 0.2-percentage-point erosion in workers' living standards occurred while the economy expanded at a healthy 4 percent, better than the 3 percent historical average.
At the same time, corporate profits hit record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay raises down.
Some see climbing profits and stagnant wages as not only unfair but ultimately unsustainable. "Those that are baking the larger pie ought to see their slices expanding," said Jared Bernstein, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
On the other hand, higher wages could hurt the economy by stoking inflation. Employers might pass the costs on to consumers in higher prices, and that in turn might prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more aggressively, possibly slowing the recovery or even triggering a recession.
For now, workers' wallets are being pummeled by something of a perfect storm of economic forces: a weak job market, rising health insurance premiums and inflationary pressures.
The biggest factor is the slack employment market, which means there is little pressure on businesses to boost pay. "They take advantage of you because there's no work and anyone will work for anything," Romero said.
Although the unemployment rate has dropped to a relatively low 5.2 percent, that figure doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of jobless people who've given up their searches and dropped out of the labor market at a greater rate than any time since 1988.
At the same time, the cost of health premiums has skyrocketed, eating into the pool of corporate cash set aside for raises. While pay increased only about 2.4 percent last year, benefit costs jumped almost 7 percent.
With benefits factored in, workers' total compensation did outpace inflation in 2004, even if they didn't see it in their paychecks. But employers also are requiring workers to pay a greater share of their premiums.
"Health care has eroded the wage base," said Janemarie Mulvey, chief economist with the Employment Policy Foundation, a business-funded think tank in Washington. "In the long run, we can't continue like this. If health care keeps crowding out wages forever, something's got to give."
The squeeze is especially intense on the 47 percent of the work force whose employers don't directly provide their health insurance. For lower-income workers, who are more likely to be uninsured, the falling value of their wages is even more serious, because they're more likely to live paycheck to paycheck. And rising food and energy prices take a higher toll on the poor than on the rich.
Historically, periods when wage growth is outpaced by inflation rarely last more than 18 months. That's partly because businesses don't want their employees' living standards to fall, as that injures morale, said Trewman Bewley, a Yale University economist who has studied wage activity during economic downturns.
Many economists figure it's only a matter of time until workers can pry more money out of their employers to catch up to inflation again. If economic growth remains robust, as many forecasters predict, workers may gain greater leverage to negotiate wage hikes.
"Chances are that those workers that have problems getting by because of higher fuel prices will probably tell their employers, `I can't make it,"' said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investors Service.
So far that hasn't worked for Brian Chartier. The 29-year-old Glendale, Calif., resident handles inventory for a Los Angeles manufacturing company. No one there, he said, has gotten a raise in two years.
"They're able to do this and I haven't quit, because where am I going to go?" he said. "There are no jobs."
While his salary remained flat, rising health-care premiums kept eating up more and more of his take-home pay, so he dropped out of his employer's insurance program. His rent also is climbing.
As Chartier loaded bags of groceries into his Honda Civic last week, he boasted that they were full of bargains. "I don't get a single thing that's not on sale," Chartier said. "I can't afford to anymore."
Despite their wages failing to keep pace with inflation, American consumers have kept shopping. Consumer spending has continued to rise. Analysts say that's partly because some shoppers are thinking less about their paychecks and more about their biggest asset: their homes.
Home prices have risen 9 percent nationwide since last February, sheltering consumers, and the economy, from much of the pinch of higher prices.
"There's been a wealth effect afoot throughout much of the recession and the recovery," said Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, "because no matter what people's incomes were doing, their wealth was improving -- their biggest assets, their homes, were accruing."
As inflation sparks higher interest rates, most economists expect the housing market to cool, making shoppers more dependent on their paychecks. And even those who have seen their paper wealth rise phenomenally aren't happy about rising costs and stagnant pay.
Corina Swatz has seen the value of her Los Angeles home triple during the 10 years she's owned it. But neither she nor her husband has gotten a raise in more than a year. At the same time, gas prices have forced them to shell out $55 to fill the tank of their Chevy Tahoe.
"I used to spend $600 a month (on groceries). Now I spend $800," Swatz, a mother of two, said as she made her weekly Costco run last week. The increased value of her home gives her only so much solace. "We're hanging in there."
The danger is that people such as Swatz, despite their home-equity cushion, may rein in their spending and pull the rug out from under the economic expansion.
That's what Gabriel Torres has done. The 56-year-old cook hasn't gotten a raise in years but pays ever higher prices to fill his Nissan X-terra. He and his wife have come up with a solution: cut down on driving.
"We don't go out much," Torres said. "We used to. But now we only drive when we really have to."
-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/041105Z.shtml
Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security
Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.
Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."
But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.
"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.
"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was being eliminated, but said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was "categorically untrue."
According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.
That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.
The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror."
The intelligence officials requested anonymity because the information is classified and because, they said, they feared White House retribution. Johnson declined to say how he obtained the figures.
Another U.S. official, who also requested anonymity, said analysts from the counterterrorism center were especially careful in amassing and reviewing the data because of the political turmoil created by last year's errors.
Last June, the administration was forced to issue a revised version of the report for 2003 that showed a higher number of significant terrorist attacks and more than twice the number of fatalities than had been presented in the original report two months earlier.
The snafu was embarrassing for the White House, which had used the original version to bolster President Bush's election-campaign claim that the war in Iraq had advanced the fight against terrorism.
U.S. officials blamed last year's mix-up on bureaucratic mistakes involving the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the forerunner of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Created last year on the recommendation of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the center is the government's primary organization for analyzing and integrating all U.S. government intelligence on terrorism.
The State Department published "Patterns of Global Terrorism" under a law that requires it to submit to the House of Representatives and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a country-by-country terrorism assessment by April 30 each year.
A declassified version of the report has been made public since 1986 in the form of a glossy booklet, even though there was no legal requirement to produce one.
The senior State Department official said a report on global terrorism would be sent this year to lawmakers and made available to the public in place of "Patterns of Global Terrorism," but that it wouldn't contain statistical data.
He said that decision was taken because the State Department believed that the National Counterterrorism Center "is now the authoritative government agency for the analysis of global terrorism. We believe that the NCTC should compile and publish the relevant data on that subject."
He didn't answer questions about whether the data would be made available to the public, saying, "We will be consulting (with Congress) ... on who should publish and in what form."
Another U.S. official said Rice's office was leery of the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate the data for 2004, believing that analysts anxious to avoid a repetition of last year's undercount included incidents that may not have been terrorist attacks.
But the U.S. intelligence officials said Rice's office decided to eliminate "Patterns of Global Terrorism" when the counterterrorism center declined to use alternative methodology that would have reported fewer significant attacks.
The officials said they interpreted Rice's action as an attempt to avoid releasing statistics that would contradict the administration's claims that it's winning the war against terrorism.
To read past "Patterns of Global Terrorism" reports online, go to www.mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp
________________________________________
© 2005 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.realcities.com
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Why World War IV Can't Sell
By John Brown
Tom Dispatch
Wednesday 30 March 2005
In a recent essay (Are We in World War IV?) Tom Engelhardt commented quite rightly that "World War IV" has "become a commonplace trope of the imperial right." But he didn't mention one small matter -- the rest of our country, not to speak of the outside world, hasn't bought the neocons' efforts to justify the President's militaristic adventures abroad with crude we're-in-World War IV agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in support of the administration's foreign policy follies. That's why, in his second term, George W. Bush -- first and foremost a politician concerned about maintaining domestic support -- is talking ever less about waging a global war and ever more about democratizing the world.
A Neocon Global War
The neocons have long paid lip service to the need for democracy in the Middle East, but their primary emphasis has been on transformation by war, not politics. You'll remember that, according to our right-wing world warriors, we're inextricably engaged in a planetary struggle against fanatic Muslim fundamentalists. There will, they assure us, be temporary setbacks in this total generational conflict, as was the case during World War II and the Cold War (considered World War III by neocons), but we can win in the end if we "stay the course" with patriotic fortitude. Above all, we must not be discouraged by the gory details of the real, nasty war in Iraq in which we're already engaged, despite the loss of blood and treasure involved. Like so many good Soviet citizens expecting perfect Communism in the indeterminate future, all we have to do is await the New American Century that will eventually be brought into being by the triumphs of American arms (and neocon cheerleading).
Since at least 9/11, the neocons have rambled on… and on… about "World War IV." But no matter how often they've tried to beat the phrase into our heads, it hasn't become part of the American mindset. Peace and honest work, not perpetual war and senseless conflict, still remain our modest ideals -- even with (because of?) the tragedy of the Twin Towers. True, right before the presidential election, WWIV surfaced again and again in the media, fed by neocon propaganda; and even today it appears here and there, though as often in criticism as boosterism. Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo have recently used the phrase to criticize neocon hysteria in their columns; and in its winter 2005 issue, the Wilson Quarterly published "World War IV," an important article by Andrew J. Bacevich, which turns the neocons' argument on its head by suggesting that it was the U.S. which started a new world war -- a disastrous struggle for control of Middle Eastern oil reserves -- during the Carter administration. For Bacevich, it appears, the neocons' cherished verbal icon should not be a call to arms, but a sad reminder of the hubris of military overreach.
Try It Long
For all the absurdity of their arguments, neocons are, in many ways, men of ideas. But they do not live on another planet. They know that "World War IV" or even the milder "Global War on Terrorism" are not the first things ordinary Americans have in their thoughts when they get up in the morning ("Does anyone still remember the war on terror?" asked that master of the zeitgeist, Frank Rich of the New York Times, early in January). This unwillingness among us mere mortals to see the world in terms of a universal death struggle, which neocon sympathizer Larry Haas, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, believes is caused by "our faith in rationality," upsets some of the Spengler-like neocons, most noticeably their cantankerous dean, Norman Podhoretz.
In February in Commentary (a magazine he once edited), Podhoretz offered the world The War Against World War IV, a follow-up to his portentous and historically falsifying September 2004 piece, World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win. In his latest piece, stormin' Norman castigates Americans right and left -- including "isolationists of the paleoconservative Right," "Michael Moore and all the other hard leftists holed up in Hollywood, the universities, and in the intellectual community at large," and "liberal internationalists" -- for being "at war" with his Rosemary's baby "World War IV." Somewhat defensively (for a rabid warmonger), he assures us that we, the American people, will, despite the best efforts of the critics, continue to support Mr. Bush, who in turn will not fail to uphold the "Bush Doctrine," which reflects, Podhoretz leaves no doubt, his own "brilliant" World War IV ideas (as admiring fellow neo-pundit William Safire described them in a New York Times column last August).
Mr. Podhoretz is angry at those who simply cannot accept his crude Hobbesian view of humanity, so he keeps shouting at us, but less virulent neocons and their allies, realizing "WWIV" has not caught on, are thinking up new terms to con Americans into the neos' agenda of total war.
Foremost among these is "the long war," evoking -- to my mind at least -- World War I, "the Great War" as it was known, which did so much to lead to the rise of fascism in Europe. (But how many Americans actually care about WWI?) A Google search reveals that as early as May, 2002, in a Cato Policy Analysis, "Building Leverage in the Long War: Ensuring Intelligence Community Creativity in the Fight Against Terrorism," James W. Harris wrote of a "long war" in describing post-9/11 world tensions. In June of last year, John C. Wohlstetter, a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, proclaimed:
"Now George W. Bush must rally the nation in the latest fight to the finish between imperfect civilization and perfect barbarism, that of free countries versus mega-death terror from both 'WMD states' and groups like al-Qai'da. The Gipper's testamentary gift to us is what should be our goal in a long war that strategist Eliot Cohen calls World War IV."
Podhoretz himself mentioned the "long war" in his September Commentary article. "[W]e are only," he noted, "in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war." But the real star of the long-war proponents is Centcom commander General John Abizaid, about whom pro-Iraqi invasion journalist David Ignatius wrote a fawning portrait in the Washington Post in late December. "If there is a modern Imperium Americanum," Ignatius announced, "Abizaid is its field general." Playing the role of intrepid "action" journalist at the forefront of the global battle lines in "Centcom's turbulent center of operations," Ignatius breathlessly informs his readers that
"I traveled this month with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him discuss his strategy for what he calls the 'Long War' to contain Islamic extremism … Abizaid believes that the Long War is only in its early stages. Victory will be hard to measure, he says, because the enemy won't wave a white flag and surrender one day … America's enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls 'Salafist jihadists.' That's his term for the Muslim fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammed, who is sometimes called the 'Salaf.'"
So now we understand why we're in a Long War: to free ourselves of the salacious Salaf.
If You Think It's Not Long Enough, How about a Millennium?
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, an early proponent of WWIV, is now turned on by the Long War idea as well. In December, in remarks titled The War for Democracy he said:
"Well, let me share a few thoughts with you this morning on what I have come to call the Long War of the 21st Century. I used to call it World War IV, following my friend Eliot Cohen, who called it that in an op-ed right after 9/11 in the Wall Street Journal. Eliot's point is that the Cold War was World War III. And this war is going to have more in common with the Cold War than with either World War I or II.
"But people hear the phrase World War and they think of Normandy and Iwo Jima and short, intense periods of principally military combat. I think Eliot's point is the right one, which is that this war will have a strong ideological component and will last some time. So, in order to avoid the association with World Wars I and II, I started calling it the Long War of the 21st Century. Now, why do I think it's going to be long? First of all, it is with three totalitarian movements coming out of the Middle East."
The three totalitarian movements, Woolsey goes on to say, are "Middle East Fascists"; "the Vilayat Faqih, the Rule of the Clerics in Tehran -- Khamenei, Rafsanjani and his colleagues"; and "the Islamists of Al Qaeda's stripe, underpinned, in many ways, by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia."
With all this war-talk from the neocons, it's always reassuring to hear the voices of those who, if our world warriors had their way, would enthusiastically give up their lives for the "long war." On December 31, reader Robert S. Stelzer wrote a letter to the Denver Post in which he said the following regarding Ignatius's paean to Abizaid:
"I interpret the article as a propaganda piece to get the American population used to the idea of a long war, and then a military draft. Maybe we need an empire to maintain our standard of living, but if we have democracy we need an informed electorate."
Despite rare dissident voices like Stelzer's, the reaction of most Americans to the Long War jingle (as to "World War IV") has essentially been that of a silent majority: nothing. Count on the neocon bastion the Weekly Standard (in January) to try to whip up those silent Americans with a ratcheted up attack-the-mortal-enemy battle cry headlined "The Millennium War" by pundit Austin Bay, a colonel, who noted that "the global war on terror is the war's dirt-stupid name. One might as well declare war on exercise as declare war on terror, for terror is only a tactic used by an enemy… In September 2001, I suggested that we call this hideous conflict the Millennium War, a nom de guerre that captures both the chronological era and the ideological dimensions of the conflict."
But Austin B's MW (apologies to the German carmaker) has not sold either, being even less repeated in media commentaries than the Long War itself -- which brings us to the Bush administration's current attitude toward the neocons' WWIV branding.
Drop That War! The Product No Longer Sells!
If there's one thing the sad history of recent years has amply demonstrated, it's that the Bush White House is profoundly uninterested in ideas (even the superficial ones promulgated by the neocons). What concerns Dubya and his entourage is not thought, but power. They pick up and drop "ideas" at the tip of a hat, abandoning them when they no longer suit their narrow interests of the moment. (The ever-changing "justifications" for the war in Iraq are a perfect illustration of this attitude). The Bushies are short-term and savvy tacticians par excellence, with essentially one long-term plan, rudimentary but focused: Republican -- as they interpret Lincoln's party -- domination of the United States for years to come. Karl Rove's hero, after all, is William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president of the United States, who, some argue, was responsible for creating GOP control of American politics for decades.
The current administration, perhaps more than any other in history, illustrates George Kennan's observation that "[o]ur actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities." Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that the war in Iraq was begun essentially for domestic consumption (as White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. suggested to the New York Times in September 2002, when he famously said of Iraq war planning, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August"). While all the reasons behind this tragic, idiotic war -- which turned out far worse than the "mission-accomplished" White House ever expected -- may never be fully known, it can be said with a strong degree of assurance that it was sold to the American public, at least in part, in order to morph Bush II, not elected by popular vote and low in the polls early in his presidency, into a decisive "commander in chief" so that his party would win the upcoming congressional -- and then presidential -- elections.
The neocons -- including, in all fairness, those among them honest in their unclear convictions -- happened to be around the White House (of course, they made sure they would be) to provide justification for Bush's military actions after 9/11 with their Darwinian, dog-eat-dog, "us vs. them" view of the world. And so their "ideas" (made to sound slightly less harsh than WWIV in the phrase Global War on Terrorism) were cleared by Rove and other GOP politicos and used for a while by a domestically-driven White House to persuade American voters that the invasion of Iraq was an absolute necessity for the security of the country.
But now Americans are feeling increasingly critical of our Iraqi "catastrophic success." "The latest polls show that 53 percent of Americans feel the war was not worth fighting, 57 percent say they disapprove of Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq, and 70 percent think the number of US casualties is an unacceptable price to have paid." To the Pentagon's great concern, the military is having difficulties recruiting; national Guardsmen are angry about excessively long tours of duty in Iraq; spouses of soldiers complain about their loved ones being away from home for far too much time.
So, as their pro-war manifestos become less and less politically useful to the Bush administration, the neocons are getting a disappointing reward for their Bush-lovin'. Far from being asked to formulate policy to the extent that they doubtless would like, they have been relegated to playing essentially representational roles, reminiscent of the one performed by the simple-minded gardener named Chance played by Peter Sellers in the film Being There -- at the U.N. (John Bolton) and at the World Bank (Paul Wolfowitz), two institutions which no red-blooded Republican voters will ever care about, except as objects of hatred.
At the same time, and despite disquieting many foreigners by the selection of Bolton and Wolfowitz (widely perceived abroad as undiplomatic unilateralists) to serve in multinational organizations, the President appears to have recognized the existence of anti-American foreign public opinion, which has been intensely critical of the neocons' bellicose views and U.S. unilateral action in Iraq. The selection of spinmeister Karen Hughes, a Bush confidante who happened to be born in Paris (no, not Paris, Texas), as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department suggests that the White House staff has begun (against its gut instincts) to acknowledge what it dismissed in Bush's first term -- the usefulness of "soft power" in dealing other nations. This may only be from fear of excessively bad news coming from abroad that could lead to lower opinion polls at home and thus threaten current Republican hegemony in America, but no matter.
We Don't Demolish, We Democratize!
Few have actually been conned into the neos' war, whatever ingredient it be flavored with -- "IV," "long," or "millennium." Now the White House, far from promulgating neocon WWIV ideas, has been dropping most references to war as Bush's second term begins. Our commander in chief, still undergoing an extreme make-over as a man who considers peaceful negotiations at least an option, is being turned into an advocate of the politically oppressed in other countries and so has come up with a new explanation to sell his dysfunctional foreign "policy": global democratization, with a focus on the Middle East.
Bush did mention democratization in his first term, but today it has suddenly become the newest leitmotif for explaining his misadventures abroad. What, he now asks the American people, are we doing overseas? And he responds, we're not demolishing the world -- we're democratizing it! And thanks to OUR democratizing so far in the Middle East, including the bombing and invading of Iraq, the Arab world is like Berlin when the wall came down. (Forget about the fact that these two events took place during different centuries and in very different parts of the world base on the implementation of very different American policies)!
And don't you forget, Bush tells us, that we're on a path to reform our social security system, far more important than the war in Iraq -- though Dubya's call for personal accounts may, in appeal, prove the World War IV of domestic policy. As for democracy at home, that can wait.
So, after all the administration has done to ruin America's moral standing and image overseas -- "preemptive" military strikes that violate simple morality and the basic rules of war; searching in vain for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction; mindlessly rushing to implement "regime change" in a far-off Third-World country, an ill-planned effort that could result in the establishment of an anti-western theocracy harmful to American interests; brutally incarcerating "terrorists" with little, if any, respect for international law; arrogantly bashing "old Europe" just to show off all-American Manichean machismo; and insulting millions abroad by writing off their opinions -- Americans are now being told by Dubya and his gang what we've really been up to all this time across the oceans: We're democratizing the Middle East, and with great success thus far!
I don't believe a word of it.
Here's what the military newspaper Stars and Stripes wrote in 1919:
"Propaganda is nothing but a fancy name for publicity, and who knows the publicity game better than the Yanks? Why, the Germans make no bones about admitting that they learned the trick from us. Now the difference between a Boche and a Yank is just this -- that a Boche is some one who believes everything that's told him and a Yank is some one who disbelieves everything that's told him."
--------
John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned in protest against the invasion of Iraq, is affiliated with Georgetown University. Brown compiles a daily Public Diplomacy Press Review (PDPR) available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com. Aside from public diplomacy, PDPR covers items such as anti-Americanism, cultural diplomacy, propaganda, foreign public opinion, and American popular culture abroad.
-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/033005J.shtml
Published on Saturday, April 2, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
'Curveball' Debacle Reignites CIA Feud
The former agency chief and his top deputy deny reports that they were told a key source for Iraqi intelligence was deemed unreliable.
by Bob Drogin and Greg Miller
WASHINGTON — A bitter feud erupted Friday over claims by a presidential commission that top CIA officials apparently ignored warnings in late 2002 and early 2003 that an informant code-named "Curveball" — the chief source of prewar U.S. intelligence about Iraqi germ weapons — was unreliable.
Former CIA Director George J. Tenet and his chief deputy, John E. McLaughlin, furiously denied that they had been told not to trust Curveball, an Iraqi refugee in Germany who ultimately was proved a fraud.
But the CIA's former operations chief and one of his top lieutenants insisted in interviews that debates had raged inside the CIA about Curveball's credibility, even as then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell vouched for the defector's claims in a crucial address to the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war.
"The fact is there was yelling and screaming about this guy," said James L. Pavitt, deputy director of operations and head of the clandestine service until he retired last summer.
"My people were saying: 'We think he's a stinker,' " Pavitt said. But CIA bioweapons analysts, he said, "were saying: 'We still think he's worthwhile.' " Pavitt said he didn't convey his own doubts to Tenet because he didn't know until after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that Curveball was "of such import" in prewar CIA assessments provided to the president, Congress and the public.
"Later, I remember the guffaws by myself and others when we said, 'How could they have put this much emphasis on this guy? … He wasn't worth [anything] in our minds," Pavitt said.
Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA European Division, said he and other senior officials in his office — the unit that oversees spying in Europe — had issued repeated warnings about Curveball's accounts.
"Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening," said Drumheller, who retired in November after 25 years at the CIA. He said he never met personally with Tenet, but "did talk to McLaughlin and everybody else."
Drumheller scoffed at claims by Tenet and McLauglin that they were unaware of concerns about Curveball's credibility. He said he was disappointed that the two former CIA leaders would resort to a "bureaucratic defense" that they never got a formal memo expressing doubts about the defector.
"They can say whatever they want," Drumheller said. "They know what the truth is …. I did not lie." Drumheller said the CIA had "lots of documentation" to show suspicions about Curveball were disseminated widely within the agency. He said they included warnings to McLaughlin's office and to the Weapons Intelligence Non Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, the group responsible for many of the flawed prewar assessments on Iraq.
"Believe me, there are literally inches and inches of documentation" including "dozens and dozens of e-mails and memos and things like that detailing meetings" where officials sharply questioned Curveball's credibility, Drumheller said.
The CIA's internal battles over Curveball were revealed Thursday in a scathing report by a presidential commission examining U.S. intelligence on Iraq and other key targets.
Drumheller and Pavitt, who each briefed the commission, added significant details in interviews Friday with the Los Angeles Times.
The CIA's assessment that Iraq had secret arsenals of deadly bioweapons, the report said, "was based largely on reporting from a single human source," Curveball, even though his reporting "came into question in late 2002." The failure to communicate serious concerns about him to Powell and other policy makers "represents a serious failure of management and leadership," the commission concluded.
The case began when Curveball, a chemical engineer from Baghdad, first showed up in a German refugee camp in 1998. By early 2000, he was working with Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, in exchange for an immigration card.
The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, which handled Iraqi refugees in Germany, furnished the engineer with the Curveball code-name. He soon began providing technical drawings and detailed information indicating that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein secretly had built lethal germ factories on trains and trucks.
But the DIA never sought to check his background or information. Instead, the commission found, the DIA saw itself as a conduit for German intelligence, and funneled nearly 100 Curveball reports to the CIA between January 2000 and September 2001.
Except for a brief meeting between Curveball and a DIA medical technician in May 2000, German authorities refused to let U.S. intelligence officials interview their source until March 2004, a year after the war began.
But warnings mounted from the start.
After the meeting in May 2000, the DIA medical technician questioned the validity of Curveball's information. Another warning came in April 2002, when a foreign spy service told the CIA it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability," the commission reported.
With skepticism rising about Curveball, Drumheller said he arranged a lunch meeting with a German counterpart at Pavitt's behest in late September or early October 2002 to ask for an American meeting with Curveball.
By then, Drumheller said, German intelligence officials were increasingly wary of Curveball. But he said they didn't want to acknowledge their doubts in public and risk embarrassment.
Drumheller said the German intelligence officer used the lunch to convey a stark warning: "Don't even ask to see him because he's a fabricator and he's crazy."
Drumheller said he passed that warning up to Pavitt's office. He said he also informed another senior official in the European division and sent a notice to WINPAC, where the chief bioweapons analyst was considered the Curveball expert.
In a separate interview, Pavitt said he didn't recall when he learned of the German warning. "A meeting took place without question," he said. "And I remember being told what he said. My recollection is I was told much, much later." He said commission investigators were unable to find a reference to it in his CIA calendar.
Pavitt rejected the notion that Drumheller should have issued a CIA-wide "burn notice" on Curveball's reports after the lunch, saying it would be inappropriate to unleash a sweeping condemnation after a single meeting with a foreign officer from an agency unwilling to stand behind its statements.
A week before Christmas 2002, McLaughlin's executive assistant held two meetings to discuss Curveball. One of Pavitt's aides told the group about Drumheller's meeting, and expressed other doubts. She also "made clear" that Pavitt's division "did not believe that Curveball's information should be relied upon."
The Curveball expert from WINPAC angrily argued back and apparently prevailed, the commission found. An official summary of the meeting later "played down" any doubts and said Curveball had been judged credible "after an exhaustive review."
Several weeks later, Drumheller discovered that his warning had been ignored when his executive officer brought him an advance copy of Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N.
Drumheller said he then arranged a meeting in McLaughlin's office and described what the German operative had told him over lunch several months earlier. After listening for 10 minutes, Drumheller said, McLaughlin responded by saying, "Oh my! I hope that's not true."
McLaughlin, who retired in January after 32 years at the CIA, said he did not recall the meeting and denied that Drumheller told him Curveball might be a fabricator.
"I have absolutely no recall of such a discussion. None," McLaughlin said in a statement Friday. "Such a meeting does not appear on my calendar, nor was this view transmitted to me in writing." He said he was "at a loss" to explain the conflicting accounts.
But another red flag appeared. On Jan. 27, 2003, the CIA's Berlin station warned in a message to headquarters that Curveball's information "cannot be verified."
Drumheller, meanwhile, said he never heard from McLaughlin or anyone else to confirm that Curveball's material had been deleted from Powell's speech. So when Tenet called him at home on another matter the night before Powell was to speak in New York, Drumheller said he raised the Curveball case.
"I gave him the phone number for the guy he wanted," Drumheller recalled. "Then it struck me, 'I better say something.' I said, 'You know, boss, there's problems with that case.' He says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm exhausted. Don't worry about it.' "
In a seven-page statement, Tenet sharply challenged much of that account.
Tenet called it "stunning and deeply disturbing" that the German warning in 2002 to Drumheller, "if true, was never brought forward to me by anyone." He said he first heard doubts about Curveball after the war, and only learned of the German warning from the presidential commission last month.
A series of formal warnings should have been "immediately and formally disseminated" after the lunch to alert intelligence and policy officials about the concern, Tenet said.
"No such reports were disseminated, nor do I recall the issue being brought to my attention," he said.
Tenet also disputed Drumheller's account of their phone conversation the night before Powell's speech. Tenet said he has "absolutely no recollection" of the CIA official warning him about Curveball.
"It is simply wrong for anyone to intimate that I was at any point in time put on notice that Curveball was probably a fabricator," he said.
© Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0402-01.htm
Published on Monday, April 11, 2005 by TomDispatch.com
Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran
by Michael T. Klare
As the United States gears up for an attack on Iran, one thing is certain: the Bush administration will never mention oil as a reason for going to war. As in the case of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be cited as the principal justification for an American assault. "We will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon [by Iran]," is the way President Bush put it in a much-quoted 2003 statement. But just as the failure to discover illicit weapons in Iraq undermined the administration's use of WMD as the paramount reason for its invasion, so its claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism. More important, any serious assessment of Iran's strategic importance to the United States should focus on its role in the global energy equation.
Before proceeding further, let me state for the record that I do not claim oil is the sole driving force behind the Bush administration's apparent determination to destroy Iranian military capabilities. No doubt there are many national security professionals in Washington who are truly worried about Iran's nuclear program, just as there were many professionals who were genuinely worried about Iraqi weapons capabilities. I respect this. But no war is ever prompted by one factor alone, and it is evident from the public record that many considerations, including oil, played a role in the administration's decision to invade Iraq. Likewise, it is reasonable to assume that many factors -- again including oil -- are playing a role in the decision-making now underway over a possible assault on Iran.
Just exactly how much weight the oil factor carries in the administration's decision-making is not something that we can determine with absolute assurance at this time, but given the importance energy has played in the careers and thinking of various high officials of this administration, and given Iran's immense resources, it would be ludicrous not to take the oil factor into account -- and yet you can rest assured that, as relations with Iran worsen, American media reports and analysis of the situation will generally steer a course well clear of the subject (as they did in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq).
One further caveat: When talking about oil's importance in American strategic thinking about Iran, it is important to go beyond the obvious question of Iran's potential role in satisfying our country's future energy requirements. Because Iran occupies a strategic location on the north side of the Persian Gulf, it is in a position to threaten oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, which together possess more than half of the world's known oil reserves. Iran also sits athwart the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which, daily, 40% of the world's oil exports pass. In addition, Iran is becoming a major supplier of oil and natural gas to China, India, and Japan, thereby giving Tehran additional clout in world affairs. It is these geopolitical dimensions of energy, as much as Iran's potential to export significant quantities of oil to the United States, that undoubtedly govern the administration's strategic calculations.
Having said this, let me proceed to an assessment of Iran's future energy potential. According to the most recent tally by Oil and Gas Journal, Iran houses the second-largest pool of untapped petroleum in the world, an estimated 125.8 billion barrels. Only Saudi Arabia, with an estimated 260 billion barrels, possesses more; Iraq, the third in line, has an estimated 115 billion barrels. With this much oil -- about one-tenth of the world's estimated total supply -- Iran is certain to play a key role in the global energy equation, no matter what else occurs.
It is not, however, just sheer quantity that matters in Iran's case; no less important is its future productive capacity. Although Saudi Arabia possesses larger reserves, it is now producing oil at close to its maximum sustainable rate (about 10 million barrels per day). It will probably be unable to raise its output significantly over the next 20 years while global demand, pushed by significantly higher consumption in the United States, China, and India, is expected to rise by 50%. Iran, on the other hand, has considerable growth potential: it is now producing about 4 million barrels per day, but is thought to be capable of boosting its output by another 3 million barrels or so. Few, if any, other countries possess this potential, so Iran's importance as a producer, already significant, is bound to grow in the years ahead.
And it is not just oil that Iran possesses in great abundance, but also natural gas. According to Oil and Gas Journal, Iran has an estimated 940 trillion cubic feet of gas, or approximately 16% of total world reserves. (Only Russia, with 1,680 trillion cubic feet, has a larger supply.) As it takes approximately 6,000 cubic feet of gas to equal the energy content of 1 barrel of oil, Iran's gas reserves represent the equivalent of about 155 billion barrels of oil. This, in turn, means that its combined hydrocarbon reserves are the equivalent of some 280 billion barrels of oil, just slightly behind Saudi Arabia's combined supply. At present, Iran is producing only a small share of its gas reserves, about 2.7 trillion cubic feet per year. This means that Iran is one of the few countries capable of supplying much larger amounts of natural gas in the future.
What all this means is that Iran will play a critical role in the world's future energy equation. This is especially true because the global demand for natural gas is growing faster than that for any other source of energy, including oil. While the world currently consumes more oil than gas, the supply of petroleum is expected to contract in the not-too-distant future as global production approaches its peak sustainable level -- perhaps as soon as 2010 -- and then begins a gradual but irreversible decline. The production of natural gas, on the other hand, is not likely to peak until several decades from now, and so is expected to take up much of the slack when oil supplies become less abundant. Natural gas is also considered a more attractive fuel than oil in many applications, especially because when consumed it releases less carbon dioxide (a major contributor to the greenhouse effect).
No doubt the major U.S. energy companies would love to be working with Iran today in developing these vast oil and gas supplies. At present, however, they are prohibited from doing so by Executive Order (EO) 12959, signed by President Clinton in 1995 and renewed by President Bush in March 2004. The United States has also threatened to punish foreign firms that do business in Iran (under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996), but this has not deterred many large companies from seeking access to Iran's reserves. China, which will need vast amounts of additional oil and gas to fuel its red-hot economy, is paying particular attention to Iran. According to the Department of Energy (DoE), Iran supplied 14% of China's oil imports in 2003, and is expected to provide an even larger share in the future. China is also expected to rely on Iran for a large share of its liquid natural gas (LNG) imports. In October 2004, Iran signed a $100 billion, 25-year contract with Sinopec, a major Chinese energy firm, for joint development of one of its major gas fields and the subsequent delivery of LNG to China. If this deal is fully consummated, it will constitute one of China's biggest overseas investments and represent a major strategic linkage between the two countries.
India is also keen to obtain oil and gas from Iran. In January, the Gas Authority of India Ltd. (GAIL) signed a 30-year deal with the National Iranian Gas Export Corp. for the transfer of as much as 7.5 million tons of LNG to India per year. The deal, worth an estimated $50 billion, will also entail Indian involvement in the development of Iranian gas fields. Even more noteworthy, Indian and Pakistani officials are discussing the construction of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan ¬ an extraordinary step for two long-term adversaries. If completed, the pipeline would provide both countries with a substantial supply of gas and allow Pakistan to reap $200-$500 million per year in transit fees. "The gas pipeline is a win-win proposition for Iran, India, and Pakistan," Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz declared in January.
Despite the pipeline's obvious attractiveness as an incentive for reconciliation between India and Pakistan -- nuclear powers that have fought three wars over Kashmir since 1947 and remain deadlocked over the future status of that troubled territory -- the project was condemned by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a recent trip to India. "We have communicated to the Indian government our concerns about the gas pipeline cooperation between Iran and India," she said on March 16 after meeting with Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh in New Delhi. The administration has, in fact, proved unwilling to back any project that offers an economic benefit to Iran. This has not, however, deterred India from proceeding with the pipeline.
Japan has also broken ranks with Washington on the issue of energy ties with Iran. In early 2003, a consortium of three Japanese companies acquired a 20% stake in the development of the Soroush-Nowruz offshore field in the Persian Gulf, a reservoir thought to hold 1 billion barrels of oil. One year later, the Iranian Offshore Oil Company awarded a $1.26 billion contract to Japan's JGC Corporation for the recovery of natural gas and natural gas liquids from Soroush-Nowruz and other offshore fields.
When considering Iran's role in the global energy equation, therefore, Bush administration officials have two key strategic aims: a desire to open up Iranian oil and gas fields to exploitation by American firms, and concern over Iran's growing ties to America's competitors in the global energy market. Under U.S. law, the first of these aims can only be achieved after the President lifts EO 12959, and this is not likely to occur as long as Iran is controlled by anti-American mullahs and refuses to abandon its uranium enrichment activities with potential bomb-making applications. Likewise, the ban on U.S. involvement in Iranian energy production and export gives Tehran no choice but to pursue ties with other consuming nations. From the Bush administration's point of view, there is only one obvious and immediate way to alter this unappetizing landscape -- by inducing "regime change" in Iran and replacing the existing leadership with one far friendlier to U.S. strategic interests.
That the Bush administration seeks to foster regime change in Iran is not in any doubt. The very fact that Iran was included with Saddam's Iraq and Kim Jong Il's North Korea in the "Axis of Evil" in the President's 2002 State of the Union Address was an unmistakable indicator of this. Bush let his feelings be known again in June 2003, at a time when there were anti-government protests by students in Tehran. "This is the beginning of people expressing themselves toward a free Iran, which I think is positive," he declared. In a more significant indication of White House attitudes on the subject, the Department of Defense has failed to fully disarm the People's Mujaheddin of Iran (or Mujaheddin-e Khalq, MEK), an anti-government militia now based in Iraq that has conducted terrorist actions in Iran and is listed on the State Department's roster of terrorist organizations. In 2003, the Washington Post reported that some senior administration figures would like to use the MEK as a proxy force in Iran, in the same manner that the Northern Alliance was employed against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Iranian leadership is well aware that it faces a serious threat from the Bush administration and is no doubt taking whatever steps it can to prevent such an attack. Here, too, oil is a major factor in both Tehran's and Washington's calculations. To deter a possible American assault, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz and otherwise obstruct oil shipping in the Persian Gulf area. "An attack on Iran will be tantamount to endangering Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and, in a word, the entire Middle East oil," Iranian Expediency Council secretary Mohsen Rezai said on March 1st.
Such threats are taken very seriously by the U.S. Department of Defense. "We judge Iran can briefly close the Strait of Hormuz, relying on a layered strategy using predominantly naval, air, and some ground forces," Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 16th.
Planning for such attacks is, beyond doubt, a major priority for top Pentagon officials. In January, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker magazine that the Department of Defense was conducting covert reconnaissance raids into Iran, supposedly to identify hidden Iranian nuclear and missile facilities that could be struck in future air and missile attacks. "I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran," Hersh said of his interviews with senior military personnel. Shortly thereafter, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon was flying surveillance drones over Iran to verify the location of weapons sites and to test Iranian air defenses. As noted by the Post, "Aerial espionage [of this sort] is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack." There have also been reports of talks between U.S. and Israeli officials about a possible Israeli strike on Iranian weapons facilities, presumably with behind-the-scenes assistance from the United States.
In reality, much of Washington's concern about Iran's pursuit of WMD and ballistic missiles is sparked by fears for the safety of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, other Persian Gulf oil producers, and Israel rather than by fears of a direct Iranian assault on the United States. "Tehran has the only military in the region that can threaten its neighbors and Gulf security," Jacoby declared in his February testimony. "Its expanding ballistic missile inventory presents a potential threat to states in the region." It is this regional threat that American leaders are most determined to eliminate.
In this sense, more than any other, the current planning for an attack on Iran is fundamentally driven by concern over the safety of U.S. energy supplies, as was the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In the most telling expression of White House motives for going to war against Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney (in an August 2002 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars) described the threat from Iraq as follows: "Should all [of Hussein's WMD] ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East and the United States.... Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a seat atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, [and] directly threaten America's friends throughout the region." This was, of course, unthinkable to Bush's inner circle. And all one need do is substitute the words "Iranian mullahs" for Saddam Hussein, and you have a perfect expression of the Bush administration case for making war on Iran.
So, even while publicly focusing on Iran's weapons of mass destruction, key administration figures are certainly thinking in geopolitical terms about Iran's role in the global energy equation and its capacity to obstruct the global flow of petroleum. As was the case with Iraq, the White House is determined to eliminate this threat once and for all. And so, while oil may not be the administration's sole reason for going to war with Iran, it is an essential factor in the overall strategic calculation that makes war likely.
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Oil (Metropolitan Books).
© 2005 Michael Klare
###
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0411-21.htm
Mounting Dangers
By Pierre Rousselin
Le Figaro
Monday 11 April 2005
Right now, it's easier in Beijing or Canton to express one's anger at Japan's "revisionism" than it is to express one's aspirations for true democracy in China. Even if the People's Republic worries about the scope of the movement, it has no one but itself to blame: in Communist regimes, nationalism always serves as the spare ideology to divert frustrations from their immediate target.
Nonetheless, the young Chinese who are demonstrating are not wrong to be alarmed. The incriminated history text is a reissue of a work that had already sustained an outcry upon its initial publication in 2001. Never is there any question of a Japanese "invasion" of China or Korea; the Nanking massacre is merely an "incident"; and the Calvary of "comfort women," those sex slaves in the service of the Imperial army, is never even mentioned.
Sixty years after the Second World War, Japan is unable to acknowledge its wrongs. No doubt a taste for self-criticism is not the primary character trait of our Japanese friends. Yet, in the modern world, international relations demand that each and every party take responsibility for its own past. Where would we be in Europe if Germany had not done so?
Is Prime Minister Koizumi only flattering Japanese nationalism each year when he insists on visiting the Shinto Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals are buried among the former Japanese combatants? In the absence of the indispensable pedagogical effort focusing on new generations, it's normal for the question to be asked.
This test of consciousness is all the more urgent in that Japan wants, rightly, to become a nation like any other, by breaking with the very pacifist constrictions of its 1947 Constitution. Even more than Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the dispatch of a Japanese contingent of over five hundred men to Iraq symbolizes the evolution underway: little by little, the self-defense forces are assuming the missions of a real army.
If Japan emerges this way from its previous reserve, it's because it fears the growth in power of China, which was presented for the first time in the last Defense White Book at the end of 2004 as "a potential military threat." For its part, Beijing can only be alarmed to see Tokyo share a "common strategic objective" with Washington in the Straits of Taiwan, as was officially announced during Condoleezza Rice's visit to Tokyo in February.
The intensity of the commercial exchanges between these two Far Eastern giants cannot disguise the diplomatic crisis. Each fears the other, without any real dialogue that could diminish tensions and avoid nationalistic one-upmanship. The dangers are mounting.
________________________________________
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.