March 20, 2002—Deconstructing the national debt means understanding the difference between GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and BFAP (Bush Fantasyland Accounting Principles).
According to BFAP, the figure for the publicly stated national debt is $5.65 trillion. When the national debt is deconstructed in terms of GAAP, however, you'll find that the accumulated national debt is closer to $14 trillion.
This figure can be calculated by plugging in debt (either current or future debt, which will have to paid) that is not included in the BFAP numbers. The $5.65 trillion number comes principally from the accumulated Social Security deficit of $3.2 trillion, combined with some provisions for the 3 percent non-marketable US Treasury notes that have been inserted into the other 43 public trust funds. They have made unrealistic projections regarding the so-called "mandated spending gaps," which are actually much higher than the figures they use.
Saturday, March 23, 2002
China has been taking advantage of the US war against terrorism to make sweeping arrests of its restive Muslim population in the far west, according to Amnesty International.
KABUL: They have been the stuff of nightmares for Russian troops and now US forces face the prospect of trying to combat Chechen fighters in Afghanistan who have thrown their lot in with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
"There are a hell of a lot of them and they sure know how to fight," one senior American officer said after the conclusion of the recent offensive Operation Anaconda against diehard fighters in eastern Paktia province.
The man who led the offensive said that a large proportion of the fighters who chose to fight to the death were non-Afghans.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "called them dead-enders," said US Major General Frank Hagenbeck. "They are left with no choice but to fight." The general said coalition forces had come across fighters from Uzbekistan and northwest China, while many Pakistanis are also thought to be fighting with the Al Qaeda and Taliban.
But Chechen separatists, who have been involved in a fierce war for independence from Russia for the past 29 months, appear to make up the largest contingent of Al Qaeda's foreign legion.
THE Army is being forced to slash its garrison in Kosovo by 75 per cent as the MoD tries to stay within its budget, defence sources said yesterday.
The number of troops based there will be reduced from 5,000 to 1,200 as the British brigade is replaced by an Anglo-French battle group.
Britain is also trying to withdraw its 1,300 troops from Bosnia but is having difficulty finding a country prepared to take over.
The reduction in Britain's presence in the Balkans is the latest in a series of "salami-slicing" cuts caused by underfunding of the defence budget by about £500 million.
More than 30 Afghans seized by American troops say they were kicked and abused at a US Army detention centre before being freed four days later.
US Central Command spokesman Major Ralph Mills says any injuries could have happened when the men were apprehended in last Sunday's raid.
The accounts of mistreatment are similar to those in February from another group seized on January 23.
"If they gave us all of Afghanistan now, this wouldn't make up for this insult," said one of the bruised and angry men, Fida Mohammad, 35.
DALLAS, March 22 — Enron Corp.’s board of directors had expected former chief executive Jeffery Skilling to protect the company in a series of off-the-books partnerships and was angered to learn the deals were mishandled, according to a published report. Meanwhile, lawmakers may issue subpoenas in an effort to force the Enron Corp. to disclose the names of investors in its numerous partnerships, a senator involved in Congress’ investigation said Friday.
MONTERREY, Mexico, March 20 — The world leaders who have gathered here to discuss how to fight poverty do not always see eye to eye on what works best. But many now agree that the force they once saw as a near panacea — globalization — has come up short.
Globalization, or the fast-paced growth of trade and cross-border investment, has done far less to raise the incomes of the world's poorest people than the leaders had hoped, many officials here say. The vast majority of people living in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East are no better off today than they were in 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall allowed capitalism to spread worldwide at a rapid rate.
Rather than an unstoppable force for development, globalization now seems more like an economic temptress, promising riches but often not delivering, in the view of many of the leaders at the United Nations conference in this Mexican city, an industrial center.
WASHINGTON -- Officials of Wall Street credit-rating agencies testified Wednesday that Enron executives -- including Jeffrey McMahon, now the company's president -- had purposely misled them as far back as 1999 in an effort to bolster the company's credit standing.
Analysts for Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Services, told a Senate panel that top Enron officials concealed key information that would have hurt the company's credit ratings.
"Day by day, it becomes ever clearer that Enron ... committed multiple acts of deceit and fraud," S&P's Ronald Barone told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
Although the agencies were quick to blame Enron, skeptical senators wanted to know why S&P, Moody's and Fitch Ratings were slow to downgrade Enron even as the company's stock was in free-fall.
Enron's credit ratings slid in October and November, but were not downgraded to "junk" status until Nov. 28. Enron filed for bankruptcy Dec. 2.
"You weren't as aggressive as you should have been," said committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.
For the first time in the Enron debacle, critics pointed at McMahon, who had been unscathed by the company's misfortunes and had risen to become its No. 2 executive.
February's $76 billion budget deficit means that, for the first five months of its current fiscal year, Washington is in the red to the tune of $69.4 billion. Last year at this time, it was nearly $26 billion in surplus.
By itself, this is no big deal. After all, the government's budget has been in the black each year since 1998.
However, the current fiscal year's slug of red ink pushes Washington up against its so-called borrowing limits, and herein lies the tale.
The government's debt outstanding at midweek totaled $5.94 trillion. Its borrowing limit, which is set by Congress, is $5.95 trillion -- only $10 billion higher.
SHAH-E KOT, AFGHANISTAN – The slate at the jagged edges of the cave, on the main road that marks the start of the now-famous Shah-e Kot Mountains, feathers in shards that can be easily plucked away.
It is difficult to fathom that some of the most-wanted terrorists on earth lurked inside caves of such seemingly brittle stone. But – perhaps like the strength of the Al Qaeda and Taliban – the caves are less breakable than they appear. Deeper into the mountainside, the rock gets harder. And this cave, like so many others, had a secret exit.
To Afghans who would like to plug the fugitives' endless escape routes, and Western analysts who hoped that US-led coalition forces would have had more success hunting down such a technologically inferior enemy, cave redoubts like this reveal much about the evolving strategy of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They also suggest that the allied forces may be skimming the surface of what the guerrilla movement has in store.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chanting and waving placards reading "Don't delete us" and "Where's Enron's Indictment?", thousands of Andersen workers poured out of the beleaguered accounting firm's Chicago headquarters on Friday and marched toward federal government offices to protest the firm's indictment.
"I like this, this is fun," said one bespectacled accountant bearing an orange button reading, "I am the real Andersen." A column of thousands of workers stretched over two city blocks toward the U.S. Justice Department (news - web sites)'s offices.
"It's a good day for us. It's been rough the last couple of weeks in particular, but we're all motivated and we're going to fight this," said Stephanie Arnold, hatless and smiling despite the sub-freezing cold.
"We may lose our jobs altogether," said Arnold, a five-year employee who works in marketing in Chicago, where Andersen is based with roughly 5,500 employees.
More Andersen auditing clients announced they were dropping the accounting firm on Friday, and some of Andersen's overseas partners defected to other firms.
Central America is in the grip of famine, and if President Bush mentions it when he visits El Salvador on Sunday, he will likely suggest that free trade is the solution.
Yet Bush's proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement is hardly going to remedy the worsening disaster in rural Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Unregulated markets are a large part of the reason why 700,000 Central Americans face starvation and nearly 1million more suffer serious food shortages.
Hardest hit are coffee plantation workers and maize farmers. Coffee prices have spiraled downward since the 1989 collapse of the International Coffee Agreement, which assigned countries production quotas. In the past few years, prices plummeted further with a surge in exports from Vietnam and Indonesia, where the World Bank encouraged expansion of coffee acreage. With the market glutted, many coffee farmers did not bother to harvest this year. The result has been evictions from plantation housing, increased migration to teeming slums and severe hunger among unemployed coffee workers.
The front page of USA Today is a piece of journalistic real estate the White House cares about deeply. With more than 2.3 million readers each weekday, the paper has a reach well beyond the elite dailies of the Cambridge-Manhattan-Washington corridor. Which is why veteran USA Today reporter Larry McQuillan found himself on the phone with the White House for several hours last Thursday.
His front-page story that day was about the administration's penchant for secrecy, and he fingered President Bush's senior aide Karen Hughes as the White House's number-one control freak. To illustrate this, McQuillan pointed out a curious development: "White House officials who have been invited to the White House Correspondents' Association [WHCA] black-tie dinner in May say they are required to notify Hughes' office. If an official receives multiple invitations, which is common, she decides which one he or she can accept." As White House aides harangued McQuillan throughout the day, picking apart the piece line by line, another USA Today reporter got a message from an administration official: The Bush aide wouldn't be able to attend the Correspondents' dinner with the paper after all.
Earlier this month, Army Secretary Thomas E. White and his wife flew to Colorado on an Army jet and closed on the sale of their three-story Aspen house, according to Army officials and sources in Colorado.
Army spokesman Larry Gottardi acknowledged that the Whites made the Aspen trip while the Army secretary was traveling on business to Seattle. Their travel, Gottardi said, was "official business and approved as such from start to finish."
He declined to explain the official purpose of the Seattle trip or what business White had in Aspen.
NEW YORK, March 22 -- Almost from the moment Enron Corp. declared bankruptcy in December, the businesses it owed money to have been feuding over how to divvy up the remains of the once-mighty Houston energy company. And now it's getting personal.
Just this week a former Enron energy-trading partner asked the judge in the case to disqualify the law firm for the creditors' committee, saying its attorneys had "myriad conflicts" because Enron and a number of Enron's major banks were clients.
EXCO Resources of Dallas said in court papers filed Tuesday that Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy was "quite possibly the worst choice" as creditors' counsel, with the possible exception of Vinson & Elkins. The Vinson firm was has been accused of failing to vigorously investigate the accounting issues that eventually led to Enron's collapse.
Congressional probes into Enron Corp. turned for the first time to the White House yesterday. A Senate committee issued subpoenas to the collapsed energy company and its accountant to see what role Enron had in creating the administration's energy policy.
The batch of 29 subpoenas significantly expands the Enron investigations in Congress to examine not only the firm's corporate failings but also its political contacts. The subpoenas add a new front in the battle to obtain information about the White House's energy task force; the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has sued the administration for task force records.
Yasser Arafat will be coming to next week's Arab summit in Beirut with his hands tied and a chain around his feet.
Incite violence, the Israelis have told him, and he may be refused permission to return to the West Bank and Gaza. Speak of peace, and he may be allowed home – on Israel's terms.
The Arab kings and presidents who wish to show their support for the Palestinian intifada are going to have a hard time squaring their demands for Palestinian struggle with Mr Arafat's role as Israel's "controller of terrorism''.
Friday, March 22, 2002
One of the Taliban commanders, whom on the condition of anonimity,
has told AL JAZEERA that Taliban leaders are having negotiations with
high - ranking U.S officials for the possible release of twenty U.S
soldiers (18 men and 2 women) which the Taliban have captured during
the recent operation ANACONDA in Gardez in eastern Afghanistan.
In a televised interview with AL JAZEERA at the afghan- pakistani
border, the Taliban commander, whom didn't show his face, said to AL
JAZEERA that the U.S is having talks with who ever is left of the
Taliban commanders for the release of those 20 POWs .
The Taliban commander also said that they would release the U.S POWs
only if the U.S government would release the Taliban and Al Qaeda
prisoners in Guantanamo. He also threatend to increase the scope of
the guerilla war which had started to oust the U.S forces from
Afghanistan.
He also assured that the US POWs are being treated in a very good
manner, that is according to the Islamic law on the treatment of
POWs, unlike the way that the Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners are
being treated at camp X- RAY.
The Taliban commander also talked about the huge loses the Americans
have had, and he also said that sixteen U.S aircrafts were downed as
a result of the Taliban and Al Qaeda fire, three of those aircrafts
are intact because they were captured after a ground battle.
When the commander was asked by the AL JAZEERA reporter about the
whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, he said that he
doesn't know where they are after they had split.
When three armed Chechens were detained in the Sverdlovsk region Thursday, one of them was carrying a pass allowing free access to the town of Lesnoi, where nuclear warheads are manufactured. Much to their surprise, investigators established that the pass was not a fake.
The Chechens were caught red-handed when they were trying to sell two Makarov guns for $1,500 each. The buyers were in fact operatives of the Sverdlovsk police department, who were fighting illegal arms possession.
The Chechens were caught red-handed when they were trying to sell two Makarov guns for $1,500 each.
When operatives searched the Chechens' homes, they found an impressive arsenal: a Kalashnikov with a silencer and special cartridges, eight grenades, 400 grams of explosives, detonators, remote-controlled explosive devices and cold steel. They also found 900 dollars, handfuls of raw emeralds, and a finished ruby weighing 20 grams. The finishing touch was Honor is More Valuable Than Life, a book written by Aslan Maskhadov.
The European Union is making plans to retaliate against President Bush’s recent imposition of steel tariffs by hitting the Republican Party where it hurts the most: at the ballot box.
THE EU IS preparing a list of U.S. imported products valued at $2.1 billion annually that could be hit with heavy tariffs. Among the items on the list: Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Tropicana orange juice, and textiles and steel products. Many of the targeted industries are concentrated in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, which Mr. Bush battled for in his narrow election victory in 2000. These states figure prominently in the White House’s effort to retain control of the House of Representatives in the fall elections.
The Bush tariffs, which took effect this week, apply to most imported steel but will hit European steel producers hardest of all. Mr. Bush said he will review the three-year tariff program after 18 months to assess its effectiveness in helping the U.S. steel industry’s efforts to restore profitability.
You've probably heard a lot of spooky tales about "the liberal media."
Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced news outlets that were offending the Nixon administration in the autumn of 1969, the specter has been much more often cited than sighted. "The liberal media" is largely an apparition -- but the epithet serves as an effective weapon, brandished against journalists who might confront social inequities and imbalances of power.
During the last few months, former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg's new book "Bias" has stoked the "liberal media" canard. His anecdote-filled book continues to benefit from enormous media exposure.
In interviews on major networks, Goldberg has emphasized his book's charge that American media outlets are typically in step with the biased practices he noticed at CBS News -- where "we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals."
At first we wondered if fumes from the high-octane debate on overhauling American energy policy might have overcome some members of the U.S. Senate.
After a full year of fulminating on the need for the nation to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, senators are poised to do nothing about it.
The two biggest components of the energy bill being debated in the Democrat-controlled Senate took divergent approaches to the problem. They were:
äThe long-term, demand approach, requiring carmakers to increase the average gas mileage of their new vehicles; and
äThe short-term, supply approach, letting oil companies drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other special, protected places.
Now it appears neither way will survive -- higher mileage standards are all but dead, and the drilling in ANWR isn't believed to have enough support to overcome a filibuster by its foes.
"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carré. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was chief economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life.
I "debriefed" Stiglitz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Instead of chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely behind the blue police cordons, the same as the nuns carrying a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS victims and the other "antiglobalization" protesters. The ultimate insider was now on the outside.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Republicans shut down three Senate committees Wednesday, two of which were considering Enron-related legislation, to retaliate against Democrats who voted down a federal appeals court nominee.
"Senate Republicans strongly believe that we should have an understanding on when President Bush's circuit court nominees, many of whom have been languishing in the Judiciary Committee for almost a year, will get hearings and be treated fairly," said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for Republican Leader Trent Lott. "We will continue to call attention to this issue."
Republicans halted three Democrat-controlled committees: Judiciary; Governmental Affairs; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
U.S.-Saudi rift
Opposition Saudi sources report that U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia are moving equipment to Qatar. The report is unconfirmed but intriguing. Washington has been planning such a move for more than a year while the Saudis allegedly are denying the United States permission to use bases in the country to attack Iraq.
If the report is true, then a major rift has opened between Washington and Riyadh.
The Washington, D.C.-based Saudi Institute cites sources alleging that they had contacted moving contractors who are negotiating with the U.S. government. The institute also cited witnesses who claimed to see U.S. military trucks moving away from Prince Sultan Air Base, south of Riyadh, toward the Qatari border.
Leaders of the U.S. Pacific and European commands said yesterday the war on terrorism has overtaxed troops and equipment, leaving dangerous shortages that ultimately could hurt Americans.
The commanders were asked whether they had enough forces to carry out all current operations as well as possible military action against Iraq, and their answers were "very troubling," said Rep. Ike Skelton, Missouri Democrat, who asked the question.
"We do not have adequate forces to carry out our missions for the Pacific if the operations in [Afghanistan] continue at their recent past and current pace," Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, commander in chief of the Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee.
Taliban and al-Qa'ida fighters have carried out an attack on American troops and British special forces at their base in eastern Afghanistan just days after the Pentagon claimed the enemy had been resoundingly defeated in the region.
Three allied Afghan soldiers were killed and an American soldier was injured in the sustained attack at the airfield in Khost, an area adjacent to the one where the Americans carried out their recent offensive.
The operation, codenamed Anaconda, had been described by General Tommy Franks, the US commander of the Afghan war, as an "unqualified and absolute success". Part of the Royal Marines-led British expeditionary force will be deployed in Khost, and the attack on the airbase has reinforced fears held by senior British officials that the United States has exaggerated its "success" and inflated the body count.
March 20, 2002 | Although it's been four years since Denis Halliday resigned from his post as head of the United Nations humanitarian program in Iraq in protest over what he called the West's "genocidal" sanctions, he is still very much a man with a mission.
After running the "oil-for-food" program, which uses Iraqi oil revenues to distribute basic food rations and medical aid to Iraqi civilians, Halliday turned his attention to spreading the word about sanctions-related suffering.
Despite Saddam Hussein's biochemical assaults on Iranian troops and his own Kurdish population in the 1980s, his invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990, his repeated threats against Israel and the U.S., and his decades-long commitment to building a secret doomsday arsenal, he now poses little threat to the world, according to Halliday. Halliday proposes a nonviolent strategy for resolving tensions between America and Iraq. In addition to catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, he says, an invasion would create long-term problems for the United States in an already volatile region.
On BBC TV's Room 101 on Monday, Alexei Sayle made an unusual selection for the scrapheap. Along with Cirque de Soleil and the abuse of disabled drivers' permits, the comedian also consigned to fiery oblivion the general public - on the grounds that they were useless, carping and never came up with anything positive.
I beg to differ. When it comes to politics, the public often get it exactly right. On the current debate on Iraq and America, for example, the electorate is bang on.
Look at yesterday's ICM/Guardian poll. A clear majority, 51%, oppose British backing for a US assault on Iraq, with only 35% in favour. (Intriguingly, the most hawkish are Labour voters, with 43% approving military action - a couple of points ahead of those hippy, peacenik pinkos who identify themselves as Conservatives.)
THE former commander of Nato forces in Europe fears that America, Britain and their allies could become embroiled in an unwinnable guerrilla war in Afghanistan.
Gen Wesley Clark said in an interview with The Telegraph that there were "worrisome signs" that the allies were drifting into a position similar to that which assailed Soviet forces after their invasion in 1979. "They won big victories to start with," he said. "It took a year or two for the opposition to build up."
His words will stoke the concern of MPs and others in Britain who fear that the deployment of 1,700 troops based around a Royal Marines commando unit will be the first step in an entanglement that will end in disaster.
Italian police say they are treating as credible an internet document which appears to be an admission by Red Brigades militants that they killed a senior Italian Government aide.
Marco Biagi, an adviser to the labour minister, was shot dead on Tuesday outside his home in central Bologna by two men on a motorcycle.
The 26-page statement says Mr Biagi, aged 52, was "executed" for his role in drawing up labour reforms, which it described as "regulation of the exploitation of salaried workers".
The assassination has sent shockwaves through Italy, raising fears of a resurgence of political violence, and prompting questions in parliament about the failure to provide Mr Biagi with police protection.
A total of 2,665 U.S. troops in stead of the 1,700 reportedly earlier, are going to the Philippines in April for the second phase of the Philippine-U.S. joint military exercises.
The second-phase exercises are set in the central of Luzon island in the north, the Philippine Daily Inquirer on-line news Thursday quoted Philippine Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes as saying.
The Armed Forces of the Philippine (AFP) spokesperson Edilberto Adan announced on Tuesday that he was expecting only 1,700 American soldiers to come in April for the joint exercises.
He said amphibious landing and field trainings, which will be held in the northern provinces of Nueva Ecija, Pampanga and Cavite, are going to involve about 2,100 Philippine troops.
A leading Israeli human rights group has accused the Israeli army of being "trigger-happy" in its operations in the Palestinian-controlled territories.
The B'Tselem organisation said that rules governing the army's use of live ammunition were dangerously vague and much of its use was unnecessary.
The group said the lack of clear rules of engagement had caused extensive injury to many Palestinians who were not involved in violence against Israel.
Yasser Arafat called for an immediate end to Palestinian attacks against civilians in Israel yesterday. The appeal was his fourth since the 18-month intifada began.
Speaking after a suicide bombing in West Jerusalem, the Palestinian leader said he would "take appropriate and immediate measure to put an end to such attacks".
In remarks that reflect intense pressure from Washington, Mr Arafat said he was committed to a truce to end the conflict, which has claimed more then 1,500 lives.
On BBC TV's Room 101 on Monday, Alexei Sayle made an unusual selection for the scrapheap. Along with Cirque de Soleil and the abuse of disabled drivers' permits, the comedian also consigned to fiery oblivion the general public - on the grounds that they were useless, carping and never came up with anything positive.
I beg to differ. When it comes to politics, the public often get it exactly right. On the current debate on Iraq and America, for example, the electorate is bang on.
Look at yesterday's ICM/Guardian poll. A clear majority, 51%, oppose British backing for a US assault on Iraq, with only 35% in favour. (Intriguingly, the most hawkish are Labour voters, with 43% approving military action - a couple of points ahead of those hippy, peacenik pinkos who identify themselves as Conservatives.)
Thursday, March 21, 2002
Heroism is typically thought a warrior virtue, and it is true that, in the absence of enough fanaticism or rage to make it unnecessary, "it indeed takes courage to fight implacable enemies with guns and bombs, given that they answer in kind".
In self-defence against malign aggression, or in the interests of principle, such courage would deserve the name of heroism. But all other fighting and killing, squabbling and destroying, never does. On the contrary, heroism is first and foremost the property of peace-makers. It takes infinitely greater courage to salvage a people or an epoch from conflict than to start or continue it. The outstanding figures of our time, among whom Nelson Mandela is the exemplar, are those who seek reconciliation, agreement, forgiveness - very milksop notions, no doubt, in the view of people who think it cleverer to let their guns do their thinking and talking.
Any academic who wants to learn about American anti-intellectualism has two ways to go. On the one hand, you can take the pastoral route, and delve into the problem as an intellectual--reading, in the quiet of your armchair, Hofstadter's classic dissertation, say, and/or Dan T. Carter's fine biography of George Wallace, and/or any other such enlightening work. Or you can drop the books, put on your goggles and your rubber boots, and venture forth into the endless shitstorm that is now our civic culture, and in that deluge try to make a reasonable argument. You do that, and you will quickly learn a lot--more, in fact, than you might pick up just by reading, and, perhaps, a lot more than you bargained for.
A key aide of George Bush, has been in England, helping Alastair Campbell to spin the war. That has meant five months with a close-up view of the UK press, and, he tells Donald Macintyre, it hasn't always been pretty
WASHINGTON - The talks last week between Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defense secretary, and Tang Yiau-ming, Taiwan's minister of national defense, marked the highest-level contacts between Washington and Taipei since diplomatic relations were severed in 1979.
They took place during a closed-door conference of US and Taiwanese defense officials organized by the US-Taiwan Business Council, and infuriated China.
On Sunday, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing summoned US Ambassador Clark Randt and expressed Beijing's "strong indignation and resolute opposition" to what it perceives as a US tilt toward Taiwan and a violation of its "one China" policy. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who also met Tang, countered in Washington that the sessions were mere "courtesy meetings".
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemned Thursday's suicide bombing in Jerusalem, promising to "put an end to such attacks" and work toward a cease-fire after 18 months of violence with Israel.
"We strongly condemn this military operation that took place in west Jerusalem today, especially since it was against innocent Israeli civilians," said a downcast Arafat, reading a statement at his desk beside a Palestinian flag. "We will take the appropriate and immediate measures to put an end to such attacks."
Thursday's suicide bombing, which killed two people and injured scores, was claimed by the Al Aqsa Brigades, a militia affiliated with Arafat's Fatah movement.
Arafat's statement fell short of the clear cease-fire call that the United States has demanded and which Israel has made a condition for lifting the travel ban on the Palestinian leader. That would enable him to attend next week's Arab summit in Beirut, Lebanon, at which Saudi Arabia is to table a regional peace plan.
Officials of the bankrupt fiber optics giant Global Crossing denied on Thursday that deceptive accounting practices were part of their company's financial collapse. "Global Crossing is no Enron," they told skeptical lawmakers.
"Some may see superficial similarities between Enron and Global Crossing," chief executive officer John Legere and chief financial officer Dan Cohrs said in a statement to a House Financial Services Committee panel.
Indeed, they noted that, like the energy trading corporation, Global Crossing had seen a collapse in its stock price, had had executive stock sales and had faced questions about accounting procedures and employee pension plans. The companies also shared the auditor Arthur Andersen.
What would happen if multinational media corporations were free to conglomerate and monopolize with even less regulation than Enron faced in the energy sector? Would they avoid getting too big because of the threat to democratic discourse? Or would they choose to maximize profits by crossing every boundary of communications technology to dominate what citizens see, hear and think?
WASHINGTON - First and foremost in our minds is the knowledge that for one day we are all Irish as we celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Among the multitudinous legends about Ireland's patron saint is the wonderful tale of how Bishop Patrick drove all of Ireland's snakes into the sea. Would that St. Patrick were living in the United States today, to rid our country of the contemporary snakes we seem to be harboring — spies.
With words and actions just begging for an intro of "once upon a time," 70 years ago many American intelligence operations were closed down on the orders of Secretary of State Henry Stimson. His rationale: "Gentlemen do not read each others' mail." My, how the world (or the definition of "gentleman") has changed.
Today there are spies not only in our capital but all over the country. There is a saying, born of bitter experience among American spy catchers, that "There may be friendly governments, but there are only hostile foreign intelligence agencies."
The Texas Attorney General's office asked the New York judge overseeing Enron Corp.'s bankruptcy to appoint an independent fee examiner to make sure attorneys representing the company submit reasonable bills.
Legal fees and expenses assessed by Enron's bankruptcy lawyers reached $11.7 million two months after the company filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on Dec. 2.
Jeff Boyd, deputy attorney general, said each dollar spent on such fees is a dollar less that can be paid to creditors. Enron owes the state about $70 million.
Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel, will lead the court challenge seeking to overturn large parts of the campaign finance bill passed by Congress.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, expected to be the lead plaintiff in the case, said Thursday that his legal team would be led by Starr, who gained national prominence in his pursuit of former President Clinton over the Whitewater land deal and the Monica Lewinsky case, and by First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams.
"This is a mission to preserve the fundamental constitutional freedom of all Americans to fully participate in our democracy," said McConnell, R-Ky.
The Senate on Wednesday passed and sent to President Bush the most far-reaching campaign finance legislation in the past quarter-century. It bans the hundreds of millions of dollars in unregulated "soft money" that corporations, unions and individuals give the national political parties and restricts in the final days before an election the use of soft money for "issue ads" that name a candidate, often with the purpose of attacking him.
The world’s biggest banks and multinational corporations have set up a shadowy system to secretly move trillions of dollars—a system that can be exploited by tax evaders, drug runners and even terrorists.
Ernest Backes exposed this dubious system and has launched a personal crusade for international oversight—earning him some high-powered and dangerous enemies.
by Lucy Komisar
n the tax haven of Luxembourg, a little-known outfit called Clearstream handles billions of dollars a year in stock and bond transfers for banks, investment companies and multinational corporations. But a former top official of this “clearinghouse” says Clearstream operates a secret bookkeeping system that allows its clients to hide the money that moves through their accounts.
In these days of global markets, individuals and companies may be buying stocks, bonds or derivatives from a seller who is halfway across the world. Clearinghouses like Clearstream keep track of the “paperwork” for the transactions. Banks with accounts in the clearinghouse use a debit and credit system and, at the end of the day, the accounts (minus “handling fees,” of course) are totaled up. The clearinghouse doesn’t actually send money anywhere, it just debits and credits its members’ accounts. It’s all very efficient. But the money involved is massive. Clearstream handles more than 80 million transactions a year, and claims to have securities on deposit valued at $6.5 trillion.
Into Philippines Fight
U.S. military advisers rushed into a firefight in the southern Philippines yesterday in an attempt to rescue a wounded Philippine soldier.
The Green Berets sped into the combat zone in a pickup truck after rebels ambushed an army patrol with grenades and small arms fire.
The clash, involving about 30 Philippine troops and guerrillas from the Abu Sayyaf rebel group, erupted as the Green Berets attended a town meeting about 2 miles away on the southern island of Basilan to discuss civilians' safety concerns.
Upon hearing that Lt. Lemuel Beduya, the platoon commander, had a serious head wound and was pinned down by enemy fire, along with another wounded soldier, the Green Berets piled into the truck and sped to the fighting. They were joined by government soldiers in another truck and an armored personnel carrier.
The initial rescue effort was blocked by heavy fire, but the two wounded Filipinos later were brought to safety by other Filipino soldiers.
"I thought my time had ... come," Beduya said later as his head wound was treated.
WASHINGTON - Republicans shut down three Senate committees yesterday, two of which were considering Enron-related legislation, to retaliate against Democrats who voted down a federal appeals court nominee.
''Senate Republicans strongly believe that we should have an understanding on when President Bush's circuit court nominees, many of whom have been languishing in the Judiciary Committee for almost a year, will get hearings and be treated fairly,'' said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for minority leader Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. ''We will continue to call attention to this issue.''
Republicans halted the proceedings of the Judiciary, Governmental Affairs, and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committees. The Judiciary Committee last week voted down Charles Pickering, a US Appeals Court nominee who is a friend of Lott. Since then, Republicans have threatened payback to the Democratic majority by slowing down Senate proceedings and blocking Democratic nominees.
The shutdown came before a vote could be taken in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on a bill that would limit employer stock in 401(k) plans. Republicans objected to Senate committees and hearings running more than two hours yesterday, forcing an end to the meeting. Another meeting was called for this morning.
''All they're doing is delaying the inevitable,'' said Jim Manley, a spokesman for committee chairman Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat.
GEORGE W. BUSH says he likes to put things in simple terms. Let's adopt his strategy and ask: Do Americans want to struggle to create a rich democracy, or are we going to roll over and accept a democracy for the rich?
Never has the question been placed in front of us more starkly. Let's run down some of the "highlights" of the Bush administration's first year:
Tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the most wealthy. Environmental regulation gutted in favor of "voluntary" efforts by corporations. An obsession with an unnecessary and unworkable national missile defense, which will defend little except the profits of the weapons industry. An energy policy plotted with the companies that will profit, through a consultation process the administration wants to keep secret.
Could there be a pattern here? Could it be that politicians, who are supposed to represent we the people, sometimes pursue agendas that benefit only the few people and corporations with the resources to put (and keep) them in power?
Could the obvious be true - that a country with an economy dominated by large corporations will find itself stuck with a politics dominated by those same corporations - and that ordinary people don't fare very well in such a system?
SARASOTA -- A businessman indicted for making pipes commonly used by marijuana smokers won an award from the National Republican Congressional Committee and was in the running Republican of the Year.
Chris Hill, 30, of Sarasota, was named one of the 500 businessmen of 2001 last week, making him a candidate for the party's top honor. He was also an honorary member of the committee's business advisory council, which made him a candidate for the Businessman of the Year award.
But Hill is facing up to 20 years in prison, charged by federal prosecutors in Iowa with distributing drug paraphernalia. Federal agents say they found his pipes when they raided three Iowa smoke shops.
When the moment finally arrived yesterday for the Senate to consider the bill known alternately as Shays-Meehan and McCain-Feingold, it passed so easily you would hardly know what the fuss had been about. Yet approval of the biggest election reform in a generation, by a vote to 60 to 40, had just overcome what seemed only six months ago to be impossible odds. Congratulations were heard, and merited, all across the Capitol. But a few more steps remain. President Bush must sign the bill. The courts must uphold its constitutionality. And the Federal Election Commission, which helped gut existing campaign finance laws, must vigorously enforce the new rules.
The intifada, which began in at the start of October 2000, has cost Israel $2.4 billion in revenue for the period October 2000 to December 2001. The main cause for the losses is the $2.1 billion decrease in revenue from tourism.
There was a 52 percent drop in the number of tourists visiting Israel between September 2001 and January 2002, as compared to the year before. From September 2001 to December 2001, following the September 11 attacks, the number of tourists who visited Israel declined to 33 percent of the number for the same period in 1999.
A report issued by the Bank of Israel's monitoring department, included in the "2001 Bank of Israel report," shows that between October 2000 and December 2001, wage costs for Palestinian workers declined by $1.1 billion. At the end of 2001, practically no money was spent on salaries for Palestinian workers in Israel. This decline was partially countered by $380 million in wage costs to foreign workers.
The number of Palestinian workers has dropped from an average of 124,000 in the third quarter of 2000, to only 4,000 in the last two quarters of 2001.
A car bomb exploded outside the US embassy in Lima late last night, killing at least eight people and injuring 30 more, officials have said. The blast comes three days ahead of a visit by the US president, George Bush.
At least four bodies could be seen in the rubble, including a boy wearing roller skates, radio reports said.
A state department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that no American citizens were hurt in the explosion. The official declined to comment further.
Arab League secretary Amr Moussa called the USA for adoption of Saudi’s Mideast settlement plan and confirmed the Arab nations’ opinion that an offensive in Iraq would spoil the situation in the region. Moussa in the interview to Corriere della Sera, Italian newspaper, said he believed “the Arab summit in Beirut would develop a distinct suggestion”.
The Arab League secretary also touched upon the Palestine-Israeli conflict and said, Ariel Sharon would not be able to improve the situation independently, as his force policy had turned out to be a failure.
Amr Moussa thinks, “if a Palestinian state with the capital in Eastern Jerusalem is created, and refugee problem is discussed, the rest problems will be easily settled as well.” Yasser Arafat’s participation is essential for the talks.
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA – At the height of the cold war, US forces maintained a hair-trigger alert along a 17-mile fence line to defend the soil of this military base against communist encroachment.
Now, at the height of a different kind of war, US government lawyers are arguing that Guantanamo isn't American at all, that it really belongs to Cuba.
It is more than just an esoteric debate about an open-ended 1903 lease agreement with Cuba establishing Guantanamo as a US coaling station. Rather, it goes to the heart of the Bush administration's effort to convert a portion of this dusty naval base into a terrorist penal colony beyond the reach of US laws and constitutional protections.
THE Royal Marines heading for Afghanistan face a protracted guerrilla war as al-Qaeda and Taleban forces begin to adopt classic, pro-active insurgency tactics, American and British defence sources said yesterday.
Vice-Admiral Thomas Wilson, director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, said that the return of warmer weather in Afghanistan would increase the likelihood of attacks on the US-led coalition forces.
US troops at Khost airfield were attacked early yesterday by al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters armed with rocketpropelled grenades, mortars and machineguns. The airfield is only 45 miles east of the Shah-i Kot valley in Paktia province, where a US-led force has just completed Operation Anaconda after 17 days of fighting. An American soldier was wounded in the arm and three Afghans were said to have been killed.
The United States plans to buy 18,000 Russian air-to-air missiles for its F-15 and F/A-18 fighters, an official from the Russian manufacturer Vympel, a partner of US aircraft maker Boeing, said on Tuesday quoted by Interfax-AVN.
According to the designer, Gennady Sokolovsky, the RVV-AE missiles will be installed on "fighters sold abroad" because US legislation does not allow imported weaponry to be installed on equipment used by the American military.
"After September 11, Boeing decided to return to projects we have discussed for several years. We will provide radars for these missiles," said the director of the Russian agency for radio-electronic military systems, Vladimir Simonov.
WASHINGTON, March 19 — After months of searching the bomb-ravaged wreckage of terrorist training camps and other sites in Afghanistan, investigators have concluded that while Al Qaeda researched chemical and biological weapons there is no indication that it acquired or produced them, government officials say.
Soil samples, swabs and other chemical tests have so far turned up no evidence of anthrax or other materials that would make chemical or biological weapons, the officials said. Testing is continuing.
WASHINGTON Senior Bush administration officials have backed off claims that an Al Qaeda militant in custody in Sudan is a high-ranking operative on President George W. Bush's list of most-wanted international terrorists.
The officials said the prisoner was not Abu Anas Liby, a close associate of Osama bin Laden who is wanted in connection with the bombings in 1998 of two U.S. embassies in Africa and an assassination attempt in 1995 against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, as reported Tuesday in The Washington Post and Wednesday in the International Herald Tribune.
Officials described the jailed Qaeda member as "moderately high up" in the network's leadership, but would not disclose his name. They would only confirm that he was not Liby.
One official who on Monday identified the man held in Sudan as Liby said Tuesday that he had been wrong about the name. "They sound alike," the official said.
A crucial meeting of Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs has ended with no apparent progress on implementing a ceasefire.
The latest talks came as US Vice-President Dick Cheney wound up a tour of the region without meeting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who remains confined to the West Bank town of Ramallah.
An Israeli Defence Ministry spokesman said another security meeting with the Palestinians would be held on Thursday or Friday.
Whole Truth On Enron
More than half of Americans believe that members of the Bush administration hiding something on Enron, while just 17% believe they are telling the whole truth. And 67% said they believe contributions to members of Congress by Enron and its execs make it difficult for Congress to conduct a fair investigation into the collapse of the energy firm.
The Big Secret might, however, be that the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew during the summer of 2001 that the largest bankruptcy in history was imminent? Or it might be that Enron and the White House were working closely with the Taliban only weeks before the Sept. 11 attack. Was a deal in Afghanistan part of a desperate last-ditch "end run" to bail out Enron? Here's a tip for Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors: Start by looking at the India deal. Closely.
A recession was supposed to rescue the Democrats in next November's midterm election. Even if they had little else, Democratic strategists expected, they could bash Bush for a weak economy. But the recession evidently is over almost before it began, and it's not even April. The unemployment rate has declined for two straight months and may not reach 6 percent. Economic growth has turned positive. Other standard economic indicators -- inventories, consumer spending, factory orders, and so on -- suggest an economy in recovery. This surprising turn raises two questions: First, is the recovery real and durable? And second, what does this do to the Democrats? Seemingly, they are stuck with an unelected Republican president who had the luck first to stumble into a security crisis that allowed him to impersonate Churchill, and then into a quick economic turnaround for which he can credit his Reaganesque tax cut.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rushed to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for closed-door meetings with House Republicans to secure their support for the president's defense budget, which was jeopardized by GOP objections to White House demands for $10 billion in defense spending the president -- rather than Congress -- would control.
"They want a $10 billion slush fund and they're not ever going to get that," said one senior House aide, referring to the White House request for $10 billion for ongoing war expenses. "The leadership is in complete agreement that it has to be understood that Congress will decide how to spend that money. Even in war, the administration can't expect to be given a $10 billion honey pot."
WASHINGTON, March 20 — Wrapping up a six-year investigation by three prosecutors, Independent Counsel Robert Ray concluded in his final Whitewater report that the land venture benefited from criminal transactions but that there was “insufficient evidence” to prove that former President Clinton or his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, broke any laws.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Landmark legislation to reduce the influence of money in U.S. politics won final congressional approval on Wednesday, ending a seven-year struggle on Capitol Hill and drawing a quick pledge from President Bush (news - web sites) that he will sign it into law.
The Senate passed the legislation, approved five weeks ago by the House of Representatives, on a 60-40 vote.
Opponents promptly shifted attention to the courts where they vow to challenge the largely Democratic-backed bill on grounds it would violate constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech.
Washington: The United States Air Force has discovered cracks on the tail ends of most of its B-2 stealth bombers, raising questions about the problem-prone aircraft's long-term future.
Pentagon officials said cracks have been found on the rear sections of 16 of the air force's 21 long-range bombers, the most expensive aircraft in the world.
The cracks, which ranged from a couple of centimetres to more than 20 cm long, were all on titanium plates behind the jets' engine exhausts.
The disclosure is a setback for a group of politicians and military officials who have been pushing the Pentagon to buy more of the aircraft, which have been effective in attacking distant targets with precise bombs.
The B-2's manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, had offered to build 40 more of the aircraft at a price of $US735million ($1.4billion) each, a significant reduction from the $US2.2billion per plane tag of the existing fleet.
WASHINGTON — Armed with evidence that al-Qaeda members have fled from Afghanistan to Indonesia, Bush administration officials are pressing to get U.S. forces into the giant archipelago.
But the administration faces opposition from an Indonesian government fearful of rising anger among its 200 million Muslims, and a U.S. Congress that severed ties to the Indonesian military in 1999.
Intelligence sources say dozens of al-Qaeda operatives have found safe haven in the world's most populous Muslim nation, which consists of 17,000 islands and 34,000 miles of coastline. Some have come by air, but most have sneaked into Pakistan, then traveled several thousand miles in fishing boats from Arabian Sea ports, the sources say.
The story of Israel’s underground apparatus in the US, and the secret war conducted against the US on our own soil, has been covered here on Antiwar.com since late November, 2001. At that time, I noted a story in the Washington Post reporting the arrest of some 60 Israelis immediately after 9/11. As government officials explained to the immigration judges, they were being held because they were "of special interest" to the feds – putting them in the same category as hundreds of mostly Arab men rounded up since the attacks.
Wednesday, March 20, 2002
March 17, 2002—Let's face it: George Bush's "approval rating" polls are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. The few remaining media "house liberals," such as Bill Press, Mark Shields or Al Hunt, can scarcely utter more than a few sentences without mentioning Bush's alleged "approval in the polls." Those polls constrain political discourse and intimidate the opposition. If their impact is to be mitigated, they must be addressed directly.
So what are we to make of Bush's alleged 80+ percent "approval rating." Is it fact or fiction? How much credence should we give to the polls. Consider, in turn, the cases for "fact" and then for "fiction."
TBILISI, Georgia -- Like his grandfather, his father and both his uncles before him, Paata Vakhtangishvili is a pilot. But whereas the elder Vakhtangishvilis served in the Red Army and swore their allegiance to Moscow, Paata is part of independent Georgia's armed forces.
"It makes me proud to be able to serve my own country," Paata shouts above the noise of a helicopter taking off behind us at the Alexeyevka air base just outside Tbilisi. "The trouble is our army isn't very good."
All that is changing. Two years ago, Paata joined 29 other budding pilots from Georgia at a boot camp in Alabama as part of a military aid program sponsored by the United States.
"We spent 10 months learning English and eight months learning how to fly American helicopters," he said. Last month the United States donated eight Iroquois helicopters to Georgia to supplement its aging Soviet stock.
When Paata left school, his friends thought he was crazy to want to join the air force. Now, five years later, most of them are only just managing to scrape together a living, and Paata says they are sorry they didn't think of the air force themselves.
It's the biggest comeback of the millennium to date: nuclear weapons.
Only this isn't your parents' nuclear winter. It's a whole new one, as is made clear in a classified Pentagon report leaked last week detailing the Bush administration's willingness to significantly lower the threshold for going nuclear. Apparently the bar has now been set at "in the event of surprising military developments." But as recent events in the Shah-i-Kot Valley proved, there are rarely any other kind. So this pretty much means "at the will of the president."
Last week also saw the release of a report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) that details how the Pentagon, two major military contractors, TRW and Boeing, and a team of high-powered MIT scientists fabricated the success of the nation's first missile defense test -- turning an embarrassing failure into a phony triumph.
Karl Rove's loyalty police should be on deep orange alert, if not hot pink. There is a sleeper cell operating in the White House.
This tale begins with Joseph Shattan, who penned an article titled "Bush's Blunder" for National Review Online on Oct. 15. Bush's endorsement of a Palestinian state confirmed "America's cowardice and corruption" to Middle Easterners, he wrote. "Thanks entirely to the president and his team . . . the campaign to defeat the Islamist challenge has gotten off to a singularly inauspicious start."
And what is Shattan doing now? Well, he's about to begin a new job -- as a White House speechwriter. The appointment is all the more intriguing because Shattan recently had been recruited as a speechwriter for the Energy Department. His hiring was vetoed by the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, which cited the heretical article.
An international press organisation has denounced the increase of violence against journalists and new restrictions on the media in many countries in the Americas.
A report by the Inter-American Press Association says the situation has worsened in countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Haiti with more cases of intimidation, kidnappings and killings of media workers.
Most successful swindles come with a bribe. Certainly the greatest swindle of modern times - the pensions racket of the late 1980s and early 1990s - could never have worked without a big bribe from the government. Soon after the big Tory victory in 1983, a gang of tightly knit Thatcherites, closely connected to the privately financed University of Buckingham and the banks, decided on a big push for private enterprise in the field of old age pensions. These men were offended by what they regarded as the "crypto-socialist" combination of state and occupational pension schemes. They campaigned for "portable pensions" - a dream world in which working people could go through life reinforced with their own personal pension bought individually with their own money to the profit of a bank or an insurance company.
NEW YORK, March 18 — Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Ayman Zawahiri, and Taliban commander Saif Rahman Mansour, among many other key U.S. targets, are still at large. Al-Qaida forces are demonstrating surprising resilience in the field and appear to be regrouping in Pakistan. Violence is escalating in the Middle East. Our “homeland” remains woefully unprepared for another terrorist attack, which the government continues to assure us is likely. Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney is in the middle of an 11-nation Middle East tour, trying and failing to round up support for a military action against Iraq. President Bush, however, remains undeterred. “We are going to deal with him,” he promises of Saddam Hussein, “All options are on the table.”
Thanks to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, we now know much more about the contents of the Bush administration's secret "Nuclear Posture Review." But it's not a pretty sight. In essence, America's undue fascination with dropping the bomb on somebody became further unhinged in the wake of Sept. 11. Which is bad news indeed. For, as Joseph Gerson wrote before Sept. 11, "on more than 20 occasions since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and at least 5 times since the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents have prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war during international crises and wars."
Notwithstanding the Bush administration's comforting public statements about reducing our nuclear arsenal, we now know that the President and the Pentagon are taking steps to be able to explode nuclear weapons: (1) against targets impervious to conventional weapons, (2) in retaliation for an attack using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and (3) "in the event of surprising military developments." Seven countries - China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Syria - have been listed as potential recipients of such explosions.
WASHINGTON - Senior senators in both political parties put the Bush administration on notice Tuesday that they expect it to consult Congress before deciding to launch a U.S. military operation to unseat Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Senate Armed Services Committee members delivered the stern message to CIA Director George Tenet during a hearing on the intelligence community's latest assessment of leading threats to U.S. security.
The senators' comments underscored growing concern inside Congress, within the uniformed U.S. military, and among America's allies in Europe and the Arab world about the potential risks, costs and scope of Bush's global war on terrorism. Especially worrisome is Bush's apparent determination to topple Saddam, which could embroil U.S. forces in a major war in a hostile region, with unpredictable consequences.
The panel's top Republican, Sen. John Warner of Virginia, told Tenet that the Bush administration has not yet answered critical questions about its plans for Iraq, particularly the impact of Saddam's ouster on regional and U.S. security.
Tuesday, March 19, 2002 - First we learned the Denver police have secret files on more than 3,200 people and 250 organizations in the city. Then we found out they were surreptitiously videotaping public demonstrations.
But now the cops have really gone too far. The Denver police apparently have started surveilling ladies who lunch.
Even during wartime, you have to admit, this is a bit extreme.
It all started on Feb. 8.
Kim Sayers had been upset about the Enron scandal and several Bush administration policies, so when she heard that the president would be speaking at the Convention Center that day, she decided it was a good time to exercise her First Amendment rights.
She called a friend, and they prepared some placards and planned to picket the event. One sign said, "Enronomics: How the U.S. budget got Layed." Another said, "W budget + Enronomics = fuzzy math." The third said, "He wasn't elected Sept. 11 either."
LOS ANGELES, March 19 — The Bush administration, under pressure from lawsuits by real estate developers, is urging federal judges to roll back legal protections for nearly two dozen populations of endangered species around the country.
In an effort to resolve as many as a dozen cases against them, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, two agencies that enforce the Endangered Species Act, are asking federal courts in California to rescind millions of acres of protected habitat for whipsnakes in the state's northern grasslands, rare birds in the scrublands to the south, fairy shrimp in shallow pools along the coast and salmon among the rivers, estuaries and shorelines of four Western states.
The administration is also questioning whether to preserve the "critical habitat" designations that safeguard millions of acres for about 10 other endangered species, from the Mexican spotted owl to the California red-legged frog, signaling a widespread shift in environmental policy that has consoled developers and incensed environmentalists.
JERUSALEM, March 19 -- Vice President Cheney said today he would be willing to return to the Middle East as early as next week to meet Yasser Arafat if the Palestinian leader takes steps to calm the violence in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
A meeting between Cheney and Arafat -- which Cheney avoided during his two-day visit here -- would make the vice president the highest-ranking Bush administration official to meet the longtime Palestinian leader and cast him into the role of Middle East peacemaker that he has long avoided.
An ongoing source of frustration and anger for many Americans is the lack of support the war on terrorism has received abroad. Other nations are considerably less enthusiastic about our use of "daisy cutter" and "thermobaric" bombs than we think they should be. Why is that?
One reason is their media. Stories alleging imperial and commercial motives for the war on terrorism are rife.
Outside this country, there is a widespread belief that U.S. military deployments in Central Asia mostly are about oil.
An article in the Guardian of London headlined, "A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the U.S. an Afghan route for Caspian oil," foreshadowed the kind of skeptical coverage the U.S. war now receives in many countries.
"The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism," wrote author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, "but it may also be a late colonial adventure."
He wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to build "oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea." He cited Ahmed Rashid's authoritative book "Taliban, Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" as a source for this information.
March 19, 2002 (Political Sanity/APJP) -- Let's begin our examination of the real Reagan Legacy by taking a look at myth number one: Democrats dominated Congress all through Reagan's terms, and called all his budgets Dead On Arrival.
That's numerically and historically false. Reagan's people shoved his program through the Congress during the early Reagan years. James A. Baker, David Stockman and other Reaganites ran roughshod over Tip O'Neill and the divided Democrats in the House and Senate, and won every critical vote. This is because of the GOP majority in the Senate and the GOP-"Boll Weevil" (or "Dixiecrat") coalition in the House. Phil Gramm was a House Democrat at the time, and he even sponsored the most important Reagan budgets.
Only after the huge Reagan recession -- made worse by utterly failed Reagan "Voodoo Economics" - did Democrats regain some control in Congress. They halted some Reagan initiatives, but couldn't do much on their own. That was a time of gridlock.
Six years into Reagan's presidency, Democrats retook the Senate, and began to reverse some of Reagan's horrendous policies. By that time, Reaganomics had "accomplished" quite a bit: doubled the national debt, caused the S&L crisis, and nearly wrecked the financial system.
DENVER — The local government here officially threw its lot in with Portland, Ore. and a handful of other municipalities around the country, passing a resolution Monday night discouraging police from enforcing new anti-terror legislation if doing so would interfere with peoples’ civil rights.
A major international espionage saga is unfolding across the United States, with some of its roots right here in the Atlanta area. It's been pretty hush-hush so far, largely because the implications could be a major embarrassment for the government.
The spy story is even more touchy because it isn't Saddam, Fidel, Osama or even what passes nowadays for the KGB spying on America -- but our "friend" in the war against "evil," Israel.
The basis of the spy allegations is a 60-page document -- a compilation of field reports by Drug Enforcement Administration agents and other U.S. law enforcement officials.
Creative Loafing last week obtained a copy of the report from intelligence sources with long-term contacts among both Israeli and American agencies. The government has attempted to deflect attention from earlier leaks about the spy scandal. However, while declining to confirm or deny the authenticity of the document, a spokesman for the DEA, William Glaspy, did acknowledge that the agency had received many reports of the nature described in the 60 pages.
GENEVA (Reuters) - U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson Tuesday blamed outlawed paramilitary groups for an upsurge in killings, kidnappings and torture in Colombia, where the government has been fighting leftist rebels for decades.
Calling the deterioration in the human rights situation ''grave, massive and systematic,'' Robinson urged the government to act against the right-wing paramilitaries who are often suspected of having links to security forces.
``Unfortunately, throughout 2001 there was a significant deterioration in the human rights situation,'' Robinson said in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, whose 53 member states are holding their annual session in Geneva.
``The activities of paramilitary groups constituted the main cause of these violations and the state cannot ignore its responsibilities,'' she added.
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Sen. Pat Roberts is a Marine veteran, a knowledgeable member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a loyal conservative Republican. Accordingly, it is hard for him to take issue with what Bush said last week. But as a blunt-spoken Kansan and a patriotic American, Roberts feels constrained to express concern.
''Why are we rattling the cage so much?'' asked Roberts, posing a question that might be asked at the Dodge City ''coffee klatch'' in his hometown. He was stunned by President Bush's remarkable Wednesday news conference, which included threats of imminent attack against Iraq and did not rule out using tactical nuclear weapons. As a senior GOP member of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities subcommittee, Roberts knows of no change in Saddam Hussein's military posture to warrant the president's stance. ''I have a lot of questions,'' he told me.
Roberts is not alone, though few other senators dare speak out. One who does is Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, another conservative Republican and a veteran of combat in Vietnam. As a Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, he has listened to foreign leaders alarmed by Bush's comments. ''This kind of rhetoric, I think, is dangerous,'' Hagel told me, ''because it does put us in a position where you have to take action or you're going to look like you're bluffing and lose your credibility.''
When Bush faced reporters in a formal news conference for the first time in five months Wednesday afternoon, Vice President Cheney was on a whirlwind international mission, presumably testing allied reaction to U.S. military action against Saddam. Still, nobody expected the president's remarkable posture.
Asked about published reports that the United States is considering the use of low-yield nuclear weapons against rogue nations, Bush replied that ''we've got all our options on the table.'' In political talk, that is a ''yes.'' When he was later asked about military action, the president used identical language: ''All options are on the table.'' That raised the possibility of a nuclear attack on Baghdad.
Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter
Scott Ritter
The controversial former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq says Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are largely disarmed, the "Iraqi threat" is built on a framework of lies and President Bush has betrayed the American people.- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Asla Aydintasbas
March 19, 2002 | During the Gulf War, Scott Ritter, then a junior military intelligence analyst, picked a fight with his boss. He filed one report after another challenging Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's claims about the number of destroyed Iraqi Scud missiles. We cannot confirm these kills, Ritter reported, much to Schwarzkopf's bewilderment. Despite pressure from the top, Ritter, a Marine captain from a military family, held his ground, challenging his superiors and the establishment.
That was just a warm-up for the man the New York Times called "the most famous renegade Marine officer since Oliver North."
In the years since, Ritter, who was chief inspector of the United Nations Special Commission to disarm Iraq (UNSCOM) until he abruptly resigned in 1998, has waged two battles -- the first with Saddam Hussein, the second with the government of the United States.
As a weapons inspector, Ritter was Baghdad's bête-noire, working with single-minded -- some said overreaching -- zeal to ferret out Iraq's concealed weapons of mass destruction. In 1997, the Iraqi government accused him of being a spy and refused to let him into sensitive facilities.
In 1998, inspections by Ritter and his teams resulted in the most serious confrontation between Iraq and the United Nations since the Gulf War. The U.S. publicly stood by Ritter, but privately tried to tone down the confrontational nature of the inspections. Saddam expelled UNSCOM; Ritter, who was being investigated by the FBI on charges that he was a spy for Israel, quit in protest over what he described as Washington's refusal to confront Saddam. (Many believe he was forced out of his post because the UNSCOM thought the U.S. had too much influence over it.) The United States ended up staging Operation Desert Fox, the largest military offensive against Iraq since the Gulf War.
Out of the intelligence game, Ritter became a vocal critic of the Clinton administration's policy on Iraq. There was too much pretense, too much infiltration of UNSCOM by the CIA, no real effort to enforce the inspections regime, he charged. He became a nuisance for Washington and a blessing for Republican hawks. During 1998 testimony before Congress, Ritter was hailed as a "true American hero."
But in 1999, Ritter confounded get-Saddam hawks who thought he was in their camp when he published "Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem -- Once and for All." In it, Ritter repeated his charge that UNSCOM's mission had ultimately been compromised by Washington's use of the inspections to spy on Saddam. But the bombshells were his assertion that Iraq was no longer a military threat and his call for the U.S. to quickly give Iraq a clean bill of health and lift its harsh sanctions, which he asserted were killing thousands of innocent Iraqi children. His solution: a Marshall plan to rebuild the country.
Ritter seems to have completely reversed himself regarding Iraq's ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In 1998 he warned a joint hearing of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees that "Iraq will be able to reconstitute the entirety of its former nuclear, chemical and ballistic missile delivery system capabilities within a period of six months." And in a December 1998 article for the New Republic, Ritter stated, "Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed." Yet he now says Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are largely dismantled and pose little or no threat.
His turnaround has caused consternation, to say the least, among many of his former colleagues and current critics. "I have no idea what has overtaken him," his former boss Richard Butler said. On another occasion, Butler said, "I'll say this about Scott, either he's misleading the public now, or he misled me then." Ritter, however, insists he has been saying the same thing all along -- people just paid attention to what fit their political agendas.
In a documentary, "In Shifting Sands," which he describes as chronicling the weapons inspection process and attempting to "de-demonize" Iraq, Ritter makes the explosive charge that in 1998, Butler told him to deliberately provoke a confrontation with Baghdad as a pretext for a U.S. bombing campaign. Butler has vehemently denied the charge. The conservative Weekly Standard attacked Ritter and the film, pointing out that Ritter was allowed back into Iraq with approval of the Iraqi government to make the film. "U.S. intelligence officials and arms control advocates say Ritter has been played -- perhaps unwittingly -- by Saddam Hussein," the Standard reporter argued. "'If you're Scott Ritter,' says one arms expert, 'the former "cowboy" weapons inspector, kicked out by Saddam Hussein, you're not going to get back into Iraq unless Saddam Hussein invites you and wants you there.'"
Ritter, meanwhile, has denied that there's any evidence connecting Saddam to al-Qaida -- as writers such as the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg and the New York Times' William Safire charge. And with Washington beating war drums against Iraq, it's not surprising that few inside the Bush administration are in a mood to listen to a former arms inspector whose views on Saddam's capacity to inflict mayhem appear to have experienced a 180-degree turn. But Ritter, a Republican who appears regularly on TV, is carrying on with his crusade to warn America against what he describes as a dangerous hard-line obsession with removing what he sees as a defanged old dictator. Salon spoke with him late last week.
When you resigned from your position as the chief arms inspector for Iraq, you were hailed as "the American hero." What made you write your book, which in the end cost you the support of many?
If I kept silent about this, that would be a lie. I am a Marine Corps officer. We never operate outside our code of honor and integrity. The truth is paramount. This is not a nation that should be building on a body of lies. As the inconsistencies of consecutive American administrations' policies on Iraq start to emerge, my position is starting to become recognized as a sound position. People start to recognize that much of what the U.S. has done has been outside the international law, outside the framework of United Nations Security Council resolutions, that Washington purports to support.
On the other hand, according to polls, over 60 percent of Americans are willing to go to war with Iraq.
I don't care about polls -- they are easily manipulated. I don't care that 75 to 80 percent of Americans want to go to war with Iraq, that's not justification for going to war with Iraq. That's why we have laws in this land that prevent mob rule by people storming to the town hall and demanding that somebody be hanged. We should allow the due process [to work] in dealing with Iraq and all the facts to be placed on the table. But the facts are inconvenient for politicians who are pushing for war.
The argument from those who push for action against Saddam Hussein, including some high-level government officials, is that Iraq, with all its weapons, poses a serious threat. Are you saying they are lying?
Dr. [Paul] Pillar, the national intelligence officer [for Near East and South Asia] for the CIA, gave a speech at Johns Hopkins two weeks ago and said Iraq does not pose a threat to the United States, especially on a one-on-one basis, that warrants the use of military power in such naked fashion. If we act in the way the Bush administration wants us to act, that would put us outside of the international law, outside the U.N. charter and on a shortlist of countries that include North Korea when it invaded South Korea and, sadly, Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. That's not a list I want my country on.
Unilateralism is a term [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld endorse. They are the unilateralists -- they believe the United States has a unique position in world history. We are the beacon which the world will follow. We have a moral obligation to lead, they say, and if we fail to lead, the world will devolve into chaos and anarchy. This allows them to say things about Iraq. When people bring up that there is no international support, they say, "They will support us once we begin or once they see we are serious." Well, maybe, and maybe not. But what I do know is that the coalition we put together to fight the war in Afghanistan is a legitimate coalition. When asked about what justification we have to go after Saddam, Richard Perle [chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon] cites "self-defense." That is, Saddam's continued existence is a threat to the U.S. because of weapons of mass destruction and because Saddam might take these weapons and give them to terrorists. Although nothing in the history of past Iraqi actions suggest this. It is pure fabrication, but that is the basis around which Perle, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are working.
It's hard to imagine Iraq as a harmless little country. In the '80s it attacked Iran, turned on the Kurds, then turned around and invaded Kuwait -- not to mention being a regional bully all along.
Saddam Hussein is a man who believes in his own version of regional hegemony. But we have to deal with facts. What is the Iraq of 2002? It has a pathetic army, a pathetic air force and an economy in tatters, destroyed by misuse, sanctions and the military. Its social infrastructure has been destroyed. It cannot project the kind of irresponsible behavior that happened in 1990. Iraq cannot project power. Economic sanctions have been responsible for the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis. The devastation wrought on Iraq means that once Iraq can reconstitute its economy, there is a real chance of creating a new Iraq, a new social identity and a national identity built upon the concepts of economic stability -- even if Saddam Hussein stays in power. The new reality in Iraq will focus on rebuilding the Iraqi economy.
This sounds like a fantasy. You know that no American president could suggest a rekindling of relations with Saddam, let alone lifting the sanctions, or the kind of Marshall Plan you are advocating.
That could eventually change. George Bush and his inner circle have betrayed the American people since 9/11. They are justified in their war on terror -- we are obligated to do this -- but they failed by taking political advantage of the upsurge of patriotic fervor to push for an extreme right-wing domestic, military and foreign policy agenda that has nothing to do with Sept. 11. John Ashcroft proceeded with some of the assaults on civil liberties. This is wrong and the American public will not fall for it for too much longer. I believe that Democrats are going to pick up on Iraq on this issue and start debating this issue. Once they take on the Bush administration on this extreme position, I think there is no choice but to endorse the kind of diplomatic engagement I am advocating.
You seriously believe Iraq will be the decisive political battle for Americans?
American people won't buy this charade that is going on right now. Bush will be voted out in the next term. On Iraq, where is the threat? I challenge Perle, Butler, Wolfowitz or anyone to a debate about Iraq's weapons programs. When you deal with facts, this kind of rhetoric no longer flies. This entire "Iraqi threat" is built on a framework of lies -- a house of cards. The policymakers in the Bush administration continue to formulate policy in this never-never land.
Conventional wisdom says we are close to taking military action against Iraq. You don't think Saddam's regime is a threat that needs to be dealt with? What if a U.S. action ends up being short and sweet and a triumph for democracy in the Middle East?
If we go against Iraq, it will require extensive military power -- more than the 75,000 [troops] that some claim. We are talking about 150,000 to 200,000 troops. Kurds and Shiites are saying don't go after Saddam. There is no Northern Alliance in Iraq and the Iraqi army is not the Taliban. If we go into Iraq, we will have to go into densely populated areas, villages, farms. People will fight back. The army will fight. They won't fight Saddam; they will fight against us, the invader, with thousands of deaths. We are talking about an unpopular war with no popular support in Iraq and going into Baghdad. Sure we'll win -- we always do. But it'll never last. Central authority in Iraq will collapse. How long will the mothers of America allow their sons to patrol the streets of Baghdad with no end in sight? When we eventually run, Iraq will collapse. Turks, Iranians, Saudis will be making a move, and the U.S. will be fundamentally isolated in the region.
You sound pretty jaded.
The second a democracy views its citizens standing up and asking its government questions, the second that becomes an act of treason, we have a problem. Americans have forgotten what it means to be a serious functioning democracy. Democracy means being involved in the process, and not just nodding your head dumbly. We have a mass of Americans now that seem to view news as entertainment. That's why they accept the statements at face value of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others when they say, "We know Iraq has chemical weapons." And it gets very difficult when Scott Ritter says, "Time out. This is a very complicated issue."
But isn't that a change of heart? Those were the same people who supported you. How did you arrive at your present point of view after being Saddam Hussein's nemesis as the chief U.N. arms inspector?
I've been consistent throughout. When I resigned [from UNSCOM], I resigned in defense of the weapons inspections process. I spoke out against what I saw as a systematic failure of the international community to back up Security Council resolutions. I spoke out against Iraq, which continued to obstruct the job of weapons inspectors. I spoke out against the United States, which manipulated the inspection process for purposes other than mandated by the Security Council, namely, the collection of intelligence information against Saddam Hussein. I spoke out against Secretary General [Kofi Annan], for getting involved in a Security Council process. I spoke out against the Security Council for failing to effectively enforce the implementation of the law it set down.
All I am doing [now] is holding the mirror up to those who passed the law. I merely said you've put the law on the books, and the law isn't being implemented. Therefore, you have an obligation to enforce the law. If you don't want the law, then change it.
Still, many were surprised when a few years ago you wrote in your book it was time to get rid of sanctions and engage with Iraq, especially since as an arms inspector, you were criticizing Washington for shying away from confrontation with Saddam.
I haven't changed, circumstances have. In 1998 I said the best way forward is to revive the legitimacy of the inspections, to get the inspectors back in, not to spy on Iraq, not to undermine the authority of Saddam Hussein. In other words, not to do anything other than what we were mandated to do: to disarm Iraq. In December 1998, the United States did exactly this. Acting under instructions of the United States government, Richard Butler [UNSCOM chairman] unilaterally dismissed the modalities for sensitive site inspections. Iraq was willing to accept inspections otherwise. But with no modalities, Butler opened the door for Iraq to say, you cannot come into this site. The United States bombed Iraq, citing this obstruction as justification. But of the over 120 sites struck by the United States in Operation Desert Fox, less than 12 had anything to do with UNSCOM's mandate. The remainder were Saddam's security, intelligence, military, and the vast majority were revealed as a part of the inspections process. So the U.S. corrupted and delegitimized the inspections process. You can no longer hold Iraq to a standard of 100 percent disarmament, to a [United Nations] resolution the U.S. no longer finds convenient to adhere to itself.
You definitely do not sound like a poster child for the hawks who want to topple Saddam.
I was not America's poster boy when I resigned. Since 1991, I confronted the United States on an almost daily basis about the manipulation of the inspection process by American intelligence services. And I demanded that we retain the integrity of the inspection process. It was a very confrontational relationship. I was backed by Rolf Ekeus [former UNSCOM chairman] during the first six years of my work. However, when Richard Butler came in, he started to accede to the demands of Americans to interfere with legitimate inspection activity. I find it incredible that conservative elements in America say here is the poster boy. They picked me as a poster boy when they hadn't a clue what they were endorsing. Once they figured out the complexity of the issue, suddenly it wasn't as convenient as they thought it would be. I wrote papers between 1992 and 1997 that found that Iraq was largely in compliance, that we had achieved a 90 to 95 percent level of disarmament.
If you thought all along that Baghdad got rid of its weapons, what was all the fuss about? We kept hearing that inspectors were not allowed in certain facilities. We bombed Iraq over this. Even your book is a chronicle of what you call the Iraqi mechanism of deception -- of Iraqis trying to obstruct the work of UNSCOM. Does Iraq have something to hide or not?
On the scientific and technical level, UNSCOM achieved a 90 to 95 percent level of disarmament. Qualitatively, Iraq is no longer capable of producing these prohibited goods -- their factories, production equipment and the weapons themselves were largely eliminated. At the same time we found out that Iraq was carrying out systematic concealment activities designed to mislead the weapons inspectors. Most of this took place between the years 1991 and 1993 -- in fact, we have very little evidence that anything took place after 1993. Ninety-eight missiles, and six operational launchers, entire biological [facilities], major aspects of the chemical weapons program including VX nerve agent production were concealed. In the end, rather than turning over programs that they had denied, Iraqis destroyed them, and all documents on this were hidden from the special commission.
We were investigating Iraq's past concealment programs. By fall 1997, we were able to confront Iraq with a hard body of evidence that could not be refuted. They finally admitted, yes, there was systematic concealment from 1991 to 1995 by the special Republican Guard, and they identified the persons involved. But they said now there is no concealment program. We could not accept this at face value. We kept pushing and pushing and uncovered acts of concealment. But it turns out they were not concealing documents pertaining to weapons of mass destruction, but documents about the [personal] security of Saddam Hussein. It became this vicious circle -- the more we distrusted the Iraqis, the closer to Saddam we got. The closer to Saddam we got, the more they evacuated material about the security of Saddam. We detected this evacuation and distrusted even more, leading to the cycle of confrontation that dominated our inspections from 1997 to 1998.
So you ended up investigating Iraq's security system -- not the stockpile?
What did directorate M23 [the Iraqi department of political dissent and the place that carries out assassinations] have to do with weapons of mass destruction? The answer is nothing. When you have a former Marine intelligence officer and intelligence officers from other countries, do you think Iraqis are willy-nilly going to let you run through these documents? No.
That makes it even harder to understand why you want inspections to resume. What can they possibly achieve under the circumstances? First, you don't know what you are looking for, second the mistrust between Iraq and the international community makes it impossible to get anywhere.
I agree the inspections were a never-ending proposition and are doomed to fail if we try to reconstitute UNSCOM. It will never work because the Iraqis will never allow these inspections to have the kind of intrusive element that is required for absolute certainty that nothing's hidden anywhere. And the United States will never fail to exploit that which gives [the U.S.] unique access to Saddam's palaces and intelligence and security apparatus. So what I am suggesting is let's have a mark of compliance [for disarmament]. Let's say 95 percent is good enough -- we don't need 100 percent. Let's just say Iraq is disarmed. Under U.N. resolutions, compliance means the end of sanctions, which is what Iraq wants, but it also triggers ongoing monitoring and verification. These new inspections would focus on monitoring of Iraq to make sure that it does not reconstitute its weapons capability. If we have inspections that focus on this, it could succeed. Because these inspections would not go into presidential palaces and the security zones. But as long as the U.S. demands that inspectors go into palaces, it's all over.
But weapons are not the only problem Washington has with Iraq.
Look, if inspectors go into Iraq today, due to forensic capability, if Iraq's done anything between 1998 and today, we would find it. But people refuse to do this. I am a proponent of qualitative disarmament, not quantitative. Stop counting the bombs, and start looking at the facts. Can Iraq produce the weapons and is there evidence of this? If the answer is no and we put an effective monitoring regime in place to make sure they don't produce it, haven't we disarmed Iraq? I say yes. But politically that is unacceptable. But it's not about weapons, it's about Saddam. And because it is about Saddam, all of my logic, my construct means nothing.
Unlike many Americans, you've met Iraqis and spent a long time there. For many, there is no face to this conflict except that of Saddam Hussein. Has knowing and meeting Iraqis shaped your position?
I've been with the highest level of Iraqi government [personnel] during my seven years. When people talk about the Baath Party, I know what this means. These are human beings. There are different power bases -- the moderates, the conservatives, the liberals. When people talk about Iraqi intelligence, I have met everyone from the director on down -- these are human beings. When people talk about the Amn El-Ammn, the gestapo of Iraq, I've met everyone from the their deputy director on down. I've been in their prisons, I've seen the horrors of them, but I've also seen that these are human beings. I've been in every special Republican Guard battalion. I've been in every Republican Guard headquarters; I've been in almost every heavy army division; I've been in the basic training camps; in factories. I've been up and down and all around Iraq. Iraq is a nation-state. I know its imperfections and realities. I had three assassination attempts on my life so I know what [Saddam's] capable of. And I have inspected the documents of [the directorate] for political assassinations. I've been to the children's prison at Amn El-Ammn headquarters in downtown Baghdad. It was horrific; these are kids in jail under horrible conditions, sweltering because of the political crimes of their parents. Dad speaks out against Saddam, Mom goes to the women's prison; the kids go to the children's prison. And do you know what they do to those kids? I don't even want to get to that.
It sounds pretty horrible -- good reasons to push for a regime change.
I know the good, the bad and the ugly of Iraq. The idea of diplomatic engagement is not naive. I've been lied to by these guys; I know how bad they are, but I also know that you could do business with them. This isn't a black-and-white comic book; this is reality. I can enter into an agreement with Iraqi officials, a life and death agreement that they will all adhere to. I know you can trust Iraqis under certain circumstances. They want a future. They want to live. And not just the average citizen; these are senior government officials. They have lives too. They have families, hopes and dreams for their children. We paint these guys as comic book characters. They are not -- they are complex characters. With all the good, the frailties and imperfections that come with this. We do a gross disservice to them, to the world, to the American people by portraying Iraq in vague, inaccurate ways.
How about the moral argument in support of toppling oppressive regimes?
I just cannot accept the argument that we have to intervene to remove Saddam Hussein on moral grounds. To eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, and linking this elimination with economic sanctions -- around 1.5 million Iraqis have died. We have killed almost six times as many Iraqis trying to eliminate weapons of mass destruction programs, than the weapons of mass destruction have killed in the entire 20th century. That's a moral issue to me. We have to understand that if we wanted to act on moral grounds, we should have acted decisively in 1991. But by dragging this on for more than 10 years and making the Iraqi people pay the price, we lost the moral high ground. We have done so much wrong in the past decade that we missed our opportunity. It's time to move on. If Saddam was rounding up and butchering 200,000 people, maybe. If Saddam was Milosevic carrying out active genocide, maybe. But that's not the case.
Yet there are human rights activists and some policy officials who believe that Saddam's past deeds are enough to indict him for genocide.
Saddam Hussein had a problem with the Kurds along the Iranian border -- active involvement of Iranians threatening the dam providing hydroelectric power to Baghdad, threatening the oil field in the north. Saddam created a depopulated zone. He did it with extreme brutality. I'm not defending it; there is a big difference between that and genocide. The Kurds are an active part, 23 percent of the Iraqi population. There has not been a genocide against the Kurdish population in Iraq. There has been extreme brutality on the part of the regime in controlling the Kurdish problem. Even prior to 1991, Kurds had greater autonomy in Iraq than they have enjoyed anywhere else. This is never talked about.
There is too much mythology that has gone into the idea of Saddam. He's a horrible man and has done horrible things. But he's also done a lot of good things for Iraq. Iraq was brought from the Third World status in the 1960s to one of the most modern advanced states in the Middle East in 1990. Saddam brought education, medicine and suffrage to women in Iraq; [Iraqi women] can vote, go to work, get an education. This isn't bad stuff. Saddam Hussein is a much more complicated issue than people like to admit. It's not black and white and he's not a cartoon character.
You've seen the ugliness from inside. You've become jaded by your experiences in Washington. Where do you go from here? Have you thought of running for office?
People have made very attractive offers. But I am not a politician. I am not saying, never. But politics is not attractive to me. I've seen Washington, D.C., and I don't like it. I am afraid of what that process would do to me as a person and what it would do to my family. There are other ways you can serve. I've served in the military and I am doing a heck of a job for my country right now by adhering to my standards and my code of honor, to the concept of integrity, and by not being afraid to speak out on issues I have substantial knowledge of. I think I am serving my country the best I can at this point in time. I also joined the volunteer fire department in my community.
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About the writer
Asla Aydintasbas is a New York journalist. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times and other publications.