A newspaper aimed at providing news of the war in Afghanistan is to be launched this month. Its editors argue that the mainstream media in the US are not providing a full picture of the war and its effects.
War Times, produced in San Francisco, will make its first bi-weekly appearance on April 12. It will be published in English and Spanish and will be distributed throughout the US.
Its editors say it is a response to a demand for more information about what is happening in Afghanistan and the possibility of conflict elsewhere.
The venture is supported by a number of academics, including Noam Chomsky, labour organisations and anti-war groups.
Its managing editor, Bob Wing, said the response to the idea had been extraordinary. "We originally planned to print only 7,500 copies of the pilot," he said, "but the demand was so great that we printed and distributed 100,000."
Saturday, March 30, 2002
March 29, 2002 -- At first light this morning the streets of Ramallah rumbled with the sound of heavy armor moving into the city. Yesterday, the residents of the city filled the shops, stocking up on supplies. Everyone was expecting the invasion. Wednesday's suicide bombing in Netanya killed 22 Israelis and injured more than 100 as they were celebrating a Passover meal.
The scale of the losses and the timing of the attack guaranteed that there would be a very stern Israeli response. Late last night, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon signaled that Israel was about to embark on an unprecedented level of reprisal. He declared that Yasir Arafat was "an enemy of Israel" and that "Israel will isolate Arafat and pursue the Palestinian Authority on all its territories."
We scrambled into our armored vehicle and drove through the deserted streets toward Arafat's compound. It wasn't long before we encountered the first group of tanks blocking one of the approach roads to the compound. We tried another route and again encountered rows of tanks and armored personnel carriers. We got out and started to film them. There were occasional bursts of gunfire, sounding just a few blocks away. The Palestinian militias were putting up some resistance.
Eventually we got to the front of the compound. It was surrounded by tanks. We walked past them and up to the main entrance. The large metal gates had been smashed down. A jeep lay crushed next to them; the tank tracks visible in the flattened metal. This time the Israeli army had gone inside.
Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, under pressure Friday as the Israeli military stormed his headquarters in Ramallah, became angry during a live telephone interview with CNN and hung up when he was asked about the U.S. call for him to rein in Palestinian violence.
``Are you asking me, who is under a complete siege?'' he asked correspondent Christiane Amanpour after her question about comments made by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
``You have to be accurate when you are speaking to General Yassir Arafat,'' he continued: ``Be quiet! You are covering the terrorist occupation and the Israeli crimes. ... Thank you. Bye, bye.''
Before he hung up the telephone, Arafat said the Israeli army had destroyed seven buildings around his office during a day that for him was filled with arms fire.
``You have to understand that it's the Palestinian people who are fighting this occupation, and I'm sure they will continue to,'' he said. ``This is the real terrorism - of the occupation.''
END
Friday, Mar. 29, 2002
Nobody expected Ariel Sharon to embrace the Arab League's latest peace offer, and not only because of the latest round of suicide bombings in Israel. Sharon has always maintained that Israel needs to keep the territories it captured in 1967 to give it the "strategic depth" to defend itself. But the ongoing battle in the West Bank and Gaza, that raged with new fury on Friday, may eventually cause Israel to rethink that theory.
Responding to a Passover suicide bombing that killed 20 people in Netanya, Israeli troops stormed Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound early Friday, exchanging fire with his bodyguards. The object, said Israel's defense minister, was not to kill Arafat, but to "totally isolate" him. It was a compromise between cabinet hawks who favor expelling or otherwise disposing of the Palestinian leader, and doves who see that as posing even greater perils.
As if in defiance of Israel's declaration of war on terror, a schoolgirl suicide bomber killed herself and two Israelis in a suburban Jerusalem supermarket yesterday. Another 22 Israelis were wounded.
Family members identified the bomber as Ayat Akhras, 16, from Deheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, who was engaged to be married. Like two Palestinian men who killed themselves on the way to the nearby Malcha shopping mall on Wednesday, she was a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia affiliated to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's assault on Yasser Arafat (news - web sites)'s presidential compound Friday fueled speculation that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) has started an endgame to oust his long-time foe.
Sharon said the aim of Israel's most direct attack on Arafat's headquarters in 18 months of conflict was to isolate him and remove the "foundations of terror." His defense minister said Israel had no intention of harming Arafat.
Israel says the decision was prompted by a Palestinian suicide bombing which killed 22 people on Wednesday. But it also followed growing pressure on Sharon from right-wing cabinet members to topple Arafat and a sharp fall in his support in opinion polls.
Some political analysts said the Israeli raid on Arafat's base in the West Bank city of Ramallah would stop short of bringing down Arafat. But others said Sharon could now be playing out his endgame.
Ramallah – A TV cameraman from the Egyptian Nile TV camera crew was wounded by gunshots from Israeli troops.
At least one bullet struck cameraman Carlos Handal in the mouth. He managed to stop and get out of the van – which was marked with "TV" signs – holding his face with one hand.
The cameraman was taking footage of the events from inside the car when he and the driver were surprised by Israeli shootings. Medics were not able to reach the place of the incident. Al-Jazeera TV aired the video tape of the attack on Handal and his colleague. Handal was finally hospitalized and is in moderate condition.
The United States has joined other UN Security Council members in approving a resolution urging Israel to withdraw from Palestinian cities.
It is the second time in a month that the US - a staunch ally of Israel - has supported UN action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having for years vetoed any proposal critical of Israel.
On 12 March, the Security Council approved a resolution submitted by Washington which called for separate Israeli and Palestinian states in the region, as well as an immediate ceasefire.
Israel's assault on Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah on Friday prompted the Security Council to hold an emergency debate, which continued through the night.
UN Resolution 1402 - proposed by Norway - was approved on Saturday by 14 votes to 0 after the marathon session.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said yesterday that Israel had told Washington in advance of its plans to attack Yasser Arafat's compound and given assurances that it intended to isolate the Palestinian leader, but not to kill or capture him.
Mr Powell condemned recent Palestinian terrorist attacks "in the strongest possible terms", but did not criticise the Israeli action.
As far as US policy went, he said, "there is nothing we are not considering". This appeared to disguise an internal debate about the direction of the administration's policy.
American officials were yesterday engaged in a desperate attempt to come up with a new Middle East policy, not so much to rescue the peace process - regarded for the moment as beyond redemption - but to salvage their credibility in the region, and to some extent at home.
RAMMING armoured bulldozers through the walls of Yassir Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters, Ariel Sharon yesterday delivered the starkest of messages that he has run out of patience with a man he would like to kill.
The heavy thud of tank shells and machinegun fire merged eerily with a thunderstorm over Judea as Israeli troops moved room by room through the hilltop compound where Mr Arafat sheltered with his senior aides, appealing in vain for the world to come to his aid.
“Where are you?” the veteran of Suez, Black September and Beirut cried to one American envoy. “Don’t you know that this will shake the Middle East?” Even as he spoke the walls of Camp Arafat shook with the force of heavy armour bludgeoning its way into the building as Mr Sharon’s tanks parked themselves on his front drive, crunching the steel front gates like gravel underfoot.
THEY had gathered to share the traditional Passover Seder meal. In the festive dining hall of the Park Hotel in the seaside resort of Netanya, around 250 Israelis chatted and prepared to be seated for dinner. Retired civil servants and court officials mingled with foreign Jews who were visiting Israel for the holidays.
Many were there only because the Park had offered a better deal than a neighbouring hotel at the last minute. Wednesday night’s dinner was to have been the centrepiece of a four-day break for one group of 12 Israeli pensioners.
The bomber, a 25-year-old Palestinian, arrived in a long black overcoat, wearing a long-haired wig, and moved to the centre of the room. Dispatched by Hamas, a movement which purports to “act in the name of religion”, he made as if to search for a seat, before detonating his explosive. The impact, in the confines of a closed room, was devastating.
With a blast on such a scale, the aftershock bounces off the walls, sending out shrapnel and debris that is enough to kill. Of the 120 wounded, many were seriously hurt; the original death toll of 16 had soon crept up to 21. By Thursday evening forensic experts had been able to identify only 14 of the dead.
Friday, March 29, 2002
USA Today quoted even Larry Klayman, executive director of the Judicial Watch, a far-right group that hounded President Clinton relentlessly: "This is a case where left and right agree ... True conservatives don't act this way. We see an unprecedented secrecy in this White House that ... we find very disturbing."
A review and analysis of the proceedings leading to the Bush administration's formulation of its May 2001 energy policy.
Before turning over the energy task force records to NRDC, the Bush administration removed extensive portions of information. Some pages were empty. Whole strings of correspondence were stripped to just a few words.
Yet even with this censorship the records reveal that industry lobbyists not only played a pivotal role in developing the administration's national energy strategy, they wrote much of it themselves. The administration sought the advice of polluting corporations early and often and then incorporated their recommendations into its policy, sometimes verbatim.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California judge on Thursday gave Enron a June 26 deadline to hand over thousands of subpoenaed documents to state officials probing possible price-gouging during last year's power crisis.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge A. James Robertson II said the battered energy firm must produce documents from its California offices within three weeks, from its Houston and Portland offices within six weeks, and requested electronic data within 90 days, or face contempt charges, the attorney general's office said.
"While we pressed for a contempt finding today, the judge decided to keep the hammer of a contempt ruling over the head of Enron," Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. "The court is focusing on the same goal we have, which is to get Enron to deliver the documents subpoenaed for our energy investigation."
Speaking at Stanford Business School on March 11, 2002, BP chief executive John Browne announced that his company had met its self-imposed target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions -- nearly eight years ahead of schedule, and at no net cost to the company.
It was Browne who, five years earlier at Stanford, had sent shock waves through the energy industry by announcing that his company had decided that the risks of climate change justified precautionary action. The following year, Browne set another first in the energy industry by pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from his firm's operations by 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, nearly twice the average cut called for by the Kyoto Protocol. At Stanford, he revealed that "we've delivered on that target," well ahead of time. BP had reduced emissions by more than nine million tons below their 1990 level.
For months, Democratic critics were frustrated in their efforts to find a fly in the soup in the administration's unwillingness to come clean about who attended private meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney's task force formulating the Bush energy policy in its first days. But with lawsuits breathing down Mr. Cheney's neck and that of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, the White House has responded to one court order with partial disclosure of thousands of pages of Energy Department documents on the meetings.
But thousands more were not released, and those that were made public were heavily deleted. So the watchdog group involved, Judicial Watch, will be going back to court for more disclosure.
Also pending is the General Account Office suit for the same information from Mr. Cheney, which the administration is bucking on grounds that the vice president as a constitutional officer is not subject to the GAO's reach.
TONY BLAIR has been a disappointing prime minister and most people think he should step down before the next election, an opinion poll for The Sunday Times reveals.
The poll, carried out on Thursday and Friday by YouGov, the online polling specialist, shows widespread disenchantment with Blair’s leadership. Coming at a time when Labour MPs have begun talking openly about a challenge to him, it shows that he faces serious problems.
Asked about how they rated Blair’s prime ministership, 54% of the 2,277 respondents said he had been a disappointment. Only 21% believed he had performed better than they had expected. Disappointment was greatest among male voters and Tory and Liberal Democrat supporters — but a third of Labour voters said Blair had been a letdown.
Asked how long Blair should carry on as prime minister, 20% said he should step down now and 43% thought he should go at the next election.
COOKEVILLE, Tenn. — Al Gore the environmentalist came through loud and strong last night as the former vice president criticized current national leaders, charging that they created an energy policy in secret and promoted use of coal and oil rather than alternatives.
But first, a cleanshaven, relaxed Gore began his talk to a packed auditorium of more than 800 at Tennessee Technological University with crowd-pleasing one-liners and anecdotes.
Gore, who drew multiple standing ovations, dropped all levity when he spoke about the environment.
The global environmental crisis will be the ''principal challenge facing our civilization,'' he said in his talk as keynote speaker in the Stonecipher Symposium on the environment.
Monday, Mar. 25, 2002
Against the backdrop of yet another Palestinian suicide bombing (this time, a failed attempt outside Jerusalem), U.S. mediator Anthony Zinni continues work to bridge the gap between Israeli and Palestinian versions of a cease-fire plan. It doesn't appear to be getting any narrower. The Palestinians are in no hurry to close a deal — they even called off a new round of truce talks scheduled for Monday night. Yasser Arafat and his aides appear to believe that the U.S. and Ariel Sharon currently need a cease-fire a lot more than he does, and he's going to set a substantial political price on that truce. Palestinian leaders believe the current cease-fire effort has been spurred by two related factors: the political crisis in Israel caused by the recent upsurge of violence, and the fact that this violence may be the biggest obstacle to the Bush administration winning Arab support against Saddam Hussein. And their perceived advantage may be underscored by the Bush administration's pressure on Sharon to allow Arafat to travel to the Arab League summit in Beirut. Today Palestinian leaders said Arafat would not attend.
AUSTIN, Texas — Have you noticed that the health-care system is not working? In fact, it's falling apart. And the most curious thing about that is how few of the people for whom the system still works — and they're the ones who make the decisions — are aware of it.
It's like the old story about frogs and hot water. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will leap to get out, but if you drop a frog in cool water and then gradually heat it up, the beast doesn't notice. Or so they say. Another factor is the now-constant cognitive dissonance we have in this country as a result of the ever-widening gap between most people and the people who run things. If you have health insurance, the system is a pain in the behind but it works. If you don't have health insurance, you are flat out of luck. And in case you hadn't noticed, more and more employers are deciding not to offer health insurance, or using "temporary" workers or out-sourcing various tasks so they won't have to cover the workers.
If you don't have health insurance, the system is an insane nightmare. A new book by Dr. Rudolph Mueller, "As Sick As It Gets: The Shocking Reality of America's' Healthcare" lays out the problems as well as any I've read. But the book is just one more grain of sand in the beaches of evidence we already have that the system is breaking up.
WASHINGTON -- Army Secretary Thomas White said today he would resign if the investigation into the bankruptcy of his former employer, Enron Corp., distracts him too much from his military duties.
"I thought I could do something good for soldiers and their families," White said in an interview with reporters. "That is my focus. If I ever get to a point where that's no longer possible, it doesn't make any sense to stay when somebody else could do a better job."
White said he would resign if the Enron investigation took too much of his time, or if he felt his role in the matter had caused troops to lose confidence in his leadership.
A top Enron executive until he took over as the Army's top civilian official last May, White denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with the company. He said he was as surprised as the rest of the country by the energy trading company's collapse in December, and the subsequent allegations of massive fraud.
I have witnessed the wrath of nature, and it is not a pretty sight. When a mighty predator makes a meal of a slow-witted, defenseless, helpless creature, one can hardly help but cringe. It can be almost impossible to restrain one's sympathy for the poor victim, whom natural selection has chosen for extinction. The springbok fallen prey to a pride of lions; the plankton and krill sluiced into the mighty maw of the baleen whale; George Will when he pisses off Norman Mailer.
Alas, poor George, he hardly knew what hit him.
It goes without saying that Mr. Will's days as a right-wing wunderkind belong to that twilit past when giants like James Watt, Anne Gorsuch, and William Casey roamed the earth. Today, he is mostly known as a member of the Hair Club for White Men, the Sunday morning ABC chat show during which George Stephanopolous tries every week to prove that he can make real hair look every bit as weird as Mr. Will's and Mr. Sam Donaldson's. But, even as he waits for his species to finally fall victim to natural selection, Mr. Will must be thinking fondly of the glory days when he would meet Nancy Reagan to dish dirt over lunch at Maison Blanche -- and be routinely written up by the gossip columns as the most powerful commentator in Washington.
OLYMPIA, Wash. - A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the state's "blanket" primary system that allows all voters to choose finalists for public offices regardless of political party affiliation.
Lawyers for the Republican, Democratic and Libertarian parties had argued a 2000 Supreme Court ruling in a California case made clear that states cannot force political parties to allow outsiders to help select their nominees.
But Judge Franklin Burgess ruled the two states are significantly different and Washington political parties failed to prove their First Amendment rights were violated.
Washington's blanket primary was created by a citizen initiative 67 years ago.
"The decision preserves the primary system Washington voters are familiar with and, I believe, prefer," Attorney General Christine Gregoire (news, bio, voting record) said after the ruling.
The political parties said they planned an appeal.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Environmentalists said Wednesday they had requested a meeting with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (news - web sites) in the months prior to release of the administration's energy report but were rebuffed by an aide who cited Abraham's busy schedule.
John Adams, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the refusal to meet with the environmentalists stands in sharp contrast to the eight meetings Abraham had with energy and business groups in early 2001 to discuss the energy plan.
For almost four decades now, Canadian chroniclers of Canada-United States relations have savoured a line by Robert Thompson, a former Social Credit leader now forgotten for almost everything else he did.
"The Americans are our best friends, whether we like it or not," Mr. Thompson is widely quoted as saying in what was either a "malapropism or magnificent insight," as John Robert Colombo called it.
These days, the emphasis is clearly on the second half of the aphorism. The fact that the United States has deep-sixed our softwood lumber industry with deeply punitive import duties should be a reminder that the Americans are not our best friends and probably not our friends at all; they are simply our neighbours.
These days George W. Bush probably has bigger fans than Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The 30 percent tariffs Bush recently imposed on foreign steel coming into the United States will, according to the Brazilians, cost their country $1 billion over the next three years. And yet even as Bush is raising U.S. tariffs, he is bent on asking Cardoso to lower Brazil's, in order to help create a full-fledged Free Trade Area of the Americas. Just this past weekend, in fact, Bush told Cardoso and other Latin American leaders that the reason the United States has been so stingy with foreign aid is that, "to be serious about fighting poverty, we must be serious about expanding trade."
What's a Latin American neoliberal to make of the apparent contradiction? When Cardoso put exactly that question to Bush Trade Representative Robert Zoellick earlier this month, Zoellick cited the perfectly Orwellian dictum that imposing trade barriers would actually help reduce trade barriers. "We are committed to moving forward with free trade," Zoellick responded, "but, like Brazil, we have to manage political support for free trade at home. We have to create coalitions."
The latest dispatch from the Heritage Foundation is a reminder that think tanks don't grow on trees. They may use up a lot of them -- although these days at most thinkeries cyberspace is a more than capable paper substitute. In the world of Washington-based think tanks the name of the game is money which, as my mother often reminded me, also doesn't grow on trees.
The folks at Heritage are not sitting back and resting on their laurels. They may be involved in shuttling comrades off to the Bush Administration, working on Homeland Security issues, pushing the privatization of Social Security, developing marriage proposals for welfare reauthorization and a bunch of other projects, but that hasn't stopped them from peppering their supporters for more cash.
It's not that Heritage has fallen on hard times. Just the opposite is true. According to Media Transparency, a web site tracking right-wing money, from 1986 through 1999, right-wing foundations doled out more than $35,500,000 to the Heritage Foundation. And, it wasn't that long ago that Washington's premier right-wing think tank concluded its multiyear campaign celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary by raising over $100 million.
WHEN YOU HEAR political people, in both parties no less, claim that you'll barely notice the pain, that it shouldn't last long, and that it might not even happen at all, the message is clear: Count the silverware.
For the second time this month, President Bush has acted in direct contravention of his alleged belief in open markets to throw American muscle around in a fashion guaranteed to produce the greatest harm for the greatest number - all in the interest of the most special of interests.
Earlier this month it was steel. Now it is softwood lumber products. Bush has managed to set the stage for higher car and appliance prices as well as for higher house prices in a couple of moves that promise to eliminate the effects of last year's tax cuts for many who are buying cars or new homes this year.
ROME (AP) - Premier Silvio Berlusconi said Thursday there is "no need for particular concern" as his defense chief criticized the U.S. government for warning that extremists might target Americans in four Italian cities on Easter.
Italy stepped up security, nevertheless, after the State Department warned on Wednesday that a "possible threat exists to U.S. citizens in the cities of Venice, Florence, Milan and Verona on Easter Sunday from extremist groups." It urged Americans to be alert and avoid large crowds.
After a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Berlusconi said Italy was ready to deal with any possible terrorist threat. "We have put anything that can be put on alert on alert," the premier said, "but based on the information we have there is no need for particular concern."
WASHINGTON, March 27— The founder and former head of Waste Management Inc. denies government allegations that he and five former top executives of the giant trash hauler duped stockholders for years. Waste Management executives also denied that the company’s auditor, embattled Arthur Andersen LLP, helped cover up the company’s improper accounting practices.
The release by the administration of thousands of pages of documents related to its energy task force last year has only heightened speculation that the Bush team is hiding something by refusing to provide logs of Vice President Dick Cheney's meetings with energy executives.
While 11,000 pages of documents were released on court orders this week, most were heavily edited to blank out any useful information, particularly e-mails. The government continues to hold back an additional 15,000 documents, citing privacy and security concerns, as well as the mysterious Cheney logs.
Cobbling from what little information was made available, reporters were able to quickly establish that Secretary of the Energy Spencer Abraham met almost exclusively with energy executives while helping formulate taskforce policy last year, while ignoring any submissions from environmental or consumer groups.
Russia is preparing "technical and scientific" measures to counter a planned US missile defence shield, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said.
"I want to underline that the US shield does not yet exist, and so it is difficult to speak of retaliatory measures," Ivanov was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS during a visit to a military base.
"But this is not to say that we are not thinking about or taking technical and scientific measures," he added.
"We are going to do everything to counter these threats when they take shape, if they ever take shape, which is to say not before 2015-2020," Ivanov said.
The defence minister said Russia's strategic forces were the "basis for the effectiveness of our army," which is due to undergo a thorough modernisation over the next 15 years.
WASHINGTON, March 28 — In the first sign of a major breach between President Bush and leading Republicans in Congress, many lawmakers complain that the White House is not sufficiently energetic in helping them in the November elections. But Mr. Bush's advisers contend, bitterly, that members of Congress have not appreciated his help and should be far more aggressive in defending the president.
The mounting tensions involve large and small differences, from policy disputes like Mr. Bush's failure to veto the campaign finance bill and to do more to win a seat on an appeals court for Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr., to concerns about the overall Republican party message.
Disenchantment with the White House was clear in interviews with J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, and Senator Trent Lott, the minority leader, who even as they insisted that relations were generally sound, went on to be unusually critical of the White House.
MARCH 19, 2002, SHAR-I-KOT — Last week the US Department of Defense declared Operation Anaconda a smashing victory over Al Qaeda and the remnants of Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Hundreds of insurgents were reportedly killed, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that "there might be more operations like Anaconda, but we won’t be fighting the same people."
Anaconda was a success, by all official accounts, because hundreds of rabidly anti-American forces were killed, with only eight American losses. But that characterization is laced with a big problem: more American soldiers may have died than the Pentagon is prepared to admit.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) A judge on Thursday ordered Enron Corp. to hand thousands of documents over to California regulators probing the state's power crisis of last year.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge A. James Robertson II said the company must respond to the state's subpoena by June 26 or face contempt charges.
California officials said Enron has dragged its feet in complying with the subpoena the state issued almost a year ago and on Thursday urged the judge to sanction the firm.
NEW YORK-I began working on a graphic-novel update and parody of "1984" a few years ago. An awful lot had changed since Orwell posited his dystopian vision of the future from his late-1940s deathbed, and I accounted for those differences in my own version, 2001's "2024." In order to acknowledge the collapse of Soviet Communism and the failure of fascism to reemerge as a potent political force, I ditched Orwell's oppressive totalitarian state in favor of an entertainment-fueled nihilism in which dimwitted citizens frittered away their lives watching web TV and working at slightly overpaid jobs to buy worthless junk...on web TV, natch. Where Orwell envisioned endless rows of soldiers marching in perfect unison to the strains of the Two-Minute Hate, I saw a world where nations had been replaced by trading blocs and the objects of hatred were the immigrants in our midst.
It's not every administration official of secretarial rank who can get called on the carpet for personal behavior by influential senators of both parties. In fact, it seldom happens. But Secretary White found himself on the receiving end of a rebuke from Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John Warner (R-Va.), chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, for retaining options to purchase Enron stock until January, eight months after he told the committee he would divest his holdings to avoid potential conflicts of interest. "An inaccurate representation" and violation of his Senate ethics agreement, they charged.
Publicly, the Bush administration says there is no link between the Israeli-Palestinian war and the one Washington wants to launch against Iraq. Linkage makes life complicated: It forces American leaders to pressure Israel--something no U.S. politician likes to do--in order to gain Arab cooperation against Saddam Hussein; and it holds any offensive against the Iraqi leader hostage to the whims of Yasir Arafat. That's why Vice President Dick Cheney, kicking off his Middle East tour last week, told reporters in London that such a connection was "inappropriate," and why President George W. Bush a few days later said that each policy "stands on its own." It's also why almost everyone in Washington will tell you--on the record--that it's merely happenstance that Cheney and U.S. Special Envoy Anthony Zinni were in the Middle East at the same time.
WASHINGTON — While everyone has been focused on the campaign finance legislation that President Bush reluctantly signed into law, he is working to make sure that the Federal Election Commission — the agency that will be responsible for enforcing the new law — remains ineffective. The president has nominated Michael Toner to be a commissioner of the F.E.C. and may put him on the commission through a recess appointment. This nomination has barely registered on Washington's radar screen, but it should cause an uproar.
The F.E.C. has earned a well-deserved reputation for refusing to enforce the campaign finance laws. The agency is particularly feckless in cases involving prominent candidates and political parties, to the point where candidates and parties feel free to violate both the letter and the spirit of the law with little fear of being held accountable. The commission also has a long tradition of creating loopholes in the laws Congress has directed it to enforce, including the soft money loophole that the new campaign finance law seeks to close.
To this sad history, President Bush is adding Mr. Toner. Mr. Toner is currently chief counsel to the Republican National Committee, and served on the transition team for the party's new chairman, Marc Racicot. He was also general counsel to President Bush's 2000 campaign committee. It is very doubtful, given his background, that Mr. Toner will wrest the F.E.C. from the control of the candidates and political parties it regulates.
WASHINGTON, March 27 — The Energy Department cannot fully account for small amounts of potentially dangerous plutonium provided under a 1954 Atoms for Peace program to 33 countries including Iran, Pakistan and India, according to an inspector general report released yesterday.
The safety of ageing nuclear reactors dotted across the United States has been thrown into doubt by the discovery of severe corrosion at a plant in Ohio that could have triggered a massive failure.
The alarm was sounded after engineers discovered acid had eaten a hole almost all the way through the six-inch thick lid of the 25-year-old Davis-Besse reactor outside Toledo. All that was left to hold back cooling water contained at 2,200lbs of pressure was a skin of stainless steel.
All 68 plants in the US that are of similar design have been ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), to inspect their lids as soon as possible. Already, electricity and natural gas prices have started to rise as the industry ponders the possibility that many plants may have to shut down.
The commission is especially concerned about six reactors that share the same design as the Ohio plant. Among them is the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania, which suffered a near-catastrophic failure in 1979. Three Mile Island is owned by Amergen, which is 50 per cent owned by British Energy plc.
SANTIAGO, Chile — With a trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet increasingly unlikely here, victims of the Chilean military's 17-year dictatorship are now pressing legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A. Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in the early 1970's.
In perhaps the most prominent of the cases, an investigating judge here has formally asked Mr. Kissinger, a former national security adviser and secretary of state, and Nathaniel Davis, the American ambassador to Chile at the time, to respond to questions about the killing of an American citizen, Charles Horman, after the deadly military coup that brought General Pinochet to power on Sept. 11, 1973.
General Pinochet, now 85, ruled Chile until 1990. He was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant charging him with human rights violations. After 16 months in custody, General Pinochet was released by Britain because of his declining health. Although he was arrested in Santiago in 2000, he was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.
LANCASTER, Pa., 11:32 p.m. EST March 27, 2002 - News 8 has found some possible answers to the mysterious resignation of Lancaster County lawmaker John Barley.
News 8 has learned there is an ongoing investigation concerning him. News 8 was told a probe is being done by a private investigator who may have uncovered corruption. It centers around Barley possibly selling votes.
Rep. Tom Armstrong, a longtime critic of Barley, told News 8 information is expected to be handed over to the federal government in a few weeks.
In a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's "Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative" is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby.
Modern political economy teaches us that small, well-organized groups often prevail over the broader public interest. The steel industry got the tariff it wanted, even though the losses to consumers will greatly exceed the gains of producers, because the typical steel consumer doesn't understand what's happening.
"Blinded by the Right" shows that the same logic applies to non-economic issues. The scandal machine that employed Mr. Brock was, in effect, a special-interest group financed by a handful of wealthy fanatics — men like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cultlike Unification Church owns The Washington Times, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled the scandal-mongering American Spectator and many other right-wing enterprises. It was effective because the typical news consumer didn't realize what was going on.
Some things shouldn't need to be against the rules.
If the speaker of the Florida House of Representatives is running for a seat in Congress, for example, it ought not be necessary to have a formal rule against the speaker using his state-paid staff to raise money for the congressional race.
Indeed, Florida hasn't needed such a rule. Along comes Speaker Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, and suddenly the notion that legislative leaders might be guided by a sense of ethics appears quaint. It's like expecting a horse to be guided by a gyrocompass. The beast just ain't got one.
Rep. Feeney was content to corrupt the entire legislative session to secure for himself a safe congressional seat. Get a responsible budget to the governor? No time. Must have the Feeney seat. If misappropriating an entire session is acceptable to the speaker, what is misappropriating an aide's time?
JERUSALEM, March 29 (Friday) -- Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers stormed the compound sheltering Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the West Bank town of Ramallah early today, firing rockets and knocking down parts of a perimeter wall.
The raid came in retaliation for a series of Palestinian attacks that killed 26 Israelis in two days and followed an urgent appeal by Arafat on Thursday night for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire.
Arafat's spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said that Arafat was inside the compound, which includes a series of underground bunkers. "He's under siege," Abu Rudeineh said. "The situation is very dangerous. This is a declaration of war."
RICHMOND, March 28 -- State and local police are conducting a criminal investigation into whether the Virginia Republican Party's executive director violated state law when he listened in on a telephone conference of Democratic leaders discussing legal strategy for a politically sensitive redistricting case, officials said today.
Edmund A. Matricardi III, the state GOP's senior staffer for the past three years, is the subject of a joint investigation by the Richmond commonwealth's attorney and Virginia State Police, according to law enforcement sources, GOP leaders and officials in the administration of Gov. Mark R. Warner (D).
Thursday, March 28, 2002
March 20, 2002—In a maddening repetition of history, the young war-fighters of the United States, along with those of its coalition partners, find themselves in battle with an amorphous opponent in a global counter-insurgency campaign managed by paranoid policy makers who see themselves as the enlightened sons of God. As the illegitimate and extremist government of the United States prepares to expend another generation of its youth for power, money and resources thousands of kilometers from home, they are negligently and criminally allowing the infrastructure, health and welfare of the United States to deteriorate.
As America wages World War III against its 21st century barbarians—the Taliban and Al Qaeda (the Visigoths and Huns?)—in a war that may well see the use of nuclear weapons, the American Empire seems doomed to duplicate the concluding events of 476 A.D. And it's not Al Qaeda's 5,000 militants that will destroy the USA, it's the current "selected" government that will sacrifice the future of the world's greatest experiment in freedom on the altar of fascism.