The source of the antagonism towards America is not difficult to divine. Not content with reneging on treaties it doesn't like, threatening countries it doesn't like and ignoring objections to policies it does like, the Bush administration wonders why the rest of the world does not seem to like it.
After September 11 commentators opined that America had lost its innocence. Well, it looks like they have finally got it back again.
If George Bush wishes to claim victimhood for himself or his nation he will have to stand at the back of a very long line. The horrific events of September 11 gave Americans a taste of the world's pain; it did not give them a monopoly on suffering.
The truth is, so long as Bush pushes ahead with this mindless, murderous military campaign and a world trade regime which discriminates against the poor and undermines democracy, he will remain a legitimate focus for anti-war and anti-globalisation protests.
Yet opposition to American foreign policy demands introspection in Europe. One of the few hopeful developments to be salvaged from the wreckage of the World Trade Centre is for America to wake up from its insularity and understand how little goodwill and how much animosity it had generated.
Friday, May 31, 2002
Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, is famous. But I knew him back when he was merely infamous, as chief Republican spokesman on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spoke with a cool, quick certainty, unhindered by any sense of conscience. A profile in GQ--not many Hill staffers receive such attention--dubbed him the "flack out of hell."
The typical press secretary shovels out fairly blunt propaganda, the kind reporters can spot a mile away and sidestep easily. But Fleischer has a way of blindsiding you, leaving you disoriented and awestruck. Once, about six years ago, I called to ask him something about tax reform. Knowing Fleischer, I tried to anticipate his possible replies and map out countermeasures to cut off his escape routes. I began the conversation by bringing up what seemed a simple premise: His boss, Bill Archer, favored replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. Fleischer immediately interrupted to insist that Archer did not support any such thing. I was dumbfounded. Forgetting my line of questioning, I frantically tried to recall how it was I knew that Archer had advocated a sales tax. But in the face of this confident assertion, my mind went blank. "Wha ... uh, really?" I stammered. He assured me it was true. Completely flustered, I thanked him and hung up. I rummaged through my files, trying to piece together my reality. Didn't everybody who followed these things know that Archer favored a sales tax? Yes--here was one newspaper story, and another, and finally a crinkled position paper, authored by Bill Archer, explaining why we needed a national sales tax. Of course he favored it. Fleischer had made the whole thing up.
Salem is an agricultural village east of Nablus in the West Bank, numbering approximately 5000 inhabitants. It has been plagued by settler violence originating from the nearby settlement of Elon Moreh. Elon Moreh, a controversial settlement established in 1976 by national religious settlers, has been expanding ceaselessly to the detriment of Salem and other neighbouring Palestinian villages. The settlers, sanctioned by the occupying authorities, confiscate agricultural land on hilltops surrounding the settlement, and subsequently link these new settlement points to Elon Moreh by a system of by-pass roads. This tactic has created a substantial settlement center in the north-eastern West Bank, stifling Palestinian economic life in the area.
The inhabitants of Salem have suffered physical assaults from the hands of settlers, as well as attacks on their agricultural resources. Since the beginning of the intifada, thousands of olive trees have been uprooted and cut down. Here are some exerps from the AIC reports on settler violence, concerning Salem:
Oct 28 2000
Settlers from Elon Moreh prevented Ahmad Abu Shutayya of the village of Salem from working on his land. When he refused to leave they attacked him with stones and injured him.
Nov 22 2000
Settlers uprooted 44 trees in the village of Salem near Nablus and 31 trees in the village of Hares belonging to Rajeh Hendi, Ref'at Shaker and Abed -'Azeez Shareef. The settlers cooperated with the solders in the uprooting. In the village of Toura Al Sharqie additional uprooting of trees by settlers and soldiers occurred, as well bulldozing land.
May 31, 2002: 14.30:The Israeli occupation forces have re-invaded Nablus and have been bulldozing homes in the Balata refugee camp this morning. Loud speaker announcements demanded that all men come out of their homes. There are 100’s of men who have been waiting in the sun for over one and a half hours, having their identity cards checked. They have been told that they will be taken to ‘Huwara’ checkpoint.
There have been at least 3 injuries and 1 fatality. One of the injured is a young girl, shot in the leg, who is being treated as best as possible at a medical clinic. The army are not allowing ambulances to evacuate the wounded.
For more information call Caiomhe (‘Queever) on +972 (0) 55 975 374
May 23 , 2002: four Palestinians were assassinated by the Israeli occupation forces stationed at Mount Tor overlooking the Balata Refugee Camp, when they opened their tank gunfire towards: Mahmoud Altiti, Imad Alkahtib, Iyad Abu Hamdan and Bashir Ya’esh (37).
Eyewitnesses said that the Israeli occupation forces suddenly and for no reason opened their Tank gunfire towards the edge of the Balata Refugee Camp murdering the 4 Palestinians and wounding more than ten citizens, the medical sources defined some of the wounded as of critical situation.
May 17,2002 : Israeli tanks early Friday streamed into the Palestinian towns of Nablus and El Bireh, near Ramallah, Palestinian security officials said. They said some 15 tanks had moved into Nablus. Israeli soldiers opened fire, but no casualties were reported, after the tanks entered the town from two directions, the officials added.
May 09, 2002 00.45: Balata Refugee Camp: At least 3 large explosions have been heardby our witnesses in Balata. In addition, flares are lighting the area and both Apaches and F16's are flying overhead. Sporadic shelling can also be heard as well as tanks moving on the Al Quds [Jerusalem] road.
JENIN: On May 23, the A.N.S.W.E.R. delegation entered Jenin, a densely populated civilian refugee camp, and found undisputed evidence of a massacre.
The delegation interviewed and took testimony from witnesses and survivors of the devastation and slaughter perpetrated by the Israeli military in its recent invasion of the West Bank, including the Jenin refugee camp.
In Jenin this testimony confirmed the indiscriminate and vicious nature of the recent Sharon directed military attack against the Jenin refugee camp. "The coordinator for health services in the camp reported that as of now they have found and identified 55 bodies, and held funerals for those people. Of these, 5 were members of the Palestinian security forces and 12 were from various factions who defended the residents of Jenin against the Israeli invasion.
The other thirty-eight rest were non-combatants, including children, elderly and disabled persons. Rescue workers believe there may be 10 to 40 others who are still buried in the rubble or who will never be found, leading sources in Jenin to estimate that there have been about 90 deaths," reported Dr. Hillel Cohen, a public health doctor and epidemiologist and member of delegation.
"Many of the houses that were destroyed by tank shells and missiles were then bulldozed flat by the Israelis. If any bodies were inside those, they may never be found. At the spot we were talking, a neighbor saw a shell explode the house of a disabled man. The building collapsed on top of him and his body has not yet been found."
RAWANDAY VILLAGE, AFGHANISTAN – Like many of the psychological operations personnel in the US Army, Sgt. Mike Dickinson is cut from a different cloth.
A half-Mexican, half-black American, he converted to Islam two years ago while on a US peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He keeps a photograph of Jordan's Queen Rania plastered to the butt of his M-16 and swears that if the US ever goes to war alongside Israel against the Arabs, he will have to become a "conscientious objector."
For Sergeant Dickinson, leader of psy-ops team 913, Afghanistan is both an absorbing adventure and a coming-of-age story. "Some of my buddies would not want to hear me say this, but I hope I will be here indefinitely," he says. "I love these people."
RAMALLAH, West Bank -- The charbroiled walls inside the Checkers restaurant building have been whitewashed, the loose concrete in the atrium has been cleared away and the streets outside have been swept of shattered glass and twisted pedestrian railings.
The six-story landmark is a prominent example of Ramallah's rapid repair job after the military offensive carried out by Israel in April. This city, which is the closest thing the Palestinians have to a capital, resounds today with the grind of rotating cement mixers, the pounding of hammers and the scrape of plasterers' trowels.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to calm the markets yesterday as the dollar crept ever nearer to a new high of NIS 5. "I believe in the Israeli economy," he said, "Israel has a healthy economy but we are temporarily in a setback. I trust the shekel, I believe in it."
The representative rate for the dollar, which is taken at around noon each day, was set at NIS 4.968 yesterday, a 0.5 percent weakening of the shekel on the day. What lies behind it all?
To announce a sharp 1 percent rise in the rate of borrowing, central bank governor David Klein called a news conference to explain why, despite the difficult economic times, he had to raise the interest rate. This will impact, not least, on those with overdrafts and mortgages.
Intelligence Report Estimates Heavy Casualties
Meanwhile, intelligence sources told ABCNEWS that India was preparing to put conventional warheads on missiles that could also carry nuclear warheads.
If these were launched, Pakistan would not know which kind of warhead was headed its way — a purposely ambiguous signal that U.S. officials fear could lead to a miscalculation and spark a nuclear conflict.
A U.S. intelligence report estimated a full-scale nuclear exchange between the two countries would kill up to 12 million people.
Scholars of the region say what they are seeing and hearing now is no longer just big talk.
Analyst George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called the situation a "very hairy business that makes the Cuban missile crisis potentially look like child's play."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has summoned top security officials to discuss what has officially been described as the "worse than critical" state of the armed forces.
His Chief of the General Staff, Anatoli Kvashnin, said at a seminar in Moscow that the country's armed forces were beset by poverty and crime.
General Kvashnin warned that miserly salaries were prompting an increasing number of officers to quit the ranks.
His comments are one of the most dramatic official acknowledgments of the desperate condition of the once-mighty military, which has fallen into decay since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
NEW YORK: Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the war against terrorism following revelations about intelligence failure on warnings of terror attacks.
Only four in 10 Americans believe the US and its allies are winning the war against terrorism, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll.
In January, when headlines focussed on military successes on the battlefield in Afghanistan, two-thirds of those polled felt the nation was winning the war.
The number has declined steadily since. Now, 35 per cent say neither side is winning the war, and 15 per cent say the terrorists are winning, the survey reported by the USA Today said.
AUSTIN, Texas -- Those of the populist persuasion are struggling against what is perhaps the most irresistible of all temptations -- the urge to say, "I told you so."
It is raining evidence these days. The newspaper business sections are turning into the Daily Fraud Update. Deloitte & Touche is now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for its role in the unpleasant doings at Adelphia, energy CEOs keep biting the dust -- first at CMS, then at Dynegy -- the Arthur Andersen trial in Houston gets more depressing by the day, and corporate evildoers are suddenly ubiquitous.
OK, I promise that I'm only going to do this once, but ... we did tell you so. Three years ago, I wrote a column explaining why I thought the high-tech market made Las Vegas casinos look good. One reader was so amused by this ludicrous display of ignorance he sent me an enormous flower arrangement -- the thing had to have cost a couple hundred bucks -- saying I'd given him the best laugh he'd had in years. I bring this up because I think it's important to remember the degree of triumphalism that raged among free-market fundamentalists during the short-lived "New Economy." So if we ever smell it again, we'll know to hunker down.
WASHINGTON - Washington's approval of more than US$1.4 billion for the economic recovery of barren and battle-scarred Afghanistan provides the Bush administration with possible insurance for deepening its petro-political sphere of influence along Russia's borders in the form of a revived Trans-Afghan pipeline.
No one disputes that America is critically in need of alternative sources of oil from outside the politically volatile Middle East. This is particularly true since Iraq's Saddam Hussein recently, albeit temporarily, halted his country's oil exports to the US. With Iran and Libyan leaders also supporting the idea of renewing the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the White House has no intention of standing idly by as frustrated Americans fight long lines and higher prices at the pump.
Since the early 1990s, three countries around the Caspian Sea - Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan - have yielded a vast reserve of oil and gas. Because all three are landlocked, however, control over their billions of dollars worth of oil and gas depends on the security and economic influence of the pipelines. For keen Washington energy analysts, the recent deployment of US special operations forces to the state of Georgia can only help enforce a Washington pipeline policy aimed at neutralizing Russian influence in oil-rich Central Asia.
For a moment it looked as if Jacques Chirac had swallowed something unpleasant. The French president gazed uncomprehendingly at George W. Bush, his lips pursing and then opening in what looked like a Gallic gasp for air.
It was halfway into a press conference in the Elysée Palace on Sunday afternoon and Mr Bush had just stumbled his way through another answer, forgetting part of the question and joking at his own lack of focus. "That's what happens when you get past 55," he cracked.
Not only is Mr Chirac about to turn 70 but his advanced age was, for a while, a sensitive issue in the presidential election campaign just finished.
It was as though Mr Chirac had gone to Washington a few weeks after Mr Bush's inauguration and made flippant remarks about the unreliability of recounts and the role of patrimony in American presidential politics.
Mr Bush's insult was unintentional, of course, but it was not the only jaw-dropping moment in Sunday's performance by the travelling American president. Earlier Mr Bush had said he was looking forward to trying some French food, because "[Jacques] is always telling me the food here is fantastic", apparently indicating that he had not heard about the quality of French cuisine in his previous 54 years on the planet.
Later he got into a peevish exchange with an American reporter who had graciously asked Mr Chirac a question in French. "He memorises four words and plays like he's all intercontinental," Mr Bush sneered. Reporters shuffled their notebooks and looked at their feet, embarrassed by this spectacle of an American president jeering at a fellow American for speaking their host's language.
US oil services and engineering firm Halliburton is being investigated for its accounting practices when US Vice President Dick Cheney was at the helm.
Halliburton is the latest in a string of companies to come under fire for allegedly shielding their true financial position from investors and analysts.
Mr Cheney was chairman and chief executive of the company between 1995 and 2000 and the probe revolves around the firm's accounts in 1998.
The Enron scandal prompted the push to clean up corporate America when it emerged that the disgraced energy firm had been reporting highly misleading accounts.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is drawing sharp criticism from civil libertarians and others for new terror-fighting guidelines that will allow FBI (news - web sites) agents to monitor Americans at religious services and in other public meetings.
Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) on Thursday freed the FBI to visit Internet sites, libraries, churches and political organizations as part of an effort to give the beleaguered agency new tools to pre-empt terrorist strikes.
"Our philosophy today is not to wait and sift through the rubble following a terrorist attack," Ashcroft told a news conference.
But critics said the new guidelines were just another erosion by the Bush administration of Americans' constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism.
"The administration's continued defiance of constitutional safeguards seems to have no end in sight," complained Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee (news - web sites).
A Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union is suspected of aiding the terrorist who committed last Wednesday's suicide bombing in Rishon Letzion, which killed two people and injured 51.
On May 23, the day after the attack, the Shin Bet security service arrested Marina Pinsky, 26, who immigrated from Russia 11 years ago, along with her Palestinian husband, Ibrahim Sarahna, 33, of the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem. The gag order on the arrest was lifted only yesterday.
Under interrogation, the two confessed to helping the terrorist, Issa Abed-Raba Badir, and revealed new details about the attack. They said that Ahmed Mugrabi, a senior Tanzim leader who had long been on Israel's wanted list, recruited Sarahna to bring terrorists into Israel, taking advantage of the freedom of movement he enjoys as the husband of an Israeli. Sarahna agreed in the full knowledge that his passengers planned to carry out attacks, but Pinsky said she discovered their purpose only after the fact.
Sarahna told interrogators that there were supposed to be two bombers in the Rishon attack, and he ferried them both from Bethlehem in a stolen car. He said he was the one who suggested Rishon as a good place for the attack, and drew the perpetrators a map of the area to help them.
IDF troops and tanks entered the West Bank city of Nablus and the nearby refugee camp of Balata on Friday morning, with soldiers going from house to house in the Balata camp by breaking through connecting walls.
The IDF said the troops were looking for Palestinian suspects and weapons and that the passage through houses was intended to avoid Palestinian fire on soldiers in the camp's narrow streets.
IDF also entered Qalqilyah early Friday morning but pulled out of the West Bank city several hours later and blockaded it.
In the Gaza Strip IDF troops exchanged fire with Palestinians and arrested suspected militants in the Gush Katif area, among them suspects of planning a terror attack on one of the Gush Katif settlements.
So many outrages. So little time. Now I know how the millions of decent, trusting American Catholics must feel about the crimes of their priests and the cover-ups of their cardinals. Now I know because the president of the United States may have the blood of his own citizens on his hands.
Up until now, I admit that I've disliked George W. Bush. I've disliked him for the shady way he gained power, for his pretense of being "a uniter, not a divider" even as he pushed an agenda that, arguably, 75 percent of the American people do not share. For his secrecy, smugness and sheer laziness. For being a pampered frat boy accustomed to having others do his bidding. For calling to mind what F. Scott Fitzgerald (through Nick Carroway) said about Tom and Daisy Buchanan: "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people come in and clean up the mess they had made."
But now I loathe George W. Bush. It does not feel good to loathe the leader of the country you love. It is no consolation to know that, as bad as I thought Bush would be as president before the election, he's much worse than my most pessimistic fantasies.
I'd like my fellow citizens to be angry. I'd like them to demand answers. I'd like them to take back their government from people who did not earn it and who've disgraced it with their actions and inactions (or, to use a Catholic metaphor, for their sins of commission and omission).
DOMESTIC PRIORITY: Overhaul conjures up Hoover days
Washington -- Few could fault the FBI for spending less energy chasing Bonnie and Clyde and more thwarting Osama bin Laden. To those most concerned with another terrorist attack, enhanced undercover operations, wiretaps and intelligence gathering are a rational and long-overdue response to 21st century threats.
Yet as the agency transforms itself from a pursuer of bank robbers into a domestic intelligence organization, others worry that national security will inevitably be confused with political dissent. To them, the FBI's reorganization announced Wednesday conjures up disturbing memories of J. Edgar Hoover's single-minded focus on communism, his penchant for domestic spying, and thick dossiers on political enemies.
As the public applauds the increased surveillance directed at would-be hijackers and suicide bombers, some warn that the FBI's wide net might also ensnare campus radicals, environmental extremists and scores of others on the political fringes.
WITH its haystacks, rusting ploughs and scent of livestock, Kibbutz Beit Alfa seems an unlikely place to affect the future of far-away Zimbabwe.
For much of the kibbutz’s 81-year history, members prided themselves on their idealism and defined themselves as a vanguard of Zionist socialism. But now, Beit Alfa is an ally of despotism in the eyes of some liberal Israelis and Zimbabwe’s opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The state-of-the-art crowd control water tankers supplied by the kibbutz this month promise to boost President Robert Mugabe’s efforts to suppress the opposition, the MDC says.
Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth over its conduct of the March election, in which Mr Mugabe declared victory over the MDC in a contest that international observers found to be neither free nor fair.
NEW DELHI: Reacting to a USA Today report about plans for mass evacuation of 64,000 Americans from India and Pakistan in the light of ongoing tensions in South Asia, the United States embassy here denied there was any US government team in New Delhi working on such a plan.
Asked about contingency plans for the evacuation of US citizens from India, a US embassy spokesman said the embassy indeed had such plans "but so does every US embassy ... such as in London or Rome".
As far as both India and Pakistan were concerned, the embassy said, the US State Department's May 24 advisory urging American citizens to defer travel plans to the two countries and to consider leaving if they are already in the region "still stands".
OK, so maybe John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller are not the sharpest tools in the shed. How else to explain that, after Sept. 11, it took the attorney general and the FBI director more than eight months to get around to telling the president and his top national security advisors about that prescient memo from the Phoenix FBI office warning of potential terrorists flooding American flight schools?
Of course, the best thing would have been to clue in the president when there was still time to tighten airport and immigration security and possibly avert tragedy. But, at the very least, you would think that Ashcroft--who learned of the Phoenix memo a few days after the attack--would have piped up when the president asked his top people whether U.S. intelligence had advance warning of the terror attacks.
The FBI has assumed new powers to investigate people and organizations not even suspected of crime, with blessings from the US Department of Justice and its terror-terrified Lord Protector John Ashcroft.
FBI Director Robert Mueller laid out the preliminary sketch during a Washington press conference Wednesday. After cleverly castigating himself for the bureaucratic bungling which caused warnings from the Phoenix field office about foreigners taking pilot training last Summer to go unanswered, and which also allowed Zacarias Moussaoui to go without a thorough investigation while he was in custody before the September atrocity, Mueller slickly concluded that the Bureau has got to go about things in a more direct manner, which is of course a scheme he's been rigging for some time. The FBI couldn't have leaked evidence of these failures more cleverly. Once the mainstream press had a chance to be outraged by the shocking revelations which the FBI no doubt deliberately fed them, Mueller beat himself up in public to bolster his arguments, win sympathy among journalists and citizens, and pave the way for his new regime.
Two countries — each with dozens of atomic bombs — are threatening to make war on each other. Large numbers of troops have mobilized. Deadly cross-border clashes are intense. And people in charge of both governments have become more bellicose by the day.
Maybe you think this situation calls for U.S. officials and American media outlets to focus on ways of preventing the outbreak of a war that could quickly turn into a nuclear conflagration. If so, your mode of thinking is distinctly out of step with the "war on terrorism."
You see, as the summer of 2002 begins, what matters most is the Pentagon's determination to kill as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible. Some of them are located in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps also Kashmir, the region that's under bitter dispute by India and Pakistan.
"Tell me, please, what am I supposed to do now?" the local Palestinian leader from the Bethlehem area asked the western diplomat. They were watching as a huge bulldozer dugs its teeth into the land of Beit Sahur, paving another road to bypass the Palestinians for the glory of the Israeli occupation. The road is particularly meant for the residents of Nokdim, the settlement that is home to MK Avigdor Lieberman. "What would you do in my place?" asked the Palestinian, a moderate who is far from being a proponent of violence. "Would you watch from the side as the settlers take your land, or would you shoot at the bulldozer?"
Those aren't the questions that are bothering the Tanzim leadership or the commanders of the Al-Aqsa Brigades. They, like the vast majority of Palestinians in the territories (92 percent according to the most recent poll by Dr. Khalil Shikaki), are in complete agreement about the legitimacy of the violent struggle against the settlers and the army that protects them.
The dilemma nowadays for non-religious Palestinians touches on the efficacy and morality of the suicide bombings inside the state of Israel, proper. There are growing signs that if Israel were to hint that it is ready, with the Palestinians, for a reprise of the Grapes of Wrath understandings, the unwritten agreement that in its day took the Galilee and the villages of south Lebanon out of the armed conflict, it would find the Tanzim and Al Aqsa Brigades willing partners.
The pop band REM had reached the climax of their concert. "Thank you!" the lead singer bellowed to the fans, "you've been amazing." The crowd screamed and the tinny radio speakers in the Baghdad taxi duly dissolved in a snowstorm of static.
The driver was tuned to Iraq's most popular radio station, VOI FM, owned by the notorious "Mr Uday" - Saddam Hussein's elder son and potential successor. The acronym stands for "Voice of Iraq FM" but given its eclectic, Westernised programming, it makes an unlikely national mouthpiece.
Unexpectedly, in this land of ferocious anti-Bush and Blair propaganda, VOI pumps out American and British music 24 hours a day, treating consumers to fruit supposedly forbidden by the ruling Baath Party. Its disc jockeys speak in English, not Arabic, as do callers to the phone-ins.
They are two best selling authors with two very different takes on terrorism. In his book, "9-11," Noam Chomsky accuses the United States of being a terrorist state. He says the war in Afghanistan is wrong, states that in recent history, America has committed acts of terrorism, and maintains that America's foreign policy is hypocritical.
In Bill Bennett's "Why We Fight," he says the war on terror is morally just. He maintains that democracy and human rights are America's noblest exports, and that we must be prepared to respond to anti-American critics. Talk about a war of words.
WASHINGTON — The United States is working on a Middle East peace proposal that would include creating an independent Palestinian state, senior administration officials said Wednesday.
Such a plan would go a step further than the previous United States position, which was merely to endorse the idea.
Officials say they hope the U.S. proposal, which would offer guidelines for dealing with some of the most nagging problems that divide the two sides, would be unveiled by July. The administration has been trying to set up a Middle East conference that month to discuss peace efforts.
Administration officials said trips to the region this week by CIA Director George Tenet and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns are intended to get feedback from Arab leaders on possible guidelines for a peace plan.
Burns arrived in Egypt on Wednesday. Tenet departs to meet with Palestinian and Israeli officials and Arab leaders Friday night.
Both men are expected to return to Washington by late next week, in time to brief President Bush before a two-day summit at Camp David with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has been a dependable United States ally, is influential among the leaders of Arab countries and is trusted by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
TEL AVIV, Israel –– When David Zonshein completed three weeks of army reserve duty at the beginning of the year, he didn't know he was about to launch a movement that would infuriate the military, reinvigorate the country's peace movement and cut him off from much of his own family.
All he knew was that as a decorated officer who was the grandson of Holocaust survivors, he could not serve another day in the Palestinian territories.
"As a Jew, I cannot do the kinds of things that I'm expected to do on reserve duty. Even if the whole world collapses around me, I will never bust into a Palestinian home again and interrogate and humiliate a father in front of his children," Zonshein said in an interview with The Associated Press.
So when the 29-year-old software engineer finished his reserve duty in the Gaza Strip in January, he called his commanders to say he wouldn't be back. Then, he and a friend published an anonymous letter on the internet vowing never to be part of an occupation.
"We were so angry, so traumatized by what we had seen in Gaza that we decided to write the letter and agreed that if we got 10 more officers to join us, then we'd sign our full names."
Yosef Barel, expected to be formally appointed by the government on Sunday as the new director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, issued orders Thursday to the IBA's editorial departments prohibiting the use of the term "settlers" on radio and TV broadcasts.
Barel told editors that a person's place of residence should be named, but the term "settler" or "settlements" can be used.
Barel did not answer News Director Rafik Halaby's question about how to distinguish between Jewish and Arab residents of Hebron, for example.
It is not clear if the editors will obey the order. Yesterday during the day on the radio, the term was still being used.
The Barel instructions came after Environmental Affairs Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, of the Likud, told Barel he should "put an end to the frequent use of the term 'settler'" in the IBA broadcasts.
Senior sources in the IBA said they believed the Barel order was meant to win Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's confidence
Endorses Police State
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department is expected to announce today new guidelines giving greater latitude to FBI agents to monitor Internet sites, libraries, and religious institutions without first having to offer evidence of potential criminal activity. Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and a former Justice Department official, had the following remarks:
"As reported in the press, the new FBI surveillance guidelines present no serious problems. Especially under post-September 11 circumstances, law enforcement monitoring of public places is simply good, pro-active police work that violates the rights of no one. The same is true for topical research not directly related to a specific crime, which the new guidelines will permit.
"Depending on how the work is conducted, there is always the potential for abuse, of course. But unless the new latitude leads to significant abuse, that potential should not preclude officials from taking an active role not simply in prosecuting but in preventing crime as well."
Washington -- Few could fault the FBI for spending less energy chasing Bonnie and Clyde and more thwarting Osama bin Laden. To those most concerned with another terrorist attack, enhanced undercover operations, wiretaps and intelligence gathering are a rational and long-overdue response to 21st century threats.
Yet as the agency transforms itself from a pursuer of bank robbers into a domestic intelligence organization, others worry that national security will inevitably be confused with political dissent. To them, the FBI's reorganization announced Wednesday conjures up disturbing memories of J. Edgar Hoover's single-minded focus on communism, his penchant for domestic spying, and thick dossiers on political enemies.
As the public applauds the increased surveillance directed at would-be hijackers and suicide bombers, some warn that the FBI's wide net might also ensnare campus radicals, environmental extremists and scores of others on the political fringes.
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
JERICHO, West Bank — A senior Palestinian leader warned yesterday that new Israeli incursions into the West Bank following a series of suicide bombings would not bring peace.
"People here are caged like animals," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Authority minister and leading peace negotiator. "I condemn any attacks on civilians. What Israel is doing to us can't be justified. Suicide bombings can't be justified."
Speaking in his office at the lowest and oldest city on earth, Mr. Erekat said that the closure of Palestinian cities would only increase the hatred that drives people to become suicide bombers.
Israel's latest strategy to fight suicide attacks has been to send troops into West Bank towns for short incursions aimed at seizing terrorist suspects.
It has also begun construction of a massive wire, earth and cement barrier along portions of the old Israel-West Bank border known as the Green Line.
Mr. Erekat said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new policy of incursions, along with Israel's nearly two-year policy of blockading Palestinians within their towns, means the Israeli leader has essentially torn up the peace accords negotiated in Oslo a decade ago.
The incursion into Lebanon in 1982 was not a fight for Israel's survival, but a misadventure. The government reluctantly set up a commission of inquiry, which forced the resignation of the head of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Yehoshua Saguy, and criticized Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Top Stories
The strongest finding was directed at Gen. Ariel Sharon for "having disregarded the prospect of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists" and "for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the chances of a massacre." Gen. Sharon told the Cabinet that accepting the report amounted to a "mark of Cain" on all of Israel.
"The physical presence of U.S. troops in certain parts of Pakistan... is not an inhibiting factor in policy determination," he said when asked if India was not taking action against Pakistan because of the presence of U.S. troops.
Singh was addressing a news conference in response to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's televised address on Monday.
Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was expected on Tuesday to convene his security cabinet after ending a brief holiday at a hill station in northern India.
Ahead of the meeting, Defence Minister George Fernandes held talks with the chiefs of the army, navy and the air force to take stock of defence preparations in the face of rising tensions with Pakistan, reports said citing Indian officials.
Earlier, President Pervez Musharraf said on Tuesday he was ready to take steps to ease tensions between his country and India, the Jiji news agency quoted him as telling Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi by telephone.
Koizumi told Musharraf to exercise restraint, and the Pakistani leader replied by asking Tokyo to tell India to do the same, Jiji said.
Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Tuesday called on Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar. According to a source both discussed the current Indo-Pak tension in detail.
JERUSALEM (AP) - A fence going up around Jerusalem is meant to stop Palestinian bombers, an Israeli Cabinet Minister said today, but some Israelis are complaining it amounts to redividing the city.
The decision to build the fence of thick coils of wire around Jerusalem - 9 feet high at points - came after repeated Palestinian suicide bombing attacks in the Jewish section of the city.
Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza are banned from entering Jerusalem, but Palestinians, most looking for work, take roundabout routes to avoid roadblocks. Bombers and other attackers also find entrance easy.
Public Security Minister Uzi Landau, visiting the fence, defended it against critics.
"We are putting here some obstacles in order to facilitate the ability of our security forces to intercept suicide bombers,'' Landau said. "Nobody's speaking here about a border.''
So far, sections of five miles of the fence have been built, and officials plan to put fencing and other barriers around the 12-mile perimeter of the city. Israel hopes to complete the fence within the next six months, said David Tzur, a police commander overseeing the fence plan.
Argentina faces a day of demonstrations and roadblocks as one of the main trade unions calls a 24-hour stoppage against the government.
The CTA union- the third largest grouping in Argentina- says the protest is against hunger, unemployment, and what it sees as President Duhalde's surrender to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The BBC correspondent in the capital, Buenos Aires, reports that traffic is lighter than usual, and that roadblocks have been set up on main access routes to the city.
The CTA, which represents hospital workers, teachers and other state employees, says schools will close, and there will be minimum staff in hospitals throughout Argentina.
In an April interview with The Ithaca Journal at his family's Cayuga Heights home, Guckenheimer, 22, shared his experiences during Operation Anaconda. He was sent on March 6 in a company of more than 100 soldiers to participate in the largest U.S.-led ground engagement in Eastern Afghanistan.
"We were told there were no friendly forces," said Guckenheimer, an assistant gunner with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. "If there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women and children to kill them."
The Israeli army has arrested a number of Palestinian militants - including a local commander of the militant group Hamas - on a brief incursion into the West Bank town of Jenin.
The incursion, which was reported over around midday on Tuesday, followed a Palestinian suicide attack that killed two Israelis, one of them a baby, and injured more than 30 others in the town of Petah Tikva outside Tel Aviv.
Israeli tanks, supported by helicopters, moved into Jenin early on Tuesday, sparking clashes with Palestinian gunmen, according to local witnesses. One Palestinian was reportedly killed in the exchange of fire.
Two-thirds of Americans think the Bush administration is hiding something about what it knew before Sept. 11, while just over a fifth think the administration is "telling the entire truth," a CBS News poll released Tuesday said. But most, 62 percent, don't believe congressional hearings are warranted on the situation.
Almost half think Democrats' questions to the White House about its handling of the Sept. 11 attacks are appropriate, and a third disagreed. The poll of 681 adults was taken Sunday and Monday and has an error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Among the poll's other findings:
–By a narrow margin, 43 percent to 30 percent felt the Bush administration is hiding something the public needs to know.
–A fourth placed a lot of blame on U.S. Middle East policies for the Sept. 11 attacks, while another half said they placed some blame on the policies.
–Almost half said the CIA and FBI had information before the attacks that could have prevented them, while a third said the agencies did not.
At Tuesday night's celebration of the Washington Times' 20th anniversary, its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, gripped a podium at the Washington Hilton and delivered an impassioned, hour-long evangelical sermon in Korean saying he established the newspaper "in response to heaven's direction."
During the sermon, he set the course for the Times' next 10 years: "The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God." Later, he added: "The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world."
By this point, several Times staffers had exited for the Hilton's bar, either because the party was alcohol-free or -- possibly -- because they needed a stiff drink.
Moon's sermon tossed gasoline on the long-smoldering embers that some Times staffers have spent two decades trying to extinguish: the accusation that their paper is a mouthpiece for Moon's religious movement, the Unification Church. Or, at best, a public relations outlet for conservative values and the Republican Party.
The charges were not helped by allegations of former reporters, who say stories were changed to favor conservatives; by editors who quit, claiming church tampering; or by obscurity surrounding the paper's finances. It has been years since many of those incidents, though, and five years since Moon's last mass wedding in Washington, which inevitably pulled the Times into scrutiny. For the past few years, the Times has enjoyed a relatively Moon-free zone.
It's gold rush fever in America's so called 'military silicon valley'.
And San Diego companies are beginning to reap the benefits of the extra $48bn the Bush administration is spending on defence in the wake of the worst terrorist atrocity committed on US soil.
The fear of a repeat of 11 September has led to mammoth budget increases in defence, homeland security and bioterrorism as the nation launches a major rearmament and wages what looks to be a lengthy war on terrorism.
The county's Chamber of Commerce says while most of the money is expected to flow to international defence giants with operations in the county, other local technology firms and even small obscure start-ups are also sharing in the largest defence build up in 20 years.
"Companies are aware of how to capitalise on those defence opportunities and we literally expect to see billions of dollars coming to this region in defence contracts," says the Chamber's chief economist Kelly Cunningham.
JERUSALEM: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat vowed to have a new government within 10 days during a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in his Ramallah headquarters, cabinet secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman said on Tuesday.
"The cabinet should change within a week, at latest in 10 days," he said.
The move, decided on at a Monday night meeting, would aim at streamlining the government as well as making its ministries more efficient and frugal, the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam said.
Twenty ministerial portfolios was deemed "an appropriate number" during the meeting, the paper said.
It was also proposed that "various political factions" participate in the new government as well as non-political figures, so as to "bring in new blood and vitality in governmental work and extend its popular base," the daily added.
Arafat also said the Palestinian Authority's various security services would be reorganised, without indicating any specific date, according to the report.
Curtailing criticism of the president is not the way to be a patriot. Dialogue--and dissent-- about the war on terrorism is the American way.
Can I say something now? Because no one's been able to do so, until recent revelations that the Bush administration had advance notice of the terrorism that came on Sept. 11. Somehow that nugget of info has broken the collective silence of the American people.
And silence, as my insurance agent used to assure me when trying to sell me yet another policy, is always interpreted as consent.
Some of us questioned the war on terrorism. The administration says it was a success, but by what criteria was success or failure measured? We didn't get Osama bin Laden. But this subject isn't something I could talk about with friends or family back in the U.S.
People with differing opinions on military action have been accused of being unpatriotic, of not loving America anymore. It's untrue and it hurts -- I feel like I'm a child again in the middle of a crisis at home where no one can say a word or Dad's temper will explode.
But I'm an American too, even if I live overseas. I have my passport; I pay taxes; my kids are American, love the U.S. and plan to live there when they are finished with school. I fly a huge American flag outside my house every 4th of July whether my English neighbors like it or not.
A US-WIDE campaign by several pro-Israeli groups in the United States has produced what the ombudsman for National Public Radio described as unprecedented pressure to influence American media coverage of events in the Middle East. This might come as a shock to Arab audiences who have repeatedly seen their causes unfairly covered by many American media organisations. But these pro-Israeli lobbies believe the majority of US news organisations nurture a pro-Palestinian bias. The campaign aims at altering media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict through various techniques ranging from boycotting newspapers to sending protest letters and e-mails.
Pro-Israeli pressure groups have accused the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune, among others, of unfair reporting that favours Arabs.
“Is it possible that so many major American news organisations are getting this story wrong — that some sort of national media conspiracy is at work here?” asked the Washington Post ombudsman in an article. “That, of course, is not the case,” he said.
So, under Peter Costello's "Keeping Australia Safe" budget, it is going to cost more to treat the common cold but we will be able to do it in a safe and secure environment. Sounds good and plays well in the electorate, but not so. Not unless Australia and other Western nations show greater vision in formulating defence and foreign policy.
Broadly, Australia's policies in defence differ from those of the Bush administration only in the way we spell it. Australia is part of whatever the US is planning. The next announcement may be the invasion of Iraq and the deployment of up to 500,000 troops. It will make Afghanistan look like a walk in the park.
And while we might support the government's stand, and many of its budget plans for increases in defence spending are sensible, we need to know that under the umbrella of Western foreign policy Australia is now a more prominent target and until that policy changes, no budget can make us "safe".
In a dark legacy from the Sydney Olympics, Australia is now better prepared for a biological/chemical attack than any other country. But that defence is far from tested. While everything possible was done for the Games, a determined attack could not have been prevented.
Yes, there was a marked increase in the efficiency of intelligence services here and overseas, but who had ever heard of Martin Bryant before he slaughtered people in Tasmania? Intelligence systems will not normally detect the Martin Bryants any more than they will detect the dozens of teenagers around the world who are being taught to hate the US and the West (including Australia) to the point that they will strap on explosives and sacrifice themselves in despair and martyrdom.
BRITAIN is continuing to sell military hardware to suspect regimes and countries ravaged by war, corruption and poverty, a Mirror investigation reveals.
A third of Britain's Government-approved arms exports go to nations where there is a risk of provoking or prolonging conflict in defiance of EU codes of conduct.
Other countries which receive our arms are likely to pass them on to Britain's strategic enemies, says the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.
To hide the extent of the scandal the Government shrouds the contents of arms consignments in secrecy, invokes the Official Secrets Act to stop MPs asking questions and hides behind confidentiality clauses.
It makes a mockery of New Labour's once vaunted claim to pursue an "ethical" foreign policy. Saferworld campaign group said: "The whole industry is shrouded in secrecy with manufacturers and politicians hiding behind phrases such as commercial sensitivity and classified information."
WASHINGTON, May 28 — British troops have deployed near the Pakistani border to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from returning to Afghanistan, U.S. and British officials said Wednesday.
NEW DELHI: Pakistani analysts are of the view that both General Pervez Musharraf’s tough speech on Monday and external affairs minister Jaswant Singh’s reaction to it on Tuesday seem to suggest that India and Pakistan are negotiating behind closed doors and a deal has been struck.
Lahore-based Friday Times editor, Najam Sethi, told The Times of India, ‘‘Musharraf’s speech was aimed at three audiences — domestic, international and Indian... For India, his message was, if you are flexing muscles so are we, but I am sure he has given India behind-the-scenes concessions. He has decided to take steps on cross-border terror and the hawkish posturing is only meant for Pakistanis’’.
According to Iqbal Haider of the Pakistan People’s Party, Singh’s harsh reaction was disappointing. ‘‘The kind of aggressive posturing on Singh’s part can only be counter-productive. He (Singh) should have realised that Musharraf’s speech was essentially meant for the domestic audience. Musharraf has given every indication in his speech that he is ready to concede on the issue of cross-border terror and was not aggressive in his posturing at all. Singh’s reaction has not helped the de-escalation of the war phobia at all and he should have kept a window open for talks at Almaty,’’ he said.
Widespread congressional support is rooted in more than just a long-term relationship. It is traced to the power of the collective Jewish or pro-Israeli lobby, a well-organized, well-funded, extremely active, and extraordinarily connected group, according to political analysts.
"They are very savvy and sophisticated," said Richard Semiatin, a political science professor at American University. "They are extremely knowledgeable and some of the best lobbyists in the country when they get into congressional offices."
Indeed, the latest crisis in the Middle East, which has been punctuated by 20 months of Palestinian uprisings that resulted in dozens of homicide bombings and the subsequent ongoing occupation of disputed Palestinian territory, has only energized this Washington lobby. The group has been hosting near-daily organizational conferences, press events, op-eds, advertising campaigns, and rallies — all demanding that Arafat get control of his militant supporters and reform his corrupt Parliament.
"It's a little like the special forces teams who go in to fight in Afghanistan. They're on the ground, calling in bombers. The planes overhead are the pro-Israeli supporters across the country," who donate money to campaigns and send letters to Washington, said former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris. "It's a very effective model and basically unequaled in the Congress."
"The key to AIPAC's success is support for the only Western
Over the past couple of weeks, the Bush administration in Washington has sounded the alarm over possible new attacks by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organisation. That's led to a heightened sense of urgency and preparedness across the United States. But not in Canada.
In fact, since September 11, many of the measures introduced by the Canadian government to beef up security at airports and border crossings, and anti-terror legislation as well as tougher immigration laws are not sitting all that well with many Canadians. For some, those measures are becoming a burden.
The Israeli far-right – always the best indicator of Israel's true intentions – is quite outspoken: its aim is to make Palestinian life unbearable to a point that they would rather get up and go. Asked about his conception of "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians, Minister of Tourism (Rabbi) Benny Eylon compared the "voluntary" element to that of a Jewish husband who refused a rabbinical order to divorce his wife. Since rabbinical court cannot undo the marriage without the husband's consent, it should use force – excommunicate the obstinate husband, slash him, jail him etc. – until he "voluntarily" agrees to divorce. This is how the Palestinians should be "voluntarily" made to leave. And obviously, as long as they do not leave – because they cannot or will not – they should be struggling to survive rather than resist their oppression.
When Ariel Sharon visited an agricultural high school outside Beersheva in the final phase of his campaign to become Israel's Prime Minister, he was met by 16-year-old Ilil Komey, whose father has suffered from shellshock in the wake of Israel's illegal 1984 invasion of Lebanon. In a scene recorded by Israeli national television , Ms. Komey pointed her finger at Israel's premier warhawk, and said:
"I think you sent my father into Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime minister."
GREAT NEWS!
While Ms. Komey's outrage may be righteous, her future as a political pundit seems cloudy, at best: if the polls are correct, it looks like Sharon – known as "the Bulldozer" for his policy (while minister of "infrastructure") of destroying Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli "settlements" – will flatten Ehud Barak and emerge at the head of the Israeli government at a crucial time in his nation's history. They tell a story about Sharon's early career that helps to put his expected election victory in perspective, and gives us an idea of what makes the incoming Prime Minister of Israel tick: As the head of "Unit 101," the notorious terrorist squad, Sharon and his fellow thugs were camped out on a kibbutz near the Syrian border, having been ordered not to make a move unless provoked. One day, Sharon ran into the headquarters, yelling "Great news! They've just killed the guard!"
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
BAND TAIMORE, Afghanistan (AP) -- Officials and elders from a sand-blown village deep in the deserts of southwestern Afghanistan expressed anger Sunday over a raid by U.S.-led coalition forces seeking Taliban or al-Qaida supporters.
Residents of Band Taimore said soldiers in four helicopters swooped down on their homes shortly after midnight Friday, blowing holes with explosives in the high walls that surround Afghan homes and throwing stun grenades inside. Some 50 men were taken away, they said.
The timing and details of the action matched an operation announced Friday by the U.S. military which said it had captured 50 people about 48 miles west of Kandahar -- roughly the location of Band Taimore. However, it did not name the location and said intelligence suggested a compound there was used to harbor senior al-Qaida and Taliban leaders -- a charge denied by the villagers.
VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Beneath a dark and foreboding sky, the largest demonstration seen in the Northwest since Seattle's WTO fireworks brought traffic to a halt Saturday in Canada's third-largest city.
It is unlikely, however, that the protest will slow the layoffs of public employees, closures of long-term care facilities or shutdowns of hospitals and courts being instituted by the ultraconservative government of B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell.
What Campbell calls "special interest groups" were in the streets -- Indian drummers, anti-poverty activists, burly longshoremen and construction workers, college students, greens and doctors frustrated by a fee dispute with the government.
But the march by up to 30,000 people may have led nowhere. With 77 of 79 seats in the provincial Legislature, Campbell's B.C. Liberal Party -- despite its name, a party of the political right -- can rule as a kind of elected dictatorship.
"I think that's dangerous because when you have legitimate democratic avenues of protest shut down, people get more and more disturbed. I think you'll see more and more unrest," George Heyman, president of the B.C. Government Employees Union, said as he marched.
Already there are signs of anger and unrest.
Campbell's constituency office was recently firebombed, and an incendiary device exploded early this month at a Vancouver school where his wife is vice principal.
It's time to challenge the premise behind White House efforts to delegitimize questions on everything from pre-9/11 screw-ups to Enron to the budget.
The premise is that we are at "war." The reality is that this is not a war. And if we're not in a war, everything about public discussion can be different. Indeed, the truest war we're in today may be the war to frame the debate, because the way debate gets framed goes far in determining its outcome.
Language matters. George Bush's invocations of war echo Churchill stiffening English spines during the Blitz. But we are not in such a war. In such a war an entire nation mobilizes against daily and massive threats to its survival. Or an entire nation puts comfort and family on hold and revamps its industrial system to support large-scale military action on foreign soil, as we did in World War II.
Bush has issued no such call for sacrifice, because none is required. The main civilian "sacrifice" of the post-9/11 age is an inconvenience -- longer security lines for the fraction of Americans who are regular air travelers. It would be preposterous to suggest we reorganize our entire economy to fight Al-Qaida.
Instead, we face a frightening new era in which terrorism, and the fight against terrorism, can be expected to be a permanent feature of American life. This is not the same as facing the full might of Nazi Germany, with tens of millions of mobilized citizens. It means facing the unconventional tactics and potentially devastating weaponry of a loosely organized network of several thousand people who want to kill us.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Kurds in northern Iraq have created a quasi-democratic, somewhat prosperous life under the protection of U.S. jets patrolling a no-fly zone and keeping Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s tanks away.
But faced with the question of whether that democracy could flower elsewhere in Iraq if the United States launched an invasion to topple Saddam, many Kurds are leery.
They worry that any U.S. military action in Iraq could just lead to a backlash against them by Saddam, who gassed Kurdish villages in the 1980s.
Even if Saddam were toppled, they could just end up with another dictator in Baghdad or — even worse — invasions by Iran or Turkey, said several who attended a meeting this weekend in Washington on prospects for democracy in Iraq.
Before they support any U.S. efforts to overthrow Saddam, the Kurds want guarantees that the United States would not stop until Saddam was overthrown, and that they would have a role in any future central Iraqi government, said Mahmood Osman, a Kurdish politician who lives in London.
"They cannot destroy all their gains, and give more sacrifices," he said at the conference, sponsored by the human rights group Freedom House and the Iraq Institute for Democracy, an organization based in Irbil in the Kurdish north of Iraq.
There's a lot about President Bush's manner, breezing through Europe and telling us all to pull our socks up, that makes you want to wipe the smile off his face. 'Iraq ought to be on the minds of the German people,' he said to a TV station in Berlin, 'because the Iraq government is a dangerous government.' Well, yes, but how exactly has Saddam's stance changed since this time last year when America was enjoying the first month's of George Bush's carefree unilateralism and Iraq was some way down the agenda?
Not much, is the answer. Saddam has probably acquired a little more weaponry but essentially his regime is as barbarous to its own people and as menacing to the outside world as it was last year. 'This is a government that has gassed its own people,' Bush added, pressing home the point. Indeed, but that was back in August 1988 when estimates of between 50,000 and 180,000 were killed in the final solution of the Kurdish question. At the time it raised only modest interest in the US media.
The President's lecture tour of Europe and Russia reminds us how little experience he has of foreign affairs and how recent is his discovery of the history and complexities of issues which have been unquestionably better covered and probably better understood in Europe than in the US. As if to underline this point, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have used the Commander-in-Chief's absence from Washington to reveal their deep concerns about any attack on Iraq.
Europe may have its faults, as Bush and Colin Powell reminded us last week, but whatever our weaknesses of coordination, resolution and principle, it still seems mightily rich of Bush to expect us to go along with a policy General Tommy Franks, head of US Central Command, said would require at least 200,000 US troops and result in large casualties.
People who said they were glad George Bush was leading the American response to terrorist attack are choking on their words. Recent events confirm that the founders knew what they were doing when they provided for the president to be chosen by the voters, as Al Gore was, and not the Supreme Court, as Bush was.
(Those founders were smart cookies. They didn't use jargon like "market-driven" in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence either. Bush says we won't stop squeezing the Cubans until they adopt "market-driven" reforms. Apparently they'll have to turn their power plants over to Enron. If Bush demands "faith-based" reforms, they'll have to take Jerry Falwell.)
We know now that the Bush administration received numerous warnings of impending terrorist attacks, some arriving almost on the eve of the Sept. 11 disaster, and did next to nothing. Well, it did slip word to John Ashcroft, our faith-based attorney general, and Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft. Faith has its limitations. When Bill Clinton got a warning in 1999, he ordered an attack on Osama Bin Laden's training camp. Congressional Republicans accused him of picking on Osama for political reasons. Trent Lott hadn't developed an interest in national unity at the time.
After the airplanes struck the towers, Bush spent the rest of the day darting around the country, maintaining distance from the crash sites, ostensibly on the recommendation of security advisers. Bush's press secretary defended this behavior by saying terrorists had targeted the presidential plane. This was a lie, it turns out. There was no such targeting, at least none that our government knew of. Anyway, an army of security advisers couldn't have kept President Clinton from Ground Zero, and indeed former President Clinton showed up there before Bush did.
A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.
Conducted for FAIR by the media analysis firm Media Tenor, the study shows that the big three nightly news shows rely heavily on society's most powerful groups when they report the news of the day. More than one in four sources were politicians-- George W. Bush alone made up 9 percent of all sources-- versus a mere 3 percent for all non-governmental advocacy groups, the sources most likely to present an alternative view to the government's.
Even before the September 11 attacks, Republicans made up a full 68 percent of partisan sources (which surged to 87 percent after the attacks). These figures should dispel the myth of a liberal or pro-Democrat news bias, but don't necessarily prove a conservative or Republican slant. Rather, they reflect a strong tendency of the networks to turn to the party in power for information. Sixty-two percent of all partisan sources were administration officials; when these are set aside, the remaining partisan sources were 51 percent Republican and 48 percent Democrat, suggesting a strong advantage overall for the party that holds the White House.
Big business, too, was overrepresented. In a year in which the country lost 2.4 million jobs, corporate representatives appeared about 35 times more frequently than did union representatives, accounting for 7 percent of sources versus labor's 0.2 percent.
At first glance, the invitation many clergy and community leaders around the country received last April to attend conferences on "Faith-Based Initiatives For Family and Community Renewal" might have looked like it came from the Republican congressional leadership and the Bush administration.
The material, decorated with a drawing of the U.S. Capitol, noted that the events would include a satellite broadcast of a GOP-sponsored "faith-based summit" for clergy transmitted live from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and said that prominent congressional leaders and White House staffers would take part.
The flyer promised that the "cutting edge program" would "provide the latest information on innovative policies and programs from the Executive and Congressional leadership in Washington; and build alliances for faith-based services at the state and community level."
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, the House Republican Conference Chairman, was issuing press releases noting that the GOP’s "faith-based" summit would be viewed by satellite at events in over 45 cities.
WASHINGTON, May 26 — An American intelligence assessment, completed this week as tensions between India and Pakistan intensified, warns that a full-scale nuclear exchange between the two rivals could kill up to 12 million people immediately and injure up to 7 million, Pentagon officials say.
Even a "more limited" nuclear war — as measured in number of warheads — would have cataclysmic results, overwhelming hospitals across Asia and requiring vast foreign assistance, particularly from the United States, to battle radioactive contamination, famine and disease, officials said.
"The humanitarian crisis that would result would be so great that every medical facility in the Middle East and Southwest Asia would be quickly overwhelmed," one Defense Department official said. "The American military would have no choice but go in and help with the victims and to clean up."
resident Bush showed little respect for history, and even less for the illuminating work done by presidential historians, when he issued an executive order last November making it significantly harder to gain access to a former president's official papers. Now a worthy bipartisan attempt to overturn that order is being stalled by the White House, which is scrambling to portray its new rules as a benign attempt to tidy up the system for releasing presidential records.
It is nothing of the sort. Mr. Bush's decree essentially repealed the presumption of public access at the heart of a proud post-Watergate reform — the Presidential Records Act of 1978. This bipartisan act established that a president's White House records are not his personal property but rather belong to the American people. Former presidents have leeway to withhold sensitive material for up to 12 years, including papers revealing the advice served up by White House aides. After that, a former president seeking to override an archivist's decision to release material must seek a court order.
I have to wonder at the astounding silence from those who frothed and rattled ceaselessly for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Isn't it inconsistent and blatantly dishonest not to be calling for an investigation of the sitting administration?
Let's see, the charges against William Jefferson Clinton were perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. As far as I know, President Bush hasn't yet had the opportunity to lie under court oath but he surely has lied about his relationship with Kenneth Lay, the staggeringly rich poor boy of Enron infamy. At least three times he publicly denied knowing Ken Lay, the guy who donated the very jet that shuttled Bush around during his campaign. The guy for whom Bush interrupted his campaign so he could watch him toss the first pitch at Enron Field. Ken Lay, the man who ran the single largest corporate contributor to the Republican Party. Bush has acted like he never heard of the guy. Lay has publicly recalled differently. But that was just lying while under the oath of office and only to the press and the American people. Not the court. Besides, Bush is such a friendly guy and has given so many people cute nicknames, maybe he really doesn't remember calling him "Kenny Boy."
Dick Cheney has lied about national security matters when his Haliburton firm did trade with Iraq (now part of the so-called Axis-of-Evil, you might recall) after it was against federal law to do so. Whoops. Cheney's Haliburton paid $2 million for defrauding the government by inflating what the taxpayers had to pay for contract maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord in California. Very likely, that $2 million was less than Haliburton profited from the scheme. We trust him to protect our national interests over his and his friends' financial interests? His history shows that to be extremely foolish. But it is questionable that all of this meets the definition of perjury, so we'll leave perjury out of the immediate considerations and move on to the remaining charges.
Obstruction of justice. That sure sound like a serious charge. I think most Americans really want to believe that justice prevails in their country. While there are some embarrassments, we generally have a proud history in our efforts at being a just society. The obstruction of justice naturally galls us as Americans, as it should.
The written charges against Clinton began with the statement: "The president has misused and abused the office and impaired the administration of justice." In Clinton's case, the charges that he obstructed justice were mostly about his lying, giving misleading statements or encouraging others to do so on his behalf relating to the Paula Jones case