The robbery of the safe deposit boxes at the Israel Discount Bank arouses professional awe. The was brilliant planning, flawless inside information, skillful execution, a right choice of timing, and scrupulous attention to detail to the point of using a vacuum cleaner to remove all traces of evidence.
What has the State of Israel come to, if the only thing that goes right is a bank robbery?
Where are the days before the IDF word-laundry turned "assassination" into "preventive strike"? The days when missions of this type were carried out in secret, most of them successfully? When an operative dressed as a woman and bumped off a wanted Palestinian in Beirut without harming his family? When today's chief of staff oversaw the liquidation of Abu Jihad at his home in Tunis and departed without a hair falling from the head of his wife and children?
Where are the days when the perpetrators of the massacre of our athletes in Munich were struck down with surgical precision, one by one, and no one would have been the wiser if not for a little identification mix-up in Lillehammer? Where are the tweezer operations, like the capture of Eichmann, who was brought to Israel to stand trial? Some liquidations have never been reported or spoken about, but at least they were all the product of an orderly decision making process, and not the whim of one man.
Israel's long arm had become a trademark. But not everything that could be done in the past can still be done today, because of our diplomatic relations and because the rules have changed. And not everything that was effective and served as a deterrent in the past does those things equally well today. Expulsions, house demolition, andcollective punishments, do more harm than good. Times and circumstances have changed. Our long, legendary arm has gone from smart to imbecilic.
"We used to catch elephants with tweezers," says Avi Gil. "Today, we catch tweezers with elephants." Yossi Sarid, who once sat on secret committees that decided matters of life and death, says that there are times when you don't have to be a military expert - you just have to be an expert in the brains department. When 180 people, including women and children, are killed or wounded in a "surgical strike," it's clear they weren't in bed with Salah Shehadeh. They are among the hundreds of people who live in tin shanties nearby.
It is hard to believe that no one knew they existed. Dropping a bomb that weighs a ton in such a teeming place is either an intelligence failure, a case of bad judgment, or the work of an evil mind, and God only knows which is worse.
Friday, July 26, 2002
July 26, 2002 | NEW YORK -- On Tuesday, the United Nations General Assembly approved Secretary-General Kofi Annan's nomination of Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello to become the next U.N. high commissioner for human rights. His term -- Vieira de Mello is just the third individual to hold the position -- will begin on Sept. 12 and he's sure to be watched closely -- by both human rights groups and the Bush administration.
After Vieira de Mello's nomination was announced on Monday, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, "[Vieira de Mello] brings to the job an impressive diplomatic and U.N. background, but he lacks hands-on human rights experience. The challenge he faces is to prove that he will stand up to governments and be an unwavering voice on behalf of the victims of human rights abuse."
As Vieira de Mello himself told Reuters, "The job in itself is a minefield ... It is the risk of politicization and how to manage that, how to ensure that human rights are not over politicized." And no one can vouch for his assertion better than Mary Robinson, the outgoing high commissioner, whose term ends on the now iconic date of Sept.11. It's common knowledge that her defense of the Durban Conference against Racism, which U.S. and Israeli representatives walked out of, her views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and her condemnation of the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Camp X-ray at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay provoked the Bush administration to oppose the extension of her term.
Robinson became the second United Nations high commissioner for human rights in June 1997 after resigning as president of Ireland. Before Robinson, Ireland's presidency was a ceremonial office, whose holder was expected to do little more than shake hands with VIPs and open schools and hospitals. But when Robinson -- a woman with socialist and feminist leanings -- was elected, it symbolized the changes in what had been a traditionally conservative and religion-dominated country. She stretched the boundaries of the presidency to fit her concerns, one of the most prominent of which was human rights. She made trips to places like Somalia and Rwanda, and in the Great Lakes region of Africa she coined the memorable phrase, "the cycle of impunity," to describe the process by which leaving mass murder unpunished encouraged others to do the same.
GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP – Spilling sweet, hot tea from the glass he is holding, Mustafa Hamarneh lurches up from sitting cross-legged on a piece of cardboard and stalks off. Suddenly he returns, displaying a brown plastic bag stuffed with the leaves and stalks of a cress-like plant that grows wild in the Gaza Strip. He plans to take the greens home to feed his family.
"Animals eat this," he growls.
An elderly man with bristly white stubble on his chin, Mr. Hamarneh sits down again, and all around him sweaty, scruffy men nod their heads in empathy. One offers a recipe for the cress: "You mix it with tomatoes."
The economic despair of the Palestinians has reached a new low: People are eating weeds.
Hamarneh and the others stand and sit under a green-and-white tarp stretched over a frame they have put up in an empty lot. Unemployed for nearly two years, these and other Gazan workers have begun to put their frustration on display, mounting demonstrations and spending their days in protest tents.
In most societies, economic angst this severe would guarantee political turmoil. But among the Palestinians, the dictum of the Clinton years needs a rewrite: it's the intifada, stupid.
While Hamarneh and his jobless brethren are angry with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) for doing too little to help them, they insist their movement isn't political.
I do not recall a period of more generalized gloom in the financial community than the one we are going through now. The crisis of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1970s comes closest. At that time, the lack of confidence centered around the shaky capital structures of the brokerage houses (also disguised by faulty accounting and incompetent management), the Israeli-Arab wars resulting in an oil embargo and the lengthy bear market that went with it. Today all of these elements are present, but it is the financial integrity of the entire American business community that is suspect, together with its surrounding support system: its boards of directors, its accountants, its investment bankers, its lawyers and the media.
This occurs at a time when we had created our own American brand of popular capitalism, whose broad participation in ownership by Americans was the envy of the world. The $6 trillion of market values that was vaporized by the bursting of the dot-com bubble and by the general decline of the market that followed now affects all Americans, if not directly, then indirectly. The tax increases of state and local governments, together with their layoffs and other service reductions, are just as much a result of these events as are the direct market losses of their pensions and savings funds.
Credit is not a science; it comes from the Latin "credere" meaning "to believe." That is the underpinning of our market system and when that underpinning is damaged, the whole system is in jeopardy. As stock markets give way, credit markets become tighter and credit becomes more expensive, or just unavailable to all but the strongest companies.
This situation is not likely to be reversed quickly. Faith, once broken, takes a long time to repair. This is a reality that is not uniquely confined to the financial system; other, older institutions such as the Catholic Church, are going to be dealing with a similar phenomenon.
WASHINGTON, July 24 — A senior State Department official said today that Israel could face "consequences," including possible sanctions on arms sales, if it improperly used American-made weapons during attacks on Palestinian targets.
Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said the United States was closely monitoring Israeli actions to ensure they did not violate the Arms Export Control Act, which requires that military items sold by the United States be used solely for "internal security and legitimate self defense."
"We've made quite clear that we're seriously concerned about some of the Israeli tactics, some of the Israeli actions, including targeted killings and actions like this that endanger civilians," Mr. Boucher told reporters today.
"So we continue to watch and monitor Israeli actions very carefully, and we urge Israel to consider consequences of actions such as these."
His remarks were prompted by reports that the Israeli military used an American-made F-16 fighter jet to drop a laser-guided bomb into a densely packed neighborhood in Gaza City on Tuesday, killing a Hamas leader and 14 civilians.
The Bush administration condemned the attack as "heavy handed" and asserted that Israel was aware that noncombatants were in the building at the time.
The arms control act requires the State Department to report to Congress when there is a "substantial violation" of the law, Mr. Boucher said. He said no such report had been issued "since the current violence began."
On Tuesday, Mr. Boucher was asked repeatedly by reporters to describe the kinds of specific Israeli actions that might lead to a report. But he declined to explain what those actions might be, saying, "It's an object of ongoing review."
The law authorizes the government to suspend military aid to countries that violate the Arms Export Control Act. In 1982, for instance, the Reagan administration suspended deliveries of cluster bombs to Israel after concluding that the military had used them improperly.
Asked today what sorts of consequences Israel might face if it were found to have violated the arms control act, Mr. Boucher replied: "I suppose there are all sorts of potential consequences. The chief issue that we've tried to address here is whether an action that harms civilians like this is right, whether it's wise, whether it actually brings anybody closer to peace."
The IDF prosecutors office has filed charges against a company commander and a soldier in the reserves for severely abusing a Palestinian youth, Israel Radio reported
The charges against lieutenant-colonel (Res.) Sagi Geva and another soldier claim that while serving in the village of Doha near Bethlehem, the two were carrying out searches for a man when they discovered his son.
The commander threatened the youth with a loaded rifle, before commanding him to remove his pants and underwear. The two then held a flame near the youth's genitalia.
In addition the two are charged with sexually abusing the boy and beating him. The incident occured three months ago.
Former Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes identified the importance of repetition as a propaganda technique when he said, "If you tell the same story five times, it’s true." This propaganda technique is still in force as conservatives keep pushing the tired myth of a liberal media.
Ironically, the supposed liberal media has cooperated fully, giving conservative media critics such as Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg widespread attention for flimsily evidenced diatribes about 'liberals' like Dan Rather and Katie Couric tilting coverage to suit their personal beliefs. Meanwhile, this same supposedly liberal bastion has somehow ignored the substantial critiques of the media from writers such as Norman Solomon, Mark Crispin Miller and Robert McChesney, who document the increasing pro-corporate tilt in media coverage and ownership in recent years.
If anything, watching Wall Street’s ongoing meltdown and our shrinking net worth should help us recognize that the glaring bias in news, especially on economic issues, is a conservative one that allowed the current financial crisis to simmer below the surface until it boiled over into its current chaos.
New documentary evidence points to an Israeli connection to 9/11
Many people write to me and ask: "Why do you hate Israel so much?" My answer to them is: No, I don't hate Israel – but I am beginning to hate Israel's government, and here's why:
"Israel's missile attack on a densely populated area of Gaza City provoked worldwide condemnation yesterday, but the Israeli Government defended its action robustly. The West and the Arab world united in denouncing the attack, saying it violated international law by targeting innocent civilians. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, hailed the killing of the Hamas commander Salah Shehada as a great success. The deaths of 14 others, including nine children, were said to be regrettable."
Okay, so it's a war, and bad things happen in wartime, unavoidable deaths, "collateral damage," etc. etc., you know the drill. But why does Israel's Prime Minister find it necessary to hail the killing of nine children as "one of our great successes" and congratulate his trained killers for a job well-done? Is he an out-of-the-closet sadist, loud and proud in his desire to inflict maximum pain?
Sharon later backtracked, somewhat, acknowledged that a "mistake" had been made in firing a heavy-duty missile at a thickly-populated apartment complex in the Gaza strip, and tried to shift the blame onto "misleading intelligence." According to the new story, Shin Bet hadn't told them that innocent civilians were in the area.
This was met with widespread disbelief. After all, firing a one-ton missile at an apartment complex – you know, a place where families live – could have had but one result. "To suggest anything otherwise," John Ryan, Ireland's UN ambassador said in the Security Council the other day, "is disingenuous."
Which is just a hifalutin' way of calling someone a bloody liar.
Even Sharon's poodle, otherwise known as the President of the United States, was moved to remark that the Gaza massacre was somewhat "heavy-handed" – although naturally the official US denunciation, as always, reiterated this administration's unconditional support for Israel. As presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer put it:
"The president's concern here is there is loss of innocent lives. The president has been and will continue to be the first to defend Israel. In this case the president sees it differently. … This was a deliberate attack on this site, knowing that innocents would be lost as a consequence of this attack."
Is it finally beginning to dawn on the White House that what we are dealing with in the Sharon government is evil, pure and simple – as evil as Hamas. Probably not, but the unmistakable evidence of something rotten in the state of Israel grows, such as this sickening story in the Jerusalem Post about an IDF company commander and a soldier in the reserves who tortured and sexually abused a Palestinian youth. The Post reports:
"The two were carrying out searches for a man when they discovered his son. The commander threatened the youth with a loaded rifle, before commanding him to remove his pants and underwear. The two then held a flame near the youth's genitalia. In addition the two are charged with sexually abusing the boy and beating him."
Thursday, July 25, 2002
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite the specter of new attacks on the United States, the U.S. military opposes any move to give civilian police powers to the armed forces to protect Americans, a top Army general said on Wednesday.
Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane spoke as the government began to examine possible changes in an 1878 "posse comitatus" law that forbids the military from making arrests and undertaking other law enforcement duties except in dire emergencies.
"We don't see any reason to change," the Army's No. two ranking officer told reporters, adding that the armed forces would continue to operate in an unarmed supporting role for civilian agencies such as airport and border security.
"I think military leaders have always resisted policing the American people. We have police forces that are appropriately trained to do that. ... We have always supported that law for obvious reasons," Keane said in response to questions at a meeting with defense writers.
But a sweeping homeland security plan proposed by President Bush ( news - web sites) last week calls for a review of whether domestic security would be increased by greater involvement of troops and how it could be done after the devastating Sept. 11 attacks on America that killed more than 3,000 people.
Both conservative and liberal members of Congress -- and most Americans, according to past polls -- have traditionally supported the historic separation between police and the military in the United States.
The European Union is to fill the gap left by the US decision to stop funding the UN's family planning organization with €32m (£20.3m) aid for sexual and reproductive health work in 22 countries, the Guardian has learned.
The aid, to be announced later this week, will replace the $34m US contribution to the UN Population Fund (UNPFA), which helps poorer countries with family planning and advice on population control, health and sexual matters.
The state department announced on Monday that George Bush was ending payment. The president has been under pressure from anti-abortionist groups to stop funding bodies which give advice on abortion.
The European commission will send the money to projects run by the UNPFA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Poul Nielson, the development commissioner, promised last year that the EU would step in when the White House announced it that it would cut its funding of organizations it suspected of encouraging abortions or sterilization.
"The losers from this decision will be some of the most vulnerable people on earth," a commission spokesman said yesterday.
The EU's development policy gives an important place to reproductive health education, including awareness of Aids, as an essential part of the fight against poverty.
The countries benefiting from its aid, ranging from Burkina Faso to Zambia, have childbirth mortality rates of 500 to 1,800 in 100,000 births.
Funds will be allotted to pre and post-natal care, pregnancy counseling, and abortion where there is risk to the mother. About 80,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions.
The EU, worried by transatlantic disputes on defense, trade and food safety, and a general US trend towards withdrawing from multinational cooperation, was angered by the withdrawal of funding, describing it as "irresponsible and counter-productive.
Demands for action were led by Clare Short, the UK international development secretary, who wanted to avoid a public row with Washington but was anxious for the EU to play an active role in global population policy.
RESIDENT George W. Bush has reassured us that ''From the antitrust laws of the 19th century to the S&L reforms of recent times, America has tackled financial problems when they appeared.'' But the savings & loan reforms came seven years and 150 billion taxpayer dollars late. Nor did that problem merely ''appear.'' It was created by a deregulation bill in 1982 overseen at that time by Vice President George Bush.
From 1981 to 1988, the Reagan-Bush administration covered up the S&L debacle. It forced reductions in S&L examiners and fought against the top federal regulator, Ed Gray, who sounded the alarm. Charles Keating, the felon who drove Lincoln Savings into the most expensive S&L failure in history ($3 billion) considered Vice President Bush an ally in his efforts to force Gray from office. Only after he was safely elected president did Bush propose to reregulate the S&L industry in 1989.
Meanwhile, Neil Bush, private citizen, was getting a ''loan'' from a business partner. The partner invested the loan for the president's son with the agreement that if the investment succeeded Neil would get all the profits and repay the debt, but if it failed he would not have to repay. Neil knew that this business partner was not creditworthy and yet was borrowing over $100 million from Silverado S&L, where Neil was a member of the board. Neil did not warn Silverado that the borrower was not creditworthy. When Silverado failed, the Office of Thrift Supervision proposed a minor enforcement action against Neil, which the Bush administration then attempted to block
3 hours not enough to figure them out
Somewhere right now, Bill Simon is having a real good laugh.
Dozens of journalists spent hours poring over more than 1,000 pages of the GOP gubernatorial candidate's tax returns Monday, and the only thing they learned for sure is that this is why they never became accountants.
If there's a smoking gun anywhere in the thicket of filings, Simon made sure it'd stay well hidden.
His ludicrous ground rules all but guaranteed that nothing would come of the late-afternoon effort but frustration and a serious headache. Among the restrictions:
-- No copies of the two-volume collection of tax returns spanning 1990 to 2000 could leave the room.
-- No cameras or other recording devices were allowed.
-- Only campaign-provided pads could be used for note taking.
Best of all, only two hours were provided to wade through page after page of the most eye-glazing, mind-numbing documents imaginable.
Simon's people invited the press to stay longer if they wanted, and some of us went a whole three hours grappling with the highly complex material. But in the end, there was nothing to do but throw in the towel.
"You get a sense that he really doesn't want anyone to know what's going on, " said Richard Del Monte, a Danville investment adviser. "This was just an exercise in futility."
So what in fact is in all those returns?
The first thing that's apparent is that Simon is doing just fine, thank you very much, with net income over the years typically surpassing $3 million annually.
WASHINGTON (AP) - When Wanda Morsell's two older children needed help last year keeping up with schoolwork, the mother of three enrolled them in summer school.
This year, when her third child, 7-year-old Thaddeus, scored poorly on reading and math in first grade, it was a different story.
Because he scored "low-basic" on skills tests, not "below basic," Thaddeus was ineligible for Washington's summer program.
"We were very dismayed," Morsell said, because the boy "definitely needed the intervention."
Because of lack of money, the city's program was cut back considerably this year, serving only those children who need the most help. Like Washington's, school districts nationwide are cutting back on summer school, just as academic requirements rise and students in many states are required to pass high-stakes graduation tests.
Added to the mix, the federal government is now tying millions of dollars in school aid to students' scores on standardized math and reading tests.
Summer 2002 represents a departure from the past six years, when school districts across the country spent millions of dollars both to increase academic standards and bulk up their summer programs.
Are we headed toward martial law? Last week Peter Kirsanow, a Bush appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said in Detroit that he envisions a situation in which the public will demand internment camps for Arab Americans. If terrorists attack the U.S. for a second time and if "they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights," he said.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration currently is in the midst of a charade over the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which states that the military cannot engage in domestic police functions. In recent years that restriction has proved to be more myth than anything else. As if to underscore that point, Alabama governor Don Siegelman announced last week that he was mobilizing 500 members of the Alabama National Guard to "serve in the homeland defense role within the United States." And at the same time, the U.S. general in charge of the Northern Command, which oversees defense of the continental U.S., suggested that the military may come to have a larger role in policing the country against terrorism. The Bush administration has its attorneys looking to see whether the Posse Comitatus Act, which was adopted to get federal troops out of the South after the Civil War, should be changed. The act has little muscle and was breached repeatedly in the Waco siege. Military personnel and technology were used at Waco to train domestic-security agents, fly choppers, supervise the use of equipment, and go over final plans for the assault. Special Forces were used to train ATF agents before the Waco operations, and they were at Waco during the siege. National Guard troops from Alabama and Texas were used in the initial phases of Waco.
BuzzFlash: How did you come to write The Hunting of the President with Gene Lyons?
Joe Conason: I started to become skeptical of Starr not too long after he was appointed, but I didn't start to write about him in any kind of sustained way for a couple of years. A writer named Murray Waas and I did a big piece about Starr in The Nation. Sometime after that, I became intensely interested in Whitewater. I had heard about this guy Gene Lyons in Arkansas, who knew a lot about it. So I started to talk to Gene on the phone, and we became sort of phone-calling pals. Within a year or so it occurred to me that there was a book in this subject, and I think Gene probably had the same thought. We decided that it would be better to do one book together than to do two similar, competing books. This was back in 1997.
BuzzFlash: You and Gene are working on a documentary that covers the same ground as the book. How is that going?
Joe Conason: I was in Arkansas several weeks ago, doing some interviews. I thought they went exceptionally well. We have talked to well over sixty people, and we're near the end of the principal photography phase of the project. In fact, editing has begun already.
BuzzFlash: Is there going to be a narrator? Have you chosen that person?
Joe Conason: There are some very fine candidates for that job -- brilliant actors who have expressed interest in the narration. I think people would be very excited to hear those names, but that's Hollywood. We'll see what happens.
BuzzFlash: Is the film coming out through standard commercial distribution?
Joe Conason: We are fortunate enough to have an agreement with an excellent distributor, Regent Entertainment, so it will be in theatres.
BuzzFlash: When?
Joe Conason: We hope before the end of the year.
BuzzFlash: You wrote The Hunting of the President, in which you argued that there was indeed a vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down President Clinton. Is that vast right-wing conspiracy -- if you'll accept that phrase -- running the government right now?
Joe Conason: I don't really believe there was one big conspiracy. I actually think there were a few tightly knit conspiracies that connected to each other in different ways, and that they took place both consecutively and concurrently over a period of years. We preferred to call this a "network." And there was a network, and it certainly has continuities. One of the continuities is that a lot of the people are involved at various levels of the present Federal government. David Brock, who knew a lot of these people, deals with this in his book Blinded by the Right. One day, he woke up and saw that there was a Bush administration with a lot of the people he had worked with to try to bring down Clinton.
American defence contractors are developing a laser weapon for fighter aircraft that may be powerful enough to blind people on the ground, even if they are relatively far from the target, New Scientist can reveal.
Laser-armed strike fighters could be sent into battle as early as 2015(Photo: AP)
The 100-kilowatt infrared laser, which is being developed for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter by defence companies Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, is far more powerful than any laser ever used in war. But because it is designed to attack targets such as other fighter aircraft, ground vehicles and anti-aircraft batteries, it is exempt from the Geneva Convention's ban on blinding weapons.
The ban came into force in 1996, and was ratified by the US in 1999 (see Why the Geneva Convention won't stop blinding by laser, below). However, it is riddled with loopholes that leave room for the proposed weapon. It only outlaws lasers explicitly designed to damage sight or cause permanent blindness, and overlooks blinding that might be caused incidentally.
"That protocol was purposely drafted to avoid capturing other types of laser weapons systems," says Stephen Goose of Human Rights Watch in Washington DC.
MIRANSHAH (NNI): Four American troops are feared dead and score of others believed injured when some unknowns fired four rockets on a mobile US-led coalition force at Lak Dewal in Gardez on Tuesday evening.“The US-led coalition troops were on patrol in the area of Lak Dewal in Gardez when they were attacked by some unknown with four rockets.
MOGADISHU: Seventeen more people were killed in factional fighting in the Somali capital Wednesday, bringing the death in two days of violence to 30, witnesses said. The fighting, in the Medina area of southwest Mogadishu, is between militiamen loyal to warlord Musa Sudi Yalahow against those supporting his former ally Omar Mohamud Mohamed, better known as "Finish".
Most of the victims were civilians caught in the crossfire or killed when artillery shells struck residential houses. The dead included four children. Fighting erupted on Tuesday, but died down late in the afternoon with only sporadic gunfire heard in the area overnight.
Clashes intensified again on Wednesday morning. Yalahow and Finish are two former allies who headed the United Somali Congress/Somalia Salvation Alliance (USC/SSA) faction, but fell out in December when Finish signed a peace agreement with Somalia's interim government, which is fiercely opposed by Yalahow.
Each of the two warlords has claimed to be the head of the USC/SSA and the leadership feud is believed to be the cause of the bloodshed. "We have destroyed the military ability of Yalahow. His forces took refuge in the part of Medina controlled by warlord Hussein Mohamed Aidid," said Abdullahi Sheikh Hassan, one of Finish's allies.
Four of Yalahow's armed vehicles have been destroyed since Tuesday, including two that were taken out of action Wednesday when six militiamen travelling in them were killed, Hassan said. Hundreds of families have fled Medina and sought refuge in other parts of south Mogadishu, according to witnesses.
William Rehnquist, chief justice of the United States, on June 15 gave a speech before a gathering of federal judges in which he condoned the suppression of democratic rights in wartime.
Rehnquist told a national judicial conference in Virginia, “One is reminded of the latin maxim, inter arma silent leges. In times of war, the laws are silent.”
The Supreme Court justice said he was offering “only a historical perspective,” but his choice of topic and what he had to say about it were obviously intended to bolster the Bush administration’s attack on constitutional guarantees of free speech, assembly, privacy and due process, which is being carried out under the cover of the government’s “war on terrorism.”
Rehnquist’s speech elaborated on themes developed in his 1998 book All Laws But One: Civil Liberties in Wartime. The title refers to President Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 speech to Congress justifying his suspension of habeas corpus, a legal procedure for a person in custody to obtain court review of the detention. Rehnquist’s seizing on this historical precedent to justify the current attacks on civil rights turns history upside down.
Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution provides that “the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” After the Confederate states seceded and commenced an armed insurrection with an attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln suspended the writ along the Philadelphia-Washington railroad line in response the efforts by Baltimore public officials to bomb the railroad so that federal troops could not arrive to defend the US capital.
The federal judiciary was replete with judges sympathetic to the slave owners, including Chief Justice Roger Taney, infamous for his majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which upheld the right of owners to travel throughout the United States with their slaves, and denied that persons of “Negro” descent could be citizens of the United States with standing to bring suit for their own freedom. The effect of the Dred Scott ruling was to overturn all Congressional actions limiting the extension of slavery into the territories, and, arguably, to legitimize the institution in the “free states” as well.
UNITED NATIONS - The United States failed to block a U.N. vote on a plan to enforce a treaty on torture, and its attempts to do so were widely criticized by European and Latin American allies.
Among U.S. concerns was language that could allow for international and independent visits to U.S. prisons and to terror suspects being held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Such visits are unlikely unless the United States chooses to adopt the plan, known as a protocol, which seeks to enforce the 1989 treaty against torture.
The objective of the protocol is "to establish a system of regular visits undertaken by independent and national bodies to places where people are deprived of their liberty, in order to prevent torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment."
The protocol to the treaty passed late Wednesday by a vote of 35-8 with 10 abstentions in the U.N. Economic and Social Council. The United States abstained.
A U.S. proposal to reopen 10 years of negotiations on the document was voted down 29-15 with the rest abstaining.
Denmark, which read a statement on behalf of the European Union ( news - web sites), accused the United States of intentionally stalling in order to kill the proposal. Costa Rica, which sponsored the plan, "urged all delegations to vote against," the American request to reopen negotiations.
Human rights advocates and diplomats argued that the protocol was essential to enforce the international convention on torture passed 13 years ago and since ratified by about 130 countries, including the United States. Countries are supposed to enforce the convention on their own, but rights groups argue that that isn't working everywhere.
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – Jae Rok Lim's tidy apartment here is filled with books for an English degree, popular music tapes, and fresh fruit and fish from street vendors.
These were once unattainable luxuries for Mr. Lim, who a year ago was living in a small city in North Korea, 50 miles outside Pyongyang. But what this slender, solemn man prizes most about his new life is "thinking my own thoughts."
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Lim is one of perhaps 200,000 North Koreans who, driven by hunger or fear, have been trying to escape one of the most repressive and controlling regimes on the planet. This week, about 10 North Korean asylum seekers slipped into the South Korean consulate in Beijing, defying Chinese security. They're the latest in a rash of North Koreans who have made their way to foreign embassies in China and, after elaborate negotiations, been allowed to go free.
As living conditions in the fortress regime of North Korea slowly deteriorate, such cases represent the tip of an iceberg of discontent and uncertainty inside the North, say defectors. Aside from eyewitness accounts like Lim's, the North remains a mystery. Travel outside Pyongyang, the capital city, is generally off-limits – except for highly scripted visits by a handful of diplomats and aid workers who must travel with native guides.
After hours of Monitor interviews with several defectors (whose names have been changed), a picture emerges of a grim and punishing world whose structures of police and military control remain very strong.
Lim, whose family was poor, says he grew up thinking North Korea was "the best country." He wanted to be a model citizen like his dad, a metal-factory technician who won a worker's prize from Kim Il Sung, the late father-figure of the North. "I was brainwashed for 20 years. Ideology was hammered into me from a child," he says.
It was while visiting relatives in China, who are part of a huge ethnic Korean population displaced by the Japanese in World War II, that Lim heard his first criticisms of the current leader Kim Jong Il. Lim argued with his kin for a month. But once home, things felt different: "China seemed more alive. I could watch TV. Going back to the North, I felt like I was going back to hell. It was so gray. The people were so sad. I was interrogated at college. There was little food; we students were issued corn powder once a day."
FATHER COUGHLIN HAD A LIVELY STYLE, TOO: There are many ways to be cast as the chump when you look up an Ann Coulter footnote. Sometimes, as on her book’s final page, her stated fact is utterly false (TDH, 7/23). Sometimes, as on her book’s page two, she has grossly misstated an interview session (7/11). Sometimes you end up with Muppet reviews (7/22). Sometimes she says that Phyllis Schlafly was “preposterously demeaned,” and the article she cites is a puff piece (7/22).
Yep, there’s a whole lot of chump change in Ann Coulter’s book. But the factual “errors” which litter this book are only one part of the problem. Perhaps as striking as the factual “errors” are the conclusions she draws from her “facts.” On her final page, Coulter baldly misstates a basic fact, saying that the New York Times kissed off the death of Dale Earnhardt. But even if the Times had put Earnhardt on page twenty-three, how in the world would that lead a sane person to a cuckoo-land statement like this one?
COULTER (page 205): Except for occasional exotic safaris to the Wal-Mart or forays into enemy territory, liberals do not know any conservatives. It makes it easier to demonize them that way. It’s well and good for Andrew Sullivan to talk about a “truce.” But conservatives aren’t the ones who need to be jolted into the discovery that the “bogeymen” of their imagination are “not quite as terrifying as they thought.” Conservatives already know that people they disagree with politically can be “charming.” Also savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans and lie for sport.
Coulter, of course, has just lied in our faces, misstating the NYT’s coverage of Earnhardt. But even if the Times hadn’t put his death on page one, how in the world would that lead to the thought that “liberals” are “savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans?” Coulter, of course, takes 27 bucks from those same normal people, then lies in their faces on page after page. But who could get from Coulter’s “fact” to the nasty, odd judgment she offers?
But Coulter’s book is full of such statements—sweeping expressions of typological thinking rarely seen in the last fifty years. Here, for example, is what she writes on her penultimate page, 204:
COULTER (page 204): This isn’t merely to say that liberals have near-exclusive control over all major sources of information in this country, though that is true. Nor is the point that liberals are narrow-minded and parochial, incapable of seeing the other fellow’s point of view, though that is also true. And it’s not that, as a consequence, liberals impute inhumanity to their political opponents and are unfathomably hateful and vicious. That’s true, too.
Such demonistic images—and such bizarre, sweeping judgments—drive this book from beginning to end. Here is an early example:
COULTER (page 6): Liberals hate America, they hate “flag-wavers,” they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam (post 9/11). Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They don’t have that much energy. If they had that much energy, they’d have indoor plumbing by now.
This produced the best question Coulter has yet been asked in her interview sessions on Slander. On Hardball, Mike Barnicle read that page 6 quote, and then posed a sane person’s question:
BARNICLE: Ann, I love you. You’re never boring, and I understand the point that you’re trying to make in this book, but aren’t you afraid—and I know you’re going to say that it’s, you know, a vast generalization, the quote I just read from—but aren’t you afraid that stuff like that makes you and your argument sound like a complete nut case?
WASHINGTON, July 24 — After a recent meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was kidding around with the secretaries in the national security adviser's White House office, complaining that their pretzel jar was empty. Then he said: "Okay, that's enough. I've got to get back to work now — and by the way, I'm not resigning."
The staff "all took a slight, shallow breath and then broke up," a senior administration official recalled. But the question of Secretary Powell's tenure is no laughing matter in Washington these days.
A string of internal policy differences and defeats — most recently on the Middle East and international family planning — have set off speculation from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom that Secretary Powell might not last through President Bush's term. Tensions with the White House and Pentagon hawks that Secretary Powell has long sought to minimize are no longer possible to disguise.
In public, Secretary Powell, the four-star-general-turned-diplomat, has done what he always does: soldier on, shaping his commander's policies as best he can from within, with some success. In private, Secretary Powell, an amateur automotive mechanic, complains that old friends spend too much time sympathetically taking his temperature — "dip-sticking me," as he puts it.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
The bubble did it. Or so goes the newly fashionable, no-fault explanation for the cascading corporation scandals now posing a clear and present danger to the U.S. economy. "The '90s were a period of excess," intones head White House economist Lawrence Lindsay.
Every economic bubble since the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 1500s has been marked by scandal and crime. We were all swept up in the craze, captured by the desire to get rich quick. Since we're all implicated, no one is responsible. The market is coming back to earth; we'll sort out the few "bad apples," the lawbreakers, and move on.
Bull. This bubbleology would allow conservatives to shirk responsibility for what they have wrought. The fact is that after the "excesses" of the 1920s drove us into the Great Depression, there was no equivalent epidemic of financial and political corruption for 50 years until the current crime wave. That's because Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal put cops on the beat to police corporations and regulate their behavior.
The Securities and Exchange Commission was created to review the books. The Glass-Steagall Act separated investment houses from commercial banks to end corrosive conflicts of interest. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department limited mergers and monopolies. Unions, some 30 percent of the workforce, made companies more responsible to their workers.
It is no accident that the current wave of costly corporate scandals followed the rise of modern conservatism to political power two decades ago. Ronald Reagan governed while denigrating government as "the problem, not the solution." He starved agencies of resources and placed committed ideological opponents in charge of them. Reagan's Commerce Department drew up a hit list of regulations resented by business ("the Terrible 20"). And of course Reagan signed the law that deregulated the savings and loans associations, while his appointee revoked requirements that any S&L have 400 shareholders. The resulting infamies cost taxpayers many billions.
The conservative assault on government reached fever pitch when Newt Gingrich led the "perfectionist" caucus of the Republican right to take over Congress. For Gingrich conservatives, government regulation was creeping Stalinism. House Majority leader Dick Armey said that in the New Deal and the Great Society, "you will find, with a difference only in power and nerve the same sort of person who gave the world its Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward -- the Soviet and Chinese counterparts."
Corporate corruption is a "moral cancer that “is threatening this great system and our economic health." These "sins of omission, malfeasance and misfeasance" are "eroding shareholder value for all corporations and public confidence in critical elements of our economic system." This is a “betrayal of capitalism.
Corporate scourge Ralph Nader? Mirthful muckraker Michael Moore? No, these quotes come from leaders of America's financial community-Pete Peterson, Blackstone Group co-founder and former U.S. Commerce secretary ; John Snow, chairman and CEO of CSX Corp.; and Felix Rohatyn, former Lazard Freres partner. All are calling for rapid, bold institutional and legal reforms to revive investor confidence.
But these financial giants are discovering that if they want to save capitalism from itself, they'll have to rely on liberals to lead the way.
Despite the dire warnings from Wall Street, it is still largely business as usual in Washington. The scandals have merely stirred dozens of industry associations and hundreds of corporations into action to bottle up even watered-down reform. For example, Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, issued an "action call" urging opposition to accounting reforms offered by Senate Banking chair Paul Sarbanes. He accused the Maryland senator of a "knee-jerk, politically charged reaction" to the Enron scandal. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which gave $14.7 million in campaign donations to both Democrats and Republicans during the last election cycle, according to Center for Responsive Politics, denounced Sarbanes' reforms as a "de facto government takeover" of the profession.
The Republican majority in the House has been happy to pass legislation pre-approved by the business lobby. In the Senate, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) has served as de facto administration point person. Congressional Quarterly reported that he urged lobbyists to "stall, stall, stall" to avoid reform legislation. Gramm denies the charge.
The Bush administration's initial response to Enron's bankruptcy was to dismiss it. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said the company's fall was evidence of the "genius" of capitalism. As the scandals have mounted, the administration has acknowledged, in the president's words, "some bad apples" in the corporate world but remains opposed to broad legal reform. Harvey Pitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the administration's lead on the issue, has rejected most of the proposed reforms, such as restrictions on stock options or conflict-of-interest limits on auditors or stock analysts.
NEW YORK — The pain on Wall Street intensified as stocks continued to struggle amid growing signs that mutual fund investors, fed up with losing money, may finally be giving up on the market.
Investors hoping the recent free fall would mark a low point for the ailing stock market instead continue to see stocks fall and the precipitous declines have raised fears that the bear market, which has wiped out $1.9 trillion in shareholder value this month, has more room to run.
"I don't ever recall so much pessimism about the short-term and long-term outlook for stocks," said Ed Yardeni, chief investment strategist at Prudential Securities. Not even encouraging words from President Bush on the economy and his belief that the 28-month bear market has created better values on Wall Street was enough to lift investors' gloomy mood.
Negative investor psychology caused by a slew of corporate scandals at well-known companies such as WorldCom and Enron is what's driving stock prices sharply lower, says Phil Dow, director of equity strategy at RBC Dain Rauscher. "Once such a psychological state is in place, it stays awhile," especially when the market is groping for a bottom, he says.
That might explain why a growing number of mutual fund shareholders, the same group that built a reputation as buy-and-hold investors during the 1990s bull market, are starting to sell their stock funds in attempt to relieve their mental anguish and cut their losses. To put the current selling frenzy in perspective, U.S. stock funds suffered outflows of $18.6 billion the week ended Friday, just shy of the record $19 billion outflow the five-day period ended Sept. 25, 2001, according to estimates by TrimTabs.com, which tracks fund flows.
Deputy Defense Minister Dalia Rabin-Pelossof is quitting her job as second-in-command to Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer in protest against the Labor Party remaining in the government.
Two weeks ago, the deputy minister handed in a letter of resignation to Ben-Eliezer, but the minister - and party chairman - asked her to wait a fortnight before going ahead with the move.
Yesterday, Rabin-Pelossof called Ben-Eliezer in London to say she would give him a new letter of resignation today, when he returned from his trip abroad.
She told Ha'aretz last night that she had decided to remain as an MK in the Labor faction for time being, while continuing her activity at the Rabin Center for Peace. If that activity conflicted with her duties as a lawmaker, she said, she "won't hesitate" to quit the Knesset.
In her previous letter to Ben-Eliezer, Rabin-Pelossof wrote that she could not "in all good conscience" remain in a government that did not continue the legacy of her late father and that she felt that the national unity government "had reached its end." She said she did not agree with the policy adopted by the government and the lack of "a political horizon" that prevented negotiations with the Palestinians.
About two weeks ago, on a Friday, Taghrid and Ismat Shbeita, Wafa and Jihad Bishara, Ghadir and Ihad Iraqi of Tira, Lubna and Mahmoud Khadija of Kalansua, and their young children went for an afternoon to the Givat Olga beach at Hadera. The Bisharas are both physicians and Ihad Iraqi and Mahmoud Khadija are attorneys. Ismat Shbeita is a merchant and his wife Taghrid is a civic activist.
They arrived around four o'clock, parked in the parking lot and settled their things on the lawn. Like everyone else relaxing around them, the children and adults went swimming, played soccer, had a game of chess, ate and drank, nibbled on roasted sunflower seeds, talked, and (mainly) rested. Some in the group knew the location from previous visits; others were there for the first time.
"Being outdoors like that was refreshing and relaxing. The kids were happy and we adults felt great, except that an unplanned and violent incident ruined our evening," related Taghrid Shbeita subsequently, sitting in her living room in Tira with most of the friends who had been present when the afternoon at the beach ended so badly.
Around ten o'clock, the account goes, a group of some 15 or 20 young people in their early twenties suddenly stood over them and demanded to know if they were Arabs. When they said yes, the youths instructed them in a threatening manner to leave the beach. One said: "Get up from here immediately or it will come to blows." Another said: "Get lost nicely, or the shit hits the fan."
Behind the young toughs, relates Taghrid Shbeita, stood a group of children who evidently knew them and knew that something unpleasant was about to happen. Ismat Shbeita, who got up to clarify what the youths intended, was kicked in the chest. Immediately all hell broke loose. The youths began fighting with Ismat Shbeita's friends, who came to his defense. According to attorney Mahmoud Khadija, they were armed with knives and a bottle.
September 11 has spawned reams of conspiracy theories. Many are ridiculous. But far more ridiculous -- if that's the word -- are the uses to which the Bush Administration has been putting last fall's terrorist attacks. It doesn't take a conspiracy nut to see the Shrub/Cheney cabal using 9-11 precisely as if they had done the deed.
Thus, the destruction of the Bill of Rights (except for the Second Amendment). A mushrooming police state apparatus. Huge boosts in military spending, virtually none of which has anything to do with actually fighting terrorism. Rampant corporate theft involving scores of Bush operatives and family members. Utter contempt for global treaties. Rollback of environmental protection. Assaults on women's and minority rights. And no attempt to shut the nuclear power plants that remain our most vulnerable and potentially horrific targets.
In short, it's been a field day for the authoritarian and mean of spirit, a conservative feeding frenzy for an inept, unelected crew that, before September 11, was all but written off. The far right has ridden the bin Laden horse so far and so fast it's sometimes hard to believe they didn't hire him in the first place. (Come to think of it, they did -- though that was to fight the Soviets.)
But the conspiracy theories? The most twisted seems to be a book now sweeping France that says the Pentagon launched missiles on the World Trade Center and itself. Ignoring a virtually infinite number of photographs and eye-witness accounts, the Gallic screed has sold some 200,000 copies asserting that the whole thing was executed by the American armed forces to enhance the power of its most cynical advocate, George W. Bush.
Then there's the stuff on the Internet. Long, detailed examinations of how and why the Bush family's long-standing ties to the bin Laden family and the Saudi Arabia they largely own prove they set the whole thing up. Sketchy CIA meetings with Osama here and there. Complex money trails. The usual.
Much of it is utterly absurd. Some makes pretty good sense.
But none is undercut by the fact that the U.S. military did, in fact, train bin Laden in all the basic skills he might have needed to pull off this attack. It's common knowledge that our men in khaki also trained Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and a host of other vile thugs behind "blowback" attacks on us. And that the real seat of oil-based terror is Saudi Arabia, to which the Bushies pander and plead on an hourly basis.
Then there's the fact that the U.S. military has leveled Afghanistan, Grenada-style, while the U.S. government has yet to begin a single credible criminal prosecution over what Bush brands the most heinous attack on the U.S. ever.
Thousands of Palestinians are on the streets for the funerals of 15 people, including the military leader of the radical group Hamas, Sheikh Salah Shahada, who were killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza.
Many waved Hamas flags and carried rifles as they vented their rage at the deaths of civilians, many of them children.
About 140 people were injured in the strike
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said: "This was an ugly crime, a massacre that no one who is sane or who has a conscience can imagine".
He urged the international community to stop "these crimes against our people" which, he said, came at a time when there were positive initiatives for peace.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - who reportedly gave his personal approval for the air strike - expressed regret for the deaths of civilians but hailed the operation as "a great success".
The attack has been met with strong condemnation from around the world, including the United Nations and European Union.
US President George W Bush has described the attack as a "heavy handed" action which "does not contribute to peace".
"The president has said before that Israel has to be mindful of the consequences of its actions," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Nine children were among those killed in the overnight missile attack on a residential building in Gaza City. About 140 people were injured and local officials said that more people could be buried under the rubble.
Israeli officials said the strike was a reaction to the death of dozens of Israelis in recent suicide attacks.
Shahada was the founder of Hamas' military wing and reported to be number one on Israel's list of most wanted militants in Gaza.
LONDON The last thing Europe wants is to be accused of going wobbly on Iraq. But the American talk of overthrowing Saddam Hussein by military force is raising alarms in European governments.
They are saying that any American miscalculation could undermine the international coalition that is fighting against terrorism, and the broad-based diplomacy needed to solve the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.
They also fear that a drive against Iraq would drive a wedge between Britain and the rest of Europe.
A French official said in an interview in Paris that some of President George W. Bush's conservative aides had become "obsessed about Iraq, while we are obsessed about achieving peace" between Israelis and Palestinians. "The important thing is to build a coalition for peace in the Middle East," he said, "not to build a coalition for war in Iraq."
Washington's increasing talk of "regime change" is hindering diplomatic strategies to press Saddam to open his country again to United Nations inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction, the French official said.
In Britain, a newspaper reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair was preparing for a significant call-up of military reserves in the fall and that he had pulled an armored division out of training exercises so it could be made available for special deployment his year.
In the House of Commons, Blair said that Britain had gathered extensive evidence that "Saddam Hussein is still trying to develop weapons of mass destruction," and he said that Britain would publish the evidence "at the appropriate time."
Last fall, the British government published the first detailed report that Osama bin Laden was directly linked to the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, thus laying down an important predicate for the war in Afghanistan.
There is agreement in European capitals that Saddam's government is dangerous and may need to be confronted one day. But any agreement breaks down over strategic priorities in the Middle East, which Europeans consider neighboring territory for trade and security. With America the lone superpower, they are ever prickly over any hint that the United States is ignoring their views or assuming, as one German official said, "that we are Euro wimps" when it comes to the use of force.
The European Union's top security official, Javier Solana, warned in an interview of a "self-fulfilling prophecy" of war against Iraq. "If Saddam Hussein thinks that this option is inexorable, why would he yield to inspectors?" Solana said.
Today we get a rare glimpse at a week in the life of one of these patriotic Americans who've volunteered to join their work with our Homeland Security needs. Joe Bigelow (an alias, of course) is not just your average cable guy. He's an unsung hero who gives of himself to keep the rest of us safe. And he's agreed to share a week of his personal journal with us.
Monday, March 10, 2003
Well, the week started out with a bang. Some no-good SOB was sitting in my parking space at the cable company this morning. I was e-mailing the Ash Man's tip line before nine with his license number and the fact that he had the Koran in his back seat. Well, it was a big book anyway and how do I know it's not the friggin' Koran; ya see what I'm drivin' at? I mean, like shoot, am I doin' my job for America if it is the Koran I don't say something? Hell no. Tough one, Habib. You picked the wrong guy's spot to steal but Mr. Ashcroft knows who you are now.
Things slowed down after that but then about three o'clock I'm doin' a cable install and the two people in the damn house are talkin' in friggin' Spanish, ya know. I mean they're home in the middle of the day, speakin' that language, ya know. Legals, illegals? I don't know but the Ash Man will. Sent the name and address off to him as soon as I got back to the office.
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Got one today. Two guys. Livin' together, if ya see what I'm getting' at. One of them referred to the other as his partner. Get it? My first week in TIPS I didn't know whether this was the kind of stuff they wanted. So I called up and asked if I should send this in and they said they like didn't want to say yes and they didn't want to say no but they would kind of like to have an idea of where these people are. So this is my fifth one now and one of those was a lesbian thing. I mean I don't mean 'em no harm but shoot we can't be too careful ya know. We had the Twin Towers go two years ago and it ain't gonna be Joe Bigelow's fault if it happens again.
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Couple of 'em today.
Young woman, about 25, she was pretty, ya know, but damned if I don't see a half-smoked homemade cigarette in her ashtray. A joint, ya know. The told us about this in training. You know, tell 'em ya gotta take a leak and go see what's in the medicine cabinet. Make an excuse to go to the basement (told her I had to check where the cable was comin' in). I didn't find anything else but I e-mailed her name and address to Mr. Ash's TIP line anyway. I mean she said she was a teacher, for cryin' out loud. What are the kids learnin' here if ya know what I mean.
And then, a damn 7-11, one that's run by, well, you know the kind of people who run 7-11s. And, these people actually have a cable hookup in the little office behind the store. I haven't gone into a damn 7-11 since 9-11 if you know what I mean. I mean it wasn't all of them, ya know. It was just a few who snuck into the country and all but I can't forget about it. I can't even have a Slurpee and I used to love those things. I hooked up their cable but I couldn't help but wonder if they were all gonna be sittin around laughing the next time a building goes down. And on the TV that I cabled up if ya know what I mean. Told the Ash Man's crew to visit this place ASAP.
(REUTERS) Congressional investigators reportedly say Enron raised billions of dollars in cash from major banks in what amounted to loans that it concealed as it struggled to survive.
That's according to the Washington Post, which quotes sources as saying that in the final year before its bankruptcy protection filing, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and other banks transferred more than $5 billion to Enron using complex transactions that were labeled as energy trades.
According to the report, the transactions, known as prepays, hid part of Enron's mounting debt burden during the last months before it filed for bankruptcy protection in December.
The prepay arrangements will be the focus of a Senate governmental affairs subcommittee hearing Monday.
According to the newspaper, investigators found that J.P. Morgan and Citigroup were Enron's main source of prepay funding between 1992 and 2001, sending more than $8.5 billion to the company.
The newspaper said the Houston energy trader received large advance payments from the banks for supplies of natural gas or other commodities for which it had contracts for delivery over a number of years. Enron used the payments to improve its cash flow on its financial statements, rather than booking them as debt, according to the report.
"It has become common knowledge that Enron engaged in accounting deceptions to convince lenders, investors and analysts that the company was in better financial shape than it was," Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee on investigations said in a statement.
"The question the subcommittee will examine is the extent to which major financial institutions like J.P. Morgan and Citicorp knew of and aided Enron's accounting deceptions," Levin said.
President George W. Bush’s lack of boldness last week in responding to the widening pattern of business abuse presents Congress with a challenge: Can it provide the new thinking and take the strong action required to prevent the business scandals from becoming a crisis of confidence that undermines the economy?
The president’s speech to business leaders appeared to signal a tilt toward government intervention. However, his actions bear a resemblance to the way President Herbert Hoover handled the “Great Crash” seven decades ago.
Hoover faced an economic crisis that turned out to be unprecedented.
Although a believer in limited government, he “made the first attempt to use the national government to fashion effective means for controlling the violent fluctuations of the American economy,” according to a book by historian Albert Romasco.
But Hoover failed because his personal ideology and inclinations precluded him from making the policy leaps the crisis demanded. “His program was designed to serve the double purpose of overcoming the economic crisis while preserving the American system as he conceived it. His initial program exhausted the possibilities of voluntary cooperative effort,” Romasco wrote. The result was that “the new departure … was restricted by old ideas and old assumptions.”
While Hoover balked, Congress proposed federal lending, unemployment assistance and large-scale public works programs to deal with the depression. Many of these ideas became key elements of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Today’s problems are potentially as threatening as those that confronted Hoover. “These scandals have begun to have a macro-economic impact,” Columbia University Law Professor Jack Coffee told me. “When investors lose confidence in the market, the cost of capital rises, companies start having to use debt rather than equity financing, interest rates go up, the cost of capital goes up, and layoffs follow.”
Up to now, Congress has responded with more smoke than fire. “There’s a lot of grandstanding,” Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware’s Corporate Governance Center, told me. House and Senate committees have hauled in alleged corporate abusers for show hearings. Despite fast action, the House has passed weak accounting and pension reform bills. The Senate is acting on pension legislation and a much stronger measure toughening accounting industry regulation.
To be truly effective, Congress must pass legislation that addresses other dimensions of the problem. “I hope the problem doesn’t get too bad but it needs to be bad enough to get action,” a tough business reform supporter, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, told me.
Speaking today before members of the Golden Manacle Club, the élite organization of C.E.O.s released on more than ten million dollars' bail, President George W. Bush said that he had once held up a bank, "like thousands of other enterprising Americans and without spending a dime of taxpayer money," and vowed to employ the same can-do attitude in solving the real problems facing American business, such as overcharging employees for lunch in company cafeterias. The President announced the formation of a blue-ribbon panel of corporate food managers, who have been asked to report back to him by the year 2050 if they have any thoughts.
Meanwhile, Vice-President Dick Cheney, addressing the annual convention of the American Association of Incompetent Board Chairmen, firmly backed the President's position on bank robberies and took the opportunity to comment on the press's reaction to his own role in a Southwestern stolen-car ring. He said he viewed criticism of his activities as an example of McCarthyite witch-hunting by a self-appointed gestapo that threatened to undermine private-jet sales for years to come. The ring, he pointed out, had pumped millions into the Swiss economy.
In his speech, President Bush dismissed his involvement in a Texas counterfeiting operation ten years ago as old news. "And anyways," he explained, "I just spent it—I didn't make it. Everybody knows I can't draw a lick." Mr. Bush went on to deplore the shady business ethics that lead executives travelling at company expense to steal shampoo, soap, and sewing kits from hotel bathrooms for personal use. He announced that he will soon recommend to Congress the establishment of a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Personal Toiletries to monitor compliance with stringent new curbs on such thefts. Vice-President Cheney drew prolonged applause during his speech after pointing out that although Abraham Lincoln had once done legal work in Illinois for the same railway companies that he later patronized as a passenger, nobody had raised an eyebrow. He added that he was "about fed up" with this blatant double standard and called for its replacement by triple and even quadruple standards.
President Bush used the occasion of his address to state that his partnership role in the Texas Switch & Bait Corporation, a discount retail appliance vender, consisted of little more than dropping by the company's headquarters every Saturday to pick up his complimentary home-entertainment equipment, "just like any other American family man doing his Saturday chores." The experience, he continued, had taught him a valuable life lesson: "Even free appliances can weigh a ton, I tell ya."
European leaders, increasingly irritated by the Bush Administration, feel they are coming to a moment of truth about themselves and their relationship with Washington.
United States contempt for a weak Europe is producing pressure for more unity, more outspoken independence and a clearer understanding that Europe must spend more money on its military forces if Washington is going to take it seriously.
Real interests are diverging, and years of talk about tensions and resentments have crystallised into a perception that the relationship itself has changed.
On fundamental issues like the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto environmental treaty and the crisis in the Middle East, even strongly pro-American leaders like the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, are openly differing with Washington with a public bluntness that would have been unthinkable five years ago - or in the weeks after September11.
There is shock over the way the US handled the court issue at the United Nations, puzzlement at the concentration on Iraq as the Israeli-Palestinian relationship deteriorates, and confusion over how to move forward in the Middle East with Yasser Arafat ruled out but no mechanism to establish another Palestinian leadership.
And there is dismay that the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, a European favourite, is losing key battles to the conservatives who seem to have won President George Bush's ear and who regard European criticism as the whining of weaklings.
The moral leadership that Mr Bush was granted and exercised after September11 has been "frittered away," a European official said. Renewed US unilateralism is giving weight to the old French idea of the European Union as a counterbalance to Washington.
Even more striking, some Europeans are talking about stepping up military spending, understanding that Washington will take them seriously only when they can project hard power to back up their foreign policies.
A more competitive relationship with Washington, some argue, would be healthier, because it would be more realistic, and it would also help respond to increasingly anti-US views among their publics.
A hidden epidemic of life-threatening infections is contaminating America's hospitals, needlessly killing tens of thousands of patients each year.
These infections often are characterized by the health care industry as random and inevitable byproducts of lifesaving care. But a Tribune investigation found that in 2000, nearly three-quarters of the deadly infections — or about 75,000 — were preventable, the result of unsanitary facilities, germ-laden instruments and unwashed hands.
The industry's stance also obscures a disturbing trend: Infection rates are soaring nationally, exacerbated by hospital cutbacks and carelessness by doctors and nurses.
Deaths linked to hospital germs now represent the fourth-leading cause of mortality among Americans, behind heart disease, cancer and strokes, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hospital infections often are preventable by adopting simple, inexpensive measures. Strict adherence to clean-hand policies alone could prevent the deaths of up to 20,000 patients each year, according to the CDC and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.
"The number of people needlessly killed by hospital infections is unbelievable, but the public doesn't know anything about it," said Dr. Barry Farr, a leading infection-control expert and president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.
MORRISON, Tenn. (AP) - Former presidential candidate Al Gore ( news - web sites) accused the Bush administration Saturday of lying to Americans about the nation's economy.
At a campaign event for a congressional candidate, Gore told Democrats that electing Lincoln Davis could be the difference in continuing the Bush administration's economic policies.
The Bush administration has "lied about the future liabilities they have put on our shoulders as taxpayers," Gore said.
The former vice president prompted a cheer when he said: "I don't care what anybody says. I think Bill Clinton and I did a damn good job."
The recent spate of corporate corruption cases reflects the administration's policies and its appointees, who are supposed to police big business, Gore said.
He compared the administration's handling of the economy to business decisions that led to the collapse of Enron, saying Bush is creating a huge deficit.
"It's going to lead to bigger deficits than when the first Bush was there," Gore said.
He said the administration should "completely scrap its economic plan and its team on Monday ... start over from scratch and start rebuilding this economy."
If Ann Coulter were a singer, she'd be Ethel Merman. Even her photos are blunt and loud. In the cover shot of Coulter's book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right , she displays the most chilling stare this side of Honey Bunny in "Pulp Fiction."
But despite the vast, left-wing conspiracy working against her, Coulter has appeared on every show this side of "Meet the Osbournes" to plug the book. Slander is No. 1 on the Publishers Weekly list, No. 1 on the New York Times list, No. 3 on amazon.com and No. 1 in the hearts of liberal-bashing Americans from coast to coast.
Seems like a good time to point out just a few of the hateful proclamations, misleading assertions and incorrect statements in the book.
On p. 4, Coulter establishes her tone--and her propensity for twisting quotes like Twizzler sticks to suit her needs--when she writes: "The infernal flag-waving after 9/11 nearly drove liberals out of their gourds. For the left, 'flag-waving' is an epithet. Liberals variously call the flag a 'joke,' 'very, very dumb,' and--most cutting--'not cosmopolitan.' ''
The "joke" quote is attributed to director Robert Altman, who was primarily criticizing the Bush administration. Also, Altman was talking not about genuine displays of patriotism, but the commercialized omnipresence of the flag. As he later told People magazine, "I don't think [the American flag] should be on brassieres."
Hmmm. Sounds likes an opinion Coulter would applaud.
As for the "very, very dumb" remark, the article Coulter cites is a New York Times piece about a controversy in Honolulu last November when an American flag was raised atop the Iolani Palace, the 19th century seat of the Hawaiian monarchy. Reacting to the suggestion that Hawaiians aren't as patriotic as other Americans, University of Hawaii-West Oahu professor Dan Boylan said, "This is when people start acting very, very dumb in their patriotism and flag-waving. I'll take Dan Inouye's empty sleeve as patriotism long before I'll take a passing bumper sticker on my car that says, 'America Forever.' "
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Alabama Activates Tank Unit
A day after President Bush's release of a homeland defense strategy calling for the possible domestic use of U.S. military forces, Alabama activated a 300-soldier Army National Guard tank battalion as part of a homeland defense force.
In a statement released Wednesday, Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman said the Ozark, Ala.-based 1st Battalion, 131st Armor "is equipped with modern battle tanks, the M1A1 Abrams" and "will serve in the homeland defense role within the United States."
Siegelman, commander-in-chief of the state's national guard, did not say what role the tank battalion would serve in homeland defense.
In addition to the tank battalion, 200 guardsmen from Special Forces units based in Auburn and Huntsville were activated and "will conduct post-mobilization training and then deploy to undisclosed locations in support of the war on terrorism," Siegelman said.
Siegelman's office forwarded questions about Wednesday's activation to the Alabama National Guard.
Asked if the armored battalion was deploying with its tanks and, if so, what role they would play in a domestic role, Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Robert Horton said: "That can't be discussed. It all will depend on the mission."
Though he said he could not provide specifics, Horton said the activation was not linked to Bush's quest for use of U.S. military forces on the home front.
The deployment will last one to two years, Horton said.
F16 Warplanes zoom overhead daily. In Rafah they've been breaking the sound barrier. At night you can watch flares light up the sky so that the Israeli soldiers in their fortified bunkers all along the perimeter of the Gaza Strip and surrounding the illegal Jewish settlements on the interior can survey the area. The staccato sound of gunshots in the distance is so familiar I pay no attention. Up close it's something different.
A boy has been shot in the back beneath the shoulder. He is crying and lying on his stomach on a stretcher as medical personnel attend to him. A reporter from Palestine Space TV is filming him now instead of the cloud of thick brown dust rushing upwards from the tunnel between Rafah and Egypt that the Israelis have just blown up. Illegal weapons smuggling, you know: can't have this sort of thing. The logic is perverse but accepted. The military superpower mini-state can test its state of the art technology on anyone and anything. Palestinians are not allowed to arm themselves even with homemade fireworks.
Fair's fair.
The boy is sweating and breathing heavily now. The attempt to keep him alive is failing. His body goes limp on the stretcher and we watch him die. "What do you mean by filming this!" An indignant soldier shouted at the cameraman. Bad P.R. for Israel you know, Israel – the innocent victim of the poverty-stricken, unemployed multitudes of the Gaza Strip. Shoot the TV bastard. They do, but miss, and the cameraman gets to go home another day.
In an incident of heavy fighting in the Rafah refugee camp Iyad peers out from behind a wall to see what he can see. Two people lie dead on the ground nearby. Someone fires at him and the bullet grazes his ear as he ducks away. The sound rushes through his head and he runs for his life, trying to reach the relative safety of his home in the Yibne block of the camp but his shock is such that, after 20 years of living in this prison, he can't find his home. He is dazed with fear. Twice he passes his home before being able to recognize it, and when he finally does he walks in, sits down where his family is eating their dinner, and eats in silence until all the food is gone. He has no recollection of this. His brother tells him about it later – about the blank, crazy look on his face, and about how he recognized nobody there. Iyad has seen many people die. His own life is the gift of Fortune.
Now we are sitting in Iyad's home eating hot stuffed grape leaves. Flies settle on the food, on our faces, hands, and feet. It does no good to brush them away. Sweat drips down our faces as we sit on the floor around the food. The children are dusty and hot. All of Rafah is without electricity today – the hottest day of the summer so far. The door is open so that a stale breeze can drift in now and then. It carries with it an overpowering smell of sewage. A huge, flying cockroach zooms in, hits the wall, and drops to the ground near our dinner. It is the sixth one this evening. Samira shrieks and someone smashes it with a shoe and sweeps it back outside. The quiet, stagnant evening engulfs us again. The temperature will drop to 85 degrees Fahrenheit tonight. Iyad lights the kerosene lamp when it's too dark to see.
How do you bear it? I ask. It's an embarrassingly stupid question.
What choice do they have?
ASTANA, Kazakhstan -- A supreme court justice sentenced a former government minister to six years in prison last week and denied him the right to appeal his conviction. Three days earlier, a former governor of one of Kazakhstan's biggest regions went on trial; his supporters say he, too, will be jailed. On July 9, the state security agency opened an investigation of a journalist and human rights activist suspected of insulting the honor and dignity of the president, Nursultan Nazarbayev -- one of many recent harassments of independent journalists.
This is a summer of political tension and repression in Kazakhstan, an oil-rich republic four times the size of Texas that occupies much of the vast steppe south of Siberia. At a time when Kazakhstan's economy is booming and its relations with the world's great powers, including the United States, are improving, Nazarbayev has turned against his critics and opponents with a harshness that has surprised many Kazakhs and foreign diplomats here.
The situation in Kazakhstan is sensitive for the United States, which has long considered this country an important future source of oil and more recently a key ally in the war on terrorism. The United States signed an agreement with Kazakhstan this month to allow use of this country's major airport for emergency landings by U.S. warplanes operating over Afghanistan, whose northern border is just 300 miles away.
"We have a big and broad relationship with Kazakhstan that is extremely important to the United States," said a senior U.S. official here.
An army of volunteers is lining up behind President George W Bush in his attempt to build an American "home guard" against terror, ignoring the protests of civil liberties groups who have criticised the plan as granting the state a licence to snoop.
Postal workers, doormen, television company "cable guys", delivery truck drivers and local shopkeepers are being recruited to become the "eyes and ears" of American domestic security - and they are showing overwhelming enthusiasm for the scheme, called Operation Tips (Terrorism Information and Prevention System).
Tips starts next month as Justice Department officials begin recruiting a million Americans for the initial pilot programme in the country's 10 largest cities.
The Justice Department has said that it wants to recruit workers whose "routines are ideally suited to help in the anti-terrorism effort because they allow them to recognise unusual events".
A national telephone hotline and a network of intelligence "reporting centres" are being set up for the scheme.
Officials are currently on their way to the 10 target cities to set up training centres. Recruits will be given lectures on what to look for and how to report suspicious persons, activities and objects.
Each delivery vehicle on an Operation Tips fleet will be issued a bumper sticker advertising a free phone number to encourage other members of the public to join in.
The plan has divided America, drawing fierce criticism from liberals and civil liberties movements.
Opponents have calculated that Operation Tips will create one "spy" for every 24 citizens, a ratio that critics point out is higher than that of the Stasi secret police in the former East Germany.
Many liberal commentators have drawn parallels with the climate of fear and suspicion during the McCarthy purges of suspected Communists and Soviet sympathisers in the 1950s.
Dennis Kucinich, a leading Ohio Democrat on the Congressional National Security Oversight Committee, denounced the scheme, arguing that it would transform America from "an information society to an informant society".
July 22 — The economy and the accounting scandals surrounding large corporations appear to be taking a heavy toll on President Bush’s popularity, according to two opinion surveys released Monday. In one of the polls, fewer than half of the likely voters questioned said they believe he should be re-elected.
THE ZOGBY America Poll, conducted Friday through Sunday, showed that 47 percent of likely voters believed that Bush deserved re-election, compared to 32 percent who said it was time for someone new.
The poll, conducted by the nonpartisan public opinion firm Zogby International of Genesee, N.Y., surveyed 1,003 likely voters nationwide. The poll reported a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
The president appeared to suffer significant damage from the plummeting stock market and the accounting scandals, according to a separate poll.
In that survey, partial results of which were released Monday, 46 percent of adults questioned by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal said they disapproved of the job Bush was doing specifically on “the problems of the financial markets and major corporations.”
Washington - The Bush administration wants a new set of eyes - millions of them.
But perched in his rig at a truck stop near Jessup, Md., George Freeman shook his pony-tailed head at a proposed terrorism informant network that would rely on millions of American workers to feed the government tips on suspicious activity.
"It's going to be overused and abused, especially with people so nervous as it is," said Freeman, 45, who hauls produce cross-country. "You're going to have people running every which way looking for terrorists and their 15 minutes of glory."
Freeman's concerns were echoed by a slew of privacy-minded groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and legislators from both sides of the ideological divide last week, perhaps signaling that Americans want some limits on governmental intrusion despite the new threats from abroad.
On Thursday, the House Select Committee on Homeland Security drafted legislation that would prohibit instituting national standards for driver's licenses - critics said that sounded too much like a national ID card that could be used to track people - and any operation resembling TIPS, the Terrorism Information and Prevention System.
"I just don't think it fits our concept of our liberties in America," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), who chairs the committee. "I don't think there's a threat that justifies a program of this nature."
A spokeswoman for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which drafted the Senate's version of a Homeland Security Department unveiled Friday, said its bill is "silent on those issues."
A Justice Department official said the Bush administration would continue to pursue the Operation TIPS program, part of the Citizen Corps suggested in the State of the Union address in January. "It delivers an important resource for those who take the time to understand how it works," she said.
America's Dow Jones index has closed below 8,000 for the first time since October 1998 as investors' worries about profits and probity at USA Inc continue to grow.
The last time the Dow was this low was in October 1998. In other words, all of the gains made in the dot.com explosion of the late 1990s have now been wiped out.
As for the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite - whose dot.com gains have long since evaporated - it finished the day at 1,282.65, down 2.77% and sitting at its worst close since May 1997.
The US losses reflect the picture seen around the world, after markets in London, Frankfurt and Paris lost about 5% apiece amid fears that insurers are selling shares hard to make sure their assets are worth enough to cover claims.
The nervous opening followed a dismal week which had seen hundreds of points wiped off most major indices, with Friday alone producing a near 400-point fall on the Dow.