Last week President Bush "got tough" with alleged corporate crooks—with some of them, anyway. The papers carried photos of John Rigas and his son Timothy being carted off on charges of looting their company, Adelphia. There were also pics of WorldCom bigs Scott Sullivan and David F. Myers in custody. Sullivan was released on a $10 million bond, while Myers was sprung for $2 million, pocket change for guys like them.
Rumors are that the president is having a hissy fit over the unending series of scandals, even considering taking away guilty executives' vacation homes and yachts, just for good measure. Yet of the 10 large corporations that have recently crashed, taking thousands of innocent investors with them, eight still have the responsible players walking the streets, a little poorer perhaps, but in no danger of being arrested.
Meanwhile, the full story of the rape and pillage of America is still unfolding. Last week the Financial Times ran the results of a survey revealing that top execs in the 25 biggest recent corporate collapses had built up fortunes from 1999 through 2001 totaling $3.3 billion. Richest of the rich: Ken Lay of Enron with $247 million and Gary Winnick of Global Crossing with $512 million.
Lay—along with his buds in the executive suite—famously ran Enron into the ground. He ripped off tens of thousands of electricity consumers in California, lying to them, manipulating the so-called free market while hiding the true nature of the corporate business from its stockholders and the government. In cold blood, he ruined the livelihood of thousands of its employees, screwing them out of any sort of "retirement." Surely Lay and the other chieftains at Enron ought to be charged with criminal malfeasance of some sort—fraud, conspiracy under the racketeering laws, obstruction of justice, or perjury, just for starters. Lay happens to be a major Bush family supporter, having financed both presidents' political conquests and acted as the frat brat's confidant on energy policy. Natch, he doesn't get charged with anything.
Beyond the political will to hold people like Lay accountable, we need a mechanism for going after the companies themselves, paving the way for placing them in receivership so they could be managed under public supervision until their acts were cleaned up. There is nothing unusual in this notion. Crooked unions go through it all the time. Corporations should get the same treatment. At the very least, firms with shoddy accounting and other dubious practices should be denied government business. For Enron, federal subsidies and contracts were the lifeblood that let the corrupt operation flourish.
Friday, August 09, 2002
Senior British ministers are privately admitting to growing exasperation across government at the lack of a clear and coherent US policy towards Iraq.
The frustration is understood to extend to senior cabinet ministers and even Sir David Manning, the prime minister's chief foreign policy adviser.
It is said no coherent military or political strategy to oust Saddam Hussein has been presented to Downing Street, even though Britain is supposedly the closest ally of George Bush, the US president.
Anxiety in No 10 has been fuelled by the results of private polling commissioned by Tony Blair which it is understood confirms Mr Bush's spectacular unpopularity among British voters.
The dramatic findings reported by Philip Gould, Mr Blair's pollster, have been kept within a tight circle of senior officials and New Labour insiders who refuse to divulge any details.
But some ministers believe Mr Blair is starting to take unnecessary political flak over supposed hard and fast US decisions when in truth Washington has yet to construct any clear policy towards Iraq.
They believe the prime minister may even have sanctioned the revelation of his private doubts when Jordan's King Abdullah told reporters in Washington last week that Mr Blair had confided in him that he has "tremendous concerns" about an Iraq invasion.
In the twentieth century, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin set historical standards for a police state by turning citizen informants against their neighbors, then removing those denounced to secret concentration camps. Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's KGB, respectively, terrorized their populations into meek submission. Personal freedom and liberty lost all meaning in those police states. But now George W. Bush is poised to compete with them as he and his cabinet gear up to create for the United States unprecedented American systems of citizen informers and, for all intents and purposes, concentration camps, under the rubric of national security.
The Bush administration recently charged the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to put in place by January 2003 sprawling temporary cities to handle millions of displaced persons. FEMA is the federal agency charged with disaster preparedness. But now it has been ordered to undertake a crash effort to prepare for multiple mass destruction attacks on U.S., reported in a July 2002 story by NewsMax. This is to get ready for nuclear, biological and chemical attacks against U.S. cities, including the possibility of multiple attacks with weapons of mass destruction.
Vendors, contractors and consultants have already notified by FEMA which is preparing to handle the logistics of aiding millions of displaced Americans who are expected to flee from urban areas that may be attacked by terrorist weapons of mass destruction. The Agency is planning to create emergency, makeshift cities that can house hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Americans fleeing urban homes when their cities are attacked. Ominously, FEMA was given a deadline of about six months to have the major American cities ready to go. The deadline is believed related to making the U.S. prepared for counterattacks when Bush orders a U.S. invasion of Iraq sometime next year.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is also poised to recruit millions of United States citizens as homeland informants under the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS). Plans for the program would use at least 4 per cent of the American population for reporting "suspicious activity." This means, the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the infamous Stasi secret police did in the former East Germany.
Informant systems have tended to be tools of non-democratic states. According to a report by Harvard University's Project on Justice in 1992, the accuracy of informant reports is poor. Often, informants stretch the truth while others simply fabricate their reports. Indeed, denouncing one's neighbor more often was used to settle old personal scores rather than to help one's country.
With the passage earlier this year of Bush's Patriot Act, there is already potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens, as civil liberties groups have warned us already. The Patriot Act already provides for a person's home to be searched without that person being informed that a search was ever performed, or of any surveillance devices that were implanted. Similarly, TIPS is being launched as part of the so-called war against terrorism, like the Patriot Act was, as a Department of Justice project under Attorney General John Ashcroft.
The Justice Department all but told a federal judge this week to take his legitimate concerns about civil liberties and stuff them in the garbage pail. The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. It took this misguided position to a ludicrous extreme on Tuesday, insisting that the federal courts could not review its determinations.
This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism. The courts must firmly reject the White House's assertion of unchecked powers.
The administration's autocratic approach is unfolding in the case of Yasser Esam Hamdi. Mr. Hamdi, who was born in Baton Rouge, La., to Saudi parents, was captured by the Northern Alliance while fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mr. Hamdi is being held in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Va., without having been charged with any crime and has been denied permission to see a lawyer. Judge Robert Doumar of the federal district court in Norfolk asked prosecutors to submit documents, including interview notes, so he could assess the claim that Mr. Hamdi is an enemy combatant. On Tuesday the Justice Department refused to hand over the documents, saying the courts had no jurisdiction in the matter.
The Bush administration has framed the dispute as being over the separation of powers and the right of the executive branch to oversee the waging of war. The courts have, in fact, given the political branches considerable leeway where wars are concerned. But declaring American citizens to be enemy combatants, and therefore not entitled to basic constitutional protections, is a clear matter of domestic civil liberties. The courts have an obligation to play an active role in reviewing these determinations.
In the case of Mr. Hamdi, the evidence submitted by prosecutors is thin. The government is relying on a two-page affidavit from a Defense Department adviser that simply gives a brief outline of Mr. Hamdi's alleged actions and declares him a combatant. Given the importance of the rights at stake, Judge Doumar was correct to ask prosecutors to hand over supporting materials so he can satisfy himself that the right decision was made.
“We, as Arabs, condemn what happened to the Jews and would stand with the Jewish people to prevent it from happening again. Yet we want to prevent it not only from happening to them, but from happening to anybody.”
—Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, speaking at the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, Sept. 2.
“The strike is painful, but it may push the American people to ask, ‘Why are the terrorists targeting us?’”
—Faisal Salman, in Al Safir, Sept. 13.
As children all over the world began a new school year this September, two pictures in The New York Times illustrated far better than words the current nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One showed Israeli children riding to school in an armored truck escorted by Israeli soldiers. The other showed Palestinian girls dressed in school uniforms being confronted by an Israeli soldier holding a machine gun. In this picture the Israeli soldier was not protecting the children but stopping them from entering their school. It was one of 24 schools in Hebron closed by the Israeli army because they were close to Israeli settlements or army outposts and therefore regarded as security threats.
The two contrasting but equally sad situations reflect the fact that Israelis now live in constant fear of suicide bombings, while Palestinians are forced to endure the very conditions that breed violence—restrictions on their every movement, impoverishment, house demolitions, and almost nightly aerial bombardment. Even where children are allowed to attend school they face formidable obstacles, according to a Sept. 1 report by the Palestinian Ministry of Education. Like students at West Bank universities, either they are delayed for hours at army checkpoints or, where roads are blocked by trenches and cement barriers, they must climb over mountains of dirt and rocks to get to class. More than two thousand children injured by Israeli gunfire must grapple with crutches or wheelchairs as well. At least 95 schools have been severely damaged by shell fire. In many areas school principals often have to transport books and supplies on donkeys or horses. One of the most serious blows to the school system is Israel’s continued refusal to turn over the $65 million in tax revenues it owes to the Palestinian Authority, money that is needed to pay teachers.
Education Minister Abu El-Humos has called on the Israelis to end the rocketing and other heavy artillery fire that terrifies, injures, and kills children, and to restore Palestinian revenues, but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he has no intention of doing either. Sharon has made it unmistakeably clear that his object is to nullify the Oslo agreements and undo any gains made by the Palestinians since the accords were signed. In an interview with The New York Times on Sept. 7 Sharon outlined peace terms that call for the Palestinians’ unconditional surrender. “Oslo failed,” he said, and declared that once a truce is reached, the two sides will have to work out a whole new set of guidelines.
My beloved son Arik, my own flesh and blood, was murdered by Palestinians. My tall, blue-eyed, golden-haired son who was always smiling with the innocence of a child and the understanding of an adult. My son. If to hit his killers, innocent Palestinian children and other civilians would have to be killed, I would ask the security forces to wait for another opportunity.
My beloved son Arik was murdered by a Palestinian. Should the security forces have information of this murderer's whereabouts, and should it turn out that he was surrounded by innocent children and other Palestinian civilians, then - even if the security forces knew that the killer was planning another murderous attack and they now had the choice of curbing a terror attack that would kill innocent Israeli civilians, but at the cost of hitting innocent Palestinians, I would tell the security forces not to seek revenge.
I would rather have the finger that pushes the trigger or the button that drops the bomb tremble before it kills my son's murderer, than for innocent civilians to be killed. I would say to the security forces: do not kill the killer. Rather, bring him before an Israeli court. You are not the judiciary. Your only motivation should not be vengeance, but the prevention of any injury to innocent civilians.
Ethics are not black and white - they are all white. Ethics have to be free of vengefulness and rashness. Every act must be carefully weighed before a decision is made to see whether it meets strict ethical criteria. Our ethics are hanging by a thread, at the mercy of every soldier and politician.
It is unethical to kill innocent Israeli or Palestinian women and children. It is also unethical to control another nation and to lead it to lose its humaneness. It is patently unethical to drop a bomb that kills innocent Palestinians. It is blatantly unethical to wreak vengeance upon innocent bystanders.
It is, on the other hand, supremely ethical to prevent the death of any human being. But if such prevention causes the futile death of others, the ethical foundation for such prevention is lost. A nation that cannot draw the line is doomed eventually to apply unethical measures against its own people. The worst in my mind is not what has already happened but what I am sure one day will. And it will - because the political and military leadership does not even have the most basic integrity to say: "we are sorry". We lost sight of our ethics long before the suicide bombings. The breaking point was when we started to control another nation.
in Nevada?
Last June, Adam Jernee died from acute lymphocytic leukemia, a remorselessly fast-moving cancer of the blood. He was 8-years old and had fought the cancer for more than two years of his short life.
Adam and his father lived in Fallon, Nevada. This small ranching town of 8,000 people in the Carson Desert 50 miles east of Reno may have the highest per capita rate of childhood leukemia in the nation. The children of Fallon are more than 100 times more likely to be stricken with leukemia then children elsewhere in country.
Last week, another Fallon child was diagnosed with leukemia. That makes 17 kids from Fallon who have been contracted leukemia since 1997. Adam is the second child to have died within the past year. In September, Stephanie Sands succumbed to the cancer after battling it for two years. She was 21.
Cancer isn't the only problem. Kids and adults in Fallon and surrounding Churchill County are coming down with a myriad of other rare diseases, such as Myelodysplastic Syndrome and aplastic anemia. These diseases also relentlessly attack the bone marrow.
The kinds of cancers and other illnesses that have cropped up in the Fallon area are almost certainly caused by some kind of exposure to toxic chemicals. The source of that poison almost certainly sits a few miles outside the town of Fallon--somewhere on the 240,000-acre Fallon Naval Air Station, one of the Navy's largest bombing ranges, and home of the Top Gun fighter pilot training school.
But good luck to getting the Navy to take responsibility or even look very hard to find out what the problem might be. Years have passed and the Navy has done next to nothing, except deny culpability and try bully anyone who demands answers from naval brass. Apparently the Navy doesn't even care if the cancers are killing children of its own officers. The Navy has known about high levels of cancer among the children of Fallon workers and Navy officers since at least 1991; yet, the Pentagon has done little except try to conceal information on levels of pollution at the base and to stiff-arm investigators.
"Our frustration level is very high," says Brenda Gross, who 6-year old son has been sick with leukemia for two years. "This should have been found and stopped a long time ago. But you can't get anything out of the Navy."
Local residents think they know the answer: jet fuel spills and fuel dumping by Navy aircraft. JP-8 jet fuel, a combination of kerosene and benzene, is a known carcinogen and has been linked to leukemia and other bone marrow diseases.
The Navy has summarily ruled out jet fuel as a cause of the Fallon cancers, but records from the state of Nevada show that the Fallon air base has at least 26 toxic waste sites, 16 of them contaminated by jet fuel. Most of the Fallon area is playa, a dry lakebed over shallow groundwater. According to the Geological Survey, several distinct plumes of jet fuel have entered the water table beneath the air base.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Some members of the nation's largest lawyer group plan to use this week's annual meeting to criticize the Bush administration's handling of the terrorism investigation and business scandals.
They will not see President Bush, who skipped a chance to speak to the American Bar Association and is taking a vacation at his Texas ranch, or hear from Vice President Dick Cheney or any Cabinet member.
The White House and ABA leaders say the president's absence has to do with scheduling, not political differences, although Bush and the group have had rough relations.
The last time the 400,000-member ABA held its annual meeting in Washington was 1985, and President Reagan delivered the welcome speech.
"It looks lot like a snub. There's a bit of arrogance, 'we don't need you guys,'" said Stephen Hess, a political scientist with the Brookings Institution. "It borders on backing away from some opposition views."
White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said the president "can't do everything and be everywhere."
The meetings cover subjects that have dominated the executive branch: how the government should handle enemy combatants and immigrants arrested in the Sept. 11 investigation and how investigators can monitor possible terrorists without violating the Constitution.
The ABA may recommend that Congress intervene and stop the administration from denying access to lawyers for immigrants arrested since Sept. 11 and for those declared enemy combatants by the president. Both issues have disturbed civil libertarians.
Britain has strongly advised the United States against attacking Iraq, warning that it risked intensifying the conflicts in Afghanistan, Israel and Kashmir, senior defence and diplomatic sources say.
In a sign of deepening discord between the two allies, British ministers and officials in Whitehall believe that a new war would "contaminate" the other crises."These are issues the Americans appear not to have considered," said one official.
They also have grave reservations about President George Bush's demand for a "regime change" in Baghdad because, London believes, no alternative regime has been identified for such a change to take place. Britain may be lumbered with leading a massive stabilisation force for "up to five years" in an anarchic post-war Iraq, with the prospect of the country being partitioned.
While Britain is certain that Saddam Hussein has acquired some form of chemical and biological weapons capacity since the United Nations weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq, ministers have seen no evidence that he can use them in any meaningful way against the West.
America has countered the British worries by maintaining that each conflict in the region can be contained and that it is impractical to wait for every issue to be resolved before taking action against President Saddam, according to the officials.
But while the reservations of Britain, perceived as America's staunchest ally in its "war on terrorism", have prompted some soul-searching among the Pentagon hawks, they have struck a chord at the State Department, where Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, is known to be more cautious about attacking Iraq.
Britain's misgivings emerged yesterday as President Saddam appeared on television to speak out against an invasion. The Iraqi leader's rare public appearance in a grey suit rather than a military uniform, and at a desk spread with white lilies, was calculated to rally international opinion against an American-led assault.
President Saddam declared that any attack by the "forces of evil" Iraqi terminology for the US and Britain would result in them "carrying their coffins back to die in disgraceful failure".
The Saudi press has launched a vitriolic attack on what it describes as Christian fundamentalism in the United States.
One newspaper, al-Watan, said Christian fundamentalism was no less dangerous to international peace and security than other forms of religious extremism.
The newspapers were responding to reports of a Pentagon briefing during which Saudi Arabia was described as the kernel of evil in the Middle East.
Despite the official statements from Washington and Riyadh that relations between the two countries are as good as ever, the anger in the Saudi press reflects a growing unease in Saudi Arabia about the way the kingdom has been portrayed in the United States since the attacks in September last year.
The prime suspect, Osama Bin Laden, is a Saudi dissident, and so were most of the hijackers.
'Dust of hatred'
One newspaper, Watani, said the international media had concentrated only on Muslim fundamentalism, forgetting that Christian fundamentalism was just as dangerous.
The paper said the influence of Christian extremists in America had increased since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon last year.
The paper said Christian fundamentalism in the US was particularly dangerous because it was capable of influencing American foreign policy to further its own interests which, the paper added, were identical with Israeli interests in the Middle East.
Another newspaper, The Saudi Gazette, said Christian fundamentalists in the US were raising what it described as "dust of hatred" about Saudi Arabia, and it called on President Bush to rein in elements whose agenda was to initiate a clash of civilizations.
HOUSTON, Aug. 7 — Desperate to meet a year-end profit target, the Enron Corporation struck a sham energy deal with Merrill Lynch that let Enron book a $60 million profit in the final days of December 1999, according to former Enron executives involved in the transaction.
The executives said that the energy deal, a complex set of gas and power trades, was intended to inflate Enron's profits and drive up its stock price. Enron and Merrill Lynch, they said, agreed that the deal would be canceled after Enron booked the profits; it later was.
By allowing the company to meet its internal profit targets, the power deal unleashed the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses and restricted stock to high-ranking executives, including Kenneth L. Lay, then the chief executive, and Jeffrey K. Skilling, then Enron's president, former executives said.
"This was absolutely a sham transaction, and it was an 11th hour deal," said one former Enron executive who was briefed on the deal. "We did this deal to get 1999 earnings." This account was confirmed by five other former executives who either worked on the deal or were briefed on it. All the executives insisted on anonymity, concerned either about losing their current jobs or being drawn into the litigation over Enron's collapse.
Merrill Lynch officials said there was nothing improper about the power deal and no prearrangement to cancel it, and one former Enron executive involved in the deal agreed.
"The trades we conducted with Enron were legitimate transactions involving real risk," Merrill said in a statement today. "At no time did Merrill Lynch knowingly assist Enron in misstating revenues."
The Bush administration’s refusal to cooperate with even the most routine and basic congressional requests for information is infuriating members of Congress and violating congressional rights and responsibilities, members charge.
From Democratic liberals like Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.), who calls getting a response from the White House “a nightmare,” to Republican conservatives like Rep. Dan Burton (Ind.), who said he had to use “strong-arm tactics” to get what he needed, there has been a rising tide of congressional complaints in both the House and Senate.
Furthermore, the administration is exacerbating the frustration among lawmakers by failing to acknowledge requests for information — even as a courtesy.
A number of lawmakers are threatening to subpoena the administration — an extreme step reserved by lawmakers as a last resort to elicit cooperation on mundane inquiries.
While power struggles between the executive and legislative branches over information are not new, most of those struggles traditionally have been confined to four areas: national defense, law enforcement, foreign policy and the White House.
Since President Bush has been in office, the battle for information between Congress and the White House has spread to other areas such as environmental, educational and science issues, lawmakers say.
David Walker, the controller general of the Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, confirmed to The Hill that the current administration has been slower to respond to congressional inquiries than previous administrations.
But by delaying the release of information that could provide ammunition to its critics, the Bush administration has sidestepped a number of draining political confrontations and kept the country focused on the president’s agenda.
For example, the Bush administration has treated some environmental issues with the same level of circumspection previous administrations have reserved for national security.
"We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the businessman is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals."
- Theodore Roosevelt, "We Stand at Armageddon", 1912
The Republican Party has been charging the Democratic Party with practicing class warfare for years, apparently because of policies that tend to favor understanding the plight of and wanting to help those Americans who are less fortunate than others. The understanding of financial diversities within the American public and striving to give a hand up to those in need should be considered an admirable goal by most Americans and not derided as a shortcoming of a political party. Evidence exists that points to a class warfare practiced by the alleged "compassionate conservatives" that is anything but compassionate. In fact, their social and financial policies might better be called repressive towards those less fortunate.
According to the Republicans, the economic and budgetary successes accomplished during the Clinton years should not be credited to his policies or ideals. Rather they claim that those successes were due in large part to the fiscal responsibility practiced by the Republican led Congress. But did they really practice fiscal responsibility?
The Associated Press recently released a study providing evidence that, while they may not have increased pork barrel spending, they certainly took actions that proved financially beneficial to the more affluent suburbs and GOP leaning farm areas.(1) This resulted in an average of $612 million more in federal spending last year in districts represented by Republicans than those represented by Democrats. That directly impacts services not only through more business loans and farm subsidies, but also through fewer public housing grants and food stamps. Spending on child care food programs was cut by eighty percent, public housing grants were all but eliminated, rental housing loans for rural areas and special benefits for coal miners were cut by two-thirds, and the food stamp program was cut by a third.
GOP leaders readily admit that the spending shift was aimed at ensuring that GOP areas received what they term "fairer treatment." Of course everything has a political motivation, but shouldn't the spending of our tax dollars be focused on real need rather than a transparent attempt to buy votes? Sure it should, but in reality nothing will change until the American public pays closer attention and demands that elected officials do what is best for the people. The AP study paints a devastating picture of political party economic priorities and conclusive evidence of the importance of which major party controls Congress.
While both major political parties benefit from campaign contributions from large corporations, the GOP is well known as the party that pushes for policies benefiting corporations over people. The Bush tax cut passed last year is well known for favoring the richest one percent of Americans and large corporations. Indications already exist that the "trickle down" theory is not working. Putting more money back into the hands of the wealthy and the large corporations was supposed to spur investment in industry and more jobs, but last week economic data showed that the expected 75,000 increase in jobs fell far short at just 6,000 jobs.
The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window, is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history.
Only in 1975 did Olson's family learn that the CIA had slipped LSD into his drink, days before his death. President Ford apologized for an experiment gone awry, and promised that the government would reveal everything about the case.
But newly obtained documents show that the Ford administration continued to conceal information about Olson -- particularly his role in some of the CIA's most controversial research of the Cold War, on anthrax and other biological weapons.
The documents show that two of the key officials involved in the decision to withhold that information were White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, today the nation's vice president and secretary of defense.
``These documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth,'' said the scientist's son, Eric Olson, who gave them to the Mercury News. ``For 22 years there was a coverup. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new coverup.''
Rumsfeld's office referred questions about the withholding of information to the CIA, where a media officer, Paul Nowack, said CIA activities related to Frank Olson's death were investigated by the Rockefeller Commission as well as subsequent congressional committees.
``The CIA fully cooperated'' in those investigations, he said, and ``tens of thousands of documents were released.'' If anyone has new information, he said, ``they should contact appropriate authorities.''
Eric Olson has contended for years that his father was murdered to cover up his research for the CIA. At a news conference in Maryland today, he will reveal the results of his long inquiry into his father's death.
The new documents do not prove those allegations. But they do show that the White House officials were concerned about any public revelation of Frank Olson's work.
Contrary to the official explanation that Frank Olson was an Army scientist, Olson worked for the CIA, at the special-operations division at Fort Detrick, the Maryland laboratory where biological weapons were tested.
Unlike his predeccessor, Theodore Roosevelt, President George W. Bush has not fought hard enough against corporate wrongdoing. The Republicans often claim the mantle of TR, but on this issue, Bush has failed to do little more than manipulate public opinion.
In the early years of the twentieth century, businesses in the United States were transformed into "big business" as a tidal wave of thousands of companies were merged into large trusts that sought to squelch competition. For instance, the nation's first billion dollar corporation, United States Steel, brought together by financier J.P. Morgan, was a conglomeration of 213 manufacturing companies, including 41 mines, and owned more than 1,000 miles of railroad track and 112 ore ships. As a result, U.S. Steel accounted for 60 percent of the nation's steelmaking output and 43 percent of its pig iron capacity.
In response to this threat, President Theodore Roosevelt responded by waging a very public battle with Corporate America, which had been used to more gentlemanly, behind-the-scenes negotiations between business and government. In 1901, he told Congress that "tremendous and highly complex industrial development" among businesses led to "very serious social problems." In his mind, "The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient."
Sensing the public's anxiety, Roosevelt used his political power to take down several of the most powerful trusts and push through government regulations, unprecedented at the time. In 1902, Roosevelt went after Northern Securities, a railroad trust controlled by Morgan, labeling the financier and those like him, "malefactors of great wealth."
Roosevelt's fight with big business expanded and redefined the power of the presidency, underscoring the government's right to regulate corporations through the establishment of federal agencies and direct intervention. By publicly taking on the responsibility for fighting trusts, Roosevelt also redefined how an activist president could make a difference.
A century later, the United States faces an even greater financial challenge--the loss of faith in big business--as a slew of corporations have either admitted to or are fighting charges of economic wrongdoing. Even worse, the ones left holding the bag have been small investors, who believed the misguided economic numbers delivered by duplicitous executives, and employees of these companies, who have been laid off numbering in the tens of thousands.
Rather than take up the mantle of Roosevelt, which the Republican Party has claimed over the last 100 years, President George W. Bush delivers speech after speech filled with weak jabs and vague proposals, geared more toward public opinion polls than real policymaking, even playing the September 11 card in his initial remarks, claiming, "People of this city are writing one of the greatest chapters in our nation's history, and all Americans are proud of New York." Later, he linked the war on terrorism with the fight for corporate responsibility.
Listing typical positives, including U.S. technology prowess and military power, Bush declared, "The American economy is the most creative and enterprising and productive system ever devised." He did not note, however, that in recent times the vaunted creativity of American capitalism has been used to dupe the system and the public.
Last September, when President Bush declared his war on terrorism, I said that you can't kill your way out of a terrorism problem. I cited the Israelis as an example.
Does anyone want to argue with that? Israel is still wracked with terrorism, despite having reoccupied virtually all of the West Bank and having killed Palestinians at a prodigious rate. Nor have we solved our terrorism problem, even though, for the time being, the terrorists are lying low.
I also said in October that American troops would be in Afghanistan long enough to realize that Afghanistan's summers are as blazing hot as its winters are cold. That was when everyone was celebrating the "short" war. Our troops are still there. Moreover, the Bush administration doesn't have the foggiest notion of how long they will have to stay.
We are in this mess because the Bush administration foreign policy is based on lies. It is based on lies in order to avoid the politically incorrect truth that our problem with terrorism is solely the result of our outrageously unjust policy of blind support of Israel. Neither Bush nor Congress wants to admit this, so they come up with absurd lies that terrorists are jealous of our freedom and wealth.
Really now, do you suppose that a multimillionaire (Osama bin Laden) who chose to live in caves is jealous of American wealth? That makes no sense at all. The Zogby organization, which has emerged as one of the country's most competent polling organizations, recently did extensive face-to-face interviews with a cross section of people in several Arab countries. What did Zogby find?
It found that people in the Arab countries do not hate America or Americans or American culture or democracy. They just hate our foreign policy. As Zogby put it, "It's the policy, stupid."
While I could write 10 columns on the injustices of that policy, one example will suffice: We have inflicted a terrible economic siege and periodic bombings on Iraq in the name of enforcing United Nations Security Council resolutions. A former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, said on global television that 500,000 dead Iraqi children were "worth it to enforce the resolutions."
At the same time, the state of Israel stands in open, stick-it-where-the-sun-don't-shine defiance of more than 60 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is able to do so because the United States refuses to allow any enforcement actions to be taken against Israel.
One expects a certain amount of corner-cutting on both procedures and concern for civil liberties during time of war. That's one of the main reasons some of us prefer to avoid war when at all possible, because we know that government power will grow and citizen liberty will suffer. War, as Randolph Bourne explained so persuasively during World War I (called the Great War at the time, which in retrospect seems tragically naive), war is the health of the State.
In addition, as Robert Higgs, now a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, demonstrated rather convincingly in his classic book, Crisis and Leviathan, increased power and authority taken by States during wartime is never given back in its entirety. Some of the wartime powers recede when the war is over, but at the end of a war the government is noticeably and permanently larger and the scope of citizen freedom is notably smaller than before the war – and soon enough this comes to seem normal. In a long war without visible end, as our esteemed leaders hasten to tell us the war on terror is, one can expect the process to be gradual rather than dramatic, but inexorable.
One of the episodes that illustrates how the process of increasing state power and reduced liberty is occurring during the current war is now being played out in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The decision to bring prisoners/detainees/captives from Afghanistan to the long-time U.S. Naval base there may have been done mainly for convenience, because the facility existed. A more disturbing hypothesis, bolstered by the way the Bush administration has chosen to defend its policies, is that it was chosen to at least some degree so the U.S. Constitution would not have to be a factor in administrative decisions. It might be that Guantanamo was used because it can be a law-free zone.
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Diplomatic china rattled in Washington and cracked in Riyadh yesterday when the Washington Post published a story about a briefing given to a Pentagon advisory group last month. The briefing declared Saudi Arabia an enemy of the United States and advocated that the United States invade the country, seize its oil fields, and confiscate its financial assets unless the Saudis stop supporting the anti-Western terror network.
The Page One story, by Thomas E. Ricks ("Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies: Ultimatum Urged To Pentagon Board," Aug. 6), described a 24-slide presentation given by Rand Corp. analyst Laurent Murawiec on July 10, 2002, to the Defense Policy Board, a committee of foreign policy wonks and former government officials that advises the Pentagon on defense issues. Murawiec's PowerPoint scenario, which is reproduced for the first time below, makes him sound like an aspiring Dr. Strangelove.
Just who the hell is Laurent Murawiec? The Post story and its follow-up, also by Ricks, do not explain. The Pentagon and the administration insist that the presentation does not reflect their views in any way. The Rand Corp. acknowledges its association with Murawiec, but likewise disavows any connection with the briefing. (Neither Murawiec nor Rand received money for the briefing, Rand says.) According to Newsday, Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard N. Perle, a former Pentagon official and full-time invade-Iraq hawk, invited Murawiec to brief the group, so Perle can't exactly distance himself from the presentation. But he can do the next best thing—duck reporters' questions. Murawiec also declined reporters' inquiries, including one from Slate.
The first half of Murawiec's presentation reads calmly enough, echoing Fareed Zakaria's Oct. 15, 2001, Newsweek essay about why the Arab world hates the United States. Its tribal, despotic regimes bottle up domestic dissent but indulge the exportation of political anger; intellectually, its people are trapped in the Middle Ages; its institutions lack the tools to deal with 21st-century problems; yadda yadda yadda.
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
One bubble burst, then another and another. Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom. The rectitude of auditors--pop. Faith in corporate CEOs and stock market analysts--pop, pop. The self-righteous prestige of Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase--pop and pop again. The largest bubble is the stock market's, and it may not yet be fully deflated. These dizzying events are not an occasion for champagne music because the bursting bubbles have cast millions of Americans into deep personal losses, destroyed trillions of dollars in capital, especially retirement savings, and littered the economic landscape with corporate wreckage. Ex-drinker George W. Bush explained that a "binge" is always followed by the inevitable "hangover." What he did not say is that the "binge" that has just ended with so much pain for the country was the conservative binge.
Economic liberalism prevailed from the New Deal forward but broke down in the late 1960s when it was unable to resolve doctrinal failures including an inability to confront persistent inflation. Now market orthodoxy is coming apart as a result of its own distinctive failures. It can neither explain the economic disorders before us nor remedy them because, in fact, its doctrine of reckless laissez-faire produced them. The bursting bubbles are not accidents or the work of a few larceny-prone executives. They are the consequence of everything the conservative ascendancy sought to achieve--the savagery and injustice of unregulated markets, the blind willfulness of unaccountable corporations.
We will be a long time getting over the conservative "hangover." It may even take some years before politicians and policy thinkers grasp that the old order is fallen. But this season marks a dramatic starting point for thinking anew. Left-liberal progressives have been pinned down in rearguard defensive actions for nearly thirty years, but now they have to learn how to play offense again. Though still marginalized and ignored, progressives will determine how fast the governing ethos can be changed, because the pace will be set largely by the strength of their ideas, their strategic shrewdness and, above all, the depth of their convictions. That may sound fanciful to perennial pessimists, but if you look back at the rise of the conservative orthodoxy, it was not driven by mainstream conservatives or the Republican Party but by those dedicated right-wingers who knew what they believed and believed, most improbably, that their ideas would prevail.
The new agenda falls roughly into three parts, and the first might be described as "restoring the New Deal." That is, the first round of necessary reforms, like the Sarbanes bill already enacted, must basically restore principles and economic assurances that Americans used to enjoy--the protections inherited from the liberal era that were destroyed or severely damaged by right-wing deregulation and corporate corruption of government. Pension funds, for instance, lost horrendously in the stock market collapse and face a potentially explosive crisis because corporate managers gamed the pension savings to inflate company profits. Employees of all kinds deserve a supervisory voice in managing this wealth, but Congress should also ask why corporations are allowed such privileged control over other people's money. Broader reform will confront the disgraceful fact that only half the work force has any pension at all beyond Social Security and set out to create tax incentives and penalties to change this.
WITH ALL the corporate and accounting scandals, you may have noticed that Congress is also working on bankruptcy reform legislation. A bill nearly passed last week and will probably be approved when Congress returns in September.
However, this is precisely the wrong kind of reform. It is a measure long sought by the banking industry to make it easier to squeeze money from ordinary individuals who declare bankruptcy after facing personal hard times or being overwhelmed by debt.
Often these are individuals facing catastrophic illnesses or personal financial reverses. Sometimes they are people who ran up too much consumer debt, but in these buying binges the credit card companies are willing coconspirators. They foist credit cards on college kids with no visible means of support save parents. They encourage people to run up debts with multiple cards.
Why? In a low-interest-rate environment, lenders love those 20 percent, Mafia-style interest rates that many consumers foolishly pay, and creditors gladly take the occasional default as a cost of doing business. But in an economic downturn, the credit card companies fear real losses. Hence they want to get tough after the fact. Under the bill written by the financial services industry, consumers who went bankrupt, rather than having a clean slate, would still be liable for a portion of credit card and other debt.
Economists use the term ''moral hazard'' in describing a deal so sweet that it encourages the beneficiary to break the law or to sacrifice ordinary prudence. For example, if a landlord is allowed to insure his rundown building for three times its worth, there is a risk that he may be tempted to set it on fire. The credit card people like to say that easy bankruptcies create a moral hazard for consumers running up excessive debts. But the real moral hazard is the one perpetrated when purveyors of credit throw caution to the winds.
Weirdly, the only thing delaying the passage of this Scrooge legislation is an entirely extraneous controversy about abortion. One version of the bill includes an amendment making it impossible for anti-abortion thugs who damaged clinics or intimidated or harmed individuals to wriggle out of damage awards by declaring personal bankruptcy. The anti-abortion lobby considers this an outrage and has been blocking the bill.
Meanwhile, the corporate guys keep declaring bankruptcy at record rates and for record sums. Even the Archdiocese of Boston is threatening bankruptcy if too many Catholics sexually abused by priests collect settlements.
Does anyone notice a double standard here? The logic of a business bankruptcy is to allow an orderly process so that old debts can be settled at so many cents on the dollar and the viable parts of the business can be rescued. What is galling under the circumstances is that the law allows the same scoundrels who ran the business into the ground to stay in charge of it after fleecing workers, shareholders, and creditors.
not something George W. Bush talks about much -- indeed, it's a fact that has been virtually purged from his official biography -- but for four years in the early 1990s, Bush was a director of a company that ultimately collapsed under the weight of its junk-bond financing and management mistakes.
The privately held company, called Caterair International Inc., was created in 1989 when Marriott Corp. spun off its airline catering business to investors organized by the Washington investment bank the Carlyle Group. If you haven't heard of it, Carlyle is a sleek financial operation that does its deals with help from a roster of former government big shots such as former defense secretary Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James A. Baker III and even former president George Herbert Walker Bush. As of 2001, a newspaper article pegged Carlyle's value at about $12 billion.
The Caterair deal was a piece of financial engineering known at the time as a "leveraged buyout." It was financed mostly by high-yielding "junk bonds," of the sort pioneered in the 1980s by Michael Milken, who later served jail time for his financial shenanigans.
Carlyle and its investors paid about $570 million for Marriott's In-Flite Services division, which the hotel wanted to sell so it could concentrate on its core business. The investor group was headed by Frederick V. Malek, a Carlyle senior adviser who had served as director of the 1988 Republican convention -- the one that nominated Vice President George H. W. Bush.
Malek resigned in September 1988 as a high-level adviser in the elder Bush's campaign after disclosure that in 1971, at the insistence of his boss, President Nixon, he had compiled a list of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who, Nixon suspected, were part of "Jewish cabal" that was distorting his economic achievements. Several on the list were later transferred to different jobs, but Malek said he had no role in personnel decisions and denied he had willingly engaged in anti-Semitic conduct, arguing that he had been coerced by Nixon's repeated requests. The Malek flap didn't hurt his friend the vice president, who was elected as the nation's 41st president in November 1988.
It was Malek who suggested that George W. Bush join the Caterair board in 1990, according to a 1991 article in the New York Times. "I thought George W. Bush could make a contribution to Caterair," the Times quoted Malek as saying. "He would be on the board even if his father weren't President."
A March 2001 profile of Carlyle in the Times noted that the investment bank "gave the Bush family a hand in 1990 by putting George W. Bush, who was then struggling to find a career, on the board of a Carlyle subsidiary, Caterair, an airline-catering company."
Bush remained on the Caterair board until May 1994, according to a Sept. 17, 1994, article in the Dallas Morning News. He said he resigned so he could concentrate on his campaign for governor of Texas. The paper reported that Bush had previously disclosed that he owned between 1,000 and 4,000 shares of "stock appreciation rights." What intrigued the Dallas newspaper was that Bush had dropped the Caterair connection from his official campaign résumé in August 1994.
At that time, Caterair was staggering under its huge debt load, and because of unforeseen changes in the airline catering business. The Dallas paper noted at the time that in SEC filings, Caterair had disclosed $263 million in operating losses and writeoffs since its 1989 founding.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that the continued cycle of terror attack followed by Israeli retaliation must stop, and the Hamas was at the point were it was ready to stop its attacks. Mubarak urged Israel to resume negotiations immediately with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's emissaries.
He added that Arafat himself should not pose a problem for Israel, since the talks would be held between envoys of both sides, and not the leaders themselves.
In a conversation with Israeli correspondents who accompanied Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on a one-day trip to Cairo, Mubarak said that since the Sharon government took power, Israel does not have "a vision, a peace plan or a solution."
The Palestinians would be able to continue their struggle for another 15 years, Mubarak added, saying that their suicide attacks were proving highly effective. The Egyptian president added that while his country does not have a peace plan of its own, he was willing to do everything he could to advance the cause of peace.
Peres told his host that Israel expects Egypt to help work out differences between Israel and the Palestinians and to push forward the Mideast peace process.
"It is impossible for Israel and the Palestinians to overcome the current stalemate without Egypt's help and intervention", Peres said at a joint press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, after meeting with Mubarak in Cairo.
Peres expressed sympathy with the suffering of the Palestinian people, but blamed the Palestinian Authority for turning down previous peace overtures from Israel and doing little to end Palestinian violence.
Peres and Maher said that their countries had agreed to pursue political negotiations as the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bring about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. They also agreed that the conflict could not be resolved militarily, and stressed the need to put an end to the circle of violence and return to the negotiating table.
For his part, Maher said "the Palestinian territories are still being occupied by Israeli forces, which subjects the Palestinian people to closure and humiliation -- a result of actions clearly condemnable and not conducive to a solution of the problem."
"When one speaks about the violence, one should not forget the violence of a strong army using weapons against a civilian population," Maher added. "It is very clear that what has happened to the Palestinians by the Israeli army and sometimes by the (Jewish) settlers is certainly something that we have strongly condemned," he stressed.
ROSARIO, Argentina -- Word spread fast through the vast urban slums ringing Rosario. There was food on the freeway -- and it was still alive.
A cattle truck had overturned near this rusting industrial city, spilling 22 head of prime Angus beef across the wind-swept highway. Some were dead. Most were injured. A few were fine.
A mob moved out from Las Flores, a shantytown of trash heaps and metal shacks boiling over with refugees from the financial collapse of what was once Latin America's wealthiest nation. Within minutes, 600 hungry residents arrived on the scene, wielding machetes and carving knives. Suddenly, according to accounts from some of those present on that March day, a cry went up.
"Kill the cows!" someone yelled. "Take what you can!"
Cattle company workers attempting a salvage operation backed off. And the slaughter began. The scent of blood, death and fresh meat filled the highway. Cows bellowed as they were sloppily diced by groups of men, women and children. Fights broke out for pieces of flesh in bloody tugs of war.
"I looked around at people dragging off cow legs, heads and organs, and I couldn't believe my eyes," said Alberto Banrel, 43, who worked on construction jobs until last January, when the bottom fell out of the economy after Argentina suffered the world's largest debt default ever and a massive currency devaluation.
"And yet there I was, with my own bloody knife and piece of meat," Banrel said. "I felt like we had become a pack of wild animals . . . like piranhas on the Discovery Channel. Our situation has turned us into this."
The desolation of that day, neighbor vs. neighbor over hunks of meat, suggested how profoundly the collapse has altered Argentina. Traditionally proud, Argentines have begun to despair. Talk today is of vanished dignity, of a nation diminished in ways not previously imaginable.
WASHINGTON NORMALLY, consumers of information about the economy pay scant heed to Bush administration officials. In the financial and policy worlds, they have a deserved reputation for ideological blinders, tight political scripts, and poor persuasive skills.
When the jittery country got two tough jolts of disturbing information about the now officially anemic recovery, however, this absence of leadership ability tended to make an upsetting situation worse. The continued inability of President Bush's team to communicate, an inability that begins at the top, is going to make consumers and not just investors even more concerned than the facts would seem to require they be.
The reports, first that the recovery effectively stalled in the second quarter and second that an expected spurt in the number of private sector jobs failed to materialize last month, were each made more disturbing by the atrocious ''analysis'' with which top officials greeted their publication.
With the news that employment gains essentially disappeared during July, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said the country should take heart from the fact that the unemployment rate ''was essentially unchanged'' and that the number of unemployed Americans who have been out of work for at least 15 weeks declined after more than a year of increases during the recession.
Her statement was absurd, and it will only heighten suspicions that conditions must be serious if Bush advisers go to such silly lengths to fudge the obvious.
There it was, the first Fourth of July after September 11: The majestic swell of a patriotism associated more with the era of the Andrews Sisters than the age of Destiny's Child. The ritual exultations of American values. The worry, yes, that something bad might happen somewhere, but even this concern only enhanced the solemnity of the moment. A splendid time, in other words, to be a president with a 70 percent approval rating.
But the moment was fleeting. For this was the very point at which the spokes starting coming off the wheels for George W. Bush. No Democrat would ever have summoned up the courage or imagination to plan it that way. For that we needed Paul Krugman, the merrily insubordinate New York Times op-ed columnist, who chose July 2 as the iron-hot moment to familiarize Times readers with the now-infamous Harken Energy stock sale.
Many elected Democrats had never even heard of it until the Krugman piece, but that didn't stop them from moving quickly to seize the moment. By July 7, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was on Face the Nation, demanding the release of Securities and Exchange Commission documents relating to Harken and taking, symbolically, an adventurous and important step: The Democrats' first real stab at cutthroat politics post September 11.
Ever since, a lot of the same people who spent eight years trying to pin everything up to homicide on the Clintons have been bawling about the unfairness of it all. But the chief complaint from liberal partisans about the newfound mettle of Daschle and his fellow Democrats is, what on earth took them so long? While it's satisfying to see Democrats playing some offense now, it's a fact that, over the past nine months, the party has been afraid of its own shadow. Let's put it as bluntly as possible: Never in modern American history has a party so failed its core constituents as the Democratic Party has during this period.
This wallflower pose has not been an accident, but a conscious strategy. For months now, Democratic operatives have debated whether to go after Bush personally and drive his poll numbers down to obtain an advantage in the midterm elections. Until recently, Bush stood at 75 percent, 80 percent, even higher. What on earth could Democrats do about numbers like that? They did some polling and found out -- phew! -- that they didn't need to go after Bush's numbers, that the president lacked coattails, that voters in discrete congressional districts and states were unlikely to cast their votes for Congress based on how they felt about Bush. There were internal arguments over this question -- some very much wanted to go after Bush more aggressively and personally -- but the numbers said what they said, and Democratic operatives concluded that they could succeed this fall without the risk of going after the president.
Aug. 6, 2002 | When Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the formation of Operation TIPS, a planned army of tens of millions of American volunteers charged with ferreting out terrorists in their neighborhoods, plenty of pundits questioned whether Americans spying on Americans was a good thing. Very few people asked exactly how it would work, and the Justice Department didn't offer any clues.
To find out, I went to the Citizen Corps Web site, then to the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) page, and signed up as a volunteer. I quickly discovered that TIPS is having a devilish time getting off the ground. After an initial welcome from the Justice Department, I heard nothing for a month. When I finally called two weeks ago to ask what citizens were supposed to do if they had a terror tip, I was given a phone number I was told had been set up by the FBI.
But instead of getting a hardened G-person when I called, a mellifluous receptionist's voice answered, "America's Most Wanted." A little flummoxed, I said I was expecting to reach the FBI. "Aren't you familiar with the TV program 'America's Most Wanted'?" she asked patiently. "We've been asked to take the FBI's TIPS calls for them."
Has Ashcroft turned his embattled volunteer citizen spy program -- which has been blasted by left and right alike -- over to Fox Broadcasting's "America's Most Wanted"? If so, the connection shouldn't be all that surprising. Ashcroft's Justice Department and John Walsh's popular crime-busters show have been a mutual-admiration society for some time now. Walsh started coaxing ratings out of the 9/11 disaster for Fox TV while the dust was still settling from the twin towers' collapse. Only two days after the attack, Walsh loaded his whole production team onto a bus in Indiana and drove the show to ground zero, where, he claimed, government officials had told him to "help us catch these bastards."
But it's still hard to nail down the exact nature of the relationship between TIPS and "America's Most Wanted." Officials at the Justice Department and Fox Television denied reports of a formal link -- even though their switchboard operators last week were working happily in concert. "TIPS doesn't exist yet," said Linda Monsour, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's Office of Justice Programs, which will oversee Operation TIPS if it gets going this fall as planned. Then Monsour conceded that the Justice Department, which has an $8 million start-up budget for TIPS, had already begun signing up individual volunteers, in advance of the program's ratification by Congress. She wasn't exactly sure how those calls were being handled. But she denied knowing anything about a hotline to the Fox show. "It's probably something I should explore," she said.
"America's Most Wanted" publicist Kim Newport also denied knowing about a formal link between the Justice Department and the TIPS program when interviewed last Friday, but she did acknowledge that the show regularly takes tips from callers about possible terror threats. "We have been taking calls on terrorism," she said. Noting that TIPS is not officially running yet, she mused, "Maybe the Justice Department just turned to us because that's how our program works." Newport says the show turns over all of its terrorism tip calls to the FBI, or to the Postal Inspector's Office if they relate to anthrax threats.
PRESIDENT BUSH still favors partially privatizing Social Security.
Would you believe it?
Can you imagine the hysteria that would sweep through the land if people's Social Security savings had been invested in Wall Street stock, while it's been plummeting? Yet our chief executive - who is consistent if nothing else - is standing by the cockamamie idea.
Another example of government by obsession, this administration's modus operandi.
For example, our fearless leaders continue to plan an invasion of Iraq. Why? Because they're obsessed with Saddam Hussein.
Here we are, still unsure just who is responsible for 9/11 and why, whether our Afghan campaign has really done anything to prevent further atrocities, not even able to track down the probably-homegrown nut shipping anthrax through the mails - and what preoccupies our administration? Iraq, a two-bit backwater, which - no matter how our powers-that-be would love to find a link - has not been tied in with 9/11 in any way. Or with anthrax, either.
Is Saddam a bad guy? You bet he is. So are a lot of the world's leaders, including some we cozy up to, like his neighbors in Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 hijackers hailed from. Is he developing those dreaded "weapons of mass destruction"? Probably. But so are a lot of countries. So, in fact, are we - big time. When it comes to WMDs, you can be sure the United States is way ahead of the rest of the world combined.
But we can't invade ourselves. So let's go invade Iraq. Maybe Americans will forget about the economy going south or an attorney general who's trying to whittle away our rights in front of our eyes.
Wag the dog, anyone?
SAUDI ARABIA is in the process of concluding a special trade deal with Baghdad and is likely to deny the United States access to its military bases for any attack on Iraq, according to diplomatic sources.
The Saudi Government, which was host to 500,000 American troops for Operation Desert Storm in 1991, has been engaged in talks with Iraq that could result in the establishment of a free-trade area between the two countries, the sources said.
The growing rapprochement between Riyadh and Baghdad, at a time when the Pentagon is weighing up the military options for toppling President Saddam Hussein, has underlined the huge changes in the region’s political environment since the previous US-led campaign against Iraq.
Intelligence sources said that the United States had “as good as eliminated Saudi Arabia” as a base for operations against Saddam. The al-Udeid base in Qatar, about 20 miles from the capital, Doha, is being expanded and is expected to be the control centre for US air operations.
The key Iraqi player in the trade talks with the Saudis has been Ezzat Ibrahim al-Douri, deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council in Baghdad. He visited Riyadh earlier this year and met Prince Nayef bin Abd al-Aziz, the Saudi Interior Minister, who, according to diplomatic sources, is in charge of communications between the countries.
The normalisation of relations between Riyadh and Baghdad was illustrated at the Arab League summit in Beirut in March when Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was seen on live television to embrace Ezzat Ibrahim, Saddam’s representative. Saudi Arabia also joined its Arab League partners in a unanimous vote against any US military attack on Iraq.
You've really got to hand it to the neocons: they sure know how to conduct a bang-up propaganda campaign. The leak of a "briefing" to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which targeted the Saudis as the real locus of world terrorism, is all over the place: not only the Washington Post, but MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, and out over the wires. The document, labeled "top secret" and "classified," according to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is described in the Post:
"A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States."
It's refreshing to see that the War Party is finally coming out of the closet, so to speak, with its real aims and ambitions. We knew that all the pious palaver about a "war on terrorism," and the export of "democracy," was just a lot of malarkey, but it's nice to have them come right out and say so. As I said all along, a war against the Saudis and the outright seizure of the Saudi oil fields is what the neocon-Big Oil-Bushian axis of aggression is really gunning for.
It's interesting to see that the conspiracy theory being pushed by the Rand Corp. briefing is quite similar to the vague mishmosh of arbitrary assertions and undocumented accusations circulating in the form of Forbidden Truth, a book by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, and published by The Nation, which was aptly described by the Los Angeles Times as
"A dense, conspiracy-minded portrait of Saudi-dominated banks, companies and tycoons, all allegedly interconnected, that they maintain have helped fund Bin Laden's holy war."
The point of the book is that the Bush administration was supposedly appeasing the Taliban right up until the last moment: Brisard and Dasquie are essentially saying that the Bushies let 9/11 happen because of a "softness" on the Saudis. "Since the 18th century," Brisard and Dasquie aver, "Saudi Arabia, has been focused on conquering the world."
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
President Bush and other politicians have talked about how scandals like Enron and WorldCom have eroded confidence among investors, but the lasting erosion for the 21st century might involve something that the politicians are ignoring: workers' attitudes.
There's a saying in sports: Winning is a great deodorant. That shoving match a few weeks ago between Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent in the Giants' dugout has pretty much blown over, largely because the team played well afterward. But if Bonds or Kent had gone into a major slump and the team lost 10 games in a row, fans would have been clamoring for one of the stars to be traded.
Many workplaces these days feel like a 10-game losing streak. The economy is down, stress is up, and that light at the end of the tunnel might just be glare from all that sweat on Alan Greenspan's forehead.
History tells us that we won't be in this same losing streak five years from now, but I'm getting more afraid that the stench will linger in many workplaces long after the losing streak ends.
My father was in the generation that rebuilt the country after the Depression. Like many people his age, he worked hard and built a good life for himself, but he didn't have the same optimistic expectations that people in younger generations did. If he had a job that paid the bills, he accepted that,
because he had spent years seeing how ugly the economy could be.
I spent several weeks in Japan in 1986, and saw the same attitude among the people who had rebuilt that country after World War II. Like my father's generation, they could never savor their economic victory because there were always tinges of fear that something could go horribly wrong again.
A fence separated several hundred retired steel workers from the presidential motorcade yesterday as it pulled into Downtown Pittsburgh, but that didn't keep the older folks quiet.
Hoping to get President Bush's attention as he arrived at the Pittsburgh Hilton Hotel and Towers, the retirees gathered in Point State Park, where they waved protest signs and chanted slogans at the behest of young organizers from the United Steelworkers and other unions. They did a repeat performance for TV cameras.
They came from Ohio, West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Aliquippa seeking government help in maintaining their health-care benefits and in propping up the import-battered industry for which they once worked.
"We're here to tell this guy that we need a health care plan like the one he has," said Bobby DeMeo, 71, a retiree from LTV Steel's defunct Pittsburgh Works.
DeMeo, like many in the crowd, lost company-paid health benefits this spring after a debt-laden LTV stopped production and sold its assets in bankruptcy court.
"Since I lost my health care coverage last April, we've already paid $2,900 for prescriptions, doctor visits and health coverage. That's more than one third of our income," said Carol McMahon, whose husband, James, retired from LTV in Aliquippa.
"We're worried about our pensions and health care," said one elderly lady who would give only her first name, Anna. "Social Security too," added one of her friends. "Prescription drugs," yelled another.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- These are the lazy dog day afternoons of August. And as U.S. leaders ponderously deploy the rhetoric of war against Iraq, they unconsciously echo an alarming pattern: At least five times in the past century, the Guns of August have brought indescribable suffering
and grief, terror and death, to the entire world.
World War I broke out at the beginning of August 1914. World War II broke outright after the end of August 1939. North Korea invaded South Korea right
before the beginning of August in 1950. And 40 years later, plus literally only two days, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
World War II ended in the middle of an August. But there was a darkly sobering aspect to that too. The first two atomic bombs ever used to destroy cities -- and the only ones so far in history to be used to kill people -- annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the first weeks of August 1945.
It has often been remarked that there is a dark, bitter irony to the fact that huge wars this century have tended to break out in August at the height of the summer vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather is often idyllic. Millions of families are on holiday in the countryside or by the beach. The governing classes of most major nations take the time to enjoy vacations of their own and often have to be summoned back to the capital when the crisis erupts.
World War II was a looming storm that was anything but unexpected. But World War I was a diabolical bolt from the blue. Until Austria-Hungary, with the enthusiastic backing of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, sent its notorious ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914, no one in Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary or Czarist Russia dreamed of the immense conflagration that was about to destroy their worlds.
The Korean War and the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait that led to the 1991 Gulf War to liberate the emirate the following year both took U.S. policymakers in Washington entirely by surprise.
The left-wing independent journalist I.F. Stone concocted a theory that the U.S. government had actually schemed to bring about the Korean War and
in the following decades his theory became fashionable among the American Left. But the opening of the Soviet archives after the collapse of communism in 1991 exposed this theory once and for all as paranoid fantasy.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," was a rewrite man. His job was to destroy documents that could undermine the government's pretense of infallibility, and replace them with altered versions.
Lately, Winston Smith has gone to Washington. I'm sure that lots of history is being falsified as you read this — there are several three-letter agencies I don't trust at all — but two cases involving the federal budget caught my eye.
First is the "Chicago line." Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush told his budget director that the only valid reasons to break his pledge not to run budget deficits would be if the country experienced recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he said. "I hit the trifecta."
When I first reported this remark, angry readers accused me of inventing it. Mr. Bush, they said, is a decent man who would never imply that the nation's woes had taken him off the hook, let alone make a joke out of it.
Soon afterward, the trifecta story became part of Mr. Bush's standard stump speech. It always gets a roar of appreciative laughter from Republican audiences.
So what's the Chicago line? In his speeches, Mr. Bush claims to have laid out the criteria for running a deficit when visiting Chicago during the 2000 campaign. But there's no evidence that he said anything of the sort during the campaign, in Chicago or anywhere else; certainly none of the reporters who were with him can remember it. (The New Republic, which has tracked the claim, titled one of its pieces "Stop him before he lies again.") In fact, during the campaign his budget promises were unqualified, for good reason. If he had conceded that future surpluses were not guaranteed, voters might have wondered whether it was wise to lock in a 10-year tax cut.
About that 10-year tax cut: It basically takes place in two phases. Phase I, which has mainly happened already, is a smallish tax cut for the middle class. Phase II, which won't be completed until 2010, is a considerably larger cut that goes mostly to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers.
I figure I must be on the short list of those likely to have a file created for, ( or added to), John Ashcroft's TIPS program. I've been receiving suspicious packages from individuals with Arab names, from locations both abroad and domestically. I've also received mail from nations of known terrorist activity. I've been shopping on Ebay, you see, and it's often a rather inexplicable experience.
When Levi's announced they were closing their American manufacturing, I developed a yen for 'authentic old-timey American quality' and by-and-by discovered the existence of Levi's 'Vintage' line of perfect re-creations of their old jeans - the product that made their name, built stout like you wouldn't believe in the original Levi factory on Valencia Street in San Francisco. The only problem with the line is that it was priced like Italian couture. Enter Ebay. Through the mysteries of the marketplace and the magic of the Internet, I've been able to obtain a couple examples of these Levi's at some fraction of suggested retail. The first pair came from a guy in London, and is the 1944 issue of the 501, complete with doughnut-hole buttons with the top one featuring a 'laurel wreath of peace' design that was a standard item on WW2 American clothing. The second came from a fellow in Texas, and is a perfect, crisp, re-issue of the zipper style Levi's I wore as a kid in the 50's. My Mom would wash them once and put them on me wet and then send me out to play, so they would shrink down to my actual size. In honor of the occasion, I washed these once and then went for a motorcycle ride. For whatever reason, both these Levi's came from men with Arab names, and judging from their e-mail's, a less than perfect grasp of the English language.
Some tipster might conclude Al Qaeda scored a container load of Vintage Levi's, and now is selling them to support terrorism, I dunno. But the pair from Texas, at least, came complete with a tag from T.J. Max, so I suspect this was simply somebody with a good eye and some entrepreneurial spirit. As I said, I also received mail from a nation which has experienced terrorist activity, in this case Croatia. The item in question is a postcard sealed in plastic, for which I paid $5, of Dan Gurney sitting on the starting grid in his 1967 F-1 Eagle-Westlake. Dan Gurney was the last American-born driver to win a F-1 race, and that year he did it in a car he built himself in Santa Ana, California. The Eagle was one of the most beautiful race cars ever to turn a wheel, and in 1967, arguably the most competitive year in Grand Prix history, Gurney was the only driver able to compete in a straight fight with the immortal Jimmy Clark in the Lotus 49. There were bumper stickers at the time that said 'Dan Gurney for President,' and hey, we've done a lot worse. Since Gurney lives not 30 miles from me, you'd think you'd be able to find something around here that acknowledged his singular achievement - but no, for this great little picture, my source is Croatia. Go figure.
But you see what I'm getting at - each transaction is completely innocent, and yet my mailman, if instructed to notice 'patterns' of deliveries from 'suspicious' sources, could quite easily decide that I fit the 'profile,' and once you fit the 'profile,' then you can bet your last dollar you're going to get your own file, whatever public statements Ashcroft makes to the contrary. Once you have a file, well, you have a file. Having a file will perforce hurt your ability to gain employment, get credit, find a place to live. You are added to the number of all others who have files, allowing Ashcroft or whomever to stand in front of the microphones and say 'We have hundreds of thousands, (or millions) of so-called Americans who we've linked to support of terrorists! Now is not the time to dither about civil liberties!' And so on.
I saw recently where Albert Einstein had an FBI file, and suffered heavy FBI surveillance, purely on J. Edgar Hoover's contention that Einstein was a 'liberal intellectual.' Well, you could say the same of Thomas Jefferson, I suppose. There's a strain of American Protestant culture, finding voice in the GOP hard-right, that holds that to read too far afield from the Bible is sinful; and so the 'liberal intellectual,' with his many books, is branded a danger to morals and the public safety. Will the cable-guy receive a profile of probable anti-American conspirators that consists of 'lot's of books on display in home'? And speaking specifically to Mr. Ashcroft's concerns, what about art? I've got a Renoir litho, an affordable posthumous print to be sure, of a reclining woman that's, you know, nekid. Too many books and bare bosoms - I'm sure to get a file.
Monday, August 05, 2002
The Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq and install a client regime in Baghdad may be popular in America, but to the outside world it increasingly recalls old-fashioned British imperialism.
If administration hawks studied Iraq's gory history, they would learn it ranks among the most disastrous and tragic creations of Britain's colonial policy, and offers a grim reminder of what George Bush's planned "regime change" in Baghdad may bring.
At the end of World War I, the victorious British and French fell like wolves on the rotting carcass of the defeated Ottoman Empire. After promising Arabs independence, Britain betrayed them, dividing the ex-Ottoman Mideast into weak states run from London. Oil had recently been discovered at either end of the Fertile Crescent: in the north around Mosul in Kurdish tribal territory, and in southern marshes bordering Iran. To secure oil for the Royal Navy, Britain created Iraq and put a puppet king, Faisal, on its throne. Faisal was to have been made king of Syria, but France managed to snatch Syria away from Britain.
Frankenstein state
To form Iraq, Britain knitted together three utterly disparate, mutually hostile regions: Kurdish tribal lands; the Sunni Muslim region around Baghdad, then a small city with a predominantly Jewish and Christian population; and the Shia south. The result was an unstable, artificial, Frankenstein state - a Mideast Yugoslavia.
In 1920, Iraqis rose in revolt against Britain but were crushed. The Royal Air Force routinely bombed, strafed, and even used poison gas against rebellious Kurdish and Shia tribesmen. Nineteen years later, King Ghazi I threatened to invade Kuwait - part of historic Iraq until detached by British oil imperialists. He died soon after in a mysterious car crash, the work, Iraqis said, of British intelligence.
In 1941, Iraqis again rebelled against their British masters, but were crushed by RAF bombers. After World War II, London put a new king, Faisal II, on the throne. But real power was wielded by Britain's man in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nouri as-Said. The U.S. and Britain forced Iraq to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact and sell its oil to the West at give-away prices.
To prevent a coup, the small Iraqi Army was denied ammunition. British troops and the RAF kept Faisal in power. But in July, 1958, a colonel named Kassem convinced Nouri to allow his men a few rounds of ammunition for training. Kassem marched out of Baghdad, turned around, marched back, and stormed the palace. King Faisal II was executed. Nouri as-Said tried to escape, disguised as a woman. He was captured by a mob, castrated and hanged from a lamppost. Kassem ordered British troops out of Iraq, and withdrew from the hated Baghdad Pact.
Col. Kassem turned out to be a murderous lunatic, executing thousands of Iraqis and bombing the Kurds. He threatened to invade Kuwait and was only stopped when Britain massed troops in its protectorate.
Five years later, Kassem was overthrown by Nasserite officers and machine-gunned on national TV. Col. Abdul Salam Aref took power, with discreet help from the CIA and British Intelligence, MI6.
Three years later, Col. Aref was assassinated by a bomb in his helicopter. His brother, Col. Abdul Rahman, took power, but he was overthrown by a cabal of officers from the underground Baath party, led by Gen. Hassan al-Bakir. A young Baath party enforcer named Saddam Hussein played a significant role in the coup, and was said to have had links to the CIA and MI6.
BERLIN: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer cautioned against a possible US attack on Iraq on Saturday, stressing the need to solve the broader Middle East conflict first.
"I can only warn against talking about or considering a war against Iraq without thinking of the consequences and without a political concept for the whole Middle East," Schroeder told a rally of his Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Hanover.
Fischer expressed a similar position in a television interview to be broadcast on Sunday.
"To talk now of having to push through a change in government in Baghdad with a military intervention, that's a false assessment of priorities," he said.
Schroeder reiterated his view that Germany stood beside the United States after the September 11 attacks, but was not prepared to engage in "adventures".
"Germany is no longer a country where chequebook diplomacy replaces politics," he said on Saturday.
On Tuesday, Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac cautioned that they could not support a US assault on Iraq without a United Nations mandate, which US and British officials argue is not legally necessary.
On Thursday, Baghdad hinted it might let UN inspectors return to investigate its suspected weapons programmes for the first time since 1998 as US President George W Bush reaffirmed his aim of toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Washington said Iraq's offer of talks on arms inspectors did not alter its ultimate goal of seeing Saddam removed from power.
Schroeder hopes to boost support for the SDP in a September election by stressing his opposition to a possible U.S. attack on Iraq, party officials said on Friday.
SPD General Secretary Franz Muentefering said even if Germany were not involved in an attack, a war would do more damage to its sagging economy, adding that the SPD's campaign slogan "We go our own way" also applied to foreign policy.
WASHINGTON -- A group of women who lost their husbands in the collapse of the World Trade Center are beginning to change some minds about the need for an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. Their next target: President Bush ( news - web sites).
For months, the president and other administration officials have argued against an independent commission. This week, however, senior White House officials met with three widows spearheading a lobbying campaign.
''They said they have a lot of thinking to do,'' said Kristen Breitweiser, one of the widows who attended the meeting.
White House officials say that a commission isn't the right way to investigate the terrorist attacks. But Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who accompanied the women to the meeting with Jay Lefkowitz, chief of the president's domestic policy council, said he's ''much more hopeful'' than he was previously.
Smith, who represents many Sept. 11 victims' families, last week helped Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., engineer a surprise House vote in favor of an independent panel to investigate the attacks. He credits the unexpected victory to lobbying by family members, who helped to persuade 25 Republicans to support the bill. ''It's hard to look them in the eyes and not get it,'' Smith said.
Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English political philosopher, felt that the lives of human beings were naturally "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." He maintains that, in order to survive this grim reality, humanity engages in continual warfare, "every one against every one."
Three hundrred years later, in 1949, George Orwell published his chilling, anti-utopian novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four," in which the brutish ruling party of Oceania rules society on the basis of slogans such as "War is Peace." In both Hobbes' "Leviathan" and Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" the frightening image of a never-ending war is evoked.
Enter America's unelected president, George W. Bush, and his "War on Terrorism." This war that Bush presents to the American people is a war that will not be over until he says it is. "The prospect of a war without end," writes historian Howard Zinn, in a March 2002 issue of The Progressive, is unlike the wars of any previous administration. "Indeed," writes Zinn, "presidents have been anxious to assurre the nation that the sacrifices demanded would be finite" with an eventual "light at the end of the tunnel."
With the macho bluster of an Old West lawman -- telling America that Osama bin Laden is "Wanted Dead or Alive" -- Bush says his administration will show no mercy toward anybody who harbors terrorists or plans to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Never mind that presidential brother Jeb Bush is governor of Florida, which has long harbored anti-Castro terrorists who've hijacked aircraft and boats without being charged with any crime. Or perhaps the president might explain why one of Pol Pot's chief terrorists now lives confortably in Mount Vernon, N.Y.
Indeed, George Bush's "War on Terrorism" is in many ways a reincarnation of America's "red scare" of the 1950s. It too was used to justify the growth of a war economy, suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissent.