ack in the ’80s, the Reagan administration established an elaborate and illegal domestic propaganda apparatus known as the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean. Its covert mission: Sell Congress, the media and the American people on the administration’s war against leftists in Central America. The stated objective: Convince Americans that the Contras are “fighters for freedom in the American tradition” and that the “FSLN [Sandinistas] are evil.”
When the Iran-Contra scandal broke, the Office of Public Diplomacy was dismantled and its unit of Psychological Operations (Psyops) agents sent home to their U.S. Army base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Three administrations—and several enemies—later, Army Psyops agents were again deployed in Washington, again fighting “evil,” but this time from the Pentagon’s new Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). The covert mission: Target foreign media organizations in the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe with disinformation campaigns. The objective: Convince foreign leaders and citizens to support U.S. policy.
The difference this time around is that conscientious Pentagon officials leaked OSI’s plans to the New York Times. A senior Pentagon official put it this way, “Everybody understands using information operations to go after non-friendlies. When people get uncomfortable is when people use the same tools and tactics on friendlies.”
Thursday, March 07, 2002
March 6, 2002—The U.S. justice system (courts, enforcement agencies, rule and law making bodies) was the last venue of hope for America's censored, oppressed, disenfranchised, and falsely accused. Indeed, the authors of the U.S. Constitution recognized that the third branch of government, the judicial branch, must be the stable and incorruptible anchor of American government and society as the other two branches—executive and legislative—would be subject to the whim and whimsy of special interests and the public whose opinions would invariably reflect those special interests. But what was once the envy of the world is now gangrene on the public body of a once proud nation, and it is the site of squalor, death, exploitation, rape, abuse, experimentation, and profit and loss.
At this critical moment in U.S. history when the American justice system is needed to stem the tide of American totalitarianism, it finds itself incapable of doing so. What a tragic commentary on a once novel and enlightened system that ended segregation, gave the convicted rights, ensured a free press and dissent, enforced a women's right-to-choose, and checked the imperious power of the executive branch. Now, however, it is extraordinarily politicized and corrupted at every level, and wealthy ideologues, corporations and defendants with money to burn far too easily manipulate it. It is a system that is suspect by the general public and daily mocked by shows like Judge Judy. High school students in America know that the right amount of money and influence can buy a favorable decision, a legislative loophole, timeshare at a low security Federal Prison Camp, and even the US presidency as the election of 2000 demonstrated.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israeli planes, helicopters and warships pounded Gaza on Wednesday in one of the fiercest assaults of the Palestinian uprising. Twelve Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed in violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Seven of the Palestinians died in fighting in Gaza. Five others died in separate incidents, including a Hamas activist killed in an explosion at his Gaza City home.
Peres' bitter exchange with the infrastructure minister, Lieberman, was reported in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper and confirmed Wednesday by Lieberman's spokesman, Sagiv Rotenberg. According to the Yediot account, Lieberman urged that Palestinians be told to halt all terror activity or face wide-ranging attacks.
"At 8 a.m. we'll bomb all the commercial centers ... at noon we'll bomb their gas stations ... at 2 we'll bomb their banks," Lieberman reportedly told the meeting before Peres interrupted to say: "And at 6 p.m., you'll receive an invitation to the international tribunal in The Hague (news - web sites)."
WASHINGTON, March 5 — Newly detected Internet traffic among Al Qaeda followers, including intercepted e-mail messages, indicates that elements of the terror network may be trying to regroup in remote sanctuaries in Pakistan near the Afghan border, government officials say.
United States officials said they had discovered the existence of new Web sites and Internet communications that appeared to be part of a concerted Al Qaeda effort to reconstitute the group and re-establish communications after the war in Afghanistan.
Senior counterterrorism officials said that Al Qaeda's effort to rebuild itself outside Afghanistan appeared to rely heavily on the Internet for communications among highly mobile operatives, who often check their messages in public Internet cafes around the world, making them difficult to track.
The White House claimed early victory over the Taliban and bragged of liberating the oppressed. "We are winning the war on terror," President George W. Bush declared in his State of the Union address.
The CIA, meanwhile, was compiling a downbeat dossier. It depicts the new Afghanistan as rife with competing warlords and bristling with ethnic tension, as well as the usual meddling from Iran. Days ago, there was a mortar attack on a boys' school in Sarobi. Its victims were as young as 8. The countryside beyond Kabul teeters sometimes toward lawlessness.
WASHINGTON (AP)- Lawyers for the government argued in court Wednesday that military recruiters never were authorized to promise a lifetime of free medical care to enlistees who agreed to sign up for a 20-year hitch.
Veterans led by retired Air Force Col. George ``Bud'' Day told the appellate panel they're determined to protect benefits they assumed they had earned.
``A promise is a promise,'' said Day, who served in World War II as a Marine and Korea and Vietnam with the Air Force. In Vietnam he was a prisoner-of-war, escaped and was recaptured.
Day said legislation and recruiting manuals from as early as 1799 set out lifetime health care as a military recruiting tool for the military.
Justice Department lawyer E. Roy Hawkens cited other regulations that require Congress expressly to authorize the money before entitlements are promised.
Everyone knows the New York Post can be a great read, and we hear it's a fun place to work these days, especially if you're from Australia or the U.K. But staffers at the titillating tabloid also know that anyone can be fired for any reason at any time.
In early February, the Voice can now reveal, Post editor in chief Col Allan abruptly fired Sunday editor and longtime Post veteran Marilyn Matlick, apparently because she was too feisty and butted heads with the boss. The acting Sunday editor is now Geoff Stead, who hails from the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia, where Allan previously ran the show. Indeed, the Aussie mentality is now so entrenched at the Post that the standard newsroom greeting is "G'day, mate!"
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush (news - web sites)'s budget would produce a larger deficit next year and a smaller total surplus over the coming decade than the White House has projected, the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites) said Wednesday.
The figures immediately touched off a political battle over how gloomy the budget picture really is. Sen. Kent Conrad (news), D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the figures show a need to "restrain spending and tax cuts." Republicans said the numbers illustrate that federal finances will improve as the decade progresses.
In testimony to the committee, CBO Director Dan Crippen said his nonpartisan agency projects a 2003 deficit of $121 billion if the tax and spending changes the president has proposed are enacted. Bush's budget, released in February, said next year's red ink would be $80 billion.
ANWR: U.S. Senate debate over drilling draws agency directive.
As U.S. Senate debate on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge looms, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials in Alaska have instructed employees not to answer some questions about the refuge without consulting the public affairs office.
Several environmentalists liken the move to a gag order, saying it seems to be an attempt by the Bush Administration, which is pro-drilling, to squelch differing opinions within the agency.
The decision to steer inquiries follows statements made by the administration that downplay the risks of oil development to refuge wildlife such as caribou and polar bears. Most recently, the acting director for Fish and Wildlife said in January that development in the Arctic would pose "insignificant" risks to polar bears and their dens. This statement was made despite agency reports that conclude otherwise.
With this backdrop, some environmentalists are wary about the motivation behind the new directive.
A few judicial nominees deserve to be Borked, and Charles W. Pickering Sr. is one. If Pickering were just a throwback to the worst days of Jim Crow, it would be one thing, but as recently as 1994, he argued that prosecutors should go easy on a man convicted of burning a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple and shooting into their house.
The worst part is that Pickering made his argument, in secret entreaties to the Justice Department, as the U.S. district judge in Mississippi hearing the case.
Pickering is clearly not qualified for his current judicial post. Now, President Bush has nominated Pickering for elevation to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
A closely divided Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Pickering's nomination tomorrow. The committee should reject it, and the few moderate Republicans on the panel should join in sending the White House a message that this kind of judicial foolishness will not be tolerated.
Does everybody hate America? Maybe the world is just concerned at the lack of visionary leadership from such a powerful nation
'By what right,' an angry environmentalist demanded at a recent conference I attended, 'do Americans place such a heavy footprint upon God's Earth?' Ouch. That was a tough one because, alas, it's largely true.
We comprise slightly less than 5 per cent of the world's population; but we imbibe 27 per cent of the world's annual oil production, create and consume nearly 30 per cent of its Gross World Product and - get this - spend a full 40 per cent of all the world's defence expenditures. By my calculation, the Pentagon's budget is nowadays roughly equal to the defence expenditures of the next nine or 10 highest defence-spending nations - which has never before happened in history. That is indeed a heavy footprint. How do we explain it to others - and to ourselves? And what, if anything, should we be doing about this?
I pose these questions because recent travel experiences of mine - to the Arabian Gulf, Europe, Korea, Mexico - plus a shoal of letters and emails from across the globe all suggest that this American democracy of ours is not as admired and appreciated as we often suppose. The sympathy of non-Americans for the horrors of 11 September was genuine enough, but that was sympathy for innocent victims and for those who had lost loved ones - workers at the World Trade Centre, the policemen, the firemen.
Republicans face potential losses in Nevada, a swing state, after Bush's ruling on Yucca Mt.
USA > Politics
from the March 05, 2002 edition
POLITICAL FALlOUT: Mining engineer Gene Polorny walks out the front entrance at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, selected by President Bush as the long-term storage site for nuclear waste.
LAURA RAUCH/AP/FILE
The political fallout from a nuclear-waste decision
Republicans face potential losses in Nevada, a swing state, after Bush's ruling on Yucca Mt.
By Abraham McLaughlin | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
LAS VEGAS - President Bush's recent decision to make Yucca Mountain the nation's nuclear-waste storehouse is settling across Nevada's political landscape like a mushroom cloud.
The move has sparked renewed fears among residents. And there's evidence this is improving Democrats' chances to win control of the US House of Representatives in the fall. Even a mild anti-Republican backlash will boost the Democratic candidate in a close-fought and nationally important House race here.
But it's even more likely to hurt Mr. Bush's prospects for winning this crucial swing state in 2004.
Dissatisfaction with the president is so strong that, "If the election were held today, and Bush was on the ballot, almost anyone could beat him," says Ted Jelen, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
TALLAHASSEE -- The legal team supervising House and Senate mapmakers redrawing Florida's political districts is a conglomerate of Republican party loyalists and administration insiders even though they are paid by taxpayers.
One lawyer on the team fended off a Miami-Dade recount on behalf of President Bush.
Another represented Gov. Jeb Bush in the legal wrangle over absentee ballots.
A third is married to Gov. Bush's reelection campaign manager and a fourth was in business with one of House Speaker Tom Feeney's top advisors.
The GOP-dominated group was amassed by Feeney to ensure that the district maps crafted by Republican leaders in the House stick. Republican leaders in the Senate have assembled a similar, taxpayer-supported legal team. Democrats, forced to take a back-row seat in the process, have their own attorneys, paid for out of private donations.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Armed Services Committee leaders have accused the Secretary of the Army of being slow to cut financial ties to Enron Corp., where he worked for 11 years before becoming the Bush administration's top official drawn from the failed energy giant's ranks.
The committee's chairman and ranking minority member said in a March 1 letter, released on Wednesday, that White failed to comply fully with an ethics agreement he signed in May as a condition for confirmation to the top Army job.
Houston-based Enron filed the largest-ever U.S. bankruptcy on Dec. 2 amid debt downgrades, lawsuits, layoffs and a stock price meltdown. Thousands of jobs and billion of dollars in shareholder equity were lost.
By
Local political rivalries in Afghanistan's eastern Pakhtia province appear to have contributed to the initial defeat of the US-led attack on al-Qaeda forces on Saturday and the worst US casualties since the war started last October.
Fighting continued on Wednesday in mountainous territory near Gardez, where US and Afghan forces are trying to force Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from a network of mountain caves and bunkers.
Militia commanders in Gardez and Kabul said the US may have made the mistake of relying on a few local commanders who, accidentally or deliberately, gave wrong estimates of enemy troop numbers and backed out on pledges to assist in the battle.
Less than 48 hours after Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, vowed to pound the Palestinians into submission by giving them a "bad beating", the Israeli armed forces set about the task in the Gaza Strip yesterday.
The 1.1 million Arabs crammed into the 28-mile long coastal region have frequently been bombed and raided since Mr Sharon took office exactly one year ago but the latest assaults were among the worst.
Yesterday, Gazans ranging from the Palestinian Authority's security chiefs – men once flattered by Washington, groomed by the CIA and cultivated as fellow-negotiators by Israel – to dirt-poor police on the street were assessing the damage of attacks from land, sea and air.
MERCURY, NEV. - It's showtime at the Nevada Test Site. A bassoon voice over a public address system sets the scene: A team of "Al Qaeda terrorists" has just seized a "nuclear processing plant."
Immediately, a "SWAT team" (actually four local cops) scrambles across the craggy desert floor into the "plant" (actually a former rocket-testing structure). They try to neutralize the "terrorists" (actually just one rag-doll dummy). But the "terrorists" retaliate - and a "nuclear fireball" (actually a flour-based explosive) flashes like a mini-supernova across the khaki moonscape.
ISABELA: Nearly 60 years ago, people living on the largely Muslim island of Basilan in the southern Philippines hailed US troops as liberators for driving out Japanese occupiers.
But US troops may not find such a warm welcome in store when they return to the embattled island later in February to join military exercises to tackle Muslim guerrillas that Washington says have links with Osama bin Laden.
Most Christian residents on Basilan interviewed seemed to regard the Americans as messiahs. A few exceptions aside, Muslims were wary of the US troops conducting the new phase of the US "war on terror".
Christian businessman Bienvenido Tan will cheer. A staunch US supporter, the seventy-year-old says he may well march in the streets waving the Stars and Stripes. But jewellery shop owner Hja Sheng, a Muslim, won't be there.
"What will become of us? Another Afghanistan?" Sheng asked.
The security cabinet's decision on Sunday night to step up attacks on the Palestinian Authority and to conduct a "continuous campaign" was implemented yesterday in a series of violent attacks in the West Bank and Gaza. An IDF force returned to the Jenin refugee camp, while other forces took action in Ramallah, Rafah and the Nablus area. According to the prime minister's statements to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the IDF is planning to operate in other refugee camps "to destroy the will and ability of the terrorist organizations."
The "continuous campaign" already resulted in tragic results, with the IDF's hitting innocent people, including four children in Ramallah, and the head of the Red Crescent in Jenin. Palestinian and Israeli sources provided contradictory versions of the two incidents yesterday, but that does not change the lethal results. All those who are shocked by the deaths of innocent Israelis cannot be apathetic to the deaths of innocent Palestinians. As we count our dead, they count theirs.
Israel's course of action, chosen in the wake of the terrible attacks on Saturday night and Sunday morning, is similar to that which was approved following the attack on the Ein Ariq checkpoint. Those operations were halted after two days, at the request of the Palestinians, who proposed convening the joint security committee and attempting a cease-fire during Id al Itha. But the cease-fire did not last and hostilities resumed. Now it appears that neither side has any intention of halting the spiraling violence.
US military officials have revealed a soldier who fell out of a Chinook helicopter was later executed by al-Qaida fighters.
Petty Officer Neil C Roberts, 32, of Woodland, California, was based in Norfolk, Virginia, with a Navy SEAL unit.
US officials said when the helicopter was hit, it rapidly took off and landed a short distance away with hydraulic failure from the attack. The crew then discovered one of its men had apparently fallen out.
Commanders then watched real-time images from an unmanned Predator drone that showed al-Qaida members capture and kill the officer.
"We saw him on the Predator being dragged off by three al-Qaida men," said Major General Frank L. Hagenbeck, the operation commander.
THE European Union condemned President Bush’s “Wild West” attitude to global trade laws yesterday and vowed to retaliate with every legitimate weapon including, if necessary, punitive sanctions on US products worth roughly $2.5 billion (£1.75 billion).
Leading a worldwide chorus of protests, Brussels insisted that there were no legal or economic grounds for Mr Bush’s imposition of 30 per cent tariffs on steel imports, only his desire to appease a powerful domestic steel lobby whose support he needed for electoral purposes.
“This is a case where Americans have clearly given preference to their domestic political interests over and above the international rules they have signed up to,” Pascal Lamy, the EU’s Trade Commissioner, said. He expressed astonishment that a US Administration ostensibly committed to free trade should have acted in such a cynical way. In a dig at the President’s Texan origins, he told a press conference: “The worldwide steel market is not the Wild West, where everybody does what they like. There are disciplinary rules.”
Wednesday, March 06, 2002
The Teapot Dome scandal forever tainted the reputation of President Warren G. Harding. The scandal involved the leasing, without competitive bidding, of oil fields in Wyoming and California and payoffs to Interior Secretary Albert Fall, who ended up going to jail.
Now Teapot Dome is being compared to Enron. Kevin Phillips, writing in the Los Angeles Times, describes how in both cases powerful energy interests enriched powerful politicians. In the case of Enron, the rise of George W. Bush as a politician in Texas and the rise of Enron happened to coincide.
Phillips writes that in 1988 George W. Bush actually served as a lobbyist for Enron, telephoning the Argentine government to promote an Enron pipeline proposal. Bush’s staff has denied that Bush made that phone call, but an Argentine cabinet minister says he did. In any event, Bush’s father was president-elect when Bush made the alleged phone call, a fact that could not have been lost on the Argentine government.
YellowTimes.org) – The American response to September 11th did not change the terms of international relations. It only enhanced and deepened a trend that was manifest in Bush's foreign policy from the beginning. Surprisingly, this trend should give pause to the corporate executives who lined up behind Bush's candidacy. Unsurprisingly, nobody else wins either. Bush is the ultimate lose-lose president.
Before the election of George Bush, the U.S. dominated a vast American empire. That empire had enormous military might, more powerful than anything ever dreamed of. U.S. military power was visible in a host of military bases around the world, from Germany and Saudi Arabia to Okinawa. However, since the end of the Cold War, U.S. military forces rarely functioned as U.S. military forces. They functioned as world police forces, intervening almost exclusively by invitation, with a mission to restore the peace or defeat local thugs.
In the space secured by this world police, America exercised its world domination, relatively peacefully, through a series of technocratic institutions that protected and extended the power of U.S. corporations over world production.
We hear a lot about rogue states these days. You know, the rogue states that refuse to ratify important treaties, the ones who refuse to allow international inspections of their weapons of mass destruction, the ones who ignore U.N. resolutions, who violate human rights with impunity and who refuse to sign on to human rights conventions? You know, those rogue states.
Let's get down to specifics. What would you call a country that produces the highest levels of dangerous chemicals in the world but abandons key negotiations aimed at reversing global warming? How about a country whose leader blithely announces that he is abandoning a quarter-century old arms control treaty, one the whole world understands to be the key to preventing complete nuclear madness? And what about a government that walks out of talks to enforce the biological weapons treaty because it doesn't want international inspectors peeking at its own weapons production facilities? That same country keeps rejecting human rights treaties, even the ones protecting the rights of children.
Sounds pretty roguish, don't you think? Iraq, maybe, or one of those other evil-doers like Iran or North Korea? But oops -- wrong guess. This particular rogue state would be the United States of America.
We are living in a time when scoundrels seek to bully the loyal opposition and demonize all dissent for their own advancement. That’s why certain Republican politicians and pundits have assaulted Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and other Democrats in terms usually reserved for foreign and domestic enemies.
Tensions over the Bush administration's sharing of information with Congress flared anew yesterday as the White House excluded the House Democratic leader from a confidential briefing and Bush aides swapped charges with lawmakers about who was told of White House contingency plans dealing with a hypothetical nuclear attack on Washington.
House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) first learned from a reporter about yesterday's classified briefing for congressional leaders on the contingency plans, his aides said. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer blamed a "scheduling matter" and said Gephardt had "already been talked to," which Gephardt's aides said was untrue.
The White House also disputed lawmakers' claims that they had not been advised of the administration's contingency plans, reported last week in The Washington Post, involving scores of career government officials taking rotations in underground bunkers outside of Washington. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) – who as Senate president pro tempore is third in line to the presidency – and Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) had said they were not informed of the plans.
Let’s get one thing straight: The Bush “Continuity of Government” plan, less charitably known as the “Shadow Government” was designed to keep Republicans alone alive.
According to the Associated Press today (March 5), “President Bush’s spokesman disputed complaints from lawmakers who said they were not informed that the administration had established a ‘shadow government’ outside Washington in case nuclear-armed terrorists strike the nation's capital.”
On Sunday March 3, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Democrat, said he wanted Bush to keep congressional leaders better informed about the war on terrorism and the shadow government, saying no lawmakers knew about the continuity of government plan.
This was spokesman Ari Fleischer’s response, according to the AP: “Fleischer said ‘the appropriate people’ on Capitol Hill knew of the plan. ‘I cannot speak to how Congress fully informs itself. I'm confident and the president is confident that when people pause and talk to each other on the Hill’ they will discover who was told of the administration's plan.”
This is laughable. Congress does not "inform itself". Someone, somehow, must inform it.
One thing is already clear though: The ranking Democrat, the Senate Majority leader, the second most important person in Congress was NOT informed. Who, if anyone, was? Apparently no Democrats. If there WERE Democrats who were told, who were they?
Clearly, if disaster struck, the Bush Administration was poised to carry on. But the manner in which they chose to do so reveals much about the nature of their thinking.
If a disaster struck, the government was to be run as a single party system, essentially a military dictatorship.
The presidential profile has become a staple of front pages and cover stories since Sept. 11. Virtually all the profiles have the same flattering tone summed up by USA Today's headline back in October: "Same President, different man in Oval Office." How different is difficult to grasp because every other profile compares George W. Bush to a different president.
He's been compared to both Roosevelts (Teddy's big stick, FDR's big commitments), to Woodrow Wilson (morality and American exceptionalism), to Harry Truman (folksy), John Kennedy (gutsy), Ronald Reagan (knows evil when he sees it) and of course to the first George Bush, although why, besides a family resemblance, is yet unclear. The comparisons work either as the gratuitous flattery that usually wallpapers a war leader's first months, or more likely as fillers of presidential tonnage Bush himself lacks.
Because to be so often compared to so many presidents should signal alarm, not self-confidence. It speaks of a void at the center of power that must be made up. In some cases it is. Afghanistan comes to mind, even if what began as a war on terrorism is, for lack of a clear victory on that front, turning into an old fashioned war of conquest, a pudding looking for a proof.
This is just a quick note of thanks for the support all of you have
given my book. "Stupid White Men" debuted at #3 on the New York Times
bestseller list this week, and at #1 on the Publisher's Weekly nonfiction
bestseller list for independent bookstores. It's still #1 for all books
on Amazon, and, my personal favorite for a good laugh, #4 on the
bestseller list for the Wall Street Journal. By the fifth day of release, the
book had gone into its 9th printing.
More copies have been sold in one week than "Downsize This" sold in a
whole year. Pundits and publishers are stunned. "But the president has
an 80% approval rating!" There's something going on here, and they don't
know what it is...
I am writing this from northern California, two weeks into the book
tour, on a drive with my family to visit small towns like Ukiah and
Arcata.
Last night in Santa Rosa, at the local high school, they had a thousand
people packed inside and another 500 out on the lawn who couldn't get
in. It's like this in all the places I visit. Hundreds, thousands,
turning out to discuss all the sorry excuses for the state of the nation.
People have had it with keeping silent for the past 6 months. They
resent having felt like if they chose to question what the government is up
to or, God forbid, dissent, they would somehow be considered
unpatriotic.
Let's get one thing straight -- this is what it means to be
"unpatriotic:"
1. When you shred our constitution and eliminate our civil liberties,
passing laws that make it illegal to encourage opposition to the
government's actions, THAT is un-American.
2. When you send our kids to go fight and die on a foreign land so that
you can finally build a pipeline for your oil backers across that
country, THAT is un-American.
3. When you use the dead of September 11 to try to get huge tax cuts
passed that will only benefit your rich benefactors, THAT is un-American.
4. When you allow criminals who are stealing the pensions of workers
and retirees to come in and hand-pick the head of the agency which is
supposed to be regulating them, and then you place some of the criminals'
top brass in your administration to "serve" as the secretary of the
army and White House counsel, and then these criminals turn out to be your
number one financial backers -- and their law firm turns out to be your
#3 backer -- and, in spite of all this you still haven't resigned in
disgrace, THAT is un-American.
I want all of you to share this success with me and feel heartened and
reassured by the response to this book. It is an overwhelming rebuke,
first to those who sought to censor or ban it, and now to the
oft-repeated conventional wisdom that the whole country is whistling the same
tune and marching in lockstep to the vision of Cheney/Ashcroft/Bush. It's
a bunch of hooey, folks, and I have seen it first hand -- and not in
the usual centers of leftist discontent.
This tour has taken me to Ridgewood, New Jersey (area that always
returns its Republican congressman), Arlington, Virginia (a town filled with
military people), Grass Valley, California (in the middle of nowhere in
a congressional district represented by a right-wing Republican). In
each of these towns it's been a literal mob scene.
The Virginia bookstore says that "this crowd is an all-time record."
The line is out the door in downtown Ridgewood, and the store does not
have enough books. In Grass Valley, so many have come from hundreds of
miles across the Sierras that can't get in, so I tell the hundreds out in
the street that I'll stick around and do a second show. Three hours
later they are still there, and I do it all over again.
I want to thank all of you who have written. I read your emails at
night and I am so sorry I don't have the energy to respond. Hundreds of you
have written to say that your bookstore does not have the book.
The main reason that is happening is that the publisher has not printed
enough books and cannot ship them fast enough when they do. Often, it
is because the bookstore did not order enough copies. A few stores, and
one chain in particular, have not been exactly overjoyed to be carrying
the book. On the other hand, Barnes & Noble have put it on their
bestseller list and are offering it at 1/3 the price.
Every single independent bookstore I have stopped into has been out of
books and they tell me that both the publisher and the distributors are
not sending them books. I do not know what to do about this. I have
made my calls. I am told everything is OK. I can see first-hand on the
road that it is not OK, and that many stores simply do not have the book.
You can help me by letting HarperCollins know when you cannot find the
book. Write them at ...
Contact
HC
Again, my sincerest appreciation to all of you and I look forward to
seeing many of you on the rest of this tour.
On Thursday I'll be in L.A., Friday in San Diego, Saturday in Denver
and Boulder, and next week it's on to Michigan and the Midwest. More
cities are being added, so check in at my website, www.michaelmoore.com.
Off to shadow the Cheney shadow government,
Michael Moore
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The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee slammed new merger review procedures agreed upon Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, charging that the agreement was made in violation of a law requiring consultation from Congress.
"I believe this is in violation of appropriations law, which states that we be consulted," said Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), referring to a law requiring federal agencies to consult Congress before restructuring in a way that will impact their budgets.
Ridge coordinates the government's anti-terrorism effort at home, though the programs themselves are carried out by dozens of other agencies. Appropriations controls much federal spending, including the $38 billion — double this year's total — that President Bush has proposed for next year's domestic security programs.
"Your views and insights on the policies necessary to meet these objectives are critical to the committee and the nation," the senators wrote.
Ridge spokeswoman Susan Neely said he would not testify because he is an adviser to the president, not a Senate-confirmed head of an agency that implements policy.
"Assistants to the president work for the president," Neely said. "And the president has spoken his recommendations to the Senate and House" in the budget he sent Congress last month, she said.
Daschle and other lawmakers also have complained they knew nothing about federal officials who have been working secretly outside Washington since Sept. 11 as a contingency government to guarantee continuity in case of a devastating attack on Washington. The "shadow government" was revealed last week by The Washington Post, and a GOP lawmaker criticized the secrecy surrounding it on Monday.
"We have to have some awareness of this because, as I recall, we are number three in succession here and that might be of interest to them," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., referring to succession to the presidency.
KABUL: Is a dead man the real ruler of Afghanistan? Judging by photographs that adorn all government offices, most shops, car windshields, and hoardings on street corners, it is certainly not interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.
The real ruler, the face that looks out from everywhere in Kabul, is Ahmad Shah Masood, a dead symbol of resistance against the Soviet Union and later the Taliban.
Never mind that Tajik commander Masood was murdered seven months ago, two days before September 11's attacks on the US set Afghanistan on its present road.
Arrive at Kabul airport and it is a photograph of Masood that looks down as your visa is stamped, not Karzai.
"Karzai does not have any real authority. Power is in the hands of those with guns," said a senior government official. "Masood followers are taking over all the important posts."
WASHINGTON (AP) - Authorities have arrested and deported dozens of young Israelis since early last year who represented themselves as art students in efforts to gain access to sensitive federal office buildings and the homes of government employees, U.S. officials said.
A draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration - which first characterized the activities as suspicious - said the youths' actions "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity."
Immigration officials deported them for visa violations; no criminal espionage charges were filed.
in the United States
It is undoubtedly the largest affair of Israeli spying in the United States that has been made public since 1986. In June 2001, an investigative report details the activities of more than one hundred Israeli agents, some presenting themselves as fine arts students, others tied to Israeli high-tech companies. All were challenged by the authorities, were questioned and a dozen of them would be still imprisoned. One their missions would have been to track the Al-Qaida terrorists on American territory, without informing the federal authorities of them. Elements of this investigation, taken up by American television Fox News, reinforce the thesis according to which Israel would not have transmitted to the United States all the evidence in its possession on the preparations of the September 11 attacks.
EVEN before dawn, it began. Just after 2am on day 523 of the Palestinian intifada, and Israeli tanks rolled into the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza in another security crackdown. An hour later, they were entering the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank, where six Palestinians were killed.
By the time darkness fell again, and the Israeli forces were once again shelling Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah base, there were at least 16 more Palestinians dead. The figure included five children, and a doctor whose ambulance was hit.
It was just another day in the Middle East, but it brought to 1,043 the number of Palestinians killed over the past 17 months. No fewer than 312 Israelis have died in the same period, and most news agencies admit they find it difficult to be sure of the toll.
PRESIDENT BUSH risked provoking a trade war with Europe last night when he imposed tariffs of up to 30 per cent on steel imports despite a last-minute appeal by Tony Blair not to damage British interests.
The tariffs, ranging from eight per cent to 30 per cent, take effect on March 20 and cover flat-rolled steel and other steel product imports from Europe and around the world.
Mr Blair's spokesman said: "We recognise the US steel industry has to restructure, but we do not believe it is in the interests of the world economy that it should impose tariffs."
ASIA LETTER: A hush descends over the small bar in Naha City as Japan's most celebrated folk singer begins his song of peace. Approximately 100 people, ranging from 17 to 70 years of age, are packed into the Chakra club on the idyllic Japanese island of Okinawa to hear their idol, the legendary Kina Shoukichi, perform.
Tonight, Kina is playing the sanshin, a local three-stringed banjo-like instrument covered with snakeskin. Sitting on stage, he closes his eyes and launches into Hana, the song which won him fame in Japan. In English, it means "A Flower for Everyone's Heart".
In the club tonight there is a group of journalists from Europe and Japan. They are attending an EU-organised conference on geopolitics in Asia post-September 11th. Leading the group is the EU ambassador to Japan, Mr Ove Juul Jorgensen.
A former CIA agent has said that a US invasion of Iraq could cause untold chaos in the Middle East.
Robert Baer, who belonged to the CIA's directorate of operations for more than 20 years, also said the US Government does not have a game plan when it comes to Iraq.
"There is no plan," he told Tim Sebastian in an interview for BBC HARDtalk.
"What terrifies me is that if the US attacks Iraq, destroys Saddam's army - which is what really holds the country together - it's going to break up ethnic and religious groups."
"If you destroy the army, the chances of Iran invading the south are very high."
WASHINGTON: Unprecedented scepticism and scorn accompanied the release by the United States on Monday of its annual human rights report amid charges of hypocrisy and double standards arising from the ongoing war on terrorism. Read this story in...
Washington’s kid glove treatment of its so-called allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan came up for withering scrutiny at a briefing to release the 2001 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, an annual administrative exercise mandated by the Congress that many feel has increasingly become a meaningless ritual.
Amid widespread domestic criticism over curtailment of civil liberties, US officials laboured to convince a disbelieving press corps that the exercise was evenhanded. The report does not look at the state of human rights in the US itself because, in the words of one official, “that wouldn’t be fair.”
Berkeley, California, March 4 (Bloomberg) -- One of the interesting aspects of the Enron scandal is the different strategies the chief villains have employed to exculpate themselves.
Kenneth Lay, the former chairman of the bankrupt energy trader, has decided he can plausibly cast himself as a stupid person taken advantage of by brighter underlings. Jeffrey Skilling, the chief executive who quit before the final collapse, believes he can set himself up as the guy who wasn't around when anything bad happened and who ``got off in Ireland'' before the ship went down.
Andrew Fastow, the chief financial officer who profited from partnerships with Enron Corp., clearly thinks if he lays low like Brer Rabbit, the public inquiry will focus on other, more senior people and bigger, more systematic problems -- and that he will be allowed to play the role of an underling who was simply doing what his bosses told him to do.
Those of us who opposed the bombing of Afghanistan warned that the war between nations would not stop there. Now, as Tony Blair prepares the British people for an attack on Iraq, the conflict seems to be proliferating faster than most of us predicted. But there is another danger, which we have tended to neglect: that of escalating hostilities within the nations waging this war. The racial profiling which has become the unacknowledged focus of America's new security policy is in danger of provoking the very clash of cultures its authors appear to perceive.
Yesterday's Guardian told the story of Adeel Akhtar, a British Asian man who flew to the United States for an acting audition. When his plane arrived at JFK airport in New York, he and his female friend were handcuffed. He was taken to a room and questioned for several hours. The officials asked him whether he had friends in the Middle East, or knew anyone who approved of the attacks on September 11. His story will be familiar to hundreds of people of Asian or Middle Eastern origin.
Tuesday, March 05, 2002
Good morning and welcome to all of our speakers and guests. I am honored to be here today among such a courageous group of people of conscience. I feel I am finally with my peers and do not have to explain myself.
I am particularly fond of the name POGO, not only for the great and necessary work this organization is doing but also because I once had a dog named Pogo. He was my loyal companion, and although quite small, warned me of intruders.
In today's forum, we pay homage to revolutionary war hero, Paul Revere. I must confess that since the first time I heard myself referred to as a whistle-blower, I cringed, and I am still uneasy with that term. It sounds demeaning. Demeaning for so noble a cause.
When Paul Revere was given the task of riding to Lexington to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock that the British troops were coming to arrest them, it is said that as he approached the house where they were staying the sentry asked him not to make so much noise, to which he cried "Noise?!? You'll have noise enough before long." After successfully warning the citizenry, he was himself arrested.
February 11--Houston Texas
An investigation in Houston Texas by the MadCowMorning News has uncovered significant discrepancies in the official version of the death of former Enron Vice Chairman Cliff Baxter. While Texas officials have been willing to share only a few facts about the case, much of what they have revealed, we have learned, is puzzling, misleading, or, amazingly, wrong.
Even more amazing is that —with billions at stake—the very real possibility that Baxter might have been murdered has been completely ignored in the press.
Freedom may be on life support in America, but it is still alive. By sending a mere $25 to the Offoce of the Medical Examiner of Harris County, Texas, The Great Speckled Bird has been able to obtain a notarized copy of the autopsy of former Enron executive, J. Clifford Baxter. A complete copy is attached. Here are the salient points as we see them:
1. Although the "Manner of Death" on page 1 is given as "suicide," no effort is made in the autopsy to support that conclusion, and, indeed, there is no supporting evidence for suicide in the autopsy. The conclusion could only have been reached based upon something extraneous to the autopsy.
PARIS (Reuters) - The United States has broken up a huge Israeli spy ring that may have trailed suspected al Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities, the French daily Le Monde reported Tuesday.
A secret U.S. government report outlining spying activities by Israelis contained "elements (that) support the theory that Israel did not give the U.S. all the information it had about the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks," it wrote.
Le Monde said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had confirmed the existence of the secret study, which says the Israelis posed as graphic arts students and tried to enter buildings belonging to the DEA and other U.S. agencies.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush (news - web sites) on Tuesday slapped punishing tariffs of 8 percent to 30 percent on several types of imported steel in an effort to aid the ailing U.S. industry, drawing criticism from American allies and mixed reviews in Congress.
"An integral part of our commitment to free trade is our commitment to enforcing trade laws to make sure that America's industries and workers compete on a level playing field," Bush said in a statement issued by the White House.
He urged U.S. steel companies to take advantage of the "temporary safeguards" and restructure their industry. The tariffs-and-quota plan, which takes effect March 20, can be amended by Bush if the industry's financial crisis worsens or eases in the next three years.
The action, while short of the 40 percent tariffs sought by companies, was generally applauded by industry.
Two executives better than one
In the hectic hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, the White House authorized the formation of a "shadow government" that exists in hidden locations on the East Coast.
First reported by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer back in October, the story became big news after The Washington Post wrote a feature story on the subject over the weekend.
Groups of high-level civilian managers are rotating into underground bunkers for shifts of 90 days at a time - presumably under the assumption that America would collapse into anarchy without the guidance of 90 federal bureaucrats squirreled away in a hidden bomb shelter. The very fact that this "shadow government," as it's now being called, exists should cause some concern for everyone.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has asked Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to visit Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt to discuss the Middle East crisis -- on the condition that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat could also be invited.
The meeting wouldn't be to end the crisis, Mubarak said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "but to give the impression to both parties, to the people on both sides, to the people in the Arab world that there is a window of hope that we have to work with."
Violence between Israelis and Palestinians has been particularly bloody over the past three days, with at least 22 Israelis and 16 Palestinians killed. (Full Story)
It seems Gov. Jeb Bush spends most of his time these days running from one place to another to refute analyses, reports and polls that show his lack of leadership has run Florida's economy into a ditch and broken the back of our public education system - reports from such left-wing think tanks as the Florida Chamber of Commerce that is.
Just as Ken Lay hid Enron's fiscal mismanagement from employees and investors, it seems our governor will go to any lengths to mislead Floridians about how the state's economy has gone from surpluses to deficits on his watch.
When Jeb Bush took the reigns of power nearly four years ago he spoke of lofty goals such as creating jobs, more efficient government and a world-class education system. Now, near the end of his term, we are back to deficit spending; our school system is at the bottom of the national pile and government graft has become of the order of the day.
After promising the most ethical administration in history, Gov. Bush has overseen corruption and nepotism run amok in his administration. It is now estimated that nearly 40 percent of our $48 billion dollar state budget gets kicked back in the form of contracts with private companies - many of which employ former Bush staffers.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As Middle East violence spun out of control on Tuesday, the White House offered little sign it would use a visit by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites) to step up its low-key mediation, saying it was up to Israelis and Palestinians to approve any outside initiatives.
Apparently brushing aside global calls for greater U.S. involvement, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) said the priority was to end the violence and that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) had to do more to crack down on Palestinian militants.
SUFFOLK -- A previous commitment will keep a Suffolk man from traveling to Washington, D.C., to accept a Republican of the Year award: He's serving a 26-year state prison sentence.
Spokesmen for the National Republican Congressional Committee, an arm of the Republican National Committee that raises millions of dollars to elect GOP candidates to the U.S. House of Representatives, acknowledged Tuesday that convicted sex offender Mark A. Grethen was invited to accept the award at its Business Advisory Council's luncheon in March. U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairs the NRCC.
``We weren't aware of his current predicament. Otherwise, (the invitation) never would have been extended,'' said Carl Forti, an NRCC spokesman. The award was rescinded after the NRCC learned of Grethen's crimes, Forti said Tuesday.
"Where do terrorists get their money?" The response: "If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you." Sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), this 30-second TV spot introduced a massive advertising blitz that included three Super Bowl spots, ads in 293 newspapers and on numerous radio stations, teaching materials for middle school and high school students, and a hyped-up, hacker-proof website. Total cost: $10 million. Suddenly, the debate on the drug war has been shifted from reason and rationale to patriotic fervor, a clever way to mask the continuing failure of America’s jihad against the production, trafficking and consumption of illicit drugs.
It was an idea so outrageous that only an administration drunk on arrogance would spawn it. Against the backdrop of President Bush in China, extolling the joys of a free democracy, and the death of a Wall Street Journal reporter accused of spying, the Pentagon recently announced plans for a new agency that would disseminate disinformation.
The new Office of Strategic Influence, itself, wouldn’t lie, but would use independent agents — contract liars, posing as journalists — to spread falsehoods abroad.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, barked nearly every government watchdog. Not only would this undermine the flow of good information on which democracy depends, it would endanger the lives of every journalist working abroad.
Official lies fed the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
Bush seeks $98 million to help Bogotá battle guerrilla pipeline saboteurs.
By Martin Hodgson | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
ARAUCA, COLOMBIA - From the air, the Caño Limón pipeline is invisible. The 480-mile tube is buried 6 feet below ground, but its route through the rolling Colombian prairie is marked by a swathe of black oil slicks and burned ground, the result of repeated bomb attacks by leftist rebels.
The pipeline, which links the oil field near the border with Venezuela to a port on Colombia's Caribbean coast, has been punctured so many times in the last 16 years that locals call it "the flute." Some 2.9 million barrels of crude oil have leaked into the soil and rivers - about 11 times the amount spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.
In the months following Sept. 11 the debate about waging war on terrorism has been understandably mute. With rare exceptions, the question boiling out of the nation's anger hasn't been whether to fight a war or where to fight it, but how quickly. Once it began, President Bush's strangely paradoxical promise that the war would certainly be won but that its duration would be open-ended should have been the first warning that such a colossal national commitment deserves less vagueness and clearer strategy, if not accountability. Nothing of the sort has happened.
The president has instead redefined success to mean whatever his administration says it means. Victory was attained in Afghanistan, even though Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader are still at large and anarchy promises to be the Afghan spring's bitterest crop. The war on terrorism is being won even though probable terrorists in custody can be counted on one hand. Meanwhile the Pentagon keeps announcing troop deployments Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Pakistan, the Philippines as if Asian geography were a game of Risk. The rubble remains of Somalia, the Sudan and Yemen are being cobbled into a minor league axis of evil. And the president has all but set a television schedule for the war against Iraq. (The May sweeps, perhaps.)
If a tale of political migration is to have any real punch, it needs a touch of passionate intensity—and, as Yeats pointed out, that's what the worst are full of. The journey from moderate liberalism to moderate conservatism or vice versa is the stuff of watery op-ed pieces and policy monographs, but it doesn't provide much in the way of narrative drive. A cracking good story requires something stronger at one end or the other, or both. Stalinism supplied that something stronger a half century ago. Its apostates moved by definition from left to right, though many of them stopped well short of the opposite pole of the spectrum. Of the six contributors to "The God That Failed," for example, five (Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, André Gide, and Louis Fischer) ended up on the moderate left, and one (Arthur Koestler) turned away from politics. For these writers, the break was with political extremism itself as much as with its Stalinist manifestation. Other ex-Communists—one thinks of Whittaker Chambers and a multitude of lesser lights—took refuge in belief systems almost as Manichaean and doctrinaire as the one they abandoned.
It's getting harder to know if the chaps in charge of things are grounded in seriousness or merely possess an odd sense of humor, for increasingly it seems they're intent on running the country on the basis of preppie-Ivy League farces and pranks. (As we all know George W. showed up at Yale, Dick Cheney studied smugness at the same institution, and Donald Rumsfeld did advanced undergraduate work in looking stern at Princeton. I think I'll send my daughter to a state university, thank you very much.) I realize W. in particular has been emboldened by unexpected popularity--who woulda thunk it, especially the White House--but his "aw-shucks" politics are getting truly bizarre, even for the already bizarre world of politics.
W. served up his latest knee-slapper at a White House breakfast for congressional leaders. He said--with that lovable, goofy innocence which only he and Mortimer Snerd can pull off--that "now is not the time to be playing politics, or using the debt ceiling as an excuse for some individual's cause" because "we're at war." He was referring to his recent request to extend the nation's credit-card limit by another $750 billion to $6.7 trillion. Of course this unfortunate necessity sprang from the administration's deliberate surplus-disappearance act which the media have deemed less deserving of critical coverage than a stain on some gold-digging intern's dress, but what the hell. We live in a brave and oblivious new world.
An astute reader has pointed out that the New York Times also printed the falsehood that Ken Lay stayed overnight at the Clinton White House, adding one of the country's leading newspapers to the list of those duped by the claim.
Alison Mitchell's February 1 article, which focuses on an ad criticizing North Carolina Senate candidate Elizabeth Dole for attending a fundraiser held by Enron CEO Ken Lay, concludes with the following paragraph:
Enron was a major donor to the Democratic National Committee in the Clinton years. Mr. Lay played golf with Mr. Clinton and stayed overnight in the White House.
The clear implication is that Lay stayed at the White House during the Clinton administration, when in fact his overnight stay came under George H.W. Bush.
Although the Washington Times and Chicago Tribune (among others) have been forced to issue highly publicized retractions of this claim in recent weeks, Mitchell said in a phone call today that this was the first she had heard of the issue and that she would look into it further. Hopefully a correction will be forthcoming soon.
BOISE, Idaho - Environmentalist have sued the Department of Energy (news - web sites), contending water resources in three states could be threatened if the agency follows through on a proposal to abandon radioactive waste that has been buried in storage tanks.
The tanks, buried at sites in Idaho, Washington and South Carolina, held millions of gallons of liquid acid used to reprocess spent fuel rods until the late 1990s. The rods were bathed in the liquid acid, which extracted uranium, plutonium and other radioactive substances but left behind a highly radioactive stew of other metals.
The waste fluid was stored in the underground tanks. Although much of the fluid has been pumped out and processed into a more solid form, a residual sludge remains, coating their bottoms and sides.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Boise, asks that the department not be allowed to abandon the tanks.
JERUSALEM (AP) -- In back-to-back attacks early Tuesday, a Palestinian man opened fire on a crowded Tel Aviv restaurant, a suicide bomber blew himself up on an Israeli bus and gunmen ambushed Israeli motorists in the West Bank. In all, five Israelis and two Palestinian assailants were killed.
Also Tuesday, a bomb went off in the yard of an Arab high school, lightly injuring seven students and a teacher. Israeli media said a previously unknown group, apparently consisting of Jewish extremists, claimed responsibility.
And in the Gaza Strip, 15 Palestinians were wounded, three of them seriously, when an explosion -- apparently caused by a bomb that went off prematurely -- rocked a building under construction in a residential area of Gaza City.
Last weekend I was at a political event in Malibu where a woman named Paradise asked a member of Congress to do what he could to protect the dolphins and whales that are becoming casualties to U.S. Navy sonar radar tests. I have a strong feeling that Paradise is going to have to add “Save the Humans” to the list of grievances. Today we have learned what many expected for so long; there is a shadow government of really important people that the federal government has tapped to be the sole survivors in case something very bad (think nuclear) hits the U.S. capital.
Are you starting to get a very strong impression that we are living in a two-tiered society, one for the executive level that knows when to cash in its shares of Enron stock or enter the Cheney bunkers and the other for us poor souls holding useless stock and standing outside the bunkers? The insiders, those high-ranking officials who are part of the underground government “would try to contain disruptions of the nation’s food and water supplies, transportation links, energy and telecommunications networks, public health and civil order. Later it would begin to reconstitute the government” (Washington Post, 3/1). In case there is a run on survivor space, the Post “agreed to a White House request not to name any of those deployed or identify the two principal locations of the shadow government.” This is definitely not another Blue Light special. How many people are we talking about with all that responsibility to run the country the day after disaster? Roughly the size of our U.S. Senate, although in this case the representation for the shadow government is from the executive branch only, not the Congress or the judiciary. (Sorry, Rep. Barbara Lee.)
The first time I went to Iraq in 1997, bringing medicine to children in hospitals, I wasn't prepared for the psychological impact of being on the front lines of a war. Madeleine Albright had clearly spelled out who the combatants were, the 500,000 children whose deaths were, " a difficult choice but worth the price." I hadn't read the Defense Intelligence Agency report which laid out the intent to unleash biological warfare on the civilian population by laying waste to Iraq's supply of clean drinking water. Yet there it was in front of me, bed after bed full of miniature, gasping soldiers whom I'm sure had no idea that they had even been drafted.
I returned to Baghdad a year later with even more medicine, desperate to make an impact, completely unaware that here, deep behind "enemy lines", I was in mortal danger. Then it happened without my even knowing-- the Iraqi people captured my heart and it was clear that my life would never be the same.
Maybe it was the woman feeding her hydrocephalic baby who was too weak to nurse, with a spoonful of milk taken ever so gently from a breast that would wither prematurely from disuse. Perhaps it was the hotel owner who informed me that we Americans had it all wrong, and when we had wrung the last drop of oil out of their country, we would have missed the true Iraq that he loved-- the rivers, the citrus and date groves, the music and poetry, the history, the magnificent architecture, the lovely people.
These last two weeks have seen some minor headlines over the Bush Administration's decision to renege on a Dubya campaign pledge and sign off on a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. For me, they've been bittersweet, bringing back memories of both empowering protests and lost opportunity. I was among the handful of folks involved in a late 1985 “encampment" (read: borrowed mobile home), sponsored by a church group out of Southern California, that was the first of what became a nearly decade-long wave of massive protests at the Nevada Test Site.
I came with a half dozen or so folks from Houston; there were others, from California, Utah, the Pacific Northwest, and points beyond, and within a year or so, the remote desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas was home to some of the largest civil disobediences in recent times. (I even spent some time early on in the jails in Beatty and Tonopah, before the numbers got too large for Nye County to cope.)
A dangerous amount of hubris seems to be settling over Washington like fallout from a bomb. Hubris, of course, is the combination of arrogance and unwarranted assumptions.
Recently, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said our "victory" in Afghanistan proves that we are the "most militarily powerful country in the history of the world." That’s hubris, not to mention ignorance of matters both military and historical.
We didn’t fight in Afghanistan. We bribed warlords to do the fighting. We just bombed light infantry troops who had no air defense. The outcome was no surprise and no proof of our military power. Sorry, Lieberman, but you’re going to have to wait until we attack somebody besides tiny and/or impoverished nations before you can properly evaluate our military prowess.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 4 (UPI) -- An Iraqi newspaper reported Monday that Baghdad might agree on the return of U.N. inspectors of weapons of mass-destruction if their return is coupled with a limited timetable for lifting the decade-old embargo on Iraq.
The report by the mass circulation Babel newspaper, run by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, came as Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri prepared to travel to New York for talks Thursday with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Babel said Iraq's main reason for opposing the return of the international weapons inspectors was "the Americans want them to stay forever, implying the unjust siege would continue indefinitely."
"Had the U.S. administration and its tail, Britain, been serious and truthful in their claims, they would have set up a timetable for the inspectors' program that should be followed by a lifting of the siege," the paper said.
It contended that the United States was determined to attack Iraq regardless of the fate of the inspection team's mission because it needed the country's oil reserves.
The paper concluded by urging the U.S. administration to deal with Baghdad in a civilized way that ensures the interests of both parties, saying, "Iraq is bound to have the largest strategic oil reserves in the coming phase."
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
Another day, another funeral ... Israeli police at the grave of fellow officer Moshe Dayan, who was killed by a sniper near the Jewish settlement of Qedar, on the West Bank, at the weekend. Photo: AFP
It is the only Middle East offer on the table, but the United States is still stepping warily, writes Gay Alcorn from Washington.
The United States responded warily at first to Saudi Arabia's Middle East peace plan, saying that it was not new and lacked specifics. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, called it a "minor development".
Then, as the only glimmer of hope in the latest bloodbath, Crown Prince Abdullah's "vision" - an offer to Israel for normalised relations with Arab nations in exchange for withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights - was welcomed more enthusiastically at the White House.
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has not been forthcoming about progress in the war on terrorism or about a "secret government" operating since Sept. 11, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Sunday.
As a result, lawmakers are finding it difficult to carry out their constitutional duties of approving money for the war and providing oversight of the executive branch, he said.
"None of us knew about the secret government," Daschle said on "Fox News Sunday," referring to the cadre of senior bureaucrats sent on a rotating basis to two undisclosed locations to ensure continuity of government if a terrorist strike hits Washington.
That, he said, is a "profound illustration of the chasm that exists sometimes with information. . . . It's an illustration of the need for a better communications process."
THE loss of American life during the largest US ground offensive in Afghanistan raised the stakes in the political battle at home over the direction of the War on Terror.
The rising death toll has increased pressure on the Bush Administration to explain its war goals as US special forces prepare to go into action in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Yemen and the Philippines and Congress takes up the President’s request for an increase in defence spending.
The emerging clash between the Bush Administration and Congress follows criticism of the President’s lack of consultation with legislators by Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader and a potential presidential candidate.
Mr Daschle put the cat among the pigeons last week when he suggested that the first phase of the war was not yet over because US forces had failed to kill or capture the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden or the Taleban’s Mullah Muhammad Omar.
WASHINGTON –– The Pentagon and contractors exaggerated the success of the nation's first missile defense test in 1997, ignoring a flawed sensor that had trouble distinguishing a warhead from a decoy, congressional investigators said Monday.
The Pentagon called the findings outdated.
Contractors TRW and Boeing, who jointly built the system that was tested, played down the problems as did a Massachusetts Institute of Technology review team, said investigators from the General Accounting Office.
But Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who released the findings by Congress' investigative agency, said, "If we can't tell the warhead apart from a decoy, what good is it?"
The latest disagreement surfaced as the costs of an anti-missile system, strongly favored by President Bush, continues to grow. Designing, testing and building a land- and sea-based missile defense system would cost between $23 billion and $64 billion by 2015, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated this year.
The arrival in Georgia of a small team of US military experts and the announcement that 200 troops may be sent there to help in the war on terrorism has focused attention on the country's Pankisi Gorge, bordering on Chechnya.
Apart from Georgia and the United States, the country that has shown greatest interest in the move is Russia, which has long accused Georgia of failing to act against Chechen rebels who it says have been sheltering in the gorge.
Initial reaction from Moscow was negative, but President Vladimir Putin later said the main thing was that action was finally being taken against both the Chechen rebels and the al-Qaeda fighters who are suspected of having joined them.
GAZA, March 4 (UPI) -- The death count in Palestinian-Israeli violence spiraled Monday as a gunman in Tel Aviv's center opened fire with an M16 soon after Israeli F-16 warplanes struck Palestinian Authority security offices next to Arafat's West Bank and Gaza headquarters.
The Palestinian gunman killed three Israelis and wounded 25 in a Tel Aviv restaurant district, police said.
The attacker was killed.
Palestinian medical sources said Israeli soldiers killed 22 Palestinians Monday during an intensive Israeli army air and ground operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The shooting followed a day of fighting that included an Israeli F-16 attack on PA security offices, bloody raids on Palestinian refugee camps, an assassination attempt and Israeli targeting of a Red Crescent ambulance.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration received information last October outlining a plot to smuggle a stolen Russian nuclear weapon into the United States, most likely New York City, two administration officials said Sunday.
The intelligence was viewed as suspect from the outset and later was deemed "not to be credible," as one official said, when a polygraph test determined the informant was "bogus."
Nevertheless, it was the source of an alert to government agencies charged with trying to prevent such a scenario, because there are "some things you can't afford to be wrong about," one official said.
WASHINGTON: Thirty US military personnel have been killed in the US-led campaign in Afghanistan, nine of them from hostile fire and the remainder in air crashes and other accidents, according to US defense officials.
The deaths of seven US military personnel reported by US defense officials in fighting Monday near the eastern Afghan city of Gardez was the highest toll to hostile fire on a single day since the campaign began October 7.
Six soldiers were killed in the crash of an MH-47 special forces helicopter, and a seventh was last several hours earlier when another MH-47 special forces helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade while it was on the ground.
On March 2, a soldier was killed along with three Afghan fighters in hostile action at the start of the offensive near Gardez.
On January 4, a US Army special forces sergeant was killed near Khost when a team he was leading came under hostile fire.
March 5 — U.S.-led forces resumed their ground assault on Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan’s eastern mountains on Tuesday, coming within 100 yards of opposition caves and bunkers, an Afghan commander said. Seven U.S. troops have been killed and at least 40 others wounded in the operation — the worst U.S. casualties to enemy fire in Afghanistan yet. The commander of the Afghan campaign said that the war had entered its most dangerous phase so far and that more casualties were likely.
THE Pentagon admitted last night that al-Qaeda fighters had inflicted heavy losses on American forces in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, killing at least eight US soldiers and wounding about 40 more as two transport helicopters came under fire.
The casualties, the heaviest since America’s ill-fated mission in Somalia nearly a decade ago, were suffered during the most intense ground combat of the five-month conflict.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, warned the American public that the battle around Shahi-Kot, known as Operation Anaconda, was unlikely to be al-Qaeda’s “last stand” and tough combat lay ahead.
Monday, March 04, 2002
RAMALLAH, West Bank –– Israel stepped up retaliation Monday for Palestinian shootings and bombings, launching attacks that killed 16 Palestinians including the wife and three children of an Islamic militant leader and a doctor whose ambulance was hit during rescue efforts.
Israel's security Cabinet decided late Sunday to intensify military strikes after 22 Israelis were killed in four weekend attacks by Palestinian militants. Israeli troops raided two Palestinian refugee camps Monday, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said his country was at war.
Just after nightfall, an Israeli F-16 warplane dropped a bomb on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Bethlehem, Palestinian security officials said. There were no reports of casualties; the building had been evacuated for several days in expectation of an Israeli attack. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
In the deadliest single incident Monday, a pickup truck belonging to a leader of the militant group Hamas, Hussein Abu Kweik, was hit in the West Bank town of Ramallah by two shells fired from a nearby Israeli tank. A second car was hit by shrapnel.
Afghan commanders and local authorities have given grim accounts of a bungled launch of the United States-led offensive against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces south of Gardez.
The Americans blundered even in retreat, the Afghans said.
US military commanders are reluctant to release details of the attack - the largest offensive of the war by the coalition, which includes Australian SAS troops.
According to the Afghan sources, the deaths and injuries among the coalition and Afghan forces occurred when they were ambushed before the battle was due to begin outside the village of Shahikot at dawn on Saturday, local time.
The al-Qaeda forces launched a mortar and machine gun barrage that killed a US soldier and wounded dozens of Afghan and US troops.
Two Army helicopters were hit by enemy fire in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday, raising to nine the number of Americans killed since a major offensive began Friday. On Monday, seven soldiers reportedly were killed when one helicopter was shot down and a gunbattle ensued. The other helicopter was on the ground when it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing one soldier on board.
(Filed: 04/03/2002)
A PALESTINIAN doctor was killed when an Israeli tank opened fire on an ambulance in the northern West Bank refugee camp of Jenin.
In a separate incident, six Palestinians were killed when Israeli tanks fired shells at the Al-Amari refugee camp in Ramallah from an army base in a Jewish settlement nearby.
The wife and three children of an official of the Islamic organisation Hamas were killed when shells hit their car. A four-year-old girl and one other person were killed in a second car.
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Opinion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip now has the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Yasser Arafat, at the peak of their popularity.
Palestinian journalists report that the fact that almost all the attacks on Israeli targets are being carried out by the Fatah's Tanzim militias, through the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, has greatly improved the prestige of the PA in Palestinian eyes. This new-found prestige stands out against a backdrop on which most of the attacks till recently were perpetrated by opposition groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while the PA's security forces were arresting and jailing those who planned and executed them.
Following one of the bloodiest weekends of the 17-month-long Palestinian intifada, the Israeli government has decided to step up military efforts to settle the conflict. That threatens an even more intense escalation of the violence
A number of allied troops were killed today when an American helicopter was shot down over the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, a US official said.
The Chinook helicopter was taking part in a new US offensive to bomb hideouts of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters and block their escape routes, Pentagon sources said.
The Pentagon refused to confirm or deny that the helicopter had been lost, and there was no immediate confirmation of how many personnel had been killed or injured. Sky News said that at least six soldiers had died on the craft, which is capable of carrying some 40 people.
This was the first aircraft to be shot down in the war in Afghanistan, launched in October in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11
The federal judge who ordered the Bush administration to turn over some records related to Vice President Cheney's energy task force wondered "what in the world" the Energy Department was doing, acting at such a "glacial pace" in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
"The government can offer no legal or practical excuse for its excessive delay," Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court in Washington wrote in an order made public on Wednesday.
But while Kessler expressed amazement at the Energy Department's response to information requests under FOIA, the 36-year-old cornerstone law for government transparency, the reluctance to provide information has become routine throughout the administration, liberal and conservative public interest groups say. They say it is a gathering trend, fed by, but not rooted in, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
CONCORD, N.H. (Reuters) - U.S. Senator John Kerry, in New Hampshire to support Democratic candidates for Congress, on Saturday accused Republicans of hiding behind a "false cloak of patriotism" as they attacked Democrats for questioning White House plans to expand the war on terrorism.
The Massachusetts liberal was speaking at a party fund- raiser in New Hampshire, whose first-in-the-nation presidential primary will play a key role in choosing the Democrat who will challenge President Bush (news - web sites) in 2004.
While Kerry has not declared himself a candidate for the White House, press aides hint that he is using trips to New Hampshire and other states to gauge support for a run.
"He wants to know that if he decides to do that, he can do it in a serious way knowing that resources are there," said David Wade, Kerry's director of communications.