WASHINGTON -- A federal judge chastised the Bush administration for seeking a "stunning" expansion of executive power in a ruling that allows a lawsuit seeking information about the administration's energy policy to proceed.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan also accused the Bush administration of making purposefully misleading arguments in defending Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force against two lawsuits.
The Sierra Club environmental organization and Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, are seeking records about how the Cheney task force was influenced by industry executives and lobbyists in formulating national energy policy.
Sullivan criticized the Bush administration's position that applying the Federal Advisory Committee Act to the Cheney task force encroaches on the president's right to receive confidential advice necessary to carry out his duties.
"The implications of the bright-line rule advocated by the government are stunning," Sullivan said.
The judge said the government's position signifies that "any action by Congress or the judiciary that intrudes on the president's ability to recommend legislation to Congress or get advice from Cabinet members in any way would necessarily violate the Constitution.
"Such a ruling would eviscerate the understanding of checks and balances between the three branches of government on which our constitutional order depends," said the judge, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton. The administration's arguments "fly in the face of precedent."
The judge said the proper approach is to examine whether disclosure would prevent the executive branch from carrying out any constitutionally assigned function.
The judge's opinion details his legal reasoning for an oral decision he made in May that rejected the Bush administration's motion to dismiss the cases.
Sullivan said Justice Department lawyers defending the Cheney task force had mischaracterized a minority opinion in a U.S. Supreme Court case as if it were controlling legal authority that should result in dismissal of the lawsuits.
Sierra Club and Judicial Watch must present on July 19 their request for documents and depositions of administration officials before a ruling on Aug. 2.
Saturday, July 13, 2002
Spain has reinforced its military presence on the Chafarinas Islands off the coast of Morocco amid growing tensions over another island.
Spain's Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy said additional soldiers were deployed after a Moroccan patrol boat was spotted near the Chafarinas, three islands which lie east of the Spanish enclave of Melilla and have been under Madrid's control since 1847.
Morocco had earlier rejected Spanish demands to withdraw a group of soldiers from the disputed islet of Perejil - which Morocco calls Leila - which lies to the north-west of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.
The troops landed on the islet - the size of a football pitch - and raised two flags there.
Rabat said the soldiers were setting up an observation post on the islet to help combat terrorism and illegal immigration, and had "every right" to be there.
'Worrying'
This is the latest in a series of spats between the two countries in recent months, which have raised tensions and led to Morocco withdrawing its ambassador from Madrid.
A federal judge chastised the Bush administration for seeking "aggrandizement of executive power" in a ruling that allows a lawsuit seeking information about the administration's energy policy to proceed.
The two groups that filed the suit, the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch and the environmental group Sierra Club, must present on July 19 their request for documents and depositions of administration officials before a ruling on Aug. 2.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said it is a "distinct possibility" that the group will seek to depose Vice President Cheney, who led the administration's energy task force, as well as Cabinet members and staff. But a Sierra Club lawyer, David Bookbinder, said depositions are not likely "in the first round."
A Justice Department lawyer said the administration is "considering all of our options" and will "come forward with our own counterproposal" on July 26.
The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, was issued Thursday night and follows an oral ruling Sullivan made on May 23. The opinion called "troubling" the administration's argument that the two groups should not be allowed to sue for documents and information about the task force under the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Sullivan wrote that by the Bush administration's logic, "Any action by Congress or the judiciary that intrudes on the president's ability to recommend legislation to Congress or get advice from Cabinet members in any way would necessarily violate the Constitution."
"Such a ruling would eviscerate the understanding of checks and balances between the three branches of government on which our constitutional order depends," the opinion said. "The fact that the government may want to advocate a new theory of executive authority and the separation of powers is its prerogative. It cannot, however, cloak what is tantamount to an aggrandizement of executive power with the legitimacy of precedent where none exists."
Friday, July 12, 2002
SINCE the United States military campaign began in Afghanistan, the unmanned spy plane has gone from a bit player to a starring role in Pentagon planning. Rather than the handful of "autonomous vehicles," or A.V.'s, that snooped on Al Qaeda hideouts, commanders are envisioning wars involving vast robotic fleets on the ground, in the air and on the seas — swarms of drones that will not just find their foes, but fight them, too.
But such forces would need an entirely new kind of network in which to function, a wireless Internet in the sky that would let thousands of drones communicate quickly while zooming around a battle zone at speeds of up to 300 miles an hour. Such a network would have to be able to deal instantaneously with the unpredictable conditions of war and cope with big losses.
Designing this network is a monumental task. Consider how poor much cellphone coverage is in some areas. Now imagine how much worse it would be with no base towers to direct signals, and with hostile forces trying to jam calls and blow up phones.
An association of nearly 300 scientists and engineers spread across 45 project teams and coordinated by the Office of Naval Research is about a year and a half into a five-year, $11 million effort to determine what it will take to build such a system.
The project is called Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents, or Minuteman (not to be confused with the nuclear missiles). While the program is not about to produce anything like the droid army from the Star Wars movies anytime soon, it has already delivered some important theoretical breakthroughs.
AMMAN (AFP) - A former UN assistant secretary general and humanitarian coordinator for Iraq warned against an eventual US attack on that country, saying it would further destabilise the Middle East.
"Promoting peace while fighting terrorism would provide the double pronged instrument needed to show the kind of leadership the world expects from the United States," Hans Von Sponeck said in an article in the Jordan Times.
"Part of such an initiative should be to seek a non-military solution to the Iraq conflict," he said Friday.
Von Sponeck, who resigned his post in 2000 to protest UN sanctions on Iraq, stressed that "intelligence analysis has not detected convincingly any links between Iraq and international terrorism.
"Nor has it confirmed an existing capacity of Iraq to produce weapons of mass destruction," he said.
"What is know without doubt on the other hand is that the Iraqi people continue to suffer immensely, primarily because of economic sanctions," imposed by the UN following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, he added.
Von Sponeck urged the United States to heed the calls of Arab leaders who have warned against any strike on Iraq at a time when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues to plague the Middle East.
"The need for peace and stability in a region which has suffered so severely offers no other solution," he said, pleading for a US "foreign policy shift for the region".
He urged the international community and the US to support the resumption of Iraqi-UN negotiations as a key step to a non-military solution.
Governor George W. Bush and the other owners of the Texas Rangers are deadbeats. Rich deadbeats, but deadbeats nevertheless.
In early January, Bush and his baseball partners hit a home run, selling the Texas Rangers to Thomas Hicks for $250 million. Bush himself hit a grand slam. For his 1.8 percent share of the club -- which cost him $605,000 -- the Governor gets paid between $10 and $14 million. That is a return of up to twenty-three times his original investment -- in less than nine years. But even though Bush and his cohorts are making nearly three times what they paid for the club in 1989, they haven't paid $7.5 million they owe the city of Arlington.
The Rangers owners owe the money
because of a court judgment against the
Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority (ASFDA), which was set up by the city to condemn land for, and administer, the Ballpark at Arlington project. In May of 1996, a Tarrant County jury found the ASFDA had not paid a fair price for thirteen acres of land it condemned, and awarded the sellers (the Mathes family) more than six times what the city had agreed to pay. A year after the jury's decision, the city decided not to appeal and paid the plaintiffs $7.5 million. That's where the Rangers' obligation arises.
In 1990 the Rangers agreed to pay any costs that exceeded $135 million on the Ballpark project. Under those terms, the city's position is that the $7.5-million judgment should be paid by Bush and the Rangers. Two days after Hicks purchased the Rangers, Arlington city attorney Jay Doegey told this reporter, "We have a
contract with them that says they will pay anything over $135 million. The costs in the condemnation case are over that amount." But Doegey has not demanded payment; it appears that Arlington city
officials don't want to irritate the owners of the Rangers.
Tom Schieffer, who was a general partner and president of the Rangers, said, "It's not our debt. That's the position we have taken. And that's consistent with what the master agreement says." But now that Schieffer and Bush are cashing in their chips, wouldn't making good on their $7.5-million debt be a nice gesture to the city? "I'm sure we will work out something," said Schieffer.
"I think when it is all said and done, I will have made more money than I ever dreamed I would make," Bush told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. And he's making millions because the Ballpark at Arlington is a gigantic, taxpayer-supported, cash machine. Last year, Financial World magazine named the Ballpark the most profitable venue in baseball. Hicks didn't buy the Rangers because he wants Juan González's autograph. He bought them because he can make a lot of money at the stadium that George W. Bush takes credit for building.
In 1993, while walking through the stadium, Bush told the Houston Chronicle, "When all those people in Austin say, 'He ain't never done anything,' well, this is it." But Bush would have never gotten the
stadium deal off the ground if the city of Arlington had not agreed to use its power of eminent domain to seize the property that belonged to the Mathes family. And evidence presented in the Mathes lawsuit suggests that the Rangers' owners --
remember that Bush was the managing general partner -- were conspiring to use the city's condemnation powers to obtain the thirteen-acre tract a full six months before the ASFDA was even created.
Despite a tough-sounding speech, George W. Bush is suddenly vulnerable on the defining domestic issue of his presidency. The cascading corporate scandals are more than a temporary blow to investor confidence. They are a serious threat to American capitalism -- and Republican doctrine.
Bush is at risk of becoming a Cinderella president. Terrorist attacks elevated him from an untested pretender with no mandate into a popular commander in chief. Now a domestic economic crisis, eerily reminiscent of Bush's own dubious financial history, could turn him back into a bumpkin.
On issue after issue, Bush's grand strategist, Karl Rove, has sought to blur the differences between Bush and his political opponents -- to "take Democratic issues off the table," as Rove likes to say. Tuesday's New York speech tried to get Bush back ahead of the curve and position him as tough on corporate crime.
But this act will be much tougher to pull off. Real reform demands not just tougher penalties; it will require an ideological reversal of two decades of Republican theory and practice.
For, as even Bush tacitly admits, the remedy for the self-dealing, the accounting frauds, and the other conflicts of interest that are now placing the entire economy in jeopardy is government regulation -- something the Republicans have vilified since Ronald Reagan.
The entire system of self-regulation has collapsed. Free markets, it turns out, don't prevent brokers from peddling junk to unsuspecting investors while they enrich themselves or auditors from conspiring with executives to cook company books.
Market discipline doesn't stop insiders from selling shares they are promoting to the public even as the company is rotting from within or senior company officials from looting the pensions of workers or CEOs from scheming to pump up stock so they can cash in options. Only regulation can change these perverse incentives.
On June 20, Bush Administration officials quietly informed a New York judge of their intention to commence legal actions likely to be far-reaching in their constitutional, political, and individual rights implications pertaining to current lawsuits and government secrecy related to the attacks on September 11, 2001. The moves were revealed in a letter obtained from a confidential source, with two other sources corroborating its existence, adding additional information.
U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Robert D. McCallum, Jr. and United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York James B. Comey advised U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, also of the Southern District of New York, that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will intervene to control access to all evidence and documents related to all private litigation before Hellerstein’s court regarding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- citing “grave national security concerns” as their motivation.
The McCallum and Comey correspondence advised Judge Hellerstein of their intention to “seek [court] entry of a global discovery order [effectively controlling evidence obtained from any country],” requiring that 1) “Transportation Security Administration (TSA) be served with [have prior access to] all requests for party and non-party discovery,” 2) “defendants and non-parties submit all proposed discovery responses that may contain ‘sensitive security information’ (SSI) to the TSA prior to releasing such material to plaintiffs,” and 3) “TSA have the necessary opportunity to review such material and to withhold ‘sensitive security information’ ” [from victim-family attorneys].
One victim family plaintiff -- speaking off the record -- told Scoop Media that family members and their attorneys have not yet sought internal memos, electronic mail, facsimiles, and documents which would shed public light upon what had to be extraordinary legal maneuverings. However, added high stakes related to the publicly undisclosed contents of the controversial August 6, 2001 Presidential intelligence briefing prior to the attacks, and a secret July, 2001 FBI memo -- said to be "50 times more significant than the August 6 briefing," by a Congressional investigator (New York Times, 5-18-2002), will only serve to heighten the importance of the June 20 letter.
Aides describing the President's outrage over CEO behavior say Bush feels "betrayed by his class." If so, one thing is certain: It's the first time he's had cause to feel this way.
Bush's muscular new piety on corporate ethics means the press has the hook it needs to reexamine his cozy Texas business history. And that means we may finally get beyond fawning accounts of Bush's first-president-with-an-MBA-management style to reminders that, among other remarkable facts, Bush is the first president to have been investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading, and that Bush seems to have received an unusual $12 million gift while governor of Texas that accounts for his fortune.
Now, before everyone starts screaming, "How dare you sully the name of our commander in chief with some dirty, low-down truth-telling," let's be clear. Bush is putting this issue in play of his own volition. Or, more precisely, because his pollsters tell him that not getting out front here is a certain risk, whereas the chance the press will broadcast damning facts from Bush's business past is less certain.
In any event, intimidating reporters into backing off negative stories about the boss is a war this White House knows how to fight. The day-one strategy, after Paul Krugman launched the first salvo in his New York Times column, was for Bush to say dismissively: "It's been fully vetted." This Krugman-to-reporters-to-Bush exchange made page A12 in the Times and A4 in the Washington Post.
A start, yes - but not nearly good enough!
While President Bush was delivering his long-awaited speech on corporate governance Tuesday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey L. Pitt was exactly where many Bush aides wanted him to be: on a week-long beach vacation.
"We were not surprised that the chairman was not included in administration plans for public appearances," SEC spokeswoman Christi Harlan said. "The commission is an independent agency."
White House officials, though calling it a coincidence, acknowledged they had no desire for Pitt's presence.
The arms-length treatment of Pitt underscores a dilemma for Bush and his radioactive SEC chairman. Many Democrats and even a few Republicans have called for Pitt's resignation because of his alleged conflicts of interest and ties to the accounting industry. There is no sign that Bush is even thinking of dropping Pitt. But whether Pitt stays or goes, he is a potential liability.
Dismissing Pitt would violate the Bush code of loyalty and would be viewed as validating Bush's critics, from Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) to Bush's Republican nemesis, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). "Dropping Harvey Pitt right now would be an acknowledgment of wrongdoing where there's been no wrongdoing," said GOP lobbyist Ed Gillespie, a former Bush campaign aide.
Forcing Pitt out would also open the White House to charges of interfering in the SEC's investigation of Halliburton Co.'s activities when Vice President Cheney was its chief executive. Underscoring that danger, Halliburton shareholders yesterday filed a fraud lawsuit in Dallas against the company and Cheney. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the suit is "without merit." That prompted Larry Klayman, whose group, Judicial Watch, represents the shareholders, to accuse the White House of seeking to influence the SEC's investigation.
Will George W. Bush turn out to be 2002's version of Ivan Boesky? The thought has obviously occurred to Bush's critics, who are asking all sorts of questions about a decade-old stock transaction that has the whiff of insider trading. And it has obviously occurred to Bush's staff in the White House, who are furiously, and a bit desperately, trying to show their boss did nothing illegal.
At issue is Bush's conduct during 1990, when he served on the board of the Harken Energy Corporation. Bush sold about $850,000 in Harken stock just two months before the company, under orders from the SEC, announced that it was restating its balance sheet, revealing a $23 million loss. Bush did disclose the sale to the SEC, as the law requires. However, he did so some eight months later, well past the legal deadline. Selling shares in a company based on exclusive knowledge about the company's finances is the very definition of insider trading--the crime that sent Boesky and a host of other Wall Street crooks to jail in the 1980s. The SEC subsequently investigated Bush for his actions. And while the SEC didn't prosecute, the fact that Bush had pretty good connections at the time (his father was president) certainly raises the question of whether special treatment, not a lack of evidence, is what saved George W. from punishment.
Last week, when a Paul Krugman column in The New York Times prompted reporters to ask questions about the transaction, Bush tried to dismiss the whole notion--perhaps hoping that, as in the presidential campaign, stories about his character would die on their own. The Harken sale had "been fully vetted," Bush scolded the press. When the media, encouraged by Democrats, persisted with the line of questioning anyway, Bush's advisers started groping for new explanations. Communications Director Dan Bartlett deployed the everyone-does-it defense: "These types of late filings are not out of the ordinary," he said. "It would be like doing a 60 [mph] in a 55." Press Secretary Ari Fleischer blamed Harken's lawyers for the negligent paperwork, thereby contradicting Bush's own prior explanation that the SEC itself was to blame. As always, the administration called the charges politically motivated.
President George W. Bush's speech on corporate ethics has failed to impress American editorial writers.
The biggest disappointment was Mr Bush's failure to insist on a forceful reform of the accounting industry
Major liberal-leaning newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, consider the presidential recommendations as too little, too late.
The business-friendly Wall Street Journal dismisses the address as political grandstanding.
And the West Coast press - while covering the speech in their news pages - have not thought it worthy of an editorial.
The New York Times says Mr Bush's speech was "disappointingly devoid of tough proposals to remedy underlying problems" in accounting and corporate governance.
"The biggest disappointment was Mr. Bush's failure to insist on a forceful reform of the accounting industry," according to the paper.
It urges Mr Bush to "transcend partisanship" and urge Republican party leaders in the House of Representatives to adopt the tough bill on accounting reform being discussed in the Senate.
JERUSALEM (AFP) - Presure mounted on the Israeli government to loosen its grip on the West Bank after senior army officers warned their new commander the occupied cities are a powder keg.
Israel reoccupied seven of the West Bank's eight major urban centres three weeks ago, with only the isolated desert town of Jericho not retaken, although it remains under tight Israeli blockade.
Israeli public television said top army officers had pressed General Moshe Yahalon Wednesday for a partial withdrawal, saying weeks of curfews had left the occupied towns on the "verge of a volcanic eruption."
The hawkish new army boss, himself a former head of the central command which includes the West Bank, took office Tuesday, succeeding General Shaul Mofaz.
Mofaz said earlier this month that the reoccupation would continue for "a long period ... at least several months," echoing comments by hardline Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The Israeli daily Haaretz quoted a senior defence official as saying that Israel is planning to loosen its grip where the security threat is deemed to have dropped sufficiently, saying the army's presence is necessary but not sustainable in the long-term.
The current crisis in American capitalism isn't just about the specific details — about tricky accounting, stock options, loans to executives, and so on. It's about the way the game has been rigged on behalf of insiders.
And the Bush administration is full of such insiders. That's why President Bush cannot get away with merely rhetorical opposition to executive wrongdoers. To give the most extreme example (so far), how can we take his moralizing seriously when Thomas White — whose division of Enron generated $500 million in phony profits, and who sold $12 million in stock just before the company collapsed — is still secretary of the Army?
Yet everything Mr. Bush has said and done lately shows that he doesn't get it. Asked about the Aloha Petroleum deal at his former company Harken Energy — in which big profits were recorded on a sale that was paid for by the company itself, a transaction that obviously had no meaning except as a way to inflate reported earnings — he responded, "There was an honest difference of opinion. . . . sometimes things aren't exactly black-and-white when it comes to accounting procedures."
And he still opposes both reforms that would reduce the incentives for corporate scams, such as requiring companies to count executive stock options against profits, and reforms that would make it harder to carry out such scams, such as not allowing accountants to take consulting fees from the same firms they audit.
The closest thing to a substantive proposal in Mr. Bush's tough-talking, nearly content-free speech on Tuesday was his call for extra punishment for executives convicted of fraud. But that's an empty threat. In reality, top executives rarely get charged with crimes; not a single indictment has yet been brought in the Enron affair, and even "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, a serial book-cooker, faces only a civil suit. And they almost never get convicted. Accounting issues are technical enough to confuse many juries; expensive lawyers make the most of that confusion; and if all else fails, big-name executives have friends in high places who protect them.
When are dead women and children not recognized as dead women and children? When they are killed by US bombs in Afghanistan!
In an all too familiar lethal pattern, US warplanes recently attacked four small villages in the Oruzgan province of Afghanistan. When initial reports surfaced from surviving family members about scores of civilian casualties, the first response by US military authorities in Afghanistan was denial of culpability. A US officer at the Bagram air base reluctantly admitted that while “there were civilian casualties during the operation..., military forces take extraordinary measures to protect against civilian casualties.” Only after incontrovertible evidence about the killings surfaced in the world media did Lt. General Dan McNeil, US commander in Afghanistan, announce on July 6, 2002 that 48 civilians had been killed.
Contradicting the claims by US military authorities about the concern for civilian casualties, one eyewitness was quoted in an Agence France Presse report of July 7th that “after bombing the area, US forces...refused to let the people help the victims or take them away for treatment.” A tribal leader in the area expressed anger and dismay at the US operation by asserting: “We fought in the same bunkers with the Americans against the Taliban, but now we are the enemy.”
Throughout the US war in Afghanistan, the targeting of civilians, whether intentional or not, has led to death and destruction on a massive scale. The managers of the war, however, have refused to acknowledge responsibility except in a few showcase incidents, such as the friendly fire that killed Canadian soldiers.
One of the most egregious examples of callous disregard for Afghan civilians happened last October when a village north of Kandahar was strafed by AC-130 gunships, resulting in the death of at least 93 civilians. The blunt response by one Pentagon official was that “the people there are dead because we wanted them dead.” Trying to avoid any further probing of the incident, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said: “I cannot deal with that particular village.”
In fact, the Pentagon has not kept any statistics about civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Or, rather, there has been no concerted effort to provide the media with the awful death toll of innocents in Afghanistan. Fortunately, Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire has generated substantive information about such deaths and has made them available on his website. By the end of 2001, the US military had killed more than all of those murdered on September 11th.
In his long career as a revisionist historian, which only ended with his death in 1968, Harry Elmer Barnes found himself constantly opposed to what he called Court Historians. He coined this term to describe those historians who could always be counted on to put the deeds of reigning politicians in the best possible light, especially in foreign affairs. As a skeptic on World Wars One and Two, as well as the Cold War, Barnes had his work cut out for him.
For Barnes, the Cold War came down to the perfection of the system described in George Orwell’s 1984. Thus, "wars – hot, cold, or phony, but mainly cold and phony – are being used to an increasing extent as the basic instrument of domestic political strategy in order to consolidate the power of the class or party in office.... The real enemy is not nations or forces outside the borders, but parties and classes within the country that are antagonistic to the party and class which hold power." Further: "According to Orwell, there is no desire to defeat the foreign enemy quickly and decisively, for to do so would undermine the propaganda campaign of fear, curtail or end the armament boom, threaten a depression, invite social discontent, and jeopardize the existing social, economic, and political order" (An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, III (1965), p. 1325).
Barnes believed it was the duty of non-Court Historians to spotlight the transnational, ruling class collusion made possible by the Cold War.
The late Murray N. Rothbard broadened Barnes’s concept into that of the Court Intellectual. As Rothbard pointed out more than once in his writings, intellectuals’ income is an uncertain thing on the free market. As a result, many intellectuals will seek a safe berth and a steady living as servants of state power and apologists for state policies and interests.
As Rothbard put it, the Cold War era was marked "by the reappearance on a large scale of the ‘Court Intellectual’ – the Intellectual who spins the apologia for the new dispensation in return for wealth, power, and prestige at the hands of the State and its allied ‘Establishment’" ("Harry Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War," in Arthur Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader (1968), p. 314).
This explains Rothbard’s interest in the Reece Committee hearings in the early 1950s. In this rather misunderstood episode, Congressman Carroll Reece (R., Tenn.), assisted by staff member René Wormser and consultant George de Huszar, looked into the grant-making policies of the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. In the end, the effort ran aground on accusations of intellectual "McCarthyism" and the disruptive antics of Congressman Wayne Hays (D., Ohio). Nonetheless, the Committee shed light on the big foundations’ promotion of empiricism, centralized "team research," big universities over small colleges, moral relativism, internationalism, and social engineering. (See Tax-Exempt Foundations: Hearings, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1954).)
War is hell. War is fog. The Pentagon seems committed to proving these axioms in Afghanistan. On July 1, the U.S. military attacked a compound in the village of Kakrak, At least 54 people were killed and 120 wounded. They were civilians; many were women and children attending a wedding celebration. Twenty-five members of the bridegroom's family were destroyed.
The event was horrible, the latest in a string of U.S. military mishaps that have caused the deaths of Afghan civilians—the total estimate of those killed ranging from hundreds to several thousand. It is probably sadly true that major military action is not possible without what's euphemistically known as "collateral damage"—especially when that action consists of air attacks and bombing raids. But throughout the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has been loath to acknowledge errors and to deal with the supposedly unavoidable and supposedly unintentional consequences of its operations. The Defense Department refused to concede that in December it had wrongly hit a convoy of tribal elders on their way to the inauguration of interim president Hamid Karzai. In January, U.S. Special Forces raided two compounds and killed over a dozen troops loyal to Karzai's government and captured and held almost two dozen more (some of whom claimed they were abused). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld eventually conceded the U.S. troops had killed and grabbed the wrong people, but he refused to characterize the U.S. actions as a mistake. No one apparently was disciplined.
Sari Nusseibeh seems an odd focus for Israeli anger. Dr. Nusseibeh, the Palestinian Authority's representative in Jerusalem, is the leading voice of moderation within mainstream Palestinian politics. In a breathtakingly wrongheaded move, Israel shut down his office at Al-Quds University on Tuesday. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should limit the damage by quickly reversing the decision.
Last month President Bush exhorted Palestinians to turn to "new and different" Palestinian leaders, "not compromised by terror." Dr. Nusseibeh, a scholarly man descended from an elite Jerusalem family, would occupy a prominent place on any list of such leaders. He has repeatedly taken constructive positions, sometimes in opposition to Yasir Arafat.
Last year Dr. Nusseibeh courageously urged fellow Palestinians to drop their insistence on a right of return by refugees to their former homes in Israel. An agreement by Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist as two neighboring states, he argued, means accepting that the future state of Palestine, and not Israel, will be the homeland for all Palestinians. This daring proposal, which resulted in death threats to Dr. Nusseibeh, would have removed the biggest obstacle to a negotiated peace agreement. Regrettably, it was rejected by the Palestinian Authority's leadership.
Well, that's a relief. Despite all the warnings and hysteria, the entire country got all the way through the Fourth of July without anything getting blown up.
Actually, my dogs—the biggest of whom has spent the better part of the week cowering under the office desk—are quick to remind me that for days we've had endless explosions right outside our window. But I don't mean fireworks. Those are our explosions. I mean their explosions—you know, the evil-doers. Them.
Our nation was awash this holiday with warnings and paranoia that terrorists would strike, apparently on the premise that because this holiday is a big deal to us, someone would come clear from some cave in Afghanistan—or more likely, the family mansion in Saudi Arabia—to show just how much they despise our beacon of freedom and democracy blah blah blah. Or perhaps people just remember that movie a few years ago where the aliens came from 26,000 light years away to blow up the White House on July 4, and figured—"Hey, those guys were aliens. So are these guys. They probably think the same way."
But seriously. Rationality has left the house when places like the Clark County (Wash.) fairgrounds fence off the area where their big annual fireworks display happens and search everyone coming in. News flash: someone came from Saudi Arabia, intent on killing as many people in as highly-revered an American venue as possible, is gonna pick a day important to them—not us—and is not gonna make a beeline for poor Clark County. You might as well just search the parking lot for a limo with Saudi plates.
BE all you can be"? Ancient history. "An army of one"? Last year's news. The military's newest promotional campaign is not even televised; it is America's Army, a free computer game produced by the military and aimed at winning the hearts and minds of tech-minded teenagers.
The game is the brainchild of Lt. Col. Casey Wardynski, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point. Although Colonel Wardynski is not a gamer himself, his two sons are, and his oldest, 17-year-old Casey, is a big fan of the action game Delta Force. The colonel said the idea for the game came to him three years ago while he was researching ways to attract computer-adept recruits for an increasingly high-tech military.
Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat said Friday he had no immediate plans to step down from power, but at the same time said he
hadn't decided whether to run in January elections.
"It is not only up to me. It will be up to many people," Arafat said in an interview with The Associated Press and Bahrain television at his Ramallah compound where he has been penned up for months, guarded by Israeli tanks and soldiers.
Arafat vowed however that he wouldn't step down any time soon. "I have been elected by the people. I am not a coward. I'm not ready to betray the people who elected me," Arafat said.
He said reforms of the Palestinian Authority demanded by the United States were already underway and that he would welcome international participation and support in furthering the process.
When asked how he felt about the U.S. demand for reform, Arafat said he
understood that Bush had supported some of the reforms being made. He cited the changes in the Palestinian security forces, which have now been brought under the supervision of a new interior minister.
Arafat said he wanted the United States' support in the reforms, but refused to be more specific. He said a Palestinian delegation would meet with Israeli leaders on Saturday to discuss "many issues."
Upbeat about the renewed contact, Arafat said he believed further progress could be made if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "will give them the mandate."
UNITED NATIONS, July 10 — Under severe criticism from some of its closest allies for demanding immunity for American peacekeepers from the new International Criminal Court, the United States offered a compromise today that would safeguard its troops and officials from prosecution for one year.
The proposal offered the first tangible prospect for the resolution of a dispute that has generated unusually fierce and united international criticism of the Bush administration. Among the sharpest critics in today's debate were the two immediate neighbors of the United States, Canada and Mexico.
The new American proposal marked a considerable retreat from the letter and spirit of earlier American drafts, which brusquely demanded blanket immunity for United Nations peacekeepers.
The new document makes no mention of immunity. It proposes that the new court not investigate or prosecute officials or personnel of United Nations missions for a year, after which the Security Council would vote to renew the arrangement.
The British ambassador, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said the resolution was "a very fair basis for discussions," which will continue Thursday morning.
But several member nations reportedly continued to question the propriety of allowing the Security Council to tamper with the treaty that established the court, and it remained far from certain whether the United States would find the nine votes needed for passage in the 15-member Security Council.
The immediate issue was Washington's demand that peacekeeping forces in Bosnia be exempt from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, which came into existence on July 1. The court is held in disdain by American conservatives as an infringement on national sovereignty, and Washington refused to renew the United Nations mandate for the forces in Bosnia unless it included the exemption.
The demand, however, touched a nerve among Europeans and others who saw it as another attempt by the United States to set itself above the rest of the world. As passions grew, the Council approved two brief extensions of the Bosnia mission, which now expires Monday.
Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000 at least 350 civilians, most of them Israeli, have been killed in over 128 attacks by Palestinian armed groups and Palestinian individuals, Amnesty International documented in a report launched in Gaza.
The report "Without distinction: attacks on civilians by Palestinian armed groups" is the seventh major report on the human rights situation in the region published by the organization since the beginning of the intifada.
"Whatever the cause for which people are fighting, there can never be a justification for direct attacks on civilians," said Amnesty International.
The victims of these attacks ranged from children as young as five months to elderly people. The oldest was Chanah Rogan, aged 90. She was killed in the bombing of a hotel at the celebration of Passover on 27 March 2002 in Netanya. Most victims were killed by suicide bomb attacks within Israel claiming 184 victims of the 350 civilians killed.
Palestinian armed groups offer a variety of reasons for targeting Israeli civilians from retaliating against Israeli killing of Palestinian civilians to fighting an occupying power. Other justifications claim that Israeli settlers are not civilians or that striking at civilians is the only way to make an impact on a powerful adversary.
Under international law there is no justification for attacking civilians. Targeting civilians is contrary to fundamental principles of humanity enshrined in international law which should apply in all circumstances at all times. Amnesty International unreservedly condemns attacks on civilians, whatever reason the perpetrators give to their action.
"Civilians should never be the focus of attacks, not in the name of security and not in the name of liberty. We call on the leadership of all Palestinian armed groups to cease attacking civilians, immediately and unconditionally," Amnesty International stressed.
The organization urges the Palestinian Authority to arrest and bring to justice those who order, plan or carry out attacks on civilians. The Palestinian Authority and Israel have a duty to take measures to prevent attacks on civilians. Such measures must always be in accordance with international human rights standards.
Although I am sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and hardly a friend of Israel, I must admit to being shocked at the analogy – made by many in the anti-Israel camp – between the Jewish state and the Thousand Year Reich. I remember seeing photos of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the US that had swastikas scrawled all over the picket signs and slogans equating Sharon with Hitler. It seemed, at the time, a little over-the-top, and even offensive: after all, there is something distinctly … icky about likening the victims of the Holocaust to the perpetrators. Now that the Israeli government is not only seizing Palestinian land but building public sector "Jews only" housing on it, however, the analogy between Zionism and Nazism is obscenely undeniable.
The Nazi-Zionist equation is still overblown, of course, since Ariel Sharon has a looong way to go before the number of his victims even distantly approaches the six-million mark. But an important principle has been established, that of exclusivism as an official Israeli policy. Just as the Nazis declared that Europe would one day be "Judenrein" (without Jews), so the leaders of the Jewish state are now announcing their intent to create a Palestinian-free nation. Unless they are stopped, the radical Zionists will be forced to utilize the same methods as Hitler's stormtrooopers: massacre, deportation, and genocide.
In America, the ceaseless refrain of Israel's amen corner boils down to one essential argument: that Israel is a "democracy," a member in good standing of the West, and even (incredibly) a "free market" economy – compared to the "closed" economies of the Arab world. It was my old friend, the pseudonymous "Emmanuel Goldstein," formerly our British correspondent and now writing his own excellent blog, Airstrip One, who first raised the interesting question as to whether Israeli political culture is, in reality, a Western phenomenon. Goldstein asserts that the waves of immigration to Israel from Arab countries, coupled with the growing Russian influence, consitutute a radically de-Westernizing influence:
"So what are the cultural implications of this? Well it is orientalising Israel. Whereas the predominantly Ashkenasi Zionist movement was heavily influenced by the ideas sweeping around Western Europe because of the years spent in or near Western Europe – what is the likely outcome of a longer immersion in Arab culture for the Sephardic Jews?"
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
The president of the United States, we are told, is "mad as hell" about the apparent collapse in corporate ethics.
Further down the pecking order, politicians are falling over themselves to seem stern and forbidding.
The current wave of economic puritanism may, cynics suggest, have much to do with Congressional elections, due in November, and a series of opinion polls showing public disapproval of white-collar crime.
But with links between politicians and big business famously close - particularly in the governing Republican party - ever more of those scandals are likely to spill over into the political arena.
As one campaigning website puts it, "Bush and his economic team promising to crack down on corporate America is like letting the fox guard the henhouse."
BBC News Online presents a basic guide to the fox's den.
WASHINGTON — It must be frustrating for the George Bushes.
They go through all the motions of proclaiming that they're self-made Texas bidnessmen.
They become president by acting more red-blooded than blue-blooded.
They whup small, backward countries that brutalize their own people and get dizzying approval ratings.
And then, after everything they've done, after all the laurels and plaudits, that darn economy gets its knickers in a twist.
And they are hounded by the same old question they have designed their lives to avoid: Can a Bush — born on third base but thinking he hit a triple — ever really understand the problems of the guys in the bleachers?
Despite the efforts of W. and Karl Rove to use Poppy's one-term presidency as a reverse playbook, to instead aim for the populist two-term touch of Ronald Reagan, the junior Bush now finds himself combating the same accusations of elitism that cost his father re-election.
By November 1991, with the demise of the blue-collar bard Lee Atwater and the decline of the economy, the rich white guys running the first Bush administration were openly admitting they were in a fog of privilege.
"Bush's idea of solving a domestic problem is to fire the maid and yell at the butler," chortled the Democratic senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.
The Democrats are going to town again on Bush obliviousness. America is repulsed by corporate gluttony and accounting racketeering. And the younger Bush must prove that his connection to the common man goes deeper than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
The 180-degree turn from "Kenny Boy" to "Book Kenny" is going to be tricky.
A hardline Israeli general, Moshe Ya'alon, has taken up the challenge of extending military operations from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip yesterday when he was named the country's 17th chief-of-staff.
A sign of Israel's preparedness for a long conflict was underlined by the army's decision to erect electronic surveillance fences around Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The fencing is in addition to the barrier being erected around the West Bank in an effort to provide a buffer between the Palestinian territory and Israel.
The burden of protecting Israelis from Palestinian attacks has now fallen on the shoulders of Lieutenant General Ya'alon,
who appears to have no illusions about how tough his job will be.
During a visit to Washington last month, General Ya'alon told Bush Administration officials that it was inevitable the Israeli Army would have to launch a major offensive against the Gaza Strip, in the event of terrorist attacks being launched from there. Israel has launched two such operations so far this year - Operation Defensive Shield and Operation Determined Path, which is still under way and involves the extended re-occupation of seven Palestinian towns.
The Gaza Strip has avoided a major assault by ground troops, despite the territory allegedly being home to prominent leaders of militant Islamic groups claimed to have carried out a campaign of suicide bombings.
AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan has said it would not allow U.S. troops to be stationed on its territory to mount any attack on Iraq, its eastern neighbor and main trading partner.
"Jordan rejects the principle of interfering in the internal affairs of its brothers under any justification," Information Minister Mohammad al-Adwan told Jordan-based foreign correspondents on Monday night.
"We refuse to be a launching pad or arena for any act against our brotherly state Iraq or to use our soil and airspace to attain this objective," Adwan said.
He was responding to foreign newspaper reports that Washington already has troops in Jordanian bases as part of secret military plans to attack Baghdad.
President Bush ( news - web sites) on Monday opened wide the door to possible military action against Iraq, saying the United States would use all tools available to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein ( news - web sites).
Jordan's Foreign Minister Marwan al-Muasher called in Iraqi ambassador Sabah Yassin on Sunday to assure him the kingdom respected Iraq's sovereignty.
Leading Jordanian opposition figures have voiced concerns that Washington would pressure Jordan to use its land bases in a wide scale military offensive against Iraq.
Adwan said the Jordanian monarch had warned Bush and other world leaders in recent visits of the consequences for regional stability of an attack on Iraq.
Jordan, a major U.S. ally in the region, has been rewarded by additional economic and military assistance for its unequivocal support for the U.S. "war against terrorism" in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
WASHINGTON — One by one, barriers erected in the post-Watergate era to prevent abuses and excesses by U.S. intelligence agencies are yielding to pressure to protect the nation from another terrorist attack.
Spying on Americans, toppling adversary regimes, even eliminating certain foreign leaders — all actions long regarded as forbidden for the CIA and other agencies — are back as policy options in the wake of Sept. 11. The shift has taken place with little public debate or formal government action.
Many of the restrictions being eased today were imposed in the wake of the so-called Church Committee investigations of the 1970s. Named after Idaho Sen. Frank Church, a special Senate committee and a House counterpart investigated disclosures in 1975 and 1976 about CIA and NSA bugging of anti-war activists, assassination plots against Cuba's Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, routine surveillance of civilian telegraph cables, and the agencies' failure to keep Congress informed. The limits set after the committee's investigation include an executive order barring assassination as a tool of foreign policy.
Now the Bush administration is using classified intelligence findings and other below-the-radar actions to empower the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other agencies. (An intelligence finding is essentially a presidential authorization to carry out a secret operation.) To sidestep legal protections that might benefit terror suspects, the Pentagon and Justice Department have developed rules of detention and trial separate from the U.S. court system.
Sultan herself had lost 19 members of her extended family in a U.S. air attack on a village near the Afghan city of Kandahar last October. And from what she could gather from news reports about the July 1 attack on the Deh Rawud village in the central Uruzgan province, the events seemed chillingly familiar.
"It was almost like playing out what happened to my family," says the 24-year-old Afghan-American. "At first, my deepest fear was that something had happened to my family. And then after a while I found I couldn't help thinking about what these people must be going through."
It was the sort of empathy that comes from having been there and done that.
Nineteen years after her family fled the fighting in her native Afghanistan for the United States, Sultan returned to the region with a U.S. documentary crew last December to find out how some of her family members who had stayed on in Kandahar were doing.
She wasn't exactly expecting an exuberant family reunion, but she had no idea it would be quite so grim. As the camera rolled inside a modest dwelling in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, where her family had taken refuge from the bombing, Sultan learned that many of them had been killed by U.S. AC-130 gunships in the village of Chowkar-Karez on October 22.
Pouring over the photographs of the victims — a smiling couple at their wedding ceremony, an impish nephew, a cousin's new bride — as her family recounted what happened that frightening night, Sultan was forced to confront the human face of war.
Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the Californian audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host of KPFA Radio's Flashpoint current affairs programme, was reading some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel's supporters in America. Each one left the people in the church – Muslims, Jews, Christians – in a state of shock. "You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!"
Bernstein's sin was to have covered the story of Israel's invasion of Jenin in April and to have interviewed journalists who investigated the killings that took place there – including Phil Reeves and Justin Huggler of The Independent – for his Flashpoint programme. Bernstein's grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi of international prominence but neither his family history nor his origins spared him. "Read this and weep, you mother-fucker self-hating Jew boy!!!" another e-mail told Bernstein. "God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids' throats." Yet another: "I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel." Lubin is also Jewish, the executive director of the Middle East Children's Alliance, a one-time committed Zionist but now one of Israel's fiercest critics. Her e-mails are even worse.
Indeed, you have to come to America to realise just how brave this small but vocal Jewish community is. Bernstein is the first to acknowledge that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative Christian fundamentalists have in effect censored all free discussion of Israel and the Middle East out of the public domain in the US. "Everyone else is terrified," Bernstein says. "The only ones who begin to open their mouths are the Jews in this country. You know, as a kid, I sent money to plant trees in Israel. But now we are horrified by a government representing a country that we grew up loving and cherishing. Israel's defenders have a special vengeance for Jews who don't fall in line behind Sharon's scorched-earth policy because they give the lie to the charge that Israel's critics are simply anti-Semite."
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A company of British Marines returned from the rugged ravines of eastern Afghanistan Tuesday, concluding Britain's last scheduled combat operation in Afghanistan.
Operation Buzzard ended Tuesday at Bagram air base, north of the capital Kabul, as a troop of British commandos, loaded down with rucksacks, spades, bedrolls and weapons, clambered down from two hulking Chinook helicopters. The British were winding up a four-month mission that brought little tangible result but ended with a welcome absence of casualties.
``I'm definitely glad it's over,'' said Marine Ross Milvan, 23. ``When we arrived, we were expecting a lot of contact with the enemy. That didn't happen.''
Milvan was not sure why it was so difficult to locate al Qaeda and Taliban soldiers, but he knew what he would do when he gets home.
``I'm going to get drunk,'' he said.
British soldiers have already begun pulling out of Afghanistan, with 317 leaving for home last Thursday.
A small combat force for contingency operations will remain under the wing of the U.S. 18th Airborne Corps until the third week of July, leaving only a logistics regiment to help dismantle the colony of tents that has been known as Camp Gibraltar.
In what has been Britain's largest
Edward P. Morgan, a mid-20th century news analyst and commentator, had strong thoughts on intellectual freedom.
"A book," he wrote, "is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your hand."
His words are among the ideas that greet visitors to Greenville's Sheppard Memorial Library, begging them to consider the liberty that resides there.
Yet as Americans prepare to celebrate their freedoms on the most poignant Independence Day in memory, FBI investigators are quietly visiting libraries and checking reading records of people they suspect are in league with terrorists. They have been granted the permission to pry in this manner by the Patriot Act, signed into law by President Bush last October.
"People are scared and they think by giving up their rights, especially their right to privacy, they will be safe," said Judith Krug, the American Library Association's director for intellectual freedom. "But it wasn't the right to privacy that let terrorists into our nation."
That perspective may seem out of order on a July 4th when fireworks will carry ghost images of collapsing skyscrapers.
Yet in the 1950s, when Morgan and others offered words of dissent, wholesale fear of communism drove red-crazed attacks against intellectual freedom and individual rights. Twenty-five years later, communism collapsed, imploded by a basic human desire for liberty.
There is not much of a hue and cry this Independence Day against the practice of checking people's reading records, or other indiscretions quietly under way courtesy of Washington's ironically named bill. But there should be.
(YellowTimes.org) – The mounting campaign aimed at linking Hizbullah with Al-Qaeda is folly of the highest order, and on so many levels that Stephen Hawking would need a calculator to keep track of them.
In a nutshell, the U.S.-led but Israeli-inspired propaganda effort, crafted with the enthusiastic participation of mainstream Western "journalists," attempts to paint the exceedingly unlikely in the colors of the indisputably certain - all the while making more probable the very outcome that all parties claim to fear.
The facts are these:
Hizbullah is a fundamentalist Shiite organization, while Al-Qaeda is a radical Sunni one. These two strains of Islam mix about as peacefully as Jehovah's Witnesses and hard-line Catholics.
During the 1990s, Al-Qaeda helped the (Sunni) Taliban massacre and otherwise mistreat Shiites in Afghanistan and participated in similar atrocities in Pakistan.
Hizbullah "operatives" were brought in to help the Lebanese Army defeat an offshoot of Al-Qaeda in a pitched battle that took place near the northern port city of Tripoli in December 1999-January 2000.
Iran, Hizbullah's most important backer, very nearly invaded Afghanistan because of the aforementioned abuse of Shiites.
Al-Qaeda has conducted terrorist acts against American targets since the mid-1990s, including the awful suicide hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001; Hizbullah has not targeted an American since 1992 at the latest and never on American soil. It also publicly condemned the crimes of 9-11.
A YEAR AGO it would have been unthinkable for the American government to hold indefinitely U.S. citizens whom it was unprepared to charge with crimes and not permit those detainees access to lawyers. Today, however, Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi are both sitting in military brigs, still unable to communicate with attorneys or defend themselves in court. Neither character, to be sure, evokes much sympathy: Mr. Hamdi was caught fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, while Mr. Padilla is suspected of involvement in a nascent plot to set off a dirty bomb. But the government's position that these offenses need not be substantiated, or even alleged, in court before either man can be indefinitely imprisoned is enormously dangerous. That danger exists even if it arises from the cases of men who may need to be locked up.
Messrs Hamdi and Padilla are imprisoned on nothing more than the government's claim that they are enemy combatants. According to the government, the president alone has the power during wartime to designate people, including citizens, as enemy fighters subject to detention until the end of hostilities. Courts, in the government's view, have no power to review these designations; at most they have the power only to rubber-stamp the reasonableness of the president's judgments, using only information that the government itself supplies. Moreover, the determination of when a war begins and ends is the president's to make, too. To make matters more Kafkaesque, those he designates as enemy combatants cannot meet with lawyers, so even if they had a legal forum in which to challenge his judgment they would have no practical ability to tell their side of the story.
The result is that they wait -- and wait -- in prison while those attempting to represent them fight the government in court without their input. Any day now, for example, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals may rule on whether Mr. Hamdi can meet with a federal public defender. And an attorney for Mr. Padilla is currently fighting with government lawyers over which court should hear his claims and who may assert them on his behalf. If they lose, what will prevent detentions of more Americans without charge, hearing or representation?
President George Bush's speech intensified the plight of the peace supporters in Israel, and in the entire Middle East. Since 1977, they were accustomed to American presidents playing the role of "fair mediators": pressuring Israel to restrain violence and to negotiate with its neighbors. Jimmy Carter mediated between Begin and Saadat, Ronald Reagan brought Israel and the PLO to a first ceasefire pact in 1981, and stopped Sharon before occupying Beirut in 1982. George Bush Senior coerced Shamir to the Madrid Peace Conference after the Gulf War, and Bill Clinton was best man to Rabin and Arafat. Then, and all of a sudden, comes a president that doesn't mediate and unilaterally supports Sharon. This is not only confusing to the Israeli "peace camp," but places the Palestinian leadership in an awkward position, and the rest of the Arab states as well. In March the Arab League accepted a brave peace plan, initiated by Saudi Arabia, and now the President Bush dismissed it off hand.
George Bush did not present a peace plan, but instead, in the subtext, we can understand who are his allies in his war plans. During the last half a year Bush stands at Sharon's side and spurs him onwards on his aggressive policies. The obvious question is: Why did Bush quit playing the "fair mediator" between Israel and its neighbors? The explanation I suggest here is very simple: Bush is planning to launch an attack on Iraq, and in recent months he has come to the conclusion that, for the purpose of this war Sharon is a more reliable and worthwhile ally than the moderate Arab states. Bush doesn't care too much about peace between Israel and Palestine, nor is he all that bothered by the millions of Palestinians living under curfew in intolerable and inhuman conditions, and neither is he really concerned about the Israeli casualties caused by the despaired suicide bombers. "Let them bleed" was the Bush administration's motto early on in its reign, until it became politically incorrect on 9/11. And yet, as long as the Bush administration continues in its plans to attack Iraq, we, Palestinians and Israelis, will continue to bleed.
"So what is our mistake? We are also human beings. Treat us like human beings," says Gulalae, a 37 year-old Afghan mother living in the dust, hunger and fear of the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Pakistan. She calls Osama bin Laden an “outsider” and says that because of him, “Afghanistan is made into a hell for others.” (1)
Grim does not begin to describe the conditions Gulalae and her family endure. In one three-month period, in just one district of Shamshatoo, bacteria-related dehydration killed a child nearly every day. The misery in this refugee city is like a grain of sand on the beach of suffering that is Afghanistan. But Americans know little of it.
If you watch mainstream press accounts of “America’s New War” you’d never know that as of Christmas, 2001, civilian deaths from U.S. bombing in Afghanistan surpassed 3,700—more than were killed in the attacks of September 11. The toll from unexploded cluster bombs, land mines, destroyed water and sewer systems and depleted uranium shells will no doubt reach into the hundreds of thousands. Add the additional innocents marked for retaliation as the international cycle of violence continues, and our war to end terrorism seems calculated to do just the opposite.
So why are we fighting? Of all the ways we could have responded to the attacks in New York and Washington, why war?
Numerous psychological, cultural and historical arguments can be mustered to answer that question, but the following does as well as any and better than most: “War is a racket. It always has been…A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.” (2)
Words of a radical peacenik? Only if a Marine Corps Major General qualifies as such. In his twilight years General Smedley Butler unburdened his soul as did other career militarists, such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, who admitted that fathering the nuclear Navy was a mistake and Robert McNamara, who almost found the words to apologize for overseeing the Viet Nam war. Unlike Rickover and McNamara, Butler named names and exposed for whom the system works.
“I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” Butler acknowledged that he’d spent most of his 33 years in the Marines as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
Radioactive Shells Spiked with Plutonium
Plutonium is a fuel that is toxic beyond human experience. It is demonstrably carcinogenic to animals in microgram quantities [one millionth of a gram]. The lung cancer risk is unknown to orders of magnitude. Present plutonium standards are certainly irrelevant."
-- Dr. Donald P. Geesaman, health physicist, formerly of Lawrence Livermore Lab
The Bush White House fooled most of the world's press with its unverified claims of intercepting a "dirty bomb" attack against the U.S. On its front page, USA Today barked: "US: 'Dirty Bomb' Plot Foiled." Newspapers everywhere explained breathlessly what radioactive materials could do if dispersed in populated areas. As Alex Cockburn reports in The Nation, when the story faced some mild scrutiny, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz backed away from the propaganda saying, "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk."
Taking Action
In the first move by someone in Congress to investigate the military's use of DU weapons, U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) has introduced the Depleted Uranium Munitions Suspension and Study Act of 2001, H.R. 3155. McKinney's bill would:
* Suspend the U.S. military's use and approval for foreign sale or export of DU munitions, pending a certification from the Sec. of Health and Human Services that DU munitions will not pose a long-term threat to the health of U.S. or NATO military personnel or jeopardize the health of civilian populations in the area of use;
* Suspend the foreign sale and export of plutonium-contaminated DU munitions;
* Initiate a GAO investigation of plutonium contamination of DU, and
* Initiate a study of the health effects of DU on current or former U.S. military personnel who may have been exposed and medical personnel who treated such affected personnel.
In an appeal for co-sponsors McKinney wrote, " ... the U.S. should take care not to leave a toxic legacy for either people in a foreign land, nor to our own military personnel. Approximately 300 tons of DU munitions were used in the Gulf War, much of which still sits on the ground in Iraq. Since we really do not know the comprehensive consequences of DU contamination, I urge you to support this legislation, and protect our soldiers and innocent citizens from any unnecessary health threats." Info: Eric Lausten at
-- JML
Meanwhile, the real-time, worldwide use by the United States of radiological dirty bombs has moved well beyond the plotting and shooting stage, and has begun to produce dire consequences. Toxic, radioactive uranium-238 -- so-called depleted uranium -- used in munitions, missiles and tank armor may be responsible for deadly health consequences among U.S. and allied troops and populations in bombed areas, and has probably caused permanent radioactive contamination of large parts of Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and perhaps Afghanistan. Depleted uranium "penetrators" as they are called burn on impact and up to 70 percent of the DU is released (aerosolized) as toxic and radioactive dust that can be inhaled and ingested and later trapped in the lungs or kidneys.
In January 2001, the world press finally discovered depleted uranium (DU) weapons(1), the super hard munitions made with waste U-238 -- an alpha emitter with a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years. Nine years of radiation-induced death, disease, and birth abnormalities in Iraq did not move major news organizations to investigate, but the deaths from leukemia of 15 Western Europeans -- after their participation in military missions in Bosnia and Kosovo -- prompted the major media, the European Parliament and 11 European governments to launch investigations into the health and environmental consequences of what Dr. Rosalie Bertell calls "shooting radioactive waste at your enemy."
UNITED NATIONS: The UN Security Council agreed to let UN member states express their views on Wednesday about the US threat to end the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia if it fails to get immunity for American peacekeepers from the new war crimes tribunal. With nearly 120 countries already on record opposing the US stand, the US government is expected to come under sustained criticism, even from close allies.
Ambassador Paul Heinbecker of Canada, which strongly supports the International Criminal Court, sent a letter to the council last week requesting an open meeting before it votes. Britain's UN Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, the current council president, said Monday he had scheduled debate on Wednesday.
Last Wednesday, the United States gave the Bosnian mission a reprieve until July 15 after two proposals to get an exemption for American peacekeepers from the new war crimes tribunal were informally rejected by the vast majority of the 15-member council.
US Ambassador John Negroponte conceded it has been "an uphill fight" to get council support for US immunity. Greenstock said there will be discussions at the United Nations and in key capitals before and after the debate to try to resolve the contentious dispute that has left the United States at odds with its allies and much of the world.
The International Criminal Court will prosecute those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes on or after July 1, but it will step in only when countries are unwilling or unable to dispense justice.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz has said his country was ready to defend itself, as US President George W Bush stepped up expectations of a military attack to topple Saddam Hussein.
"President Bush and his government did not bring the Iraqi leadership to power, therefore they cannot remove the Iraqi leadership," he said after a visit to South Africa.
"We are very well prepared to defend the country against any kind of aggression."
He spoke after Mr Bush said that he would use "all tools" at his disposal to oust Saddam Hussein.
"It's a stated policy of this government to have a regime change. And it hasn't changed," he told a news conference on Monday.
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S COMMITMENT
TO CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
Washington, D.C. – On the day President Bush will address Wall Street, American Family Voices will launch a television advertisement saying Bush and his economic team promising to crackdown on corporate America is like letting the fox guard the henhouse.
The ad, which will begin running tomorrow in Washington, D.C., and New York, NY, notes that President Bush played a key role at Harken Energy, which used Enron style accounting to hide losses, while Bush was selling out at a profit. Vice President Cheney, the advertisement notes, was CEO of Halliburton, which used more Enron-style accounting and is currently being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And Harvey Pitt was the accounting industry’s top lawyer before taking the helm at the SEC.
Text of the American Family Voices television ad: (Video/audio copies of the ad itself are available by contacting the Glover Park Group at 202/337-0808.)
"Remember the saying about foxes guarding the henhouse…well guess what’s happening in Washington.
President Bush says he’s getting tough on corporate fraud. But look at the record:
Bush played a key role at Harken Energy – they used Enron style accounting to hide losses…
Bush sold out early.
The Bush team?
Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton …more Enron-style accounting.
And Harvey Pitt – the accounting industry’s top lawyer.
Bush thinks tough talk can hide the record…that’s sly – like a fox."
His name was Michael. He had round cheeks, large brown eyes and dimples that, to strangers, concealed his chronic unhappiness. He was 9 in 1999 when I taught him in fourth grade.
Michael came to me in October, after his mother had been expelled from the homeless shelter where they were living and an aunt had agreed to take him in temporarily. Unable to write even his name, Michael had academic difficulties and a suspicion of anyone who tried to work with him that spoke of a history of shuttling between schools and shelters and short-term living arrangements.
I worked all fall to be someone Michael trusted, but it was slow going. Then in January Michael's aunt made the agonizing decision to send him back to his mother, who was living in a hotel room in a nearby town and who had told Michael repeatedly that she didn't want him.
I was sad to see him go and feared what this change would do to a boy already unable to trust or love adults for fear of losing them. But eventually my memory of him faded amid the noise and bustle of my classroom.
Faded, that is, until April, when Michael's new school called to tell us that Michael had just registered there, and that they would need his records. What this meant was that between January and April, Michael had been missing, perhaps sitting in his mother's freezing hotel room, where he often would be left for hours, or perhaps wandering through the city by himself.
Now Michael would start at a new school, stay for two short months and then disappear into the streets of summer. Nobody knew where he would resurface in September, if he resurfaced at all.
US soldiers stormed the homes of Afghan villagers after they were bombed in a US air-raid last weekend and barred people from treating their wounded relatives, outraged Afghans said here.
"First they bombed the womenfolk, killing them like animals. Then they stormed into the houses and tied the hands of men and women," Mohammad Anwar told AFP at Kakrakai village in central Uruzgan province's Dehrawad district.
"It was cruelty. After bombing the area, the US forces rushed to that house, cordoned it off and refused to let the people help the victims or take them away for treatment," he said.
Anwar was pointing to the home of his brother Sharif, who was hosting a huge pre-wedding party for his son on the night of June 30 when US airships strafed Karkrakai and surrounding villages.
Sharif, who risked the wrath of the Taliban to keep Afghan President Hamid Karzai alive during his daring mission into then-Taliban-ruled central Afghanistan last October, was killed.
So were Anwar's wife, Sharif's wife and four children. The groom-to-be son survived because he was confined to a separate house as local wedding tradition decrees.
The US-led coalition commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Dan McNeil, announced Saturday that 48 people, according to Afghan officials, had been killed.
The torrent of praise from President Bush, Republican congressional leaders and political pundits for retiring Rep. J.C. Watts, a GOP member from Oklahoma, sharply contrasted with the deafening silence from black Democrats and civil rights leaders. This should hardly surprise.
After his election from a predominantly white district in 1994, he threw down the gauntlet to black Democrats. He defiantly declared he would not join the Congressional Black Caucus.
In one of the keynote addresses at the Republican convention in 1996, Watts also challenged the old-line civil rights leadership. He punched all the conservative hot buttons, championing family values and self-help and hammering welfare and public housing. Watts goaded black Democrats and civil rights leaders a year later when he branded them "race-hustling poverty pimps." It was a low in mudslinging, and the reaction was swift and harsh.
A somewhat chagrined Watts and his Republican mentors rushed to claim that he was not talking about any one leader or point of view. However, anyone remotely familiar with the political battle between liberals and conservatives knew what and whom he meant and what they represented--liberalism and blacks.
Arthur Levitt, Bill Clinton's choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, crusaded for better policing of corporate accounting — though he was often stymied by the power of lobbyists. George W. Bush replaced him with Harvey Pitt, who promised a "kinder and gentler" S.E.C. Even after Enron, the Bush administration steadfastly opposed any significant accounting reforms. For example, it rejected calls from the likes of Warren Buffett to require deduction of the cost of executive stock options from reported profits.
But Mr. Bush and Mr. Pitt say they are outraged about WorldCom.
Representative Michael Oxley, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, played a key role in passing a 1995 law (over Mr. Clinton's veto) that, by blocking investor lawsuits, may have opened the door for a wave of corporate crime. More recently, when Merrill Lynch admitted having pushed stocks that its analysts privately considered worthless, Mr. Oxley was furious — not because the company had misled investors, but because it had agreed to pay a fine, possibly setting a precedent. But he also says he is outraged about WorldCom.
Might this sudden outbreak of moral clarity have something to do with polls showing mounting public dismay over crooked corporations?
AP) The NAACP says several states have made little progress in fixing elections problems that left thousands of minority voters disenfranchised in the 2000 presidential election.
In an election report released Monday, six states received failing grades, though some officials immediately disputed the findings. The states that received an F were Delaware, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Vermont. Florida, where the results of the 2000 presidential race remained in dispute for more than a month, got a D.
"We now are on the verge of midterm elections," Mfume said, and there is "across this country a continuing refrain, 'When will real election reform take place and when will local government, state government, federal government find a coordinated way to protect" people's right to vote.
On Tuesday, the NAACP is expected to turn its attention to hotels by releasing a report card assessing whether hotel chains have improved business opportunities for minorities.
The lodging report card measures diversity in employment, promotions, vendors, advertising, philanthropy and equity ownership and franchise opportunities.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The American Civil Liberties Union has urged state Attorney General Bill Lockyer to prevent FBI spying on political dissidents after recent revelations the agency had done so in the past.
In an open letter to Lockyer the ACLU's three state chapters urged Lockyer to enforce the state's right to privacy, adopted by voters in 1972.
The ACLU cited a recent story by the San Francisco Chronicle which detailed that the FBI had spied on student activists at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced guidelines May 30 allowing FBI agents to conduct surveillance in places that are open to the public, without evidence that those being watched have committed or are planning to commit crimes.
"California has drawn a line with respect to privacy, political and associational rights that government must not cross even with the best of intentions," the ACLU letter said. "Yet, some of the intelligence practices now openly encouraged by the new federal guidelines cross that long-standing state line."
The guidelines repealed rules imposed by President Gerald Ford that allowed FBI surveillance only during criminal investigations and after evidence of wrongdoing. President Bush claimed that those restrictions gave terrorists and advantage and pledged that the new FBI powers would not stifle speech or dissent.
Ronald Reagan was America's first Teflon president (nothing stuck to him), but George W. Bush is just plain slippery.
When you look at his record up to now, it's hard to imagine Bush ran in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative." If he's compassionate, I'm a Tibetan monk.
He also called himself "a uniter, not a divider." Frankly, I had never heard of the word "uniter" until Bush used it, but I assume he meant "one who unites." Well, America did unite behind Bush after Sept. 11, but he can thank 20 Middle Eastern terrorists for that. Aside from his so-called war on terrorism, he's done nothing but create division in our country.
When he accepted the Republican nomination in Philadelphia, Bush promised "a new beginning." Throughout his presidential campaign, he ran as a Washington outsider, someone who would freshen up the stale air in our nation's capital.
He's done exactly the opposite.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Jailing crooked executives and strengthening laws against corporate wrongdoing are needed to restore Americans' confidence in big business, lawmakers said Sunday as they surveyed the wreckage of companies such as Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc.
The drive for change was taking center stage this week: a House committee hearing Monday on WorldCom and President Bush ( news - web sites)'s speech Tuesday to Wall Street about his ideas for tougher penalties on corporate officials.
"Some of these corporate criminals need to go to jail," said Rep. Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the massive bankruptcies of energy trading giant Enron and the telecommunications company Global Crossing.
"As soon as one of these major corporate leaders is indicted, confidence will generally come back," Tauzin, R-La., told NBC's "Meet the Press."
Current and former WorldCom executives were summoned to appear Monday before the House Financial Services Committee. The big telecommunications company is battling to avoid bankruptcy since the recent disclosure that it disguised nearly $4 billion in hidden expenses.
WASHINGTON -- President Bush on Monday stood by the besieged chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission while rejecting suggestions that his own past business conduct may rob him of credibility.
During a news conference, Bush found himself repeatedly on the defensive on the eve of his long-awaited speech on Wall Street, in which he is expected to demand tougher penalties against dishonest executives and give the SEC significantly more money to investigate illegal business practices.
SEC Chairman Harvey L. Pitt has come under fire for not taking tougher and more timely actions against corporate wrongdoers. But Bush said he has no intention of heeding calls for Pitt's ouster.
"Pitt's doing a fine job," the president said.
Much of the news conference focused on Bush's own record as a businessman. In recent days, new questions have arisen about his tardiness, by eight months, in reporting to the SEC his sale of nearly $850,000 worth of stock in a Texas-based energy firm 12 years ago. Just weeks after Bush sold the stock, its value plummeted.