Anthony Romero's first day on the job as the new executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union was Sept. 4, 2001. He was anxious to get started as he strode into the A.C.L.U. headquarters at the lower tip of Manhattan. From his 18th-floor office he had an amazing view of New York Harbor and, appropriately, the Statue of Liberty.
"I had spent part of the summer looking back at the history of the A.C.L.U.," he said. "And one of the things I looked at were the Palmer raids, which were right after the First World War."
A. Mitchell Palmer was an unsuccessful Senate candidate who was appointed attorney general by Woodrow Wilson in 1919. It was a tumultuous period, with the rise of revolutionary movements overseas and tremendous social and political upheaval in the U.S., including a series of bombings by suspected anarchists.
Palmer responded to the turmoil by leading a vicious and unprecedented campaign against alleged radicals and dissidents. Government agents in dozens of cities rounded up thousands of individuals, most of them immigrants. Many were brutalized and held without charge. Hundreds of eastern Europeans were deported without benefit of due process.
The Palmer raids (with a young J. Edgar Hoover as an important operative) would ultimately be discredited by history. They were illegal, unconstitutional and shameful. But at the time they had widespread support, so it took courage to speak out against them.
Among those with the requisite courage was Roger Baldwin, who in 1918 had been a founder of the National Civil Liberties Bureau. In 1920, in the heat of the controversy over the Palmer raids, the bureau became the American Civil Liberties Union.
Anthony Romero was immersed in that history when the awfulness of Sept. 11 occurred. And that history was on his mind when, amid the national sorrow and the fear that followed the terror attacks, President Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft, began elbowing the Constitution aside as they moved aggressively to expand the powers of the executive branch.
Mr. Romero was in a difficult position. He understood the depth of the sorrow and the fears. But he also understood, better than most, that both the strength and the greatness of the United States were rooted in the nation's commitment to freedom and the rule of law, and its remarkably successful system of governmental checks and balances.
And so the A.C.L.U. — sometimes in concert with other champions of civil liberties (not all of them on the political left, by any means) — has challenged a series of initiatives by the executive branch. It has filed lawsuits or otherwise objected to a variety of government policies, including the secret detention of people suspected of violating immigration laws; the use of material witness statutes as a form of preventive detention; and the refusal to allow American citizens arrested as "enemy combatants" to see their lawyers or challenge their detention before a civilian judge.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
It's a subject about which he has some expertise, and not surprisingly Al Gore yesterday blamed the latest problems in Florida's election system on President Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
During campaign appearances in Jacksonville and Palm Beach County, areas that figured in the 2000 election debacle, the former Democratic presidential candidate called last week's botched primary election "déjà vu all over again."
"I didn't expect there to be all the problems at the polling booths again," said Gore, who attended a rally and fundraiser for Rep. Corrine Brown. "The money the Congress tried to allocate was defeated by President Bush and there was a lack of attention and leadership at the state level by Governor Bush."
The governor's office responded by saying Florida's 67 counties received $32 million to fix their independent elections systems and only two, Miami-Dade and Broward, run by Democrats, had serious problems. "This sounds like a wannabe candidate who's desperate to be heard," Katie Muniz, Jeb Bush's spokeswoman, told the Associated Press.
During the Sept. 10 primary, hundreds of voters in the two largest counties said they were turned away because of equipment failures. Other tabulating problems and recounts led Janet Reno to wait a week before she conceded Tuesday to Bill McBride in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
"Even though the late-night comics have gotten ahold of it again, it isn't funny," Gore said earlier at a fundraising breakfast in West Palm Beach for Carol Roberts, a Palm Beach County commissioner and Gore supporter while serving on the county's canvassing board during the 2000 recount. She's running against Rep.Clay Shaw (R).
While Gore traveled in Florida, the Republican state government was asking for help from the Justice Department in averting a third straight election fiasco in the Nov. 5 general election. Secretary of State Jim Smith called on Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's staff to "take whatever steps necessary" to ensure a fair election.
Of all the grave and ugly developments on the fringes of settler society, none is more frightening than acts of Jewish terror, whose perpetrators attack Palestinian targets, primarily schools in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, without hindrance. One or more cells, comprised of Israelis living either in the territories or west of the Green Line, has for the past two years succeeded in making a laughingstock of the Shin Bet security service and the police, and assaulting Arabs. These attacks would be disturbing even if the targets were chosen at random. But the targets are chosen carefully - and, abominably, they are children. Even worse, these attacks target children while they are in school. So blindly evil is the fire of vengeance that burns in these Jews that they seek the lives of children where they can be found in the greatest quantity - while they are studying.
It is true that these attacks usually fail, but they should be dealt with as if they had succeeded - as if they had killed Palestinian children. In light of the impressive successes of the security services in foiling Palestinian terror attacks over the last two years, the failure of the Shin Bet's Jewish department demands a more convincing explanation than those that have so far been offered. It is admittedly difficult to penetrate a small, tightly knit organization of Jewish zealots, but this task should not be beyond the powers of those who have so successfully penetrated Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Tanzim - and what human agents cannot accomplish, electronics should be able to fill in the gaps.
The available resources are limited, but they are allocated on the basis of a strict order of priorities. Some new items have been added to the national priority list in recent years, such as international organized crime rings that are trying to set up branches in Israel. In the same way, Jewish terror should be elevated to the top of the intelligence priority list, and the best brains and the maximum resources should be assigned to this task.
If the Shin Bet needs administrative tools to foil Jewish terror and to arrest the suspects, the prime minister and the attorney general must supply such tools. Israel cannot permit itself to demonstrate governmental impotence in the face of the murder of innocents, children as well as adults; it must prevent the wanton criminals among its citizens from wreaking their will. The despicable murder of Israeli children does not justify the lawlessness subsumed under the rubric, among others, of "avenging the children."
The United Nations is likely to throw into disarray America's war plans for Iraq by introducing a timetable for weapons inspections that could give Saddam Hussein a breathing space of almost 12 months.
The extended timetable, which would allow the inspectors first to deploy in Iraq and then to begin and complete their complicated mission, could exhaust the patience of Washington, which envisages attacking the country much earlier, probably in February. Yesterday the Bush administration asked Congress to endorse the military option before the UN makes its move.
President Bush "reserves the right to act in the interests of the United States and its friends and allies", his spokesman said.
Such a disavowal of the United Nations by the United States would spell both war and diplomatic disaster for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who helped to persuade Washington to bring the crisis back under the UN's umbrella. Britain's global influence depends largely on its permanent seat at an effective and respected UN Security Council. The organisation will be shunted into irrelevance, diplomats fear, if President Bush unilaterally goes to war.
Even as envoys scurried in New York to craft a new resolution on Iraq, the Pentagon was privately briefing on plans to deploy 250,000 ground troops in the country to spearhead an assault aimed at toppling President Saddam and his regime.
If it achieved nothing else, the offer of the Iraqi government to accept without conditions the return of United Nations weapons inspectors has exposed the most essential truth of contemporary international politics: the Bush administration wants war. Its hysterical claims of “weapons of mass destruction” have never been anything else but a means of manufacturing a public justification for war. The Bush administration has responded angrily to the diplomatic note of the Iraqi foreign minister—demanding that it be ignored by the UN—because it knows that Saddam Hussein’s concession deprives the United States of the fig leaf of a pseudo-legal pretext for invading Iraq, destroying its government, seizing its oilfields and reducing the country to what would be, in effect, semi-colonial status.
Last week’s maneuvers by the Bush administration at the United Nations were based on the assumption that Iraq would never be able to comply with the provocative and draconian resolutions that the United States intended to ram through the Security Council. Moreover, the resolutions would leave it to the United States to decide whether or not Iraq was in compliance. The Bush administration was confident that this arrangement would inevitably provide the United States, within weeks if not days, with a casus belli. It would simply declare that Iraq was in “noncompliance” and initiate hostilities.
At least for the moment, this scenario has been somewhat disrupted—though there is no reason to believe that the United Nations will not soon bend to American pressure. The Bush administration will get, in all likelihood, both the resolutions and the war it wants.
For more than a half-century every American administration has invoked the specter of Munich 1938—when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain caved in to Hitler and handed Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis—to justify its own aggressive imperialist politics. America habitually cloaks its actions in the mantle of resistance to aggression. But this latest attempt to cast Bush as a modern-day equivalent of Churchill, standing firm in the wilderness against those who would compromise with a ruthless tyrant, attains a degree of mendacity that no other administration has ever achieved. For nothing so closely recalls the methods employed by the Nazi regime in its willful fabrication of the Czech crisis and its conduct of the negotiations in Munich in September 1938 than the tactics that have been pursued by the Bush administration in relation to Iraq.
The initial findings of a Congressional committee that has been reviewing the performance of America's intelligence agencies before Sept. 11 are profoundly disturbing. While the investigation has not found that the agencies collected information pointing to the date and targets of the attacks, it has discovered reports that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to hit sites in the United States and that they might employ commercial airliners as weapons. The response of spy organizations — and the government at large — was anemic.
One of the great unanswered questions has been whether the government had enough intelligence in the months before Sept. 11 to fear an imminent blow within the United States and to take aggressive steps to heighten security, especially at airports. The answer now appears to be affirmative. Investigators working for the Senate and House intelligence committees found numerous reports in the archives of the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy organizations suggesting that the bin Laden network was eager to mount attacks within the United States. There were also warnings that terrorists were considering using airplanes.
The accumulation of alarming evidence led George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to tell his top aides in December 1998 that "we are at war" with Osama bin Laden and "I want no resources or people spared in this effort." That was exactly the right reaction, but the mobilization of resources that followed did not match the threat.
The Congressional investigators learned that almost no one at the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of Mr. Tenet's declaration of war. On Sept. 11, the F.B.I.'s international terrorism unit had just one analyst to deal with Al Qaeda. Even the C.I.A. itself did not make major readjustments to evaluate the threat. The agency increased the number of analysts assigned full time to the bin Laden network from three in 1999 to five in 2001 before the attacks. Despite the indications that airliners might be used as weapons, including one August 1998 report that terrorists might fly a plane into the World Trade Center, intelligence analysts apparently made little effort to assess the aerial threat. The Federal Aviation Administration did not take the threat seriously.
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WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — Nearly all middle- and upper-middle-class families will lose some of the income tax cuts scheduled over the next eight years as they are forced to pay a separate tax originally intended to make sure that the rich cannot live tax-free, a study released today found.
By the end of the decade, when the tax cuts pushed into law by the Bush administration in 2001 become fully effective, 85 percent of taxpayers with two or more children will be forced off the regular income tax and onto a separate system known as the alternative minimum tax.
The additional burden will fall largely on families with incomes of $75,000 to $500,000. Just three years ago fewer than one million taxpayers, most at the upper reaches of the income spectrum, were subject to the complex separate tax. But if nothing is changed, by 2010 about 36 million taxpayers will face it. Indeed, virtually all taxpayers earning $100,000 to $500,000 will fall under its sway.
"What was a class tax is becoming a mass tax," said Len Burman of the Urban Institute, one of the study's authors and a tax expert under former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Under the alternative minimum tax system, many deductions are denied, including those for children, the taxpayers themselves and for state and local taxes. At that point, taxes are calculated at rates of 26 to 35 percent.
"We're talking about a really nasty marriage penalty," Mr. Burman said. "You are 25 times to 30 times more likely to be on the alternative minimum tax if you are married rather than single."
Accounting failures in the private sector have been big news lately. But the granddaddy of accounting failures belongs to the public sector — the federal government's handling of money held in trust for more than 300,000 Native Americans.
The government gave allotments of land to various Indian tribes around the turn of the century, but kept control of the property, leasing it out for mining, lumber operations and ranching. The revenue was theoretically held in trust. Yet as Judge Royce Lamberth of Federal District Court observes, "The Department of Interior's administration of the Individual Indian Money trust has served as the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century." This week, Judge Lamberth found Interior Secretary Gale Norton guilty of civil contempt of court for her department's failure to straighten out the mess.
Ms. Norton, the third cabinet official to be cited for contempt in this ongoing debacle, inherited the problems from her predecessors. The government has always preferred to hope that the whole issue would go away — in part because the amount owed to the Native Americans could by now total billions of dollars. But nobody really knows. The physical records have fallen into disrepair, been lost or, in some cases, been purposely destroyed. According to Judge Lamberth, the Interior Department doesn't seem to have made much effort to improve things, creating the illusion of developing a new plan for a historical accounting of the trust money while doing nothing of the kind.
The justice of the Native Americans' claim for an accurate accounting of money owed them is almost self-evident. Perhaps the most damning part of Judge Lamberth's decision came at the end, a sentence tinged with sadness and anger. "I may have life tenure," he wrote, "but at the rate the Department of Interior is progressing that is not a long enough appointment." Over time, many of the Native Americans who have hoped for a just accounting from the Interior Department have discovered how accurate Judge Lamberth's words really are. Lifetimes have come and gone, and still nothing meaningful has been done. It is time to change that.
WASHINGTON - Nowhere in the country could a minimum-wage employee afford to pay rent on a two-bedroom home, an advocacy group said Wednesday. And in three-quarters of the country, even two full-time, minimum-wage jobs couldn't pay for such housing.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, in its annual "Out of Reach" report, found that the average U.S. employee must make nearly three times the federal minimum wage, or about $14.66 an hour, to afford a modest two-bedroom rental and still pay for food and other basic needs. In Arizona, a worker must earn $14.49 an hour.
About one-third of the nation's households are renters, said the Washington-based advocacy group. In the four years since the coalition began its study, the gap between wages and rents has widened, both during times of economic expansion and recession.
"Even as the homeownership rate rises, access to good, affordable rental housing diminishes," the report said. "Eventually the number of people who succeed as renters will become so small that the pool of potential homeowners will evaporate."
Sheila Crowley, the coalition's president, said the problem of finding affordable housing is felt throughout the nation.
"Some places are worse than others, but nowhere is housing affordable," she said.
The coalition favors increased federal spending on affordable housing and raising the minimum wage to address the issue.
Last year, about 2.2 million workers earned the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour or less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We’re getting the band together,” White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told the group on their first conference call last week. The “Band” is made up of the people who brought you the war in Afghanistan—or at least the accompanying public-relations campaign. Their greatest hit: exposing the Taliban’s treatment of women. Now, they’re back for a reunion tour on Iraq.
You've got to hand it to Saddam. In one brisk, neat letter to Kofi Annan, he pulled the rug from right under George Bush's feet. There was the American president last week, playing the role of multilateralist, warning the world that Iraq had one last chance – through the UN – to avoid Armageddon. "If the Iraqi regime wishes peace," he told us all in the General Assembly, "it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related material." And that, of course, is the point. Saddam would do everything he could to avoid war. President Bush was doing everything he could to avoid peace. And now the Iraqi regime has put the Americans into a corner. The arms inspectors are welcome back in Iraq. No conditions. Just as the Americans asked.
No wonder the United States was whingeing on about "false hopes" yesterday. No wonder the Americans were searching desperately for another casus belli – be sure that they will find one – in an attempt to make sure that their next war keeps to its timetable. Be sure, too, that Saddam, that master of the post-agreement conditional clause, will have a few surprises for the UN inspectors when they do turn up in Baghdad. Will the UN boys be allowed to visit the Beast of Baghdad's palaces? Will they be waved through all checkpoints when they want to visit Tuwaitha or any of the other horror factories in which the Iraqis once cooked up their biological weapons?
But for now, the Americans have been sandbagged. It will take at least 25 days to put the UN inspection team together, another 60 for their preliminary assessment – always assuming they are given "unfettered" access to all Iraqi government facilities -- then another 60 days for further inspections. In other words, George Bush's latest war has been delayed by more than five months. Saddam, of course, must have his own worries. Back in 1996, the Iraqis were already accusing the UN inspectorate of working with the Israelis.
Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's nemesis-turned-saviour, was indeed – as an inspector – regularly travelling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam accused the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months. Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads – though they didn't all know it – had been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with UN resolutions.
But a glance back at George Bush's UN speech last week shows that a free inspection of Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction was just one of six conditions which Iraq would have to meet if it "wishes peace". In other words, stand by for further UN Security Council resolutions which Saddam will find far more difficult to accept.
The other Bush demands, for example, included the "end of all support for terrorism". Does this mean the UN will now be urged to send inspectors to hunt for evidence inside Iraq for Saddam's previous – or current – liaisons with guns-for-hire?
Then Bush demanded that Iraq "cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shia, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans and others". Notwithstanding the inclusion of Turkomans – worthy of protection indeed, though one wonders how they turned up on the Bush list – does this mean that the UN could demand human rights monitors inside Iraq? In reality, such a proposal would be both moral and highly ethical, but America's Arab allies would profoundly hope that such monitors are not also dispatched to Riyadh, Cairo, Amman and other centres of gentle interrogation.
The fact that the Justice Department is investigating Enron Broadband Services indicates that prosecutors are now focusing on Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and possibly other top executives, according to observers.
Investigators are clearly looking into whether executives misled investors about the financial well-being of the company and its future prospects, said Jacob Frankel, a former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer now in private practice.
At issue is the "quality of the disclosure made by executives into whether they disseminated false or misleading financial information or failed to provide information to investors," Frankel said.
Sources familiar with the investigation say there's particular interest in a Jan. 20, 2000, meeting with analysts, where the future of Enron Broadband, or EBS, was enthusiastically promoted by Skilling and others. Enron's stock price jumped 30 percent that day, starting a yearlong rise to its all-time high of about $90 per share.
EBS never turned a profit or lived up to its hype, but rather turned out to be a multibillion-dollar drain on the company. Executives continued to sing its praises as late as January 2001, though the business was crumbling.
EBS is only one part of the multifaceted investigation, which includes such areas as improper power trades to boost prices in California and a 1999 energy trading deal with Merrill Lynch that helped Enron earn a $60 million profit.
But the new focus on EBS and other businesses also indicates that Skilling and Lay cannot be clearly linked to the complex partnerships that former Enron executive Michael Kopper admitted he created with former Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow to siphon money into their own pockets, said Robert Mintz, a New Jersey-based attorney and former federal prosecutor.
Prosecutors will most likely find it easier to show that Lay or Skilling misrepresented the finances of the company than to prove they knew of the intricate accounting involved in the partnerships, Mintz said.
"Prosecutors must feel fairly certain they have their case against Fastow secured and are moving on to the bigger fish," said Mintz. "They're just trying to fit the missing pieces of the puzzle together."
Israel ought to oppose an American attack on Iraq, Scott Ritter, the former head of the United Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq, said yesterday.
In an interview with Ha'aretz, Ritter said an American strike against Iraq would be "a disaster for Israel," as it would have three negative side effects: It would open the door for an Iraqi attack on Israel, whether conventional or nonconventional; it would undermine regional stability and tilt Arab public opinion even further against the U.S. and Israel; and it would increase terrorism inside Israel.
"A war will not be good for Israel. I would be very surprised if anyone in Israel supported such a step," he said.
Ritter said that he did not know for certain whether Iraq either possesses nonconventional weapons or is able to fire missiles at Israel. "My assessment in 1998 was that Saddam [Hussein] did not have this capability, and the Israeli government accepted this assessment," he said. "I don't know what has happened since, but I assume that Israel has continued its excellent intelligence operations. There will always be uncertainty over Iraq's capabilities until inspectors are on the ground."
Ritter quit the weapons inspection team in 1998, charging that neither the UN nor the American administration was backing his effort to conduct thorough checks. Since then, however, he has become a leading opponent of both military action and economic sanctions against Iraq, even traveling to Baghdad last week to give a speech against American military action to the Iraqi parliament.
He argues that the current administration's talk of Iraq's nonconventional weapons is unfounded and meant only to serve its interest in toppling Saddam. The Iraqi leader, he insists, is not the issue; the issue is Iraq's nonconventional weapons - and the way to deal with that is through UN inspections.
FRANCE dramatically joined a UN split over Iraqi weapons inspections yesterday as Nelson Mandela branded the US a world bully.
Leading Security Council members France, Russia and China opposed any new UN resolution approving military action against Iraq without first giving time for inspectors to do their work.
But the US, backed by Britain, dismissed Iraq's offer to allow inspectors back without conditions as a stalling ploy, insisted a new resolution was still necessary - and continued to prepare for war.
President Bush said last night: "The UN must act. We will not be held to blackmail by a barbaric regime. It's time for us to deal with the true threats of Saddam."
His hardline stance outraged former South African president Nelson Mandela, who said: "What right has he to say Iraq's offer is not genuine? We must condemn that very strongly.
"No country, however strong, is entitled to comment adversely in the way the US has done.
"They think they're the only power in the world. They're not and they're following a dangerous policy. One country wants to bully the world. We must not allow that."
According to an assessment document prepared for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, officials in Jerusalem believe that the American offensive against Iraq, if ultimately ordered, would be a focused operation, with its objective the assassination of Saddam Hussein and members of his family.
The document, covering military developments in the Gulf, indicates that the narrow focus would be intended to spur a change in Iraq's regime without causing the country's dismemberment, thus allowing Saddam's successor to begin reconstruction.
In internal discussions in Jerusalem, some officials have suggested that the United States, in its recent air strikes on targets within Iraq, has in fact already begun its military offensive, without having expressly declared this. But this is a minority view. The direction of the position presented to Sharon and Peres is that the current strikes represent a widening of previous military activity.
The document states that the American and British air forces are destroying Iraqi infrastructure in an effort to "bait" Iraq's military, especially its anti-aircraft arm, into a response, in an effort to test its defenses and discover previously undetected targets.
The trap is sprung. The name of the game is containment. Contain the wild man, the leader with the messianic and relentless glint who is scaring the world. Surround him, throw Lilliputian nets on him, tie him up with a lot of United Nations inspection demands, humour him long enough to stop him from using his weapons and blowing up the Middle East.
But this time, the object of the containment strategy is not Saddam Hussein, but George Bush, the president with real bombs, not the predator with plans to make them.
America's European and Arab allies now act more nervously about the cowboy in the Oval Office who likes to brag of America as "the greatest nation on the face of the Earth" than the thug in the Baghdad bunker.
"We don't want another war in this region," says an adviser to the Saudi royal family. "When Afghanistan is bombed, they just hit rocks. When there's bombing in our neighbourhood, they hit oil fields."
Many international commentators have welcomed the closer involvement of the UN Security Council in the Iraq crisis and Baghdad's acceptance of UN weapon inspectors. Critics of America's policy on Iraq see the UN's involvement as a positive step away from war.
They argue that UN engagement creates a 'breathing space' for a negotiated solution, and that the UN's influence will ensure that US unilateralism is constrained by international law, as only the UN Security Council can sanction military aggression.
But both these claims are wrong: UN involvement neither makes war less likely nor does it make an attack on Iraq any more 'legitimate'.
Far from providing a breathing space, the preparations for any regime of weapons inspections guarantee months of high-profile wrangling over alleged Iraqi obstruction, while the USA continues to assemble its military forces.
According to military analysts, even without a breathing space an extensive assault on Iraq would not be feasible until later in the year - and possibly not until spring 2003. It seems unlikely that the Iraqi government will be able to buy breathing space beyond this point, whatever steps it takes. After all, the White House has already declared that the acceptance of weapons inspectors is not the issue and that Baghdad's offer is 'too little too late'.
More importantly, UN engagement encourages war because it is seen to give military action international legitimacy. Opinion polls in the USA and Britain seem to suggest that public support for military action is increasing, with many arguing that the prospect of UN support will build further public backing for a military campaign. The UN's involvement makes it easier for governments to commit to military action, encouraging the likelihood that there will be war rather than a negotiated solution. It also enables the USA to put more pressure on governments that are currently reluctant to support US action.
The consequences of 11 September remain visible on several fronts. Psychologically, the American empire has constructed a new enemy: Islamic terrorism. Its practitioners were evil, the threat was global and, for that reason, bombs had to be dropped unilaterally and wherever necessary. The leaders of the United States wish to be judged by their choice of enemies rather than the actual state of the world, leave alone the concrete results of the 'war against terrorism'. Politically, the United States decided to use the tragedy and re-map the world. Its military bases now cover every continent. The largest of these is situated in one of the tiniest states: Qatar in the Persian Gulf. There are 189 member states of the United Nations. There is a US military presence in 120 countries. Domestically, the Bush administration sought and obtained extensive new powers to curb dissent and to detain and deport suspects at will. On the East Coast alone, over a thousand immigrant workers of South Asian origin were arrested and deported to their countries of origin, without any outcry in the mainstream media.
A year on, what is the balance sheet of the war? With the help of its Pakistani creators, the Taliban regime was overthrown without a serious struggle, though approximately 3000 innocent Afghan men, women and children perished under the bombs. For the West, these lives were not even worth half as much as those of the US citizens who died in New York and Washington. No memorials honouring innocent victims will be built in Kabul. The torture and mass execution of prisoners of war leaves many liberal supporters of 'humanitarian wars' unmoved. However, despite all this, the central aim of the military operation, which was the capture ('dead or alive') of Osama Bin Laden and his confederates and the physical destruction of Al-Qa'eda, has still not been accomplished. On 16 June 2002, The New York Times reported:
"Classified investigations of the Qa'eda threat now underway at the FBI and CIA have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States, the officials said. Instead the war might have complicated counter-terrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area."
Nor has the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan led to stability, peace or prosperity in the region. The character of the Afghan government is symbolised by the fact that the US-backed leader, Hamid Karzai, asked for and received bodyguards consisting exclusively of US soldiers. He did not feel safe being guarded by Afghans. The lack of trust is mutual. The factions of the Northern Alliance who rule outside Kabul dislike Karzai and would despatch him overnight if they could do so without incurring retaliatory bombing raids. To preserve this regime the United States will have to maintain a permanent military presence. In other words democracy, human and social rights, etc, are as remote as they ever were.
The 'wider geographical area' includes neighbouring Pakistan. Washington's closest ally is the country's newest military dictator. The first Afghan War (1979-89) required a Pakistan general prepared to play the Islamic card. Zia-ul-Haq obliged. The result was the creation of the Taliban. This time the events required a secular general to help demolish the Taliban. Enter General Musharraf (or Busharraf according to local wags) who has institutionalised the Pakistan army as the country's major political party, accountable only to itself and the Pentagon. The Pakistan army is the proud possessor of nuclear weapons and has the ability to use them. Likewise India, the regional hegemon. A nuclear tussle over Kashmir has frightened the rest of the world but not the generals in India and Pakistan. The policy-makers in New Delhi are ready to accept Washington's dictates globally if they are permitted to mimic the empire locally. So far permission has been refused and the presence of US soldiers and pilots in Pakistan acts as a safeguard. But for how long?
There is no better place to take the pulse of Arab and Muslim sentiment than Cairo, historic Mother of the World, pioneer or hub of the two great movements that swept the region in recent times, the pan-Arab secular nationalism of which President Nasser was the champion, the "political Islam" that came into its own with Nasserism's failure and decline. Today, from air-conditioned think tanks on the banks of the Nile to the sweltering alleyways of the splendid but dilapidated mediaeval city, the preoccupation with the two things, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and US plans for possible war on Iraq, that seem most fateful for the future, is overwhelming. "Bin Laden may have lost a lot of his appeal," said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, "but that doesn't mean the US isn't hated; it is, more than ever, and more, now, from an Arab than an Islamic standpoint."
In a workshop in the City of the Dead, hard by the elaborate, 15-century tomb of Sultan Qaitbai, Mohamed Ahmed carries on the ancient, glass-blowing craft of his forefathers on a day when, even without the additional heat of his furnace, the temperature stands at 45 centigrade. "What makes you think that Bin Laden really did it?" he asks, giving voice to a still widespread popular suspicion, "Bush is just using him to put us down.'' The future is dark, he added. Indeed, much darker, for most Arabs, than might have appeared in the immediate aftermath of that apocalyptic atrocity, because, one year on, it seems clearer to them in its consequences. It is a momentous, double crisis, an external and an internal one, of which they are almost everywhere taking cognisance. The two are inextricably intertwined. Long maturing, Bin Laden, in fact, brought both to a head.
As they see it, the US's post-11 September "war on terror" now boils down, essentially, to an assault on themselves. For in the Bush universe of good versus evil, it is essentially they, with Iran thrown in, who are the evil ones. In the collision to come, the Arabs risk further massive blows to all those ideals and aspirations - independence, dignity, the unity and collective purpose of the greater Arab "nation" -- which, after centuries of foreign conquest and control, the pan-Arabism of Nasser so triumphantly, if defectively, embodied; a reversion to quasi-colonial subjugation of old.
Internally, they are dismally ill- equipped to meet the external challenge, racked as they are by all manner of social, economic, cultural and institutional sicknesses. These, the US says, are the very conditions which threw up Bin Ladenism. Few Arab opinion-makers would dispute it, or doubt their societies' desperate need of root-and-branch reforms, ushering in democracy, human rights, accountability.
There is no more compelling measure of that than the UN's newly released Arab Human Development Report. It describes a Third World region which has fallen behind all others, including sub- Saharan Africa, in most of the main indices of progress and development; whose 280 million inhabitants, despite vast oil wealth, have a lower GNP than Spain; whose annual translation of foreign books is one fifth of Greece's; 51 per cent of whose young people would emigrate if they could. A prime cause of this backwardness, say the report's exclusively Arab authors, is that the peoples of the region are the world's least free, with the lowest levels of popular participation in government. "Those who wonder why Afghanistan became a lure for some young Arabs and Muslims," wrote Jordanian columnist Yasser Abu Hilala, "need only read this report, which explains the phenomenon of alienation in our societies and shows how those who feel they have no stake in them can turn to violence." Yet most Arab regimes have ignored this damning verdict on themselves. "The fact is," said Nader Fergani, the report's Egyptian lead author, "that governments that were repressive in the first place have in the past year become more so. They have not learned the lesson of 11 September -- but neither has the US."
Now that the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 has passed, the United States is fast-approaching the one-year anniversary of the Bush administration's assault on domestic civil liberties.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, a grab bag of police-state schemes cobbled together by Attorney General John Ashcroft to capitalize on 9-11 fears, was signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 26, 2001.
It had been passed with almost no debate by the House of Representatives two days earlier, on a 357-66 vote. Of the 66 votes against the legislation, 62 came from Democrats, three from Republicans and one from Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders. Among the members of the House who rejected Ashcroft's grab for dramatically enhanced surveillance powers and the ability to punish legitimate political activism were two Wisconsin House members: Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, and Tom Barrett, D-Milwaukee.
In the Senate, only one member opposed the grotesquely misnamed "USA Patriot Act": Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold. At the time, Feingold described the legislation as a "truly breathtaking expansion of police power." Almost a year later, he says, "I would cast the same vote today, but even more confidently, as we see how law enforcement is beginning to use the new powers in the bill and how the Department of Justice has proceeded on a variety of fronts not directly addressed in the bill."
As the United States approaches the one-year anniversary, some components of the USA Patriot Act have already been challenged with success in the courts. But, for the most part, the breathtaking expansion of police power remains every bit as breathtaking and expansive as when it was enacted.
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
TEN YEARS from now, will we be looking back asking how the United States could have thought that an unprovoked, preventive war on Iraq could succeed when the signs of danger were so clear and ominous? How the impossibility of accomplishing the mission through air power would lead levels of American casualties not seen since the Vietnam War? How an oil shock and deficit spending for war would plunge the United States and world economies into a major recession? How an administration so focused on getting rid of Saddam failed to create a workable policy to shape a post-Saddam Iraq?
It may be that the most compelling way to answer these questions will be to apply the insights of the psychologist Irving Janis on what he called ''groupthink.'' Looking back on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in his 1972 book ''Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascos,'' Janis asked: ''How could bright, shrewd men like John F. Kennedy and his advisers be taken by the CIA's stupid, patchwork plan'' to invade Cuba?
Drawing on studies of group decision-making, Janis argued that the pressures of like-minded people deciding as a group lead to a deterioration of mental reasoning, reality testing, and moral judgment. In short, groupthink leads to a breakdown of critical thinking.
In his 1972 book Janis also examined the flawed decision making that went into the Korean War, Pearl Harbor, and Vietnam and presented in contrast the decision making process that occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the post-World War II Marshall Plan.
So far the Bush administration's foreign policy team has manifested all the symptoms of groupthink that Janis identified:
Illusions of invulnerability leading to excessive optimism and the taking of extreme risks.
Collective efforts to rationalize leading decision makers to discount warnings that might otherwise force them to reconsider.
Stereotyped views of enemy leaders as too evil to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate and too weak or stupid to counter an attack against them, leading to miscalculations.
ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear," said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."
Is this accurate? Just about every reporter following the story thinks so. Most say that the so-called Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or Iran-contra, both in its scope and its consequences. And all believe that, with investigations continuing, it is bound to get bigger.
Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage? Certainly, if you watched Nightline or read the London Financial Times or the Los Angeles Times, you saw this monster grow. But if you studied the news columns of The Washington Post or, especially, The New York Times, you practically missed the whole thing. Those two papers were very slow to come to the story and, when they finally did get to it, their pieces all too frequently were boring, complicated,and short of the analysis readers required to fathom just what was going on. More to the point, they often ignored revelations by competitors.
The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam's arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.
Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don't appear to be getting any better telling them. In the interest of learning from our mistakes, this reporter examined several hundred articles and television transcripts on Iraqgate and spoke to dozens of reporters, experts, and generally well-informed news consumers.
Before evaluating the coverage, let's summarize the Iraqgate story itself:
Some of today's newspapers must be trying to protect the public from dangerous information. Following are some of the news stories crucially underreported:
* The two biggest sponsors of terrorism in the Middle East in our time are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; the Saudi ruling coterie, or part of it, finances training, arms and development at facilities provided and staffed by Pakistan. The kidnapping-murder in Pakistan of a Wall Street Journal reporter is only the most recent incident in a pattern reaching back more than a decade.
* Bombing pitiful Afghanistan is not fighting terrorism. Afghanistan (called "Pipeline-istan" for good reason) is a big vacant lot dominated by squabblers with guns; its training camps and similar operations were staffed, equipped and financed largely by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
* That fourth plane attacking on September 11, 2001, brought down in Pennsylvania by passengers, was almost undoubtedly headed for the Pentagon. For years, hijacker/bombers have struck in pairs where possible, with symmetrically paired, parallel attacks either on two targets simultaneously or paired on a single target. They did so in New York, and they intended to do so in Washington. Why the psychological denial that the Pentagon was a target?
* After spending a trillion dollars, we've come up with a military that -- so we are given to understand, at least by implication -- did not know the Pentagon could be a target. Is anyone asking why the air space over it was not defended? Didn't they have radar? Satellite surveillance? Video monitors?
* Those anthrax letters were sent by someone who had anthrax samples and a grudge. Forget about looking for Dr. No. Instead, check out every military-installation employee who (a) received the anthrax vaccine but (b) didn't like it. Stealing at military installations is easy; courts-martial for theft are conducted every year. Find the guy with the attitude, "Hey, let's see whether this [expletive] vaccine works . . ."
* The investigation of the September attacks and the anthrax mailings has been coordinated at the national level directly from the White House. Not the FBI; the White House. White House operatives are good at what they do -- manipulating the press, the opinion polls, Congress, and judges -- but they are not trained investigators. This is one reason why the anthrax mailer, the Taliban's Mullah Omar, and Osama bin Laden have not been found.
* Another reason is that Osama bin Laden is dead. You don't bounce back from renal shutdown, and anyway if he were alive, we'd be hearing from him. This tidbit has been outed in Pakistan, which supported bin Laden and the Taliban. Here, it was fed to the supermarket tabloids.
* Osama bin Laden did not "mastermind" the September attacks. Virtually no Arabic writer considers him a mastermind; his "nuclear weapons" documents turned out to be a well-known Internet hoax. His pleased claim of responsibility was the shallow tactic of a dying man.
* The September 11 attacks were halfbaked and vicious, but they were neither random nor "symbolic." A bunch of young Saudi (mostly) wannabe professionals went for broke trying to knock out the US stock market and the Pentagon. Even President Bush has said that the attackers were trying to destroy the markets.
* The attacks of September 11 were supported, passively and otherwise, by the so-called secret services of our allies. Terrorist operations throughout the Middle East and Europe for years have been enabled or supported or carried out by the secret service of Pakistan, the Gulf nations, Russia and Israel. Forget the shortcut analysis of "religious fundamentalism," and start looking into agency complicity.
* The brownshirt phrase "Homeland Security" was invented well before September 11. Some sources for it were the Anser Institute for Homeland Security, in northern Virginia, the rightwing think tank CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies, funded partly by Richard Mellon Scaife), and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Insight Magazine. The Anser Institute - a nonprofit, despite its patents and its large government contracts - and Insight Magazine were touting "Homeland Security" and a "second Pearl Harbor," and spending on same, before September 11.
* The attacks of September 11 were not an "act of war," they were a mass crime. Calling them acts of war gives them undeserved dignity; calling them mass murder, or major crime - and, as the United Nations calls them, a breach of security - would enable investigation. Calling them "war" prevents investigation under a "wartime" guise of secrecy.
* We're not at war. If we were at war, the CIA wouldn't be funneling self-justificatory articles through one of the most visible reporters in the US (Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein), purporting to show the innermost workings of the CIA and the White House in crisis, to the front page of the Washington Post. They would be security breaches.
* Only Congress has the power to declare war in this country, and it does not have the power to give that power away. --September 17, 2002
For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge.
The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting.
Whenever I get an email from the institute, several of my Guardian colleagues receive one too and regularly forward their copies to me - sometimes with a note suggesting that I might like to check out the story and write about it.
If the note happens to come from a more senior colleague, I'm left feeling that I really ought to write about it. One example last week was a couple of paragraphs translated by the institute, in which a former doctor in the Iraqi army claimed that Saddam Hussein had personally given orders to amputate the ears of military deserters.
The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem.
Its work is subsidised by US taxpayers because as an "independent, non-partisan, non-profit" organisation, it has tax-deductible status under American law.
Memri's purpose, according to its website, is to bridge the language gap between the west - where few speak Arabic - and the Middle East, by "providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media".
Despite these high-minded statements, several things make me uneasy whenever I'm asked to look at a story circulated by Memri. First of all, it's a rather mysterious organisation. Its website does not give the names of any people to contact, not even an office address.
Thank God for Scott Ritter, eh? Gen. Zinni too. And I thought I'd never say it, but Brent Stone Cold Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleberger, Henry the Original Gangster Kissinger, Dick the True Dick Armey, and James Baker the goddamned third, too. God bless them all. Because without their opposition to George W. Bush's Blitzkrieg for oily Lebensraum in the Middle East, any other intelligent and principled opposition would now find itself labeled 'unpatriotic' and dragged from its cars and homes and beaten in the streets, which is I'm sure what Karl Rove had in mind. But, rock-ribbed conservatives all, they have spoken out and rather emphatically too, so in this moment of righteous rage-interruptus maybe there's still time to state a few facts.
Just for fun, let's think back to the China spy plane incident - remember how the Bush administration initially came out all butch and swinging, nothing but hot talk about war with China? Remember who was doing that? Perle, Wolfawitz, von Rumsfeld, etc. - everyone who's so horny now for war with Iraq. (To be followed by Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and then, maybe China.) And remember who it was that pulled Bush junior's fat out of that fire? It was Scowcroft, Kissinger, Powell and Poppy himself who worked the diplomatic back-channels to put the accident/incident into proper perspective. And remember Dubya's role in all this? Wondering if the aircrew had free-weights and Bibles? It was reported that what military decisions being made at the time, whether to run a carrier task force by the Chinese coast, were not being made in the White House - Bush was apparently not allowed in that loop.
We all thought at the time that this was all proof that either the training wheels were still on this administration, or this was in fact the second presidency of Poppy. I guess we have to give the decision to the training wheels scenario; but now that Junior has his driver's license, it seems he's still driving drunk at 110 into oncoming traffic.
As for Iraq - this week we learned that U.S. Intelligence hasn't prepared a new assessment of Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction' since 1991. Why the urgent need for a 'pre-emptive' attack this month, but not last? According to White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, 'Because August is not a month that you roll out a new product.' 'Besides,' Karl Rove chimed in, 'The president was on vacation.' Pretty compelling, huh?
We also recently learned of a Pentagon briefing early in 2001, where one of Wolfawitz's underlings punched his finger in the Saudi delegate's chest and told him 'As soon as we get settled we're going after Iraq, and then we're going to start calling the shots in the Middle East. And you better go along because you don't have any choice.'
So it would seem 'calling the shots' has rather more to do with the issue than 'weapons of mass destruction.'
Sometime back, Kent Southard published a letter on Bush Watch from a reader who regularly met with a group of 40-something, affluent, white males who were "very pleased with Mr. Bush and the way he was running the country."
I've long puzzled over segments of the ill-informed American electorate and now believe that I may have a partial explanation for their behavior. This group probably reads and is regularly influenced by the Opinion Journal published in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Between the 40-something white males who receive their information from the WSJ, and half of the rest of the population who get their information from Fox News, we have a big problem in the United States. It is known as the great mass of misinformed and ill-informed citizens.
Our problem in the United States is not just the 50 percent who don't vote, but the 50 percent who do vote with only the shakiest idea of what they are voting for, or what a Republican, Democratic or Green vote means in 2002. If you doubt these words, just check the reader response to Michael Ledeen's article in the WSJ Online Opinion.
As part of my penance for the Bush administration, I now regularly beam into the WSJ and, at least, check the headlines and brief summaries. The September 4th edition ran Michael Ledeen's article "The War Won't End in Baghdad." It clearly combines the genius of both George Orwell and Joseph Goebbels.
Ledeen is proposing that we "also topple terror states in Tehran and Damascus and reform the one in Riyadh." Ledeen wants the United States to cleanse "Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia" of their terrorist Al Qaeda connections. This is quite an undertaking, even for an administration dedicated to never wanting to be weaned from its oil teat.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush the First said, "This will not stand," and began amassing troops for Desert Storm. The United States had the support of the rest of the world, even Arab countries. Who will stand with Bush the Second in 2002 in his grab for control of the Middle East's oil supply?
My guess is that it will be the 40-something, affluent white American males. But will they mount their camels and ride off into the desert to do their patriotic duty? Not in this life. They will be glued to their TV sets watching "smart bombs" destroy a civilization. Then they will congratulate themselves that they don't know anyone who has to place his or her body in harm's way. They will wave their flags, spout their rhetoric, drive their fuel-hungry vehicles, and be appalled by protesters who march in the streets.
If another act of terror replicating September 11 occurs, they will wrap themselves even tighter in the American flag and beat their war drums even louder, shouting "bomb them back into the stone age." They will glue themselves to their television sets, but never question whether they or the Bushes are a major part of the world's problem with terrorism.
Perhaps those who say "American Democracy is dead" are correct. Perhaps my voice and protests are meaningless in the present environment. Perhaps there is no hope for America. But like that small group of German protesters who fought Hitler in the 1930s, we have to stand and be counted while we still are able to stand and have a voice. If the Bush administration continues on its present course of replicating Hitler's path to corporate totalitarianism, we don't have much time to turn the tide. --Sept. 15, 2002
Sara DeHart, a freelance writer and democracy activist, lives in the Seattle, Washington.
Also posted at http://www.YellowTimes.org.
Two months ago, PRAVDA.Ru published an interview with John Hrankowski, a survivor and crew member of the USS Liberty, who had been on board the American vessel on the tragic morning of June 8, 1967 when the Liberty was attacked by the Israeli air force.
Mr.Hrankowski mentioned a really interesting and important fact just in passing: “American ships arrived only in 16 hours after the attack. A Soviet ship offered help to us on that night. They said that they would stay just at the horizon and, if our ship began to sink, they would help us.”
This fact has drawn our special attention. Former officer of the US Navy and film producer Richard Thompson recently helped produce a film about the tragic June 8 event. Mr. Thompson recommended us to talk to Russian submariner Captain Nikolay Charkashin, who has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the Liberty tragedy during the past several years. What is more, a book by Nikolay Cherkashin, “Mysteries of Lost Warships,” was recently published. This is the result of his independent investigations of Russian submarines from Empress Maria to the Kursk.
A PRAVDA.Ru journalist met with Nikolay Cherkashin, and we offer the following interview to our readers. It was rather unexpected to hear Nikolay Cherkashin say that no Russian ship was close to the USS Liberty that night.
- What happened to the Liberty is an astonishing and unique fact, but Soviet sailors had no connection with it. However, according to Thompson’s version, two Soviet ships were allegedly in the area and offered help but the Americans refused. In my mind, this information isn’t true. No Soviet ships were in close vicinity during the attack. Moreover, the very fact of the attack against the USS Liberty was practically unknown to the Soviet people. Probably, only the Soviet defense minister, Chairman of the Soviet government Kosygin, and several top officials in the government knew about it, that’s all.
BEIRUT (AP) — Billboards bearing pictures of the dead look over the mass grave of hundreds of men, women and children slain by Lebanese militiamen at two Palestinian refugee camps during Israel's 1982 invasion. On the 20th anniversary of the Sabra and Chatilla massacre, the survivors have little hope they will ever see justice.
"Each year is worse than the one before," said Mohammed Abu Rdeina, who lost his father, sister and other relatives in the slaughter.
On Sept. 16, 1982, pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militiamen entered the Beirut camps and killed hundreds of civilians over the next three days. They sought revenge for the assassination of their leader, President-elect Bashir Gemayel, which they blamed on Palestinian guerrillas.
The exact number of people killed has never been firmly established, but most estimates center around 700-800.
Lebanon, which suffered 150,000 deaths during its 1975-90 civil war and is patched together by a fragile pact of coexistence between its Christian and Muslim communities, has never prosecuted any Lebanese for the massacre.
Many Arabs blame Israel for the slayings, noting that soldiers of its invading army stood by just outside the camps during the killings.
An Israeli commission of inquiry found then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the invasion, indirectly responsible for the massacre, prompting his resignation in 1983.
When Sharon became Israel's prime minister last year, 23 survivors of the massacre filed a war crimes complaint against him in Belgium under a 1993 Belgian law granting its courts "universal jurisdiction" over war crimes committed elsewhere.
But a Belgian appeals court dismissed the complaint June 26, ruling a case could not proceed against a person not in Belgium.
Some Belgian lawmakers are seeking to bolster the "universal jurisdiction" provision, but Abu Rdeina puts little faith in the effort.
"The case is over against Sharon," he said, standing in a narrow alley of Chatilla where his father, pregnant sister, brother-in-law and several cousins were killed. He, his mother and younger sister had become separated from the rest of the family and were freed after being taken to another location by Christian militiamen.
Monday, September 16, 2002
Iraq Briefings: Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Sen. John McCain strode into the most secure room in the Capitol for a "top secret" briefing by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on the threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
With the windowless room swept for bugs and lawmakers sworn to deepest secrecy, Rumsfeld proceeded to disclose, well, absolutely nothing this group of lawmakers couldn't have read in the morning papers or watched on TV news channels, according to participants. Actually, they weren't told even that much. "It was a joke," said McCain (R-Ariz.), who soon rose and strode out the door.
This has become an increasingly familiar scene on Capitol Hill, especially since the Bush administration blamed senators this summer for leaking classified information about top-secret intercepts of communications among terrorists in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Since the leak, the White House has put even tighter controls on classified -- and unclassified -- information available to most lawmakers, even those with special intelligence clearance. The FBI is hunting the alleged leaker, even as the administration promises to consult more closely with Congress on how to deal with Hussein.
It's not the first time legislators have seethed over Bush's tight grip on classified information. Last October, members of both parties strongly objected to the president's decision -- later rescinded -- to limit sensitive briefings to eight of Congress's 535 members.
The president's distrust of lawmakers now appears to be undermining his campaign to win congressional authorization to go to war with Iraq. Rumsfeld and other top advisers are not only keeping most lawmakers in the dark about new intelligence on Iraq, but they also are aggravating relations with Congress by portraying their briefings as top-secret affairs, according to interviews with several lawmakers.
LAKE CHARLES, La., Sept. 13 — The Rev. Don Wildmon, founding chairman of a mushrooming network of Christian radio stations, does not like National Public Radio.
"He detests the news that the public gets through NPR and believes it is slanted from a distinctly liberal and secular perspective," said Patrick Vaughn, general counsel for Mr. Wildmon's American Family Radio.
Here in Lake Charles, American Family Radio has silenced what its boss detests.
It knocked two NPR affiliate stations off the local airwaves last year, transforming this southwest Louisiana community of 95,000 people into the most populous place in the country where "All Things Considered" cannot be heard.
In place of that program — and "Morning Edition," "Car Talk" and a local Cajun program called "Bonjour Louisiana" — listeners now find "Home School Heartbeat," "The Phyllis Schlafly Report" and the conservative evangelical musings of Mr. Wildmon, whose network broadcasts from Tupelo, Miss.
The Christian stations routed NPR in Lake Charles under a federal law that allows noncommercial broadcasters with licenses for full-power stations to push out those with weaker signals — the equivalent of the varsity team kicking the freshmen out of the gym.
This is happening all over the country. The losers are so-called translator stations, low-budget operations that retransmit the signals of bigger, distant stations. The Federal Communications Commission considers them squatters on the far left side of the FM dial, and anyone who is granted a full-power license can legally run them out of town.
In the United States there is currently a debate over the methods and extent of military action to be taken against the Iraqi regime. This debate is constrained very narrowly, and all sides accept certain presuppositions which are not discussed. Both sides agree that Hussein is a dangerous menace developing weapons of mass destruction and the United States plans to restore democracy, or at least a more moderate leadership, in order to enhance stability and protect America and her allies from attack.
The problem is that virtually every claim about Iraq made by the Bush administration and its compliant "opposition" is an outright lie.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Bush's story: Saddam Hussein was never disarmed. "The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade...This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world...By seeking weapons of mass destruction, [Iraq] poses a grave and growing danger."
Reality: By 1997 the inspectors tasked with destroying Iraq's nuclear program had demolished more than 50,000 square metres of laboratory space and 1,900 pieces of equipment. They reported that "There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." [IAEA]
By 1996, over 480,000 litres of live chemical weapons agent, 28,000 chemical munitions and approximately 1.8 million litres, and over 1 million kilograms of some 45 different precursor chemicals and a variety of production equipment had been destroyed by UNSCOM inspectors. [UNSCOM]
According to the former head of the UNSCOM inspection team, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel and registered Republican, by 1998 "we could account for 90 percent to 95 percent of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, versus the 100 percent required by the Security Council". Ritter believes the remaining 5 to 10 percent were destroyed by Iraq and their existence denied. In any case, he says, the chemical and biological agents in question would have been rendered useless by natural decay by now. [RealAudio]
The Bush regime has not presented evidence regarding Iraq's weapons capabilities, either to the UN or, according to a TIME article, to its own Congress. [TIME]
United Nations Action on Iraq
Bush's Story: The UN has failed to deal with Iraq, allowing it to defy the world without punishment. It needs to "grow some backbone", and "will either be able to function as a peacekeeping body as we head into the 21st century, or it will be irrelevant, and that's what we are about to find out."
Reality: United Nations sanctions on Iraq, now in their twelfth year, have been absolutely crushing to the country. Mortality rates in the country skyrocketed during the 1990s, accounting for a half a million more deaths than would be otherwise expected among children under 5. The Executive Director of UNICEF said that "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war." [UNICEF]
Dennis Halliday, former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, resigned after thirteen months, calling the sanctions "genocide". He rejects the argument that the oil-for-food program could care for the Iraqi people, pointing out that the approximate amount provided amounts to less than ten dollars a month per person. He rejects the claim that Hussein is deliberately withholding aid, pointing out that before the war his Ba'ath party provided the best health care in the Arab world. His succsessor Hans van Spoeneck resigned for similar reasons.
Far from being "spineless", UN -- really US -- policy towards Iraq has been indescribably harsh and will be remembered, if there is ever an honest accounting, as one of the great atrocities of history.
(YellowTimes.org) – The other day my brother and sister-in-law sent me a very touching Internet card that says God did many things to try and diminish the horror of the 9/11 attacks. It holds that without His intervention, literally tens of thousands more people would have died. And it also offers the hope that for the victims - He gave them comfort in their last moments. The card gives encouragement to the belief that God was performing miracles on that day.
I don't know exactly what to think about this card. I am still one who moves between doubt and belief in the concept of an intervening God. On the other hand, because I have experienced several synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, in my life, I am open to the possibility of there being something of the miraculous in this world.
But what if, for the sake of argument, we assume the premises of the Internet card: that God was trying to mitigate the horror of 9/11? What then does that say about George W. Bush?
Can we say that George W. Bush was doing God's work on September 11?
Let's take a look at his actions on that day.
George W. Bush said on two different occasions that he saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on September 11. He also stated that Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff, told him about the second plane hitting the World Trade Center at 9:05 a.m. Despite all of this, Bush did nothing but listen to a children's story until 9:30 a.m. instead of ordering fighter jets to intercept all hijacked planes immediately.
Why did he sit in that classroom and not even budge for at least 25 minutes? Why did he not order jets to be scrambled to intercept the other planes after the first strike on the World Trade Center at 8:46? Maybe he could have prevented the second plane from hitting the WTC at 9:05? And maybe he could also have prevented Flight 77 from striking the Pentagon at 9:43? Even if the chances were slim of stopping any of these attacks, couldn't Bush have at least tried?
Granted there is one thing Bush may have actually done to prevent a greater disaster. There is evidence that he ordered the shootdown of Flight 93 that crashed at 10:06 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But then there remains the troubling question of why he and his administration chose to cover up this action - if Flight 93 was indeed shot down?
WASHINGTON — President Bush said Thursday that Iraq could make a nuclear bomb within a year after getting enriched uranium or plutonium. But Saddam Hussein has been unable to get that nuclear fuel for more than a decade.
There are two ways for him to get these fissile materials: purchasing them from the black market or making them himself. U.S. officials and independent experts said he had had no luck at either.
Despite "trying like the dickens," said a senior U.S. official, Iraqi front companies are not believed to have succeeded in buying any significant quantities of highly enriched uranium or plutonium on the international black market.
"It's hard, because there is not much of it out there and there are a lot of people trying to prevent bad people from getting it," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Moreover, there is no evidence that Iraqi engineers have succeeded in rebuilding the country's fissile materials-production facilities, some of which were destroyed by U.S. bombs in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and others by U.N. inspectors afterward, U.S. officials and experts said.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Vice President Al Gore ( news - web sites) on Saturday criticized President Bush ( news - web sites)'s economic policies, saying they have squandered trillions of dollars of projected U.S. budget surpluses and ought to be "scrapped."
Speaking to a group of black members of the U.S. Congress, the remarks by Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to Bush, were part pep rally for Democratic candidates in the Nov. 5 congressional elections.
But his dual themes of Republican economic recklessness and disregard for the ailing Social Security ( news - web sites) retirement fund also may have been a preview of campaign stump speeches to come, if Gore decides to seek a rematch with Bush in 2004.
"Surpluses are gone. They're gone. Where'd they go? One year. Boy, that was fast work," Gore told the Congressional Black Caucus ( news - web sites), an ardent supporter during his presidential campaign.
When Bush took over the White House early last year, the Congressional Budget Office ( news - web sites) was forecasting U.S. budget surpluses of $5.6 trillion over 10 years.
In contrast, last month CBO said there will be budget deficits through fiscal 2005 before a return to surpluses that will total only $336 billion through 2011.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Gore warned that Bush's sweeping tax-cut plan, which will reduce government receipts by about $1.4 trillion, was too "risky" for the U.S. economy. His Saturday speech was a not-so-subtle "I told you so."
In recent days, some attention has turned to the role of Congress in the Iraq issue. Shouldn't the nation's legislators have to act — pro or con — on this crucial issue, some people ask.
One flippant, but not entirely unreasonable, response would be, Why should they be expected to act on Iraq when they're not acting on anything else?
With three weeks to go in the fiscal year, and not much more than that before Congress theoretically adjourns for the year, Congress has not passed any of the 13 appropriations bills that will fund federal agencies next year. This doesn't mean government will come to a halt. Missing deadlines is a common enough activity in Washington that mechanisms have been developed for dealing with it.
But the lack of congressional action — unusual even as Congress goes — does mean a lot of big decisions are being put on hold.
Some people in Congress will tell you the problem is that everybody is in Washington is busy working on terrorism (creating a new Department of Homeland Security, for example) and Iraq. But there's something else clearly at play:
Every decision Congress makes about spending now either increases the deficit or hurts some group whose favorite program is being cut or restrained.
There are important new budgetary needs, in both the defense and domestic realms. But the economy is stumbling, meaning Congress has less money to play with. Meanwhile, Congress has cut taxes, and the biggest of the cuts it has slated haven't even taken effect yet.
For all these reasons, the federal deficit has a new lease on life and is growing fast.
Passing the budgets is no fun, so the budgets don't get passed.
Years ago, in a snug underground restaurant in downtown Tehran, drinking duq – an Iranian beverage of mint and yoghurt – Saddam Hussein's former head of nuclear research told me what happened when he made a personal appeal for the release of a friend from prison. "I was taken directly from my Baghdad office to the director of state security," he said. "I was thrown down the stairs to an underground cell and then stripped and trussed up on a wheel attached to the ceiling. Then the director came to see me.
" 'You will tell us all about your friends – everything,' he said. 'In your field of research, you are an expert, the best. In my field of research, I am the best man.' That's when the whipping and the electrodes began."
All this happened, of course, when Saddam Hussein was still our friend, when we were encouraging him to go on killing Iranians in his 1980-88 war against Tehran, when the US government – under President Bush Snr – was giving Iraq preferential agricultural assistance funding. Not long before, Saddam's pilots had fired a missile into an American warship called the Stark and almost sunk it. Pilot error, claimed Saddam – the American vessel had been mistaken for an Iranian oil tanker – and the US government cheerfully forgave the Iraqi dictator.
Those were the days. But sitting in the United Nations General Assembly last week, watching President Bush Jr tell us with all his Texan passion about the beatings and the whippings and the rapes in Iraq, you would have thought they'd just been discovered. For sheer brazen historical hypocrisy, it would have been difficult to beat that part of the President's speech. Saddam, it appears, turned into a bad guy when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Before that, he was just a loyal ally of the United States, a "strong man" – as the news agency boys like to call our dictators – rather than a tyrant.
But the real lie in the President's speech – that which has dominated American political discourse since the crimes against humanity on 11 September last year – was the virtual absence of any attempt to explain the real reasons why the United States has found itself under attack.
WITH PUBLIC support for war against Iraq flagging in the U.S. in recent weeks, the Bush administration was clearly hoping the 9/11 anniversary would be just the thing to get war fever back on track.
Certainly, the media could be counted on to do its part to whip the citizenry into a frenzy of grief and rage, thereby rousing the American people to wage war on a country that apparently had nothing to do with 9/11, but at least offers a target that can be located.
The manipulation of grief to stoke enthusiasm for battle is, of course, nothing new. It was used in Iran in the '70s by fundamentalist Muslim clerics to drum up support for their fledgling movement. Whenever dissidents were killed by the Shah's brutal forces, the clerics held elaborate funeral ceremonies to further stir emotions and enlist recruits to fight the Shah and his backers in Washington. The clerics'strategy was highly effective — and they didn't even have CNN at their disposal.
This is worth remembering as we contemplate the media frenzy of the past week that has helped turn the bloodbath of 9/11 into a staging ground for endless war.
Certainly, the U.S. media have greatly helped the White House make its case. When tracking down Osama bin Laden proved too difficult, the Bush administration switched its focus to "regime change" in Iraq. The media have followed this turn in the plot without question, highlighting Saddam's use of chemical weapons against his own Kurdish population — an atrocity that receives far more media attention now than when Saddam was still a U.S. ally.
The U.S. media also acts as a filter, preventing incorrect ideas from slipping through.
As Antonia Zerbisias noted in The Star last week, CNN and MSNBC hosts have smeared Scott Ritter, former head of the U.N. weapons inspection mission in Iraq, who blames Washington for the mission's breakdown. TV hosts have openly questioned Ritter's loyalty as an American, indicating the media have taken on the function once performed by the McCarthy Committee on Un-American Activities.
Certainly, criticizing Washington these days leaves one vulnerable to the charge of anti-Americanism. With its demands for blind, unquestioning loyalty, and talk of good and evil, the world's only superpower seems to be increasingly taking on the characteristics of a cult.
Above all, the U.S. media have filtered out anything that could lead viewers to question why so many people around the world feel such bitterness toward Washington.
When George Bush, soon after 9/11, provocatively raised the question: "Why do they hate us so?" it seemed inevitable the media would start examining some possible reasons, such as the long history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- It would be immoral for America to attack Iraq without provocation, a former U.S. senator said here Saturday.
James Abourezk, who used to represent South Dakota in the senate, was speaking to reporters after he, Democratic West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall and two other Americans met with Iraqi Health Minister Omed Medhat Mubarak.
The four-person delegation arrived overnight in Iraq, saying it intended to push for peace as well as the return of U.N. weapons inspectors.
It is the first time in several years that a sitting U.S. legislator has visited Iraq, which has been under U.N. sanctions since it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
''We are on a humanitarian mission ... not only to convince the Iraqi people that the American people are concerned with their suffering, but also to show that the American people, their vast majority, are peace-waging individuals,'' Rahall told reporters after flying in from Syria.
There's another significant anniversary this week, but not one that's attracted the sort of attention the 11 September commemorations have.
On 16 September 1982, under the watchful eye of their Israeli allies who had encircled the area, Lebanese Christian militiamen entered Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps bent on revenge for the assassination of their leader Bashir Gemayel.
There followed a three-day orgy of rape and slaughter that left hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocent civilians dead in what is considered the bloodiest single incident of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
If Americans approached the 11 September anniversary with trepidation, many residents of Shatila camp, and its more run-down neighbour Sabra, have been dreading the milestone on Monday which marks two decades of pain and the futile search for justice.
Take Um Ahmad, who still lives in the same house where she lost her husband, four sons and a daughter when a thick-set militiaman carrying an assault rifle bundled everyone into one room of their hovel and opened fire.
Only she and her daughter Suad survived the carnage, their survival aided by the fact of their being hidden under the broken remains of their loved-ones. Another daughter, Nuhad, escaped by hiding in a cupboard in the kitchen.
Opening wounds
"I'd rather not talk about what happened," Um Ahmad says as she bids us sit down in the room where her family perished. "What's the point of opening old wounds?"
But talk she does, despite herself, telling us how the events unfolded and recalling each of her four sons by name, Nizar, Shadi, Farid and Nidal (whom they called Bassam because of his bright smiling appearance).
A terrible fate awaited the boys in this family photo
I learn that, for many years, the survivors did not set foot in the room where the killings took place. But this year they have decided to open it up, the only sign of its tragic history a large funereal-looking banner in Arabic over the door which says: "There is no god but God".
When I ask if she has a photograph of her boys, Um Ahmad begins rummaging deep inside a cupboard where she produces a framed colour picture of three sweet-looking kids. The youngest, barely out of nappies, had three bullets drilled into his head, she says.
Where did Um Ahmad come from in Palestine, I ask, wanting to change the subject.
"Safad, on the border with Lebanon," she says, a pale smile on her face for the only time during my visit.
"I was five years old in 1948 when we left. I can still remember it, like a dream," she adds.
Failed prosecution
Every year since 1982 has been a bad year for Um Ahmad, but 2002 has been among the worst.
Residents of the camps remain haunted by 1982
In 2001 lawyers representing her and two dozen other victims' relatives attempted to have Ariel Sharon (Israel's defence minister at the time, now prime minister) tried for the massacre under Belgian legislation, which grants its courts "universal jurisdiction" for war crimes.
There had been great enthusiasm about the case in the camps. Mr Sharon, after all, had already been found to bear "personal responsibility" in the massacres by an Israeli commission of inquiry (which concluded he shouldn't hold public office again).
But the relatives' hopes were dashed again in June 2002, when the Belgian judges ruled that the case was inadmissible.
The fact that Mr Sharon had got off on a technicality (thanks to his absence from Belgium) is of little comfort to people who have spent every day of the last 20 years living with the consequences of the massacres.
In fact, many in Shatila rounded on the lawyers for enlisting them in an exercise that, in the end, had only - to paraphrase Um Ahmad - "opened the old wounds again".
Nor was there any satisfaction in the camps that the man who had led the killers, Elie Hobeika, himself met a violent end this year. Death in a car bomb followed his announcement that he would testify against Mr Sharon in Belgium.
Anniversary plans
During my visit to Shatila few people knew how they were going to spend the anniversary.
This is the only monument to the victims of 9/16
It will certainly be a far cry from the ceremonies in New York and Washington, where American leaders told the world that its pre-eminent military power was going to ensure that justice for the victims would triumph over evil whatever the cost.
The Palestinian survivors of the 1982 massacres will probably gather for speeches at the place where their loved-ones were buried en masse - a dusty vacant lot marked by a pathetic temporary monument of breezeblocks.
But there will be no internationally-observed minute's silence for the innocent victims of Sabra and Shatila, or global news coverage about the survivors and their miserable existence at the scene of this evil crime.
Now that the gauntlet has been thrown down, the Bush administration's best-case scenario for confronting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a rapid sequence of events resulting in the dismantling of his deadliest weapons - or in military action.
US President George Bush stressed the urgency of action again on Saturday before meeting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at Camp David.
But the reality of the unfolding diplomatic drama might be quite different.
Indeed, the momentum generated by the President's galvanising speech to the UN General Assembly on Thursday is likely to meet a series of hurdles that could both slow it and make the process much messier than it now appears, according to UN diplomats, former weapons inspectors and Iraq experts.
The preferred US timetable is tight:
Two weeks or less to win compromise on a tough UN resolution ordering Iraq to "comply or else" on disarmament and authorising the use of force if necessary to secure that goal.
An additional four weeks to get UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq to begin finding and dismantling its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles.
Then, within six months or so, Iraq would surrender its arsenal and potentially also begin to comply with a host of other UN resolutions. At the first sign of obstruction, UN members would be empowered to use force.
ZARANJ, AFGHANISTAN – A secret new US Special Forces mission to hunt down Al Qaeda along Afghanistan's border with Iran is triggering cross-border accusations of espionage, amid persistent suspicions that Iran is harboring terrorists.
The Green Berets have based themselves in a desert compound three miles from the Iranian frontier.
Surrounded by a maze of barricades to thwart suicide bombing attacks, the new base is being seen as an affront by Iranian religious hard-liners, who oppose the US-led "war on terror."
Interviews in Zaranj with Afghans expelled – and sometimes beaten – by Iranian authorities suggest that Tehran is treating the new US presence as a threat to its national integrity. The Iranian military is blaming the threat on local Afghans, whom they accuse of spying for the Americans.
While the US soldiers have been probing border areas where Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan meet, it is unclear if the teams will cross over into Iran, Western military analysts say. They add that US special operations commanders in their home bases are still formulating rules and guidelines for new "snatch squads" to nab Al Qaeda suspects at large across the globe.
Meanwhile, Iranian border troops, their ranks bolstered since the arrival of the three dozen American soldiers, have been digging fresh trenches in the sands here and setting up new gun positions.
The tensions at the border form the latest chapter in two decades of bad relations between the US and Iran. Western analysts in Iran warn that Bush's categorization of Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" has strengthened the hand of hard-line Islamic forces which have supported terror in the past.