America is negotiating with Britain and other European Union countries to expand blanket immunity to cover civilian as well as military personnel who might fall foul of the new international war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
The move is expected to seriously undermine the credibility and effectiveness of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which opened for business in July.
The US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, Pierre-Richard Prosper, said yesterday that 16 countries had, or were about to sign, bilateral agreements giving America the right to have US citizens accused of atrocities sent home rather than be tried at the new court.
It had been thought that America was only seeking immunity for its military personnel but now it is clear that Washington wants a much wider agreement.
The new court, which is backed by 137 countries and has been ratified by more than 70, will be a permanent forum for the prosecution of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the US has stubbornly refused to sign the treaty which establishes the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Mr Prosper said that the bilateral agreements would extend to "present, former and future servicemen and officials". But he added that America was also looking to include all its citizens.
He added: "We are discussing it with the states as we move along. We do have concerns of US citizens; we have a responsibility as an administration to protect the overall interests of the United States and that will include US citizens.
"What we are asking is that if there is a crime then that person not go to the ICC.
"But we believe in the rule of the law and we will ensure that the person is investigated and properly prosecuted."
Monday, September 23, 2002
WASHINGTON — Don't feel bad if you have the uneasy feeling that you're being steamrolled. You are not alone.
As my girlfriend Dana said: "Bush is like the guy who reserves a hotel room and then asks you to the prom."
As the Pentagon moves troops, carriers, covert agents and B-2 bombers into the Persian Gulf, the president, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld continue their pantomime of consultation.
When Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota asked the defense chief on Thursday, "What is compelling us to now make a precipitous decision and take precipitous actions?" an exasperated Mr. Rumsfeld sputtered: "What's different? What's different is 3,000 people were killed."
The casus belli is casuistry belli: We can't cuff Saddam to 9/11, but we'll clip Saddam because of 9/11.
Mr. Rumsfeld offered sophistry instead of a smoking gun: "I suggest that any who insist on perfect evidence are back in the 20th century and still thinking in pre-9/11 terms."
Ah, Rummy. Evidence, civil liberties, debating before we go to war . . . it's all sooo 20th century.
Anyway, how can we have evidence when we learned last week that our evidence-gathering snoozy spooks are even more aggressively awful than we thought?
The administration isn't targeting Iraq because of 9/11. It's exploiting 9/11 to target Iraq. This new fight isn't logical — it's cultural. It is the latest chapter in the culture wars, the conservative dream of restoring America's sense of Manifest Destiny.
The Bush hawks don't simply want to go back in a time machine and make Desert Storm end with a turkey shoot. They want to travel back even farther to the Vietnam War and write a more muscular coda to that as well.
Extirpating Saddam is about proving how tough we are to a world that thinks we got soft when that last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975.
We can't prove it with al Qaeda. That's like grabbing smoke.
So former Nixon officials Cheney and Rummy are playing out their own "Four Feathers," rescuing the lost honor of the American empire in the sands of Arabia. They want to stomp on Saddam to exorcise the specters of Vietnam and Watergate — the ethical relativism, the lack of patriotism, the postmodern angst, the loss of moral authority, the feeling that America is in decline or in the wrong, the do-whatever-feels-good Clintonesque ethos.
Dick Cheney fought multinationalism and Lynne Cheney fought multiculturalism, defending the dead white males who made the republic great. She has written a children's book, "America: A Patriotic Primer," and urged that 9/11 be a day to remember the nation's glories rather than its "faults and failings."
The Cheneys, who have been known to invite dinner guests at the vice presidential mansion to sing along to "Home on the Range," think they can restore a sunnier, more can-do mood to our society. Even if it takes incinerating Baghdad to do it.
Of all the explanations for Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent alleged war on terrorism, the least illuminating is that it's all about evil. We didn't know or didn't appreciate that there is evil in the world. Now we do know, or ought to. In President Bush's "axis of evil" speech last January, the first item on his list of truths "we have come to know" after 9/11 is that "evil is real, and it must be opposed."
William J. Bennett -- the Martha Stewart of morality -- takes up the theme in a quickie book, "Why We Fight," on a Web site (www.avot.org, AVOT being "Americans for Victory Over Terrorism"), and in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial page piece. "It took George W. Bush . . . to revive the language of good and evil," Bennett slobbers. Until a year ago, he avers, "terms like 'evil,' 'wrong,' and 'bad' " were not in "the lexicon." And even now, a fifth column of "pseudo-sophisticated intellectuals" is undermining America's war effort with nefarious suggestions that it might be more complicated than that.
Bennett's evidence that the concept of evil is endangered is pretty thin. He scrounges up a couple of professors making moral-relativist noises about understanding terrorists as people and the possibility that America's own actions may have contributed to America's current dilemma. Neither of them is actually quoted as dissing the word "evil." My own impression, for what it is worth, is that concepts such as "bad" and "wrong" did pop up occasionally before 9/11 and that there has never in our history been a proposition from which fewer Americans dissent than, "Osama bin Laden is evil." Calling terrorists "evil" requires no courage and justifies no self-congratulatory puffing. It's just not a problem.
But it's also not a solution. There are many groups of people, unfortunately, who would be happy to hijack four airplanes, fly them into crowded buildings and kill 3,000 Americans. In terms of malign intent, they all are evil. But only one of them managed to do it. The concept of evil tells you nothing about why -- among the many evils wished upon the United States -- this one actually happened. Nor does "evil" help us figure out how to stop evil from visiting itself upon us again.
Labour MPs opposed to Tony Blair's backing for American-led military action against Iraq are preparing a Commons ambush that could lead to the biggest backbench revolt of his leadership.
The rebels plan to use a parliamentary procedure last employed 15 years ago to allow MPs a substantive vote on Tuesday's recall of the Commons.
The Government had hoped to contain a revolt with an adjournment debate at the end of which MPs can vote only on a technical motion ending the sitting.
Michael Martin, the Speaker, is being asked to rule on whether to allow a "manuscript amendment" to that motion, which would give the rebels their chance.
The procedure was last used by Tony Benn in 1987 in an emergency debate following revelations about the secret Zircon spy satellite.
Mr Benn, who is advising the rebels, said: "I believe that the Speaker has the discretion to allow a manuscript amendment. There are clear precedents." Leading rebels are pressing for talks with the Speaker tomorrow to discuss the move.
Lord Weatherill, the former Speaker, said MPs had a "very good case" for pressing for a substantive vote. He has voiced his "extreme surprise, not to say distress" that the Government is allowing MPs and peers just three hours to study the dossier of evidence against Saddam Hussein before this week's debates.
The looming ambush will alarm Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip, who has assured Number 10 that a mass rebellion can be avoided. Already 133 Labour MPs have signed an early day motion to signal that they believe action without UN backing to be unwise.
Mr Blair has been given a warning by Clive Soley, the former party chairman. "Things could get very serious for him if Britain takes part in US action not authorised by the UN," he said.
However, Donald Anderson, the chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, who was briefed last weekon Iraq's weapons, said that his colleagues should not tie Mr Blair's hands with "gesture politics".
JERUSALEM, Sept. 22 -- Israeli bulldozers halted the demolition of Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah tonight as the Palestinian leader remained confined with more than 200 others in a single building surrounded by coils of barbed wire. Palestinian protests in support of Arafat spread across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel rebuffed several overtures to mediate an end to the siege, diplomats said. Israelis, Palestinians and Western diplomats said they believe Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is trying to force the Palestinian leader to seek exile abroad.
After destroying most of the buildings in the sprawling complex -- the Ramallah governor's office, a conference center, an intelligence headquarters and several mobile homes -- Israeli soldiers late Saturday added one more highly symbolic humiliation, raising the blue-and-white Israeli flag over the Palestinian leader's compound.
"It's gloating," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. "It's their silly idea of a victory." He added, "The idea of raising the flag on the compound means they don't want Palestinians here, they don't want us to exist."
Arafat was defiant. "We will hoist the flag of Palestine above the walls, churches and minarets of Jerusalem. . . . May God make me a martyr," Arafat said in excerpts of a telephone conversation with an Israeli Arab lawmaker broadcast on Israeli television, Reuters reported.
In the protests, two Palestinians were killed early today in Ramallah, and two more later in the day when Israeli troops opened fire, according to Palestinian hospital officials and the Israeli army. The army said there were armed Palestinians in the crowds. A fifth Palestinian, a teenager, was shot and killed in Nablus, in the northern West Bank. The army said it was checking the details of the fifth death.
Tonight, hundreds of Palestinian youths were gathering to protest in Ramallah's Manara Square, but the Israeli military this time appeared to be making no attempt to disperse the crowd, as it has in the past.
QUANTICO, Va. (AP) - Despite the vast technological superiority of U.S. forces in potential combat against Iraqi troops, the prospect of a street fight in Baghdad makes American war planners shudder.
But that kind of warfare may be necessary to remove President Saddam Hussein ( news - web sites) from power. He has promised to take any war with the United States into his cities, and U.S. military and intelligence officials acknowledge that combat in Baghdad's neighborhoods may be Saddam's best chance to counter some of America's military advantages.
Military strategists hate the idea of fighting in cities because it is so costly to both armies and civilians.
A defending force has many places to hide: buildings, rooftops, cellars. Streets turn into funnels for gunfire. Homes and parks become the front lines.
In a city, artillery bombardment and precision airstrikes — important aspects of U.S. military superiority — carry with them the potential of heavy civilian casualties should a bomb go awry. Communications are spotty where there are tall buildings.
"You're receiving fire from rooftops. You're receiving fire from streets and windows, and sewers and cellars," said Col. Frank Panter, who commands the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at the Corps' Quantico base, which studies urban warfare. "Any open area would probably become a killing field."
An urban enemy has three weapons — an AK-47 automatic rifle, rocket-propelled grenades, and a cell phone to coordinate attacks, Panter said.
A military adage says that an offensive force can expect to lose 30 percent of its troops taking a city. But some U.S. military planners are trying to overturn the old thinking by developing new tactics and technologies for urban combat.
Baghdad itself offers a diverse landscape for combat, a mix of modern wide boulevards and ancient side streets. It is divided by the Tigris River into western and eastern halves. Other waterways leave the older, eastern city essentially an island, reachable only by one of numerous bridges.
Most of the Iraqi government's buildings, and Saddam's palace, are on the west side. Baghdad's civilian airfield is west of town; the interior of the city has two military airfields, one on each side of the river.
An invading force would find itself fighting in a first-world downtown, surrounded by third-world suburbs, said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor, who last visited Baghdad as a journalist in the 1980s. It has a sewer system and some basements, but no subway system — vital facts for planners who want to advise troops where to look for enemy attacks.
Criminal justice experts say they have become increasingly concerned that the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft is moving to exert political control over previously independent agencies within the department that collect crime statistics and grant crime research awards.
At stake, they say, is the integrity of statistics about whether crime is increasing or decreasing and the findings of scholars about what causes crime and how to reduce it.
The experts' worries center on several little-publicized developments involving the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical arm of the Justice Department, and the National Institute of Justice, its research arm.
A Justice Department official said that despite the changes, the statistical reports maintained "the highest levels of integrity" and that there had been no political interference.
The agencies, created by Congress, have long been independent of the attorney general and had been allowed to release reports or make research grants without clearance by the attorney general's office, former directors of these offices said.
But a number of employees in those agencies as well as former officials and leading scholars said in interviews that over the last year and with increasing speed recently, political appointees under Mr. Ashcroft have worked to undermine that independence.
These critics trace the shift to the passage in October of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, a sweeping antiterrorism measure that removed much of the freedom the directors of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute of Justice had long enjoyed, giving their authority to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs, Deborah Daniels, and her deputy, Tracy Henke.
In a report to Congress on these changes, Ms. Daniels, whose brother, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., is director of the Office of Management and Budget, said there was a need to centralize control over these agencies because of the Sept. 11 attacks. Ms. Henke is a close associate of Mr. Ashcroft and was responsible for inserting language in the Patriot Act undercutting the two agencies' independence, employees say.
As a presidential candidate two years ago, George W. Bush called for a degree of humility in our dealings with other nations. Since Mr. Bush took office, it has often been hard to locate that sentiment in his foreign policy. The latest and most definitive articulation of his views, published on Friday, reflects a good deal more modesty and generosity than earlier expressions, but it also bristles with bald assertions of American power. Mr. Bush's Texas supporters may like it — he instructed his staff to write it in plain English so "the boys in Lubbock" could read it — but it is sure to make the rest of the world uneasy, including America's closest allies.
The tension between idealism and realism in foreign policy runs through America history, and the fault lines are evident in Mr. Bush's policy statement. The paper — a policy summation that every president is required to submit to Congress — seems in some sections to be animated by the most enlightened and constructive impulses of the land of Jefferson, Lincoln and the Marshall Plan. It dedicates the nation to extending the benefits of freedom, democracy, prosperity and the rule of law to struggling countries around the globe. Mr. Bush speaks eloquently in an introductory letter about working with other nations to combat disease and alleviate poverty, and he reaffirms his determination to increase American foreign aid.
At other points, the paper sounds more like a pronouncement that the Roman Empire or Napoleon might have produced. Given Mr. Bush's lone-wolf record on matters like global warming, and the nature of the issues he now faces, including a looming confrontation with Iraq, it is clear these combative attitudes will be driving Washington policy in the months ahead. The boys in Lubbock may want to pause before signing on for the overly aggressive stance Mr. Bush has outlined.
Mr. Bush imagines an intimidating, heavyweight America. A few of the policy prescriptions capture the spirit: American military power will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from ever trying to challenge the military supremacy of the United States. Washington is free to take pre-emptive action against hostile states that are developing weapons of mass destruction. The successful strategies of the cold war, which relied on the threat of overwhelming American retaliation to deter foreign aggression, are largely obsolete. Forceful measures to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons are more effective than treaties.
In 1999, when the Kansas Board of Education, under the control of fundamentalist extremists, removed the teaching of evolution from the science curriculum in public schools, Kansas became the object of national and international ridicule for having caved in to zealots and know-nothings. But the biggest uproar actually came from business leaders, who recognized that the economic viability of the state depended on the availability of credible public education. Businesses don't relocate to or invest in communities where ignoramuses set the educational curriculum.
The Kansas Board reversed itself within a year.
Too bad Texas hasn't learned from the Kansas experience. For the economic future of Texas is now under attack from similar extremists who, once again, are trying to inject politics and sectarian religious views into the selection of textbooks for schools in Texas.
Consider "the Mel Gablers" of Longview, whose Web site (http://members.aol.com/TxtbkRevws/about.htm) provides the primary ammunition for Texas extremists looking to censor school texts. The Gablers are candid: "We are a conservative Christian organization that reviews public school textbooks submitted for adoption in Texas." Translated into plain language: They censor textbooks for material offensive to conservative Christians, regardless of its accuracy.
The Gablers, who have no scientific or academic qualifications, set out pages and pages of "criteria" for the teaching of history, constitutional law and science, criteria that would get them laughed out of a meeting of real historians, lawyers or scientists. They share the common antipathy of the far right toward evolutionary biology, whose scientific validity is nowhere in doubt outside the coterie of religious extremists. Their conception of constitutional history emphasizes the understanding of state and federal power circa 1800, ignoring the complete transformation of our constitutional structure in the wake of the Civil War, a fact familiar to every first-year law student. And despite their enthusiasm for free markets, their understanding of economics is simplistic. "Private ownership fostered development and conservation of natural resources," they intone, although every undergraduate economics major has studied the "tragedy of the commons," the inability of regimes of private ownership to provide for the protection of common resources. (That's why we have national parks, after all!) "Market competition best limited discrimination and expanded minority opportunity," the Gablers report, not mentioning that it was government intervention, not markets, that created opportunities when the minorities were African- or Mexican-American.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. attack on Iraq could reshape the increasingly grim federal budget landscape, making deficit projections, already bleeding red, look far worse in coming months.
Administration officials have argued a $300 billion swing from surpluses to deep deficits in just one year will be rectified by 2005. But analysts are skeptical. They say that deficits will worsen before there is any improvement.
Building expectations for massive deficits could also speed up an eventual increase in market interest rates, threatening the recovery. Interest and mortgage rates, now at their lowest levels in a generation, are helping companies get back on their feet and are fueling a housing boom.
"There is considerable risk of a large further expansion to Treasury borrowing in the event of U.S.-led military action against Iraq," said John Youngdahl, senior economist and Treasury financing watcher at Goldman Sachs.
Those comments came just a few days after White House senior economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey pegged the cost of a war with Iraq anywhere from $100 billion to $200 billion, far exceeding a previous military estimate of $50 billion.
"These are pretty serious numbers," said Anthony Karydakis, financial economist at Banc One Capital Markets in Chicago. "I would be highly skeptical of anyone who tells me that the deficits will last for only another year or two and then we go back to surpluses."
Even Federal Reserve ( news - web sites) Chairman Alan Greenspan ( news - web sites), who supports the Bush administration's $1.35 trillion tax cut that took a huge bite out of projected budget surpluses, said fiscal discipline is under siege.
If Saddam Hussein is America's frying-pan, these men are the fire into which President Bush may be jumping. Foreign Editor David Pratt runs the rule over some of the highly assorted and far from loveable would-be beneficiaries of Iraqi 'regime change'
CORRUPT, feckless and downright dangerous. Some say they make the Butcher of Baghdad himself look good. Who are they? The contenders for Saddam Hussein's throne.
Ever since the September 11 attacks 'regime change' has been the catchphrase coming out of Washington. But if George Bush is as intent on invading Iraq as he seems to be, overthrowing the Iraqi regime and deposing Saddam may well turn out to be the easy bit.
If Afghanistan's nightmarish internal politics proved problematic after the toppling of the Taliban, Bush should be under no illusion that Iraq's would be any less so. The Northern Alliance might not have seemed a very palatable alternative to the Taliban, but it has a certain rough credibility. There is no equivalent in Iraq.
Following any ousting of Saddam, the task will be to prevent anarchy from returning to the streets of Baghdad and the oil facilities throughout the country. To that end the US needs its own strongman to put in Saddam's place.
Saddam, of course, has never had a problem with making enemies. Indeed, the breadth of the Iraqi opposition -- from Islamic fundamentalists and communists to monarchists and free-marketeers -- demonstrates his ability in this respect. Seemingly every week a new group springs up and issues an identikit statement to the international media. Recently one organisation, which nobody seems to have heard of except its own members, even took over the Iraqi embassy in Germany to prove that it existed.
There are, however, some basic patterns to the cacophony of proclamations from new movements, councils and parties that purport to represent the voice of the authentic Iraqi individual.
First, there are the national bodies that were created inside Iraq before 1990, when the bond that had formed between Iraq and the US was shattered by the invasion of Kuwait. These are groups like the Iraqi Communist Party, the largest group in Iraq from the 1950s through to the 1970s, and al-Daawa al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Call), which engineered the biggest demonstrations against the Iraqi regime in the 1970s and had close ties with Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolutionaries in neighbouring Iran.
ISN'T IT SCARY that we're only a few days away from invading Iraq? And isn't it just as frightening that the reason we're going to war is because of oil, which George Bush fronts as national security.
Our lunatic president can say all he wants about Saddam Hussein ignoring United Nations-imposed rules. And he can rant and rave about Saddam being a madman, capable of waging chemical warfare or even nuclear warfare. The truth is that big business, and W's buddies in the oil business, are behind the push to invade Iraq.
None of our intelligence agencies can say for sure that Saddam has the capability to deploy any type of weapon of mass destruction. Sure, he might have deadly chemicals, and he might be in the process of gathering material for a nuclear weapon.
But when it comes to deploying them, even our own intelligence agencies admit that Hussein has no such capabilities.
What's that line from Cervantes' "Don Quioxite"? The proof is in the pudding, and so far there's no pudding and no proof.
And so we'll sacrifice young men and women so oil companies will have a direct pipeline to the second-largest oil reserves in the world.
Don't believe it? Why is Russia no longer verbalizing opposition to a war in Iraq? And why are the French quietly rethinking their stance?
Russia, which has an oil agreement with Iraq, doesn't want to be left out of the loop on oil, so it has quietly cooked up a deal with the United States on dividing the oil reserves. And France is the same way.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — Prominent national Democrats now regard Senator Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey as their party's most vulnerable Senate incumbent, prompting concern that his endangered seat might cost Democrats control of the Senate.
Many Democrats said they had expected Mr. Torricelli to overcome his ethics troubles more easily. Instead, his predicament has roiled the party and stirred resentment toward him among fellow Democrats.
Some of them say that Mr. Torricelli's wounds are self-inflicted and that he opened himself to attack — not to mention gave ammunition to his Republican challenger, Douglas R. Forrester — by engaging in behavior that led the Senate Ethics Committee to reprimand him in July for improperly accepting gifts from a campaign donor.
Echoing a sentiment that is widespread among party leaders in and out of Congress, Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said he now viewed Mr. Torricelli as the most endangered Democratic incumbent in the Senate.
"Torricelli's is the tightest," Mr. McAuliffe said in an interview this week, referring to Mr. Torricelli's race. "He's dead even at best."
Some Democrats also say they are concerned that the party's focus on New Jersey threatens to limit the money and other resources that are available for other Democrats.
Labour rebels set ambush for Blair
Labour MPs opposed to Tony Blair's backing for American-led military action against Iraq are preparing a Commons ambush that could lead to the biggest backbench revolt of his leadership.
The rebels plan to use a parliamentary procedure last employed 15 years ago to allow MPs a substantive vote on Tuesday's recall of the Commons.
The Government had hoped to contain a revolt with an adjournment debate at the end of which MPs can vote only on a technical motion ending the sitting.
Michael Martin, the Speaker, is being asked to rule on whether to allow a "manuscript amendment" to that motion, which would give the rebels their chance.
The procedure was last used by Tony Benn in 1987 in an emergency debate following revelations about the secret Zircon spy satellite.
Mr Benn, who is advising the rebels, said: "I believe that the Speaker has the discretion to allow a manuscript amendment. There are clear precedents." Leading rebels are pressing for talks with the Speaker tomorrow to discuss the move.
Lord Weatherill, the former Speaker, said MPs had a "very good case" for pressing for a substantive vote. He has voiced his "extreme surprise, not to say distress" that the Government is allowing MPs and peers just three hours to study the dossier of evidence against Saddam Hussein before this week's debates.
The looming ambush will alarm Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip, who has assured Number 10 that a mass rebellion can be avoided. Already 133 Labour MPs have signed an early day motion to signal that they believe action without UN backing to be unwise.
Mr Blair has been given a warning by Clive Soley, the former party chairman. "Things could get very serious for him if Britain takes part in US action not authorised by the UN," he said.
However, Donald Anderson, the chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, who was briefed last weekon Iraq's weapons, said that his colleagues should not tie Mr Blair's hands with "gesture politics".
Sunday, September 22, 2002
and the Hidden Paths of Power
Sept. 4 — Inside a cold, foreboding structure of brown sandstone in New Haven, Conn., lives one of the most heavily shrouded secret societies in American history. Yale’s super-elite Skull and Bones, a 200-year-old organization whose roster is stocked with some of the country’s most prominent families: Bush, Harriman, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney. Journalist Alexandra Robbins, herself a member of another of Yale’s secret societies, interviewed more than a hundred Bonesmen and writes about the rituals that make up the organization. Read an excerpt from her book ‘The Secrets of the Tomb’ below.
THE LEGEND OF SKULL AND BONES
Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale student named William H. Russell—the future valedictorian of the class of 1833- traveled to Germany to study for a year. Russell came from an inordinately wealthy family that ran one of America’s most despicable business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut state legislature, a general in the Connecticut National Guard, and the founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret society that hailed the death’s head as its logo. Russell soon became caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious eighteenth-century society the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the United States, he found an atmosphere so Anti-Masonic that even his beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the most promising students in his class-including Alphonso Taft, the future secretary of war, attorney general, minister to Austria, ambassador to Russia, and father of future president William Howard Taft-and out of vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known.
Saturday, September 21, 2002
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Japan is Asia's most exposed economy to a possible U.S. war on Iraq because of its high dependence on imported energy and exports, according to a new regional analysis.
Oil accounts for 52 percent of Japan's total energy supply, and about 86 percent of its $50 billion in annual oil imports comes from the Middle East.
That is a far higher figure than the 25 percent dependency on Mid-East oil for the United States and 5 percent for the U.K., according to Japan's New Energy Foundation.
South Korea and Taiwan are also heavily dependent on oil from the Middle East. Between them, the three countries account for about 85 percent of East Asia's oil imports.
Military analysts say oil tankers heading out of the Arabian Gulf would likely become targets if hostilities break out. That in turn would put pressure on oil supplies in Asia, despite most refiners keeping reserves of at least 70 days.
On Tuesday the U.S. Navy warned that al Qaeda terrorists may be planning attacks against tankers, sending oil prices to $30 a barrel on the NYMEX Wednesday. (Full story)
West Texas Intermediate for October delivery closed at $29.77, after briefly touching the $30 mark. In London, Brent crude closed at $28.40.
Friday, September 20, 2002
Many US media reports were quick to declare that two suicide bombings in Israel on September 18 and 19, in which eight Israelis were killed, had brought an end to a period of "calm" simply because there had been no similar attacks for six weeks and few Israelis had been victims of Palestinian violence. In fact, the bombings came at the end of a particularly bloody period in which dozens of Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians, and a large number of them children, had been killed and injured by Israeli occupation forces. In effect, the definition of "calm" or a "lull in violence" inherent in these reports is 'only Palestinians are being killed.'
The Chicago Tribune ran a prominent headline above a report about the September 18 bombing in which one Israeli police officer was killed, declaring "Bomb breaks 6-week calm" (September 19). The Washington Post called the bombings a "flare-up in violence" which broke the "relative calm in the Middle East." ("Violent reminder of a simmering issue," September 20).
The Baltimore Sun ran a continuation headline reading "Bombs shatter 6 weeks of relative calm" and asserted "a six-week lull in violence had given both Israelis and palestinians hope that two years of violence might be ending." ("Tel Aviv bus bomb kills five, injures 50," September 20).
NBC news anchor Brian Williams told viewers that,
"After six weeks of relative calm today, a second straight day of violence in the Middle East. Another suicide bombing, this time on a crowded Tel Aviv bus, that killed five people, injured more than 50. As a result, Israeli tanks are once again surrounding Yasir Arafat's compound in Ramallah in the West Bank."
Following that introduction, NBC reporter in Tel Aviv, Jim Maceda, declared,
"Well, after those six weeks with no suicide bombings either in Israel proper or the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, some observers here believed that they actually saw Palestinians and Israelis inching towards a truce, even a peace. But all that was shattered today." (The News with Brian Williams, CNBC, September 19, 2002)
In other words, according to NBC, only suicide bombings, and nothing else, fit the definition of violence and if there are no suicide bombings, then peace may be at hand. Similarly, on CNN's morning news on September 19, Mike Hanna informed viewers that the bombings had ended a period of "comparative calm."
The Los Angeles Times declared that the September 19 bomb in Tel Aviv "seemed to burst any illusion that the relative calm of the last six weeks was a precursor to peace." Contradicting and making a nonsense of its own characterization of the situation, while revealing the underlying reality, the same report stated later
"Not that the lull has been without violence. Several dozen people - soldiers and civilians - have died on both sides, with the heavier toll falling on the Palestinians. Most of the violence has been in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Palestinians are living under Israeli military authority." ("Blast kills Israeli, Ends a lull in suicide bombings," September 19, 2002)
The last few weeks have been anything but a period of "calm" relative or otherwise for Palestinians. On September 19, Abdul Salam Sumerin, a 9-year-old Palestinian school boy was shot dead when, according to Haaretz, Israeli occupation forces "used live fire to disperse a crowd of school children challenging the army's attempt to impose a curfew on the El Amari refugee camp, in El-Bireh" near Ramallah. (IDF kills 9-year old boy in El-Bireh, September 20, 2002). According to other reports Israeli forces fired at the children using heavy machine guns mounted on armored vehicles.
Way back in the late 1970s when the acrid stench of Watergate still filled the air, New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh spoke at my college. I was just a wet-behind-the-ears sophomore who found it hard to believe my government would lie to me, wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life.
I found my life's pursuit in Hersh's inspirational message: "It is the government's job to keep secrets; it is my job to find them out." There are many events that compelled me to join the largely thankless, low-paying-for-most, hypocritical business of journalism, but that hour of listening to Hersh - who has exposed numerous government secrets, including the 1968 My Lai massacre of hundreds of Viet Nam men, women, and children by U.S. troops - talk about how he unearthed such secrets ranked right up there. I saw journalism as almost missionary work, as a way to right wrongs, to expose injustice, to help the needy, to speak truth to power. When I read English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton's words, "The pen is mightier than the sword," I believed, brother.
Little did I know I was merely entering a harsh Fantasy Island. Once the boat left, reality was quite different from the brochure.
More than two decades later, I can only shake my head in wonder. How can we spend so much time and energy covering O.J. and Condit and the latest clothing trends, and miss the really important stories - the government secrets - like the details of exactly how the Republicans stole the 2000 election and how we've killed more civilians in Afghanistan than those who died here on Sept. 11? Speaking of Condit, why have we ignored the story of Lori Klausutis, an aide to former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough, R.-Fla., who was actually found dead in the congressman's district office in July 2001 amid rumors of an extramarital affair, the resignation of Scarborough, and questions about cover-ups?
How can we magnify Clinton's and Gore's shortcomings to the point we're repeating bald-faced lies without even checking them, yet let Bush - who rarely has a press conference because his handlers are afraid of what he might say or mangle when not giving prepared remarks - off the hook and even compare him to Franklin D. Roosevelt? How can we let the Republicans convince us that the Democrats were equally tied to Enron and it was more of a business scandal, when the Bush administration spent the last year falling all over itself to help its friend, Kenny Boy?
The answers lie in money and myths. Let's just scratch one myth right off the bat: The media is no more liberal than Bush is sincere. Many reporters and editors might have been liberal in the Watergate days. But these days most are either moderate or lean to the right, based on my observations of working in the media for more than two decades. And the ones who call the shots - the corporate media bigwigs - are mostly true conservatives. Just review federal election records, and you will find the names of big media executives like Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch giving money only to Republicans. You won't find many who gave to Clinton or Gore.
That's why a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a group organized by Columbia University and others, concluded that overall Bush was twice as likely to receive positive media coverage as Gore in the last weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign. Another study by that group found that more than three-quarters of the campaign coverage of Gore cast him as someone who lied, exaggerated, or was tainted by scandal. Meanwhile, most coverage of Bush carried the theme that he was a "different kind of Republican."