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| Politicizing the War ... |
| 05.31.04 (4:28 pm) [edit] |
"[i]Dissent is the highest form of patriotism[/i]" - Thomas Jefferson
[b]What is Freedom??? ...[/b] Freedom [i]is so much more than[/i] the right to go to football games ... Freedom[i] is so much more than [/i]the right to speak your mind in the privacy of your own home ... [b]True Freedom [i]is the right [/i]to publically disagree with your government and affect real change in policy, leadership and those vital issues that most touch all of our lives [/b]...
Today "We the People" are staring down a dangerous precipice because of a tyrannical & dictatorial government gone astray and run amok ... Our democracy and freedoms are tottering on the edge of an abyss-of-fascism, for we are told that we should[i] shut up[/i]-- If "We the People" even dare to [i]criticize, debate or question [/i]the corrupt & traitorous Bush regime's policies regarding their illegal & immoral incursion into Iraq, we are told that we are "politicizing it" [i]as though that is something wrong [/i]([i]For goodness sake[/i]!!!) ... Consider this however, "politicizing" a vital issue central to our people's health & well-being[i] is what makes us strong [/i]as a nation for it means that we are engaged in healthy civic dialogue, the life-blood of a free society ... It is when we [i]cower and are afraid [/i]of "politicizing" an issue that our democracy and freedoms [i]shrivel & die[/i] ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
[u][b]Politicizing the War[/b][/u] - http://www.zmag.org/content/s...
Many people (mostly Republicans) say (mostly to Democrats) that it's wrong to "politicize" the war in Iraq. But politicizing the war is exactly what should now occur. To be precise, those who oppose the war should politicize it as much as the Bush administration has already done. Politics is not just the activity of politicians; it is a democratic people's chief means of making basic decisions about its future. Such decisions -- whether the country's foreign policy will be imperial or democratic, whether the constitutional system will remain intact, whether the United States stands for or against torture -- are now before the electorate. In any case, it seems clear from the President's speech at the Army War College on May 24 that no basic change in US Iraq policy is likely before November 2. On the other hand, the entire direction of American politics is at stake on that day. To point this out is not to be indifferent to the welfare of the people of Iraq. For the shape of their future will also depend chiefly on the outcome of the election.
The beginning of realism is to acknowledge that the next step in the President's policy -- his promise of "full sovereignty" to Iraq -- is a cosmetic operation. The story of the war has been one of official claims or predictions dissolving upon contact with fact. Let's see how quickly I can run through the over-familiar list: Weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's Iraq? Not there. Iraqi ties with Al Qaeda before the war? Missing. Democracy in Iraq? Drowned in blood at Abu Ghraib. Transformation of the whole Middle East? For the worse.
The promise of "full sovereignty" is the next in this series (coming along just in time to refresh the litany). But in one way it's different. You had to wait some months for the previous mirages to dissipate, but this one is dead before arrival. It is a phrase advanced in the teeth of multiple admissions by the administration itself, which has let it be known that the new "sovereign" will not: possess authority over either American forces or its own; be able to pass legislation; control its own news media; make decisions about the economy of the country. Neither will it enjoy the authority of the "interim constitution" recently promised by Bush but now simply forgotten. Arguably, the new group will possess less authority even than the powerless existing "governing council." "Withdrawal of power" might be a better description than "transfer of power" for what is about to happen -- except that the governing council lacked real power in the first place. As for the election promised in January, this will be as uncertain, once the US election in November is out of way, as the interim constitution turned out to be.
What is at stake on June 30 has little to do with any reality in Iraq. In all important respects, American policy will remain the same. The Coalition Provisional Authority will be renamed an "embassy." (The President said, "Our embassy in Baghdad will have the same purpose as any other American embassy." This is true if the comparison is to, say, the American Embassy in Chile in 1971.) Some 138,000 -- or more -- troops will remain in the country, using, in the President's ominous words, "measured force or overwhelming force." The electricity, water and oil will stop and start as usual. The fighting will continue. Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis will jockey for power. The prison at Abu Ghraib will be torn down, but a new "modern maximum security prison" -- America's latest gift to Iraqi democracy -- will replace it (as if a building, not the people in it, had been torturing Iraqi prisoners.)
The changes that will occur are all in the realm of appearances. But they are not, for that reason, insignificant, for as the White House well knows, it is appearances that may determine the November election. The trick for the administration is to create, for a period of four months, an illusion that American policy is working. In this effort, there are at least four distinct fronts. One is the United Nations. Theoretically, its man Lakhdar Brahimi is choosing the country's next government. In actuality, he has become a key figure, however unintentionally, in George W. Bush's election effort. Now the United States and Britain have placed before the Security Council a draft resolution inviting the UN to give its blessing to the new order in Iraq. The UN is in danger of creating an aura of legitimacy and international control where none in fact exist. The draft permits the Security Council to "review" -- not "renew" -- the presence of the American and other foreign troops after a year. That is, the United States, wielder of a veto in the council, can keep its troops in Iraq as long as it wants.
The second front is the political leadership in Iraq, which is under intense pressure by the administration to play its part. What happens to defectors was recently illustrated by the treatment of the Pentagon's former favorite Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi, who made the mistake of turning against the occupation, stating, "sovereignty is not to be given, it is to be seized." With a brutality that is the hallmark of this administration's approach to any opposition, an Iraqi force accompanied by Americans looted his office and home, breaking up furniture and smashing family photographs.
The third front is the American media. Its members should awaken to the fact that every time they use phrases like "handing over sovereignty" or "transition to democracy" they are misleading the public just as thoroughly as so many did when they accepted at face value the administration's claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
A final front is the administration's Democratic opposition, which is hobbled by Senator John Kerry's own "stay the course" position. Perhaps he is simply following the old political rule that when your opponent is destroying himself by his own efforts, you should stay out of the way. However, by failing to challenge the President on the war, he risks himself becoming a kind of unwilling accessory to the White House propaganda maneuvers.
The UN should not abandon the people of Iraq; neither, of course, should the leadership of Iraq; American reporters should not become partisans of the Democratic Party; and John Kerry should not adopt any view on the war simply to bait his rival. But all of them should be aware that, to whatever extent they give credence to the charade on June 30, they are above all else assisting in the re-election of the President.
[b]This is a Jonathan Schell "Letter from Ground Zero" column from the[i] Nation [/i]magazine. Many of Schell's Ground Zero columns since 9/11/2001 have just been collected into a book, A Hole in the World, An Unfolding Story of War, Protest and the New American Order (Nation Books). Schell, the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute, is also the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People among many other books[/b]. - http://www.zmag.org/content/s...
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| Is the President American??? |
| 05.31.04 (11:38 am) [edit] |
"[i]And for the support of this Declaration [of Independence], with a firm reliance on the protection of the divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor[/i]." - The Signers of the Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776
[b]Our Founding Fathers were men of great courage ... They risked http://www.constitutionfacts.... their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor-- and would have been hung as traitors had Great Britain succeeded in putting down the American Rebellion, Revolution and/or Insurgency by those so-called "uncivilized terrorists", our Founding Fathers ... [/b]Historians agree http://www.tblog.com/template... that the failure Bush will go down as the [i]worst president [/i]to befall this nation in our 229 year history ...
Tragically[i] how far we have fallen [/i]to find ourselves saddled with the most stupid, childish and corrupt man ever to be thrust upon our nation ... Bush is an ignorant, callous and arrogant man http://www.tblog.com/template... who has [i]never risked anything [/i]in his entire wasted-and-spoilt, overly-pampered, and ne'er-do-well life in which Poppy Bush has [i]bailed him out of every mess and failure [/i]he stumbled, fumbled and bumbled into ... Bush was an AWOL deserter who spent Vietnam in a drunken stupor partying, instead of serving his nation while better men risked their lives and many died ... Flash-forward to 1st May 2003 and the buffoon-boy Bush prances around, dressing-up Holloween-style in Military Garb barking "Mission Accomplished!" as he foolishly jokes about our U.S. Soldiers & Innocent Iraqi Civilians slaughtered in his illegal and immoral war in Iraq (while embezzling US Taxpayer monies diverted into the bulging pockets of Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) ...
Even today on Memorial Day 2004, "We the People" [i]are making all of the sacrifices [/i]in blood and treasure, while the immature adolescent-minded Bush http://www.smh.com.au/article... and his traitorous cabal of neo-con liars, thugs, traitors and war criminals "take-the-money-and-run" ... Congress http://www.congress.org should be compelled by "We the People" to [i]impeach[/i] Bush & Cheney and to [i]fire[/i] the dishonorable Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the neo-con crooks who disgrace our nation ...
[u][b]Is the President American?[/b][/u] - http://www.independent-media....%20Reported
What made America great? What fuels the American Dream? What soars American ideals? What American values touch your heart? What in America gives hope to society and solace to the mind? It is rooted in being American. From that germinated the founding values, principles and the pillars of democracy which, in turn, characterized how America will grow as a nation and how America will be governed. All the goodness that made America great, admired, respected, loved and gave pride flowed from that fountain of America's founding values and principles.
At anytime an American officer becomes confused or if American society or its institutions are brought to a crossroads or faced with conflicting values, all that is needed is to steal some fleeting moments to look at or reflect upon America's founding values and principles for guidance. They will never fail you.
If they tell you to retreat from what you are doing, you retreat and refrain for you may bring calamity or shame. If they tell you to change your path, you correct it. If they tell you to keep working, you labor on till you taste the fruits of thy labor. If they tell you to march on, you keep going till victory is thine. If they tell you its time to blow the whistle, you become a whistle-blower.
The values and the principles on that founding tablet are as sacred as the divine writ in your heart. Its practice in government shall always prompt the president to be straight and forthright. It shall always prompt the president to always act in favor of human dignity. It shall always prompt the president to protect human rights. It shall always prompt the president to aid the meek and the innocent. It shall always prompt the president to act in fairness. It shall always prompt the president to nurture the good name of America.
It shall not prompt the president to hound or denounce whistle-blowers. It shall not prompt the president to abandon the legal recourse. It shall not prompt the president to sanction or authorize tortures. It shall not prompt the president to manipulate the public or public fears and it shall not prompt the president to lie. Therein lies the greatness and strength of America.
Yet, there is mounting evidence that US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, authorized harsh (and degrading) interrogation techniques, which were aimed at terrorists in Afghanistan and transferred to Iraq because these methods apparently proved successful. According to Seymor Hersh in the New Yorker, the "program was approved by every federal agency and President Bush was informed about it (NST, May 29 2004).
That may very well explain the sizzling lies by the various spokespersons, including the Pentagon Chief spokesman, Larry DiRita who says, "I think for the moment, everyone has been treated, as has been generally described, either Geneva three or Geneva four" (AFP, NST, May 28 2004). The third and fourth Geneva Conventions bar cruel, humiliating or degrading treatment. That is called cover-up or down-play publicity, as if the public are a bunch of idiots and dinkidoos.
The International Red Cross had already reported that there was a pattern of systematic abuse. This, in all likelihood is the case because the same pattern was seen at Guantanamo, Afghanistan and later at Iraq. And that finding that the method was successful in their aim against terrorists in Guantanamo and Afghanistan and was approved and transferred to Iraq seems to have a credible foundation and in contrast, the suggestion that the prison tortures were the work of a few rogue soldiers does not hold water.
The first step in the pattern was to strip the prisoners or detainees, many of whom were not combatants. In mid-east cultures, stripping is already a form of torture. The other steps included putting them in stress positions for hours. Where sexual humiliation was also a step, prisoners and detainees were forced into sexual acts, including sexual acts between males. This is an aggravated form of sexual torture for those cultures and some of those released say their manhood was taken away from them and, "I consider myself dead." Some were left to bleed to death while others were choked or smothered. Sitting on their chests was a "compression" technique used to create painful suffering against the will to breathe and live. A general is said to have died from compression.
If that sounds like grotesque prison tortures or sadistic orgies in prisons, what about the rape of girls whose screams come to haunt. Some will like to call it a program but lawyers acting for freed detainees say there is "compelling evidence of an institutionalized regime of torture and degrading treatment" (Reuters, NST, May 29 2004). Could an institutionalized regime of torture and degrading treatment or a pattern of 'abuse' that was apparently successful in Afghanistan and transferred to Iraq be the work of a few rogue soldiers or isolated incidents or one coming with approval from every federal agency as reported in the New Yorker, after their evaluations?
There is no such authority under the provisions of the War on Iraq Act 1998 to sanction or carry out such prison tortures of the grotesque and sadistic prison orgies or rape of Iraqi girls in prisons. And American values forbid it. US law does not even allow prison officers, as they did in Alabama, to handcuff prisoners to a metal post in the sun.
The lies are too many. Lie after lie spun out into webs that choke democracy and democratic values and it is afflicting the way the government is run. Spokespersons are telling lies, too. If not half-truths, some of the statements are twisted, compressed and choked to death. Sizzling lies from a Presidency that will not admit mistakes or wrong doings or misdeeds and one that will not hold itself accountable to anyone is dangerous for America simply because it has strayed too far from the founding values and principles. And that means it has strayed too far from being American!
Now more than ever, more Americans are wondering if they really got a straight story about taking the US to invade Iraq on a USD200 billion bill. Tony Blair has passionately defended "the historic struggle in Iraq" while Bush is saying the "war he started is an epic struggle against terror".
The hard facts are that the Twin Towers were brought down with only USD200,000.00 while the sufferings of Iraqis and Iraqi children have, in consequence of the War on Iraq increased, excluding the 11,000 abused and tortured Iraqis in US run prisons for whom its a nightmare.
In the meantime, the rebuilding of Iraq is degenerating into insurgencies organized and carried out by the infiltrating Al Qaeda fighters. It is a management gone wrong. And a vision gone wrong from defeating a WMD threat to creating a "free and stable Iraq" - a democratic Iraq. Never before did Washington ever nurtured such a "mission".
Iraq is struggling. Iraq might break into civil war and in that turbulence it might break into three nation states. Then, there is the difficult situation of handling Saddam under the War on Iraq Act 1998. Legally, it is not proven that he was a threat to the US and the sovereign authority used to invade his country and topple him falls flat. Iraq is slipping. It might be too late for Iraq.
All of this anguish hijacks the mind. So, take a deep breath. Reflect on the founding values and principles. It is beautiful to be American, but only when molded in those values. There is no place for "twisted values and atrocious policies". If you like an honest-to-goodness, law abiding, caring neighbor nurtured by polite education, so must the President be. If America was founded on values, so must the Presidency be. Its time to stop and think, "Is the President American?" He is an American citizen, but is he American? - http://www.independent-media....%20Reported
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| Too Little, Too Late??? ... US Needs Help in Iraq, Rumsfeld (Finally) Admits ... |
| 05.30.04 (5:34 pm) [edit] |
[b]Too little, too late??? ... [/b]The corrupt, traitorous and incompetent Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] waged its illegal & immoral war in Iraq based upon heinous lies, deceptions & falsehoods-- having wantonly ignored the advice, warnings and admonitions by our allies-- and subsequently these neo-con, neo-fascist thugs & goons [i]who have hijacked our nation [/i]went even further down a [i]dead-end road to chaos & misery [/i]by recklessly ignoring the sage counsel of U.S. Military & Mideast experts who warned the[i] deaf, dumb & blind [/i]Bush regime that a[i] 'go-it-alone' [/i]strategy would[i] fail [/i]... But the arrogant Bushies[i] ruthlessly ignored [/i]everyone and said that they didn't need or want any help from anyone else ([i]because they greedily lusted for the war-booty to gorge upon by themselves ... Bush's Crime Family has stolen hundreds of millions in war-profits from their neo-fascist war in Iraq ...[/i]) ... Now we find ourselves saddled with the crooked Bushies' tragic bloody nightmarish fiasco in Iraq ... So [i]now[/i] "know-it-all" Rummy [i]finally admits [/i]that "we need help" to clean-up the neo-cons' disastrous mess ... The War Criminal Rummy has [i]some nerve [/i]...
It is time to demand the [i]impeachment[/i] of Bush and the[i] resignations [/i]of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz and the rest of their neo-hitlerian neo-cons ... Please contact Congress http://www.congress.org in order to express your outrage at the unnecessary and tragic daily slaughtering of lives and the squandering of treasure to enrich the rapacious Bush regime's corporate-take-all pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc...
Surely "We the People" deserve[i] better [/i]than this ... If so, then we[i] must demand [/i]it ...
[u][b]US needs help in Iraq, Rumsfeld admits[/b][/u] - http://news.independent.co.uk...
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, conceded at the weekend that America needs help from other countries to end the bloodshed in Iraq and defeat terrorism around the world.
"This cause is an international one," he said in a speech to the graduating class at the West Point military academy in New York. "Its success depends on convincing friends and allies with whom we are so inter-dependent to not be terrorised by threats or isolated by fears".
His address was striking in its conciliatory tone. Two years ago, President George Bush used the same ceremony at West Point to outline his doctrine of pre-emptive strikes that was the backdrop to the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent fraying of America's relations with many of its traditional allies. "We must take the battle to the enemy," Mr Bush said at that time.
Mr Rumsfeld warned that the global war on terrorism was likely to be long. "We are closer to the beginning of this struggle, this global insurgency, than to its end," he said. Mr Rumsfeld made no mention of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. In recent weeks, he has faced pressure from critics to take responsibility for the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and resign his post.
Hours after the Secretary of Defence made his speech on the campus about 100 protesters marched to the gates chanting: "Rumsfeld resign!" His speech was met by mostly polite applause from the graduating cadets.
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| Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: "Rumsfeld Says 'War on Terror' Just Beginning" ... |
| 05.29.04 (3:15 pm) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt neo-con Bush cabal must be [i]thrilled out of their "crazy" minds [/i]as they seek to make[i] their dreams, our nightmares [/i]self-fulfilling prophesies ... The neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] hijacked our nation with a [i]lust in their hearts [/i]and[i] no brains in their empty-headed minds[/i], in order to wage insane neo-imperial warfare for illegal & immoral war-profiteering ... The sluttish Bushies & their corporate pimps (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) have made a vast ([i]mountain of gold[/i]) fortune out of embezzling the American Taxpayers via waging terror and warfare ... [/b]
Terror!!! ... Terror!!! ... Terror!!! ... And a [i]terrified[/i] American public[i] suits the sordid motives & squalid purposes [/i]of these neo-hitlerian mafiaso-style fear-mongers.
"We the People" must [i]reject and oust the traitorous Bush regime & their GOP toadies in Congress, as soon as possible, [/i]and clearly ring-out the[i] bell of freedom [/i]in the [i]great-and-wise words [/i]of Franklin D. Roosevelt who said that "[b]We Have Nothing To Fear, But Fear Itself[/b]" http://historymatters.gmu.edu... ... And "We the People" must [i]stand strong and firm against [/i]the neo-con, neo-fascist Bush cabal of criminal liars, thugs, crooks, traitors & war criminals [i]who cannot be permitted [/i]to forceably put[i] fear [/i]into our hearts and minds ... Let us elect representatives to the White House and Congress who will[i] pursue sane policies [/i]to [i]improve the prosperity and freedoms [/i]in the great tradition of the United States of America and who are[i] capable of working well with other nations [/i]of the world who [i]also oppose terrorism[/i], but who [i]refuse[/i] to let [i]fear defeat[/i] them into [i]becoming paralyzed and overcome [/i]by tyrannical dictators like the Bush/Cheney War Criminals ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
[u][b]Rumsfeld Says 'War on Terror' Just Beginning[/b][/u] - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
WEST POINT, New York - The United States' declared war on terror is closer to the beginning than the end, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told graduates of the U.S. Military Academy on Saturday.
Rumsfeld told the 2004 graduating class of 935 cadets that in the three years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, the U.S.-led coalition had "overthrown two vicious regimes and liberated 50 million people, disrupted terrorist cells across the globe and thwarted many terrorist attacks."
"Yet despite our successes, we are closer to the beginning of this struggle with global insurgency than to its end," he said.
Rumsfeld addressed the graduates, who wore full dress uniforms at West Point's Michie Stadium football field, before heading back for Washington for the dedication of the World War II Memorial.
Rumsfeld said the world "has changed dramatically" since the Sept. 11 attacks when hijackers flew commercial airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington, killing nearly 3,000.
He said on the latest front, in Iraq where the Bush administration is facing continued fighting that is undermining efforts to end the U.S. occupation, "We are facing a test of wills, with an enemy that seeks to derail the Iraqi people's path to self-governance."
"The extremists know the rise of a free, self-governing Iraq, respectful of all religions - would deal the terrorists a decisive blow," Rumsfeld said. "Its success depends on encouraging friends and allies with whom we are so interdependent to not be terrorized by threats or isolated by fear."
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| Will George W. Bush Use Terrorism to Become America's First Dictator??? |
| 05.29.04 (7:52 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" better ponder the[i] disastrous consequences [/i]that have already befallen our nation in the calamitous time that the corrupt & traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]has waged its heinous war upon America ... The insane neo-con, neo-fascist Bush regime is tearing our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights asunder and we must take action to stop them[i] now[/i]!!! ...[/b]
[b]Read on ...[/b]
Will George W. Bush use terrorism to become America's Pinochet?
Attorney-General John Ashcroft is priming the public for a terrorist attack, which can only mean Bush is sharpening his blades to behead the Constitution.
Augusto Pinochet seized absolute power in Chile on September 11, 1973. The US national security apparatus, including George H.W. Bush, used terrorism as an excuse to help Pinochet destroy what had been a constitutional democracy.
So is Shrub a president? Or is he a Pinochet?
By a 4:1 margin American historians have already rated W. "a failure." More than one in ten surveyed in the recent George Mason University History News Network Poll also rate Bush as "the worst president ever." http://www.tblog.com/template...
But ultimately, this Bush has no peer among US presidents. Let's look at three likely matches.
Richard Nixon trained Dick Cheney and Karl Rove as Dirty Tricksters. Nixon is Bush's role model for corruption, cynicism and personal psychosis. But Nixon was also a skilled, literate global diplomat who opened doors to China and the former Soviet Union and supported environmental protection. Bush has trashed all that.
Herbert Hoover callously presided over the beginnings of America's worst economic depression. Bush is right there. But Hoover was also a skilled, literate bureaucrat, and a Quaker-raised foe of war. Not exactly Bush.
Warren G. Harding was astonishingly corrupt. Bush, Halliburton and Enron have more than matched him. But Harding also hated repression and brought the anti-war socialist Eugene V. Debs straight from a federal prison cell to meet him in the Oval Office. Bush might well have had Debs executed.
Ultimately, Bush's real peers are not US presidents but Third World dictators, like Pinochet, many of whom his father also put in office. Their [i]coda[/i] is clear:
-- Use of "terror" as an excuse for totalitarian control;
-- Official secrecy for its own sake;
-- Seizure of power in contempt of free elections;
-- Totalitarian militarism;
-- Abuse of human rights and liberties;
-- Love of the death penalty;
-- Hatred of a free press;
-- Imprisonment without legal recourse;
-- Widespread torture;
-- Brazen theft of public billions;
-- "Free market" smokescreens for corporate domination;
-- Taxing the poor to benefit the rich;
-- Hatred of labor unions;
-- Decimation of the natural environment;
-- Assaulting elected leaders anywhere, anytime;
-- Contempt for international treaties;
-- Reactionary alliance with right wing church groups;
-- Contempt for women's rights;
-- Manipulating divisions of race and class.
The one American actually offered a dictatorship, George Washington, turned it down, shaping the nature of the Presidency for more than two centuries....[i]until now[/i].
Meanwhile Bush has beheaded the American economy, replacing First World surpluses with Third World debt.
Reminiscent of Joe Stalin, foreign intelligence, economic assessment and even basic science must not contradict Rovian spin or fundamentalist prophecy.
American education, once the envy of the world, is in shambles, with global students now turning away for the first time. America's moral prestige, never higher than after September 11, 2001, has been trashed. No US president has ever been so personally hated.
And never has a would-be Third World dictator stood more ready to shred our Constitution.
Stalin once quipped that power resides not with those who cast the votes, but with those that count them.
Bush may try to follow Stalin's (and brother Jeb's) lead by stealing the 2004 election, as in 2000. Or he may try to seize power like Pinochet did on 9/11/73 in a repressive crusade against convenient terrorism.
But one thing is certain: if Shrub's hyped-up power play succeeds, the beheading of America will be complete. - http://www.freepress.org/colu...
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| Can Osama bin Laden Save George W. Bush??? ... |
| 05.28.04 (2:17 pm) [edit] |
[b]"Will Bush Stage A Terrorist Attack To Terrify Americans & Take-Over In A Coup d'Etat???" was a question I posed http://www.tblog.com/template... in the aftermath of the lunatic Attorney General John Ashcroft's bizarre pronouncement that we face a [i]big shot at another "terrorist attack" [/i]on our soil in the near future ([i]before the November elections [/i]...)-- although later we learnt that Ashcroft's so-called "intelligence" was [i]old news [/i]and that his cynical press conference was more likely [i]staged for political purposes [/i] http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... to take some of the [i]heat off [/i]of the corrupt & traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's [/i]heinous [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]...[/b]
More thoughts on whether "We the People" would be [i]so easily duped yet again [/i]by the mendacious Bushies ...[i] Can Osama bin Laden save George W. Bush??? [/i]... [i][b]Hmmm[/b][/i] ...
If you ever doubted the potential for violent actions to affect political change, the events in Madrid on the morning of March 11th 2004 erased all doubt. Early on that Thursday morning, sympathizers of Osama bin Laden seized a wide-open opportunity to alter the course of a modern western democracy through carnage.
Four packed commuter trains were torn apart by powerful explosives designed to kill in large numbers -- they did. In all, 191 people on their way to work died and some 1500 were wounded. The timing, just four days prior to Spain's national elections, was clearly an effort to affect those elections. The ruling People's Party, led by Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, was unexpectedly swept from power by the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, led by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. But the life and death question is, why?
[b]Why Spain turned on Aznar [/b]
You may attempt to make the argument that Spain rewarded Osama bin Laden by rejecting Aznar, but I do not recommend you attempt to make it on the streets of Madrid. If you did, you would quickly be confronted by the truth. Aznar sealed his own fate by lying to the Spanish people.
Aznar lied on two major counts. First; In committing the Spanish to a war they did not want, taking the position that it was needed to fight terrorism. That is a lie. The minions of bin Laden will never be defeated by armies marching. They can only be defeated meticulous police work and by social and economic conditions that do not drive supporters to them. Second; In the aftermath of the bombings, Aznar attempted gain political advantage by blaming the Basque separatist group ETA. That was an insult to Spain.
The resulting verdict rendered at the polls was not an acceptance of bin Laden's madness, but rather a condemnation of Aznar's betrayal of Spain.
[b] The other side of the Atlantic [/b]
On the 10th day of September 2001, George W. Bush's poll numbers were better than they are today, but not much. The Rehnquist-ordained presidency was having difficulty impressing anyone but the Republican faithful. That was about to change; as the towers fell, George W. Bush's fortunes rose. Overnight his approval ratings doubled, and that was just the start. Over the past two and a half years since the attacks, Bush has used the fear generated by September 11th to effect a broad social and economic agenda that had little or nothing to do with national security.
[b] Attacks this summer [/b]
Wednesday's press briefing by John Ashcroft was a puzzlement. The presentation appeared more geared towards public relations than public safety. One had to wonder if Ashcroft was trying to stop terror, or cause it. Where was the information here? What purpose did this serve? For the record Mr. Ashcroft, if you have any real information about attacks on Americans, we would love to hear about them -- you know John, like the information that caused you stop flying commercial aircraft in the weeks prior to the attacks of September 11th? How do we qualify for those kind of warnings?
Ashcroft did take the opportunity to suggest that Madrid might set the stage for similar attacks in the U.S. prior to our November elections, saying, "Al-Qaida may perceive that a large-scale attack in the United States this summer or fall would lead to similar consequences." Al-Qaida may perceive that, but only if they can't read. The last Al-Qaida operation on U.S. soil did little to empower the opposition. On the contrary, it put the opposition on the endangered species list.
[b]The Baghdad trap [/b]
If you believe that bin Laden would like to sweep Bush from power, then you would have to wonder if an act of violence on U.S. soil would produce that. However if you are concerned that Baghdad is bin Laden's trap for Bush, then you might wonder if another attack on U.S. soil might better serve bin Laden's interest. It would, in greater likelihood, keep Bush in power and the U.S. Army in Baghdad. If that, in fact, is what bin Laden wants, then this could be a very dangerous summer indeed.
[b]Can bin Laden save Bush?[/b]
Bush is in trouble for sure. It would take something big to wash away the memory of the twisted freak-show at Abu Grahib, and the Chalabi betrayal has yet to really see the light of day. So the question hangs a bit. The answer may lie in another question: [i]Will the Americans accept the same lies that the Spanish would not?[/i]
[i][b]You can send comments to t r u t h o u t Executive Director Marc Ash at: director@mail.truthout.org[/b][/i] - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| The Return of the "Stab in the Back" ... |
| 05.28.04 (8:58 am) [edit] |
[b]Our greatest institution in addition to our ability to hold our elected representatives in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our government accountable (and the Judicial Branch can be held accountable through the impeachment process if they violate the law and ethics regulations ...) is our Freedom of the Press, as per the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... It is vital that our media and press [i]are not made the scape-goats [/i]for reporting the truth and the facts ... [/b]
"We the People" must be [i]cognizant of the difference [/i]between editorialists who by definition give their opinions (the right-wing dominates the airways with blow-hard neo-con neo-fascists like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Fox News, and other ideological demagogues ...) but [i]it is up to the intelligent citizen to differentiate [/i]editorialists and opinionated pundits from reporters ... Tragically, the corrupt and traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is attempting to[i] tyranically put down factual reporting on the ground [/i]in Iraq and is launching a neo-hitlerian, neo-orwellian campaign to squash Freedom of the Press in order to avoid having the truth and the facts reported to "We the People" ... Moreover, it is the right of editorialists of all persuasions to express their opinions (conservative, liberal, independent, etc.) and this is why newpapers separate their editorial sections from their reporting sections ... The heinous violation of our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights, must not be allowed to continue by the neo-con, neo-fascists who will do anything including destroy our nation in order to prop-up their corporate-owned Bush regime ...[b] Please[i] boycott those whom you hear blame the media and the press [/i]instead of the neo-con Bush regime for [i]its' own [/i]blatant and ugly failures, criminal corruptions and unconscionable incompetence that has led to their heinous [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the tragic sullying and tearing-down of America's values of democracy and freedom ...[/b]
[b]Read on ...[/b]
Take a look at the morning paper nowadays and it's clear that America has a lot of enemies. Two or three different brands of insurgency are operating in Iraq. North Korea has nuclear weapons and Pakistan is selling them. Our former best friend in Baghdad [Convicted embezzler, liar and neo-con con-man Ahmed Chalabi] turns out to be an American spy [Given top-secret U.S. intelligence by the Neo-Con Traitors in the Pentagon while spying for the Iranians]. Al Qaeda, of course, is still out there. All this notwithstanding, some commentators on the right seem to have decided that the real enemies aren't the ones they read about it the papers, but the people who write them.
Thus, Michael Barone opined http://www.townhall.com/colum... in his May 24 column "that today's press works to put the worst possible face on the war" in Iraq. The president's main task, then, is not to improve his war-fighting policies, but to "show, once again, that the media have got it wrong." Three days earlier, columnist Morton Kondracke warned http://www.realclearpolitics.... that "the media and politicians" are "in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq."
The argument here - that everything is fine except the media coverage - is absurd on its face. [u]The reporters in question are[/u], [i]unlike their pundit-detractors[/i], [u]on the ground in Iraq witnessing the situation for themselves[/u]. It is undeniable, moreover, that a growing chorus of former war supporters - liberals and conservatives alike - people like George Will, Tucker Carlson, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, and Bill Kristol have grown increasingly dubious that the president's policies will bring us to success. Is this band of ex-hawks really trying to bring America down, or are they sincerely worried that the president[i] is the one [/i]bringing us low? The doubters, moreover, are hardly to be found in the press alone. Three of the past four top generals in the U.S. Central Command have denounced http://www.washingtonmonthly.... the president's handling of the situation and the fourth is on the board of a company that depends on good will from the Pentagon to stay in business. These general are not die-hard liberals, or surly reporters, they're men who've spent years commanding all U.S. military forces in the region. Perhaps the argument can be made that the likes of Barone and Kondracke are more familiar with the difficulties of war-fighting ([i]sic[/i]) in the Middle East than are these men, but it's a case I've yet to see.
Nevertheless, the political purpose of the theory isn't hard to grasp. The groundwork is being laid for a new version of the "stab in the back" myth that helped destroy Weimar Germany. No matter how far south things go in Iraq,[i] the blame will be laid not at the feet of the president who initiated and conducted the war[/i], but rather on those who had the [u]temerity to note[/u] that it wasn't working. Rather than the critics having been proven right, or so the story goes, the critics are to blame for the failure of the very policy they were criticizing. It's an ugly tactic, and as you go down the journalistic food chain, it grows uglier still.
Former Gingrich aide, Tony Blankley, writing in the well-known bastion of journalistic "propriety" ([i]sic[/i]) that is [i]The Washington Times[/i], likewise took the press to task, calling it "heatbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory." Standard stuff, so far, but he went on to lament that nothing could be done about it . . . yet. "Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently -- although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America." Some might find it heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media allies [i]are more committed to his re-election [/i]than to the basic principles of American democracy.
On May 18, Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the proprietor of InstaPundit, the most popular of the hawkish weblogs, pushed http://www.instapundit.com/ar... this line of thought further down the road. "[b]Freedom of the press, as it exists today[/b]," he observed, "[b]is unlikely to survive if a majority - or even a large and angry minority - of Americans come to believe that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic[/b]." While Blankley worried that the courts might block his dreams of censorship, Reynolds doesn't even need a majority. How will this work? Mob violence, perhaps? Indeed, if his campaign http://www.instapundit.com/ar... to incite the defacement of [i]New York Times [/i]distribution boxes goes well, that might be the next logical step.
The image of an "unpatriotic" press hell-bent on wrecking Bush's war couldn't be further from the truth. Indeed, we got into this mess in no small part because of the [i]media's reluctance to apply a proper degree of scrutiny to the administration's claims [/i]about weapons of mass destruction and the likely postwar situation. With the original rationale for war long since having bitten the dust, we've now shifted to a campaign designed to bring American freedoms to Iraq. It's a campaign that will likely fail, not because it's being undermined by a hostile media, but because the president has steadfastly refused to commit the resources necessary to achieve his grandiose vision. As if the consequences of the fateful mismanagement of the war weren't bad enough, we now face that prospect of losing the very liberties we set out to spread.
[i][b]Matthew Yglesias is a staff writer at The American Prospect. Visit his Web site at www.matthewyglesias.com.[/b][/i] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Terror and Lies??? ... |
| 05.27.04 (3:07 pm) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt panic-striken Bush regime is[i] playing us [/i]all for suckers and idiots ... Listen folks, the Justice Department under John ("[i]Bible-thumper, but it would be nice if he knew something about the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights[/i]") Ashcroft didn't even let its own people, governmental departments and/or police agencies around the country know about their "threat of terrorism" ...[/b] Even folks within the Justice Department responsible for planning response programs & communications plans [i]found-out about it [/i]on TV ... [i]Jeez [/i]... There appears to be a bizarre [i]power-struggle going on [/i]between various elements within the [i]out-of-control [/i]Justice Department who don't agree on how to handle the "threat of terrorism" according to the [i]CBS Evening News [/i]... Meanwhile, "We the People" are victims of the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]corruption & incompetence ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
Crusader-in-Chief John Ashcroft seized control of George Bush’s re-election effort yesterday. Hoping that faked-up warnings of an imminent terror attack by Al Qaeda would rally support in Bush’s imploding polls, Ashcroft cited “credible intelligence from multiple sources” to warn that Al Qaeda was planning “to hit the United States hard” this summer.
Just in case we didn’t get the point, a Bush administration official quoted in the pro-Bush [i]Washington Times [/i], the Moonie News, said that the coming attack might even involve weapons of mass destruction. “A WMD attack remains on the table for the bad guys. Although Osama bin Laden has not used these attack modes yet, clearly he is interested in them.”
Really? Would those be the same “sources” who said that Iraq was an imminent threat? And that Iraq supported Al Qaeda? (False and false, of course.) [i]The Washington Times [/i]announced all this in a screaming headline with photos of seven supposed terrorists—somehow omitting that lawyer in Oregon, who is now collecting FBI apologies—but it received enormous coverage in sane newspapers, too.
Well God bless [i]The New York Times[/i]. Ashcroft’s baloney appeared nowhere on page one. Instead, it was relegated to page A14, in an article whose headline said: “[u]Some Question the Threat and Its Timing [/u].” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... Wow. Here’s an excerpt:
[i]There's no real new intelligence here, and a lot of this has been out there already,” said one administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There is really no significant change that would require us to change the alert level of the country.
The names of six of the seven were publicly circulated by the authorities months ago, and officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that they had no reason to believe that any of the suspects were in the United States.
Some intelligence officials said they were uncertain that the link between the fresh intelligence and the likelihood of another attack was as apparent as Mr. Ashcroft made it out to be.
Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Firefighters, told reporters in a conference call organized by Mr. Kerry’s campaign that he found the timing of the announcement to be “politically convenient at best” because it came after “we see the president’s approval ratings plummet.[/i]” - http://www.tompaine.com/artic...
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| America is Asking ... |
| 05.27.04 (7:42 am) [edit] |
"[i]An outraged president called yesterday for the immediate resignations of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the president in the White House. It was the shadow president, the one who won the popular vote[/i]." - Maureen Dowd, NY Times, http://nytimes.com/2004/05/27...
"[b]Bush speech alarms even war enthusiasts[/b]" is the lede http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin... in an article that begins: "Even the staunchest supporters of President Bush's Iraq enterprise were less than cheered by his speech to the nation Monday night outlining the path forward, some describing the administration as being in a state of panic." ... Clearly whether or not you are a "staunch" Conservative, a "flaming" Liberal, or a "middle-of-the-road" Independent-- increasingly the American people are (rightly) losing confidence in the corrupt Bush regime ... Bush has [i]badly mis-managed [/i]his illegal and immoral war-turned-bloody-guerril la-quagmire in Iraq; and what is worse, he [i]refuses to fire [/i]those responsible for the bloody fiasco and war crimes that have cost:
1. The [i]precious lives [/i]of over 800 U.S. Soldiers and over 4,000 U.S. Soldiers maimed, injured and/or scarred for life;
2. The[i] precious lives [/i]of between 11,000-15,000 Innocent Iraqi Civilians and tens of thousands of Innocent Iraqi Civilians who are maimed, injured and/or scarred for life as well; (No one knows the exact count because Bush's ugly U.S. Occupation doesn't consider Iraqi casualties worth counting ...)
3. Over $191 Billion squandered in bloody warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq that is a horrendous failure as well as a [i]corrupt swindle of the U.S. Taxpayer[/i] because much of our U.S. treasure is diverted into the gluttonous, corrupt pockets of Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.
The insane Bush Mantra of "[i]I'll 'Free' Y'all Iraqis, If I've Got To Kill Every Last One Of Y'all To Do So[/i]" is a heinous affrontery to civilization ... "We the People" should carefully consider the dire and disastrous consequences of the barbaric Bush's extravagant mistakes, costly blunders and deadly errors-- that will cost the U.S.A. for years to come in U.S. Lives, U.S. Taxpayer Dollars and U.S. Goodwill Around the World ...
[u][b]About What President Bush Failed to Say Monday Night[/b][/u] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
President Bush's speech at the Army War College on Monday night was the first in a series outlining the administration's plans for ongoing operations surrounding the June 30 transfer of power in Iraq. Many American newspapers noted that the speech failed to provide any new details and did little to satisfy the skepticism of the American public. The following is a sample of editorial opinion from across the country.
[b]Kennebec, Maine - [u]Maine Kennebec Journal[/u][/b], [i][b]May 26, 2004[/b][/i]
"President Bush failed to give the nation what it was seeking Monday night.
"His speech, promoted in advance as one that would spell out the future of the United States involvement in Iraq, did not even come close to providing answers to the complex questions about this war. Instead of details, the president offered platitudes about staying the course.
"Iraq might have a new government on June 30, but nothing will change for Americans.
"'History is moving, and it will tend toward hope or tend toward tragedy,' Bush said. 'We will persevere and defeat this enemy and hold this hard won ground for the realm of liberty.'"
"Fine-sounding words, indeed. But they offer no answers."
[b]St. Petersburg, Fla. – [u]St. Petersburg Times[/u][/b], [i][b]May 26, 2004[/b][/i]
"President Bush's five-point plan for bringing self-rule to Iraq was too vague and unrealistic to reassure Americans and win new international support.
"President Bush disappointed Americans who had hoped that his Monday night address at the Army War College would lay out a concrete and pragmatic plan for ending the U.S. military occupation in Iraq. Instead, the president's five-point plan sounded more like a five-point wish list.
"Beyond his troubling lack of specifics, the president still shows no willingness to acknowledge the grievous failures of the past year and demand accountability from those responsible.
"Every sane American supports the president's stated goal of building 'a free and self-governing Iraq" and bolstering "the security of America and the civilized world.' But this administration's policies have brought chaos to Iraq and left our country more isolated and more vulnerable.
"The president plans to deliver several more speeches between now and June 30. Americans deserve to hear a more realistic plan for reversing those policy failures than they heard Monday night."
[b]Louisville, Kentucky - [u]Louisville Courier Journal[/u][/b], [i][b]May 26, 2004[/b][/i]
"President Bush's best chance to achieve a bearable outcome in Iraq rests on his willingness to acknowledge that terrible mistakes have been made and to present a coherent strategy to prevent a disintegrating mess from collapsing into utter disaster. Unfortunately, as he demonstrated again Monday night in a televised speech, he seems incapable of doing either.
"The President merely outlined familiar steps that his administration's timetable for Iraq contemplates, with inadequate indication of how they might successfully be accomplished.
"Meanwhile, the President's aversion to admitting error leaves him unable to reconcile the daunting challenges in Iraq with his ludicrously premature declaration of victory a year ago. He speaks of terrorists and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, without noting the deep religious and ethnic cleavages that pose a greater threat of civil war.
"He insists Iraq must not become a base for terrorism, without acknowledging that the terrorists arrived after the American invasion, not before.
"The President plans five more speeches on Iraq before June 30. He will achieve neither the international cooperation nor the domestic support he needs if he does not drop the pretenses and speak truth."
[b]Albany, New York – [u]Albany Times Union[/u][/b], [i][b]May 26, 2004[/b][/i]
"There are increasing signs that the Bush administration has finally realized it must reassess its policies in Iraq and take prompt corrective action. But the President's speech, meant to restore public confidence in his handling of Iraq, gave no indication that he has a specific plan of action.
"For all of his expressed determination to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush failed to answer the questions that are troubling many Americans on his ability to lead.
"[He also] leaves unanswered the question of how a new Iraqi government can root out the terrorists who have now flocked to that country to kill Americans. Will that require a long-term American military presence, then? Or is there an exit strategy? If so, what ends must be accomplished before it can take effect?
"Mr. Bush's speech was the first in a series of weekly addresses on Iraq. Perhaps in time he will answer all questions that he avoided Monday. He should. Time is wasting."
[b]Norfolk, Va. - [u]The Virginian-Pilot[/u][/b], [i][b]May 26, 2004[/b][/i]
"Americans are steadily losing faith in President Bush's stewardship of the war in Iraq.
"If his speech to the U.S. Army War College was meant to rally Americans and bolster their faith, then it was a disappointment.… the speech contained little of substance to reassure jittery Americans.
"If the Army War College speech is a preview of what's to come in the five weeks ahead, then it appears the president intends to say the same things as before, only more frequently.
"It's becoming ever more apparent that America, the United Kingdom and a handful of other nations with nominal troop contingents in Iraq can't do the job by themselves. The U.S. needs help and the president should ask for it."
[b]Minneapolis, Minn. - [u]Minneapolis Star-Tribune[/u][/b], [i][b]May 25, 2004[/b][/i]
"Let's be clear at the outset: President Bush's much-anticipated speech Monday night at the Army War College in Pennsylvania wasn't about Iraq. It was about the general election on Nov. 2…
"Throughout his speech, he continued his effort to wrap the war in Iraq in the war on terror. At this late date, just five weeks from the return of some sovereignty to Iraq, Bush refuses to acknowledge what is plain: The war in Iraq had no relationship to the war on terror; it was a distraction from the essential war on Al-Qaida and other terrorists who wish America harm.
"Bush spoke also of returning full sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30. He spoke of five steps necessary to make that sovereignty meaningful, but none of it is new; all of it has been known for months.
"The Bush team has screwed up from the get-go in Iraq, and no amount of feel-good spin will change that."
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| Ignoring the Crisis ... |
| 05.26.04 (3:14 pm) [edit] |
"[i]We've passed what's called Health Savings Accounts...It's a good way to help control costs[/i]." – President Bush, 5/25/04, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
[i][b]VERSUS[/b][/i]
"[i]Sharply higher health insurance deductibles may hit workers in the next two years as employers embrace newly created tax-free Health Savings Accounts[/i]." – USA Today, 4/25/04, http://www.usatoday.com/money...
[b]"We the People" surely must not idly sit by and watch the corrupt and traitorous Bush regime squander $200 Billion with no end in sight ([i]in wanton waste of US lives & treasure[/i]) on illegal and immoral warfare to enrich their corporate pimps (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) ... while over 45 million of our citizens lack health care coverage-- with millions of people living in miserable pain and ill unable to get care-- and, with over 18,000 Americans dying each year because they can't get care ... And, the situation is growing worse because this callous and greedy Bush regime is[i] ignoring the crisis [/i][u]here at home[/u] ...[/b]
[b]U.S. HEALTH CARE: IGNORING THE CRISIS [/b]- http://www.americanprogress.o...
With four million more Americans losing their health insurance since 2001, President Bush yesterday promoted a modest proposal to increase funding for community health centers. He gave his speech in Ohio, where more than one million people (13 percent of the state's population) are uninsured. Nationally, the numbers are even worse – a recent report found that more than 74 million Americans were forced to go without health care coverage at some point between 2001-2002. While the president billed the $1.8 billion proposal as a major step in addressing this health care crisis, he did not mention that the increase is more than offset by billions of dollars in other health care cuts he is proposing. For instance, Families USA notes the President's latest budget would reduce Medicaid funding "by nearly $1 billion in 2005 and by nearly $16 billion" over the next ten years, even as states have been forced to dramatically reduce their low-income health insurance programs because of budget shortfalls. Similarly, the American Association of Family Physicians points out the president's budget also calls for $1.1 billion in cuts to non-Medicare/Medicaid programs, such as rural health programs and grants for the uninsured.
[b]PROPOSALS THAT EITHER MAKE THINGS WORSE OR DO NOTHING:[/b] In his speech yesterday, the president trumpeted his "health savings account" proposal, claiming the accounts are "aimed at helping to control medical costs" for average workers. But because the accounts only apply when workers have high-deductible health insurance plans, they essentially encourage employers to raise their deductibles and premiums. As USA Today notes, "widespread adoption of the plans could drive up the annual deductible paid by workers." The President also claimed new "drug discount cards will allow seniors to save between 15 percent and 25 percent off of brand-name medicines." But the drug cards do not guarantee any savings, as they allow drug companies to raise prices at any moment, while locking seniors into the card they choose. And as the WP notes, many Internet pharmacies already sell medicines at lower prices than would be offered by the drug cards. Additionally, the massive increase in prescription drug prices is now threatening to negate any positive effects of the drug cards. [i]American Progress [/i]columnists Judith Lichtman and Alice Weiss argue the Bush plan is a flawed approach to helping the uninsured.
[b]STUDIES – MIDDLE CLASS GETTING SQUEEZED:[/b] A series of studies show how the Bush administration's inaction on prescription drug and health care costs is now putting the squeeze on the middle class as never before. Families USA and AARP yesterday each released reports showing "prices for name-brand medicines most commonly prescribed for seniors have risen at least three times faster than inflation in the last four years." Late last year, Business Week calculated that overall health spending is rising at about 7.3% a year, with the average premium for a family health insurance policy now at $9,086 per year – 21% of the median household income. In all, Americans pay the highest prices on the planet for prescription drugs and spend the most per-capita on health care, yet have the largest amount of uninsured citizens in the industrialized world.
[b]CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS WELL SPENT:[/b] Why would the Bush administration continue to negate health care issues when more and more Americans are being squeezed by health care costs? Because the health care industry that bankrolls the Bush campaign is making out like bandits. A recent study found that HMO's profits increased 52% last year – raking in an extra $6.7 billion from American consumers. Meanwhile, according to the administration's own cost estimates, these insurers stand to gain an additional $46 billion from the new Medicare law over the next decade. These are the same companies that gave at least $10 million to President Bush and his allies in Congress, http://www.opensecrets.org/in... and who have seven former or current executives in the President's "Pioneer" club (those who gave him $100,000 or more http://www.whitehouseforsale.... ).
[b]WHITE HOUSE INACTION ON AIDS DRUG CRISIS:[/b] Consumer groups are demanding action from the Bush administration after Abbott Laboratories announced a massive increase in the price of a key AIDS drug developed, in part, at U.S. taxpayer expense. Abbott, which is a major contributor to President Bush and which has financial ties to HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, said it was raising the price of Norvir by 400%. Drug companies regularly argue they need to charge exorbitant prices to pay for research and development, and recover losses incurred when they explore new drugs that never come to fruition. But, as Abbott itself admitted in its patent application, Norvir was originally developed with $3.2 million in taxpayer-funded NIH grants, meaning taxpayers took the original risk, yet are now being fleeced with exorbitant prices. The non-profit consumer group Essential Inventions is now asking the NIH and the Bush administration to invoke the bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act, which permits other companies to produce drugs developed at taxpayer expense if the original company (Abbott) misuses its patent. But the drug industry is one of President Bush's largest campaign contributors, and the administration has appointed former drug industry officials to key government positions. That means, as the WSJ reports, "there is little indication http://lists.essential.org/pi... the Bush administration is inclined to [intervene and] take a step that would be anathema not only to Abbott, but to the entire pharmaceutical industry."
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| Will Bush Stage A Terrorist Attack To Terrify Americans & Take-Over In A Coup d'Etat??? |
| 05.26.04 (2:49 pm) [edit] |
[b]Don't be [i]surprised [/i]if the neo-con neo-fascists in the Bush regime[i] stage [/i]a terrorist attack upon America ([i]because experts claim that Americans would "rally around the president" out of fear [/i]...) ... [/b]Bush has a sordid history of telling squalid lies, deceptions and falsehoods that place the United States of America in dire danger ... Bush did not protect America in September 2001, when his approval ratings were low and he was facing a crisis with the Enron / Oil Rape by Cheney who illegally price-gouged the American people in the summer of 2001 ... Don't forget that Bush's popularity ratings jumped in the aftermath of 9/11 because Americans were scared and wanted to believe that a "father-figure" could rescue and protect our nation ... It was illusory on our part to place trust in Bush who doesn't deserve it, and wantonly squandered it ...
Bush traitorously took the nation to war in Iraq by misleading the American people about phony WMDs posing a so-called "imminent threat" to our national security; phony non-existent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein; and false accusations that Iraq was involved in terrorism-- when in fact, his crooked-cronies, the Saudi Royal Family were involved in 9/11 instead (Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11) ...
Bush [i]cannot[/i] be trusted ... Bush is a dangerously stupid, corrupt and incompetent president-- a deadly combination of moral depravity and intellectual vacuity ...
"We the People" must demand that the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] be[i] impeached [/i]from office ... The alternative is that we face the[i] end [/i]of our Republic ...
Consider "[b]'Those missing Taguba pages: More dirty tricks in TortureGate'[/b]" by[i] Kurt Nimmo [/i]on http://www.smirkingchimp.com/... :
It sure is curious how documents entering the Bush Machine exit with blank pages. It happened with Iraq's 11,800-page dossier on weapons and now it has happened again with the report on prison abuse produced by Major General Antonio M. Taguba.
"The copy [the Senate Armed Services Committee] got after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's testimony on May 7 was a thick document with 106 annexes, and it was quickly arranged into separate binders. Only later did the committee stack up all the pages, compare them with a ream of 6,000 blank pages and decide that at least 2,000 pages were missing," reports Time Magazine.
If indeed the Bushites filched the pages it would hardly be surprising or unusual. This is a criminal administration at ease with deception and thievery. Lies, dirty tricks, and theft are their modus operandi -- from the 2000 election onward.
Obviously, the pages in question are not missing because they contain embarrassing nudie shots of the Bush twins. The pages are missing because there is ample evidence of Bush administration complicity in the torture of Iraqi detainees.
"Interviews and government documents obtained by The New Yorker and Newsweek show that the very highest levels of the Bush administration -- including President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld -- set up programs designed to extract more information out of detainees by circumventing international laws banning torture. Moreover, they were fully conscious that in doing so they were violating US and international law and leaving themselves open to prosecution for war crimes," writes Alex Lefebvre.
Seymour Hersh's article The Gray Zone reveals how the Bushites set up torture mills after September 11, 2001. From the very outset of the so-called war on terror the Bush administration and the Pentagon neocons have conspired to violate international law.
"If the government is not handed over to the Iraqis, if Osama Bin Laden is not arrested and if torture photos keep coming in, Bush will lose the election," predicts Joseph Napolitan, a former political adviser to John F. Kennedy.
Napolitan would be correct under normal conditions. However, since Bush stole the 2000 election, conditions have been anything but normal. Is it outrageous to believe Bush will steal it again or contrive a situation where the American people believe they have no choice but to hand him the election? Bush's only option may be to demand a rally.
"Even though Bush II will lose the popular vote in the US presidential election of 2004, his electoral college victory seems assured. With Republican party governors firmly in charge of Florida, California, Texas and New York, and supported by a whopping Bush campaign war chest approaching $200 million, dubious electronic voting schemes courtesy of Diebold, Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors (http://www.blackboxvoting.com...), it seems certain that Bush will make it back to the Oval Office through the back door that is the Electoral College," writes John Stanton. "And if not the Electoral College then by benefit of a rebel attack on US soil which kills thousands of Americans and leads to the suspension of the US Constitution."
Stanton's mention of a "rebel attack" on the US during or prior to the election is not the fictional meandering of a conspiracy theorist. Condi Rice talked about just such a possibility recently. "I think that we do have to take very seriously the thought that the terrorists might have learned, we hope, the wrong lesson from Spain," Rice told Fox News Sunday. And then there is the "nightmare scenario" floated by the White House. "We assume an attack will happen leading up to the election," a senior official told US News & World Report.
David Rothkopf, former Clintonite, made similar observations. "Recently, I co-chaired a meeting hosted by CNBC of more than 200 senior business and government executives, many of whom are specialists in security and terrorism related issues," Rothkopf wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece. "Almost three-quarters of them said it was likely the United States would see a major terrorist strike before the end of 2004."
Bush and Crew believe the Taguba report is little more than a troublesome public relations problem. It will not be allowed to get in the way of the neocon plan to attack the Arab Middle East and cripple Islam. Four more years will give the Pentagon neocons time to set up bases in Iraq --- these "enduring camps" are in the process of construction (as Christine Spolar wrote the Chicago Tribune) -- and devise pretexts to invade Syria and Iran.
"Pentagon hardliners are drawing up plans to invade Iran once Iraq and its oil are 'liberated.' They hope civil war will erupt in Iran, which is riven by bitterly hostile factions, after which a . regime will take power. If this does not occur, then Iraq-based U.S. forces will be ideally positioned to attack Iran. Or, they could just as well move west and invade Syria, another of Israel's most bitter enemies," Eric Margolis wrote in November, 2002. "Israel's Likudniks thirst for revenge against Syria -- and also Iran -- for supporting Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, which drove Israeli forces from Lebanon."
None of this should be particularly surprising. It's all spelled out in A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written by Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, Jonathan Torop, David Wurmser and Meyrav Wurmser way back in 1996 for then-incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "It provides an early window into some of the current administration's thinking. For one, it predicted that toppling the Hussein regime could be the beginning of a larger rollback of autocratic, terrorist-supporting states such as Syria and Iran, blamed for supporting Hezbollah guerrillas operating in southern Lebanon and accused of terrorism against Israel and the United States," reported the Boston Globe last August.
But it's not simply Hezbollah or the mullahs in Iran. It's the whole neoliberal global game plan -- or rather the neocon take on it -- that's at stake if Bush is shown the door in November.
Team Bush will do whatever it takes to get Dubya reinstalled in the White House, even if it means the installation process -- some of us still refer to it as democracy -- is circumvented entirely. Treason concerns them little.
As Joe Nichols writes in Asia Times Online, the central issues beyond Israeli dominance in the Middle East are "oil, the prospects for privatizing the region, derailing any possibilities for a common currency among Arab nations, the position of the dollar in petroleum markets and for the central reserves in Asia, and the balance of trade between the US and the nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries." These issues are so important to our rulers they will not allow an election to get in the way.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon rolled out glib excuses for the crucial pages missing from the Taguba report. "If there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight," explained Pentagon spokesman Larry Dirita.
Sure it was, Larry. And so was the bogus report that Saddam had acquired uranium from Niger, a crudely fabricated lie Bush pawned off on the United Nations and the world in order to invade Iraq and kill 10,000 innocent civilians. Bush has amassed a pile of lies as of yet unanswered for -- the aluminum tubes, the WMD trailers, the fictious links between al-Qaeda and Saddam, misrepresentations concerning weapons inspections and the International Atomic Energy report alleging that Iraq was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon. All clear-cut lies. Is there any reason to believe the curious disappearance of pages from the Taguba will be any different? Is it foolish to believe the election is so hallowed Karl Rove and his dirty tricksters will not subvert it, especially now that Bush is running neck and neck with that other neolib, John Kerry?
Is it possible the Bush neocons in the Pentagon will stage a terrorist attack as the election approaches, or take advantage of a terrorist "event" in order to steal the election?
Considering the pathological lies and dirty tricks of this administration -- lies and dirty tricks resulting in war crimes and arrogant disregard for international law -- a "nightmare scenario" cannot be ruled out.
In fact, as continuous scandals and evidence of misdeeds pile up on Bush's doorstep -- and as an inevitable result he falls behind in the polls -- the American people should expect nothing less than dirty tricks.
Question is, will they sheepishly accept it?
Or will enough finally be enough?
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| Bush Promises the "Appearance" of Chaos??? ... Jeez ... |
| 05.26.04 (9:05 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" must be in a[i] nightmarish sleep-walking daze[/i] like the Germans were in the 1930s when Hitler led them down a path of chaos and destruction ...[/b]
Bush promises the "appearance of chaos" ... [i]because[/i] his panic-striken incompetent and blood-thirsty regime[i] [u]is[/u][/i] in chaos ...
Perhaps Bush should promise the "appearance of corruption" ... [i]because[/i] it is obvious that his traitorous regime [i][u]is[/u][/i] corrupt ...
Perhaps[i] too [/i]Bush should promise the "appearance of insane neo-con, neo-fascist lunacy" ... [i]because[/i] his Un-American regime[i] [u]is[/u] [/i]comprised of neo-con thugs & neo-fascist goons who are undermining our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights, and waging illegal and immoral warfare for war-profiteering and at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Neo-Nazi Likud Party ... [i]Jeez [/i]...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
There was a moment in Bush's speech to the nation on May 24 when he appeared lost, and his eyes bugged out, and he paused. He simply did not know how to pronounce the name of the Iraqi prison first made notorious by Saddam's brutality and now made further notorious by the torture some U.S. soldiers committed there.
It's remarkable that the President didn't know how to pronounce Abu Ghraib (he tried three different pronunciations in three different sentences, including "Abu Grump"). This has only been the single biggest scandal of his Administration.
He appeared like an unprepared high school actor who forgot his lines in the class play. Even after countless rehearsal he couldn't get it right.
On the substance of the scandal, all he said was that it amounted to "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values."
But these "few American troops" weren't the only ones.
Bush did not mention White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who sent out a memo after September 11 that said the war on terrorism "renders obsolete" the "strict limitation on questioning of prisoners" that the Geneva Conventions require. In that memo, Gonzales referred to some of the Geneva protections as "quaint."
Bush did not mention Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted that the Taliban in Afghanistan did not merit the protection of the Geneva Conventions. According to Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, Rumsfeld gave these interrogators a free hand in Afghanistan and then sent them to Iraq to pry out information from the detainees there.
Bush did not mention his own culpability for unleashing the CIA. "The President has given the agency the green light to do whatever is necessary," one senior official told Bob Woodward in a Washington Post article on October 21, 2001. "The gloves are off."
This scandal is not about a few sadistic soldiers.
Something much more disturbing, something much more systemic, is going on, but Bush did not even come close to describing the magnitude of the problem, much less own any responsibility for it.
Anyone looking for Bush to be contrite, or to come clean, or to fire Rumsfeld was out of luck.
What you found instead was Bush's fusing of the Iraq War yet again with the war against Al Qaeda. "We did not seek this war on terror, but this is the world as we find it," Bush said.
But Bush certainly did seek the war against Iraq, which--as Richard Clarke and Anthony Zinni and many others have noted--was unconnected to the war on terror and actually exacerbated it.
No matter. For Bush, it's all just a matter of playing fill-in-the-blanks for the names of the bad guys.
Forget about Saddam. Now the problem is "an Al Qaeda associate named Zarqawi" and "a young radical cleric [Muqtada al-Sadr] who commands an illegal militia."
Ironically, by waging this unnecessary and illegal war, Bush may have created an Al Qaeda threat in Iraq where none existed before.
It's a threat he feeds off of.
Bush invoked "the flames of September 11," and he took pains to mention that Americans have "learned new terms, like 'orange alert' and 'ricin' and 'dirty bomb.' "
He seems to like nothing more than to remind Americans of how vulnerable we are so that we'll trust him to protect us.
He even alluded to the decapitation of Nicholas Berg, though Berg's family blames Bush for his death.
One particularly alarming moment in Bush's speech came when he was boasting that the American military showed restraint in Fallujah, but then suggested that this might not last forever. "In the city of Fallujah . . . American soldiers and Marines could have used overwhelming force" but decided not to because it could "alienate the local population and increase support for the insurgency," Bush said. But he added, "We will do all that is necessary--by measured force or overwhelming force--to achieve a stable Iraq."
The itch to use overwhelming force has been with Bush for a long time. Here are his words from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2000: "A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world . . . the victory must be overwhelming."
A couple of times Bush promised to transfer "full" sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30, which is different from the "limited sovereignty" that some of the members of his Administration had been talking about.
But how "full" will that sovereignty be?
Unlike Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said that if the new Iraqi government wants the U.S. troops to leave then they'll leave, Bush said, "After June 30th, American and other forces will still have important duties. American military forces in Iraq will cooperate under American command as part of a multinational force authorized by the United Nations." And Bush said, "We'll maintain our troop level at the current 138,000 as long as necessary," hinting that the number may even rise.
What kind of sovereignty is it that has a massive foreign army in its midst?
And what kind of sovereignty is it that has to accept the new currency that Bush's viceroy Paul Bremer introduced?
And what kind of sovereignty is it that has to accept the privatization of the economy that Bush insisted upon? Bush lauded the Iraqi Governing Council for approving a law Washington drafted "that opens the country to foreign investment for the first time in decades." This law allows for 100 percent repatriation of profits: a dream come true for U.S. corporations.
Bush said "the U.S. occupation will end" on June 30--but it will still be a de facto U.S. occupation.
He played up the prospects of the interim government that U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is feverishly trying to cobble together.
But Bush gave no reason why the turnover of power will go smoothly. Quite the contrary: He said there will be more violence before and after the turnover. And he provided no realistic basis for expecting that the resistance to the U.S. occupation will fade.
Instead, he tried to foreshadow troubles to come. "There are difficult days ahead, and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic," he said.
That may be the understatement of the year. - http://www.progressive.org/we...
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| Neo-Con Traitors: Pentagon Spies Betraying the U.S.A.??? |
| 05.26.04 (8:14 am) [edit] |
[b]Neo-con traitors in the corrupt Bush regime turning over [i]top-secret U.S. government information [/i]to Chalabi [i]and/or [/i]the Iranians??? ... [/b]It is already becoming evident that some like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams, Bolton will [i]lie, cheat, steal & commit war crimes [/i]on behalf of Israel and have [i]no loyalty whatsoever[/i] to the United States of America ... The fact that the former are able to so easily [i]dupe[/i] the neo-crooks Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Rove demonstrates that the latter are [i]unfit to serve[/i] in government and the entire cabal should be shipped off to the Hague to be tried for heinous[i] Crimes Against Humanity [/i]...
"We the People" should demand that a[i] full blown investigation [/i]into the spying by the neo-cons who have betrayed our nation commence[i] immediately [/i]... Contact Congress on http://www.congress.org ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
The fallout from the fall of Ahmad Chalabi looks like it might splash all over the Pentacons—the neocon hardliners in the Pentagon who've backed Chalabi since the '90s. And Chalabi's backers are worried. Here's today's [i]Wall Street Journal [/i]editorial, citing a report in [i]The New York Times [/i]that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating Pentagon officials:
[i]Critics of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy are using the raid and the leaks as an excuse for demanding a purge of anyone who ever supported Mr. Chalabi. A Monday piece in The New York Times , based on more anonymous leaks, noted that 'intelligence officials' are investigating a handful of officials in Washington and Iraq who dealt regularly with Mr. Chalabi.' Are they Iranian agents, too[/i]?
Maybe, and maybe not. But next, here's a report from [i]The Guardian[/i] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Ira...,2763,1224075,00.html :
[i]An intelligence source in Washington said the CIA confirmed its long-held suspicions when it discovered that a piece of information from an electronic communications intercept by the National Security Agency had ended up in Iranian hands. The information was so sensitive that its circulation had been restricted to a handful of officials.
"This was 'sensitive compartmented information'—SCI—and it was tracked right back to the Iranians through Aras Habib," the intelligence source said.
The DIA is also reported to have launched its own inquiry into the INC-Iran link.
An intelligence source in Washington said the FBI investigation into the affair would begin with Mr. Chalabi's "handlers" in the Pentagon, who include William Luti, the former head of the office of special plans, and his immediate superior, Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy. There is no evidence that they were the source of the leaks. Other INC supporters at the Pentagon may have given away classified information in an attempt to give Mr. Chalabi an advantage in the struggle for power surrounding the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30[/i].
Next is this, from UPI yesterday, reporting that the FBI is investigating a Pentagon official and a former Pentagon official for having passed classified info to Chalabi. Though not named, the two officials in the UPI story are, according to my sources, Harold Rhode, an official in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, and Michael Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute. Reports UPI:
[i]Officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority are suspected of having leaked sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, which passed them on to the government of Iran, according to federal law enforcement officials and serving and former U.S. intelligence officials.
These sources also acknowledged that the Bush administration has been the victim of an enormous Iran-perpetrated intelligence fraud that worked to provoke a U.S. military invasion of Iraq in order to defeat Iran's bitter, long-time enemy, a campaign of deception which one U.S. source called "positively a most brilliant and extraordinarily successful operation."
This source said that some of the intercepts are believed to have been given to Chalabi by two U.S. officials of the Coalition Provision Authority, both of whom are not named here because UPI could not reach them for comment.
Other targets of the probe include senior and other Pentagon officials who dealt with Chalabi on a regular basis, this source said[/i].
One former CPA official has returned to the United States and is employed at the American Enterprise Institute, the former very senior official said, a fact which FBI sources confirmed without additional comment.
When I asked Rubin if the story was accurate, he replied with the three-word message: "It is untrue." [Rubin is [i]not[/i] a source to be believed ...]
It's not clear where all this might lead. Certainly, the CIA is a sworn enemy of Chalabi, and it has been for many years. And certainly, Chalabi's enemies would love to use the scandal over Chalabi's Iran connections to tarnish his Pentacon allies. But it seems to me unlikely that they would risk a formal investigation unless they had some concrete evidence to support what otherwise would be a witch hunt.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Dreyfuss Report, TomPaine.com, http://www.tompaine.com/artic...
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| Bush's Lack of Credibility: The Reality Gap in Iraq ... |
| 05.25.04 (4:23 pm) [edit] |
"[i]America continues to fight and win the war on terror[/i]." - President Bush, 4/26/03, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
[i][b]VERSUS[/b][/i]
"[i]Al-Qaeda remains a viable and effective 'network of networks' and has been galvanized by the war in Iraq...the group is present in more than 60 countries and has '18,000 potential terrorists at large[/i].'" - International Institute for Strategic Studies, 5/25/04, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi...
[b]"We the People" must demand a serious[i] course correction [/i] to put an end to the bloodshed; chaotic fiasco; and the tyranny of US Occupation in Iraq, instead of Bush's insane "stay the course" lunacy ([i]Bush's Mantra: "I'm dumb and so I'll drive us off a cliff, but I can claim to be so-called "decisive" [/i]...) ... [/b]We are witness to the tragic massacre of U.S. Soldiers & Innocent Iraqi Civilians[i] on a daily basis with no end in sight [/i]... The mediocrity Bush and his neo-con cabal of war criminals are "[i]in over the heads[/i]" without a clue what to do and are [i]operating in panic mode[/i], in [i]'make-it-up-as-you-go- along' mode[/i], etc.-- so they continue their heinous neo-orwellian spins, lies and propagating falsehoods [i]on a daily basis with no end in sight[/i] ... Let "We the People" bring this catastrophe to an end and demand the [i]impeachment[/i] by Congress http://www.congress.org of the corrupt, traitorous Bush regime ...
[b]Consider ...[/b]
Facing polls which show Americans have lost confidence in his ability http://www.washingtonpost.com... to manage the crisis in Iraq, President Bush delivered the first in a series of speeches to respond to growing criticism. He offered not one new policy proposal. One administration official acknowledged the growing credibility gap on Iraq, saying the president's speech was needed to dispel "this idea that we don't know what we're doing." But the post-speech headlines reflected just how far the president was from laying out a clear vision: Newsday headlined, "Bush: More of the Same," http://www.newsday.com/news/o...,0,7376782.story?coll=ny-editorials- headlines the Boston Globe pointed out "Bush's Reality Gap" http://www.boston.com/news/gl... and the Houston Chronicle noted "Iraqi Leaders Say They're Dissatisfied With Post-Occupation Plan." http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/s... Bush "did not provide the midcourse correction that even some Republicans had called for in the face of increasingly macabre violence." He also did not "try to answer some of the looming questions that have triggered growing skepticism and anxiety at home and abroad about the final U.S. costs, the final length of stay for U.S. troops, or what the terms will be for a final U.S. exit from Iraq." Instead, he "basically repackaged stalled U.S. policy as a five-step plan." While President Bush does not have a plan for Iraq, American Progress does: see our Strategy for Progress in Iraq http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b]UNANSWERED – HOW ARE WE GOING TO PAY FOR THIS?: [/b]With $166 billion already spent, the speech provided no answers about how much the war will ultimately cost Americans. As senior appropriator Rep. David Obey (D-WI) noted, by the end of this year, "we will have spent on Iraq more than the United States spent on World War I, and that's after it's adjusted for inflation." Instead of fessing up to this reality, the president trumpeted the fact that Iraqi oil revenues had reached $6 billion, expecting Americans to forget that before the war, the administration told Congress Iraq's oil revenues would bring in "between $50 and $100 billion" in the first two to three years, and that Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction." The president also provided no justification for why he is pushing $1 trillion in new tax cuts at the same time he wants Congress to increase the national debt to finance more spending on the war. According to the LA Times' Ron Brownstein, the Bush cut-taxes-and-war-spend policy is the first of its kind in American history: every president since Lincoln who faced a major war asked the country to sacrifice by paying more taxes. Brownstein asks: "If Iraq is important enough to bleed for, isn't it important enough to pay for?"
[b]UNANSWERED – WHAT ARE THE POLICY CHANGES AT PRISONS?: [/b]Addressing the burgeoning prison abuse scandal, the president said the eventual replacement of the Abu Ghraib prison with a new, U.S.-funded maximum security prison would put the entire controversy to rest. Ignoring the fact that American maximum security prisons are renowned for their poor conditions, the proposal did not modify administration-approved policies that may have led to the Abu Ghraib abuses in the first place. Nor did Bush follow through on pledges to enforce "personal responsibility" and fire senior Pentagon officials. As the NYT reported, in December the administration sent a letter to the Red Cross emphasizing the "military necessity" of isolating and mistreating some inmates at the prison for interrogation. Similarly, Newsweek reported that "President Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door" to the abuse. For a plan to restore American credibility in the wake of the prison scandal check out this American Progress report http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b]UNANSWERED – HOW TO DEAL WITH THE CREDIBILITY GAP IN IRAQ?: [/b]The president claimed the coalition "has a clear goal, understood by all" – an implication that the U.S. has broad support among the Iraqi people. But Slate's William Saletan points out, even before the prison scandal, "the most reliable Iraqi poll http://www.reuters.co.uk/news...§ion=news (to which his own Coalition Provisional Authority submitted questions) found that most Iraqis want coalition soldiers to get out." USA Today confirms, "American credibility in Iraq may be at its lowest point since the war began," with "much of the trust desired and needed for a smooth transition" being "replaced by cynicism." According to a nationwide poll by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, whereas six months ago only 1% of Iraqis supported cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his insurgency against American troops, 68% now say they support him.
[b]UNANSWERED – WHO IS GOING TO SECURE AND RUN IRAQ?: [/b]The President promised that on June 30, "the occupation will end, and Iraqis will govern their own affairs" – but offered no details as to whom the U.S. would transfer power, and did not mention that there would be "severe limits" on the new government's sovereignty, including "no authority to enact new laws." He also said that "a force of 260,000 Iraqi soldiers, police, and other security personnel" will be able to secure the country – ignoring the fact that these same forces "are suffering from inadequate training, poor pay, equipment shortages and a serious lack of public support." He said that "we want the Iraqi people to know that we trust their growing [security] capabilities" – but failed to mention that American forces will continue to assume full responsibility and that Iraqi generals will be forced to serve under an American general.
[b]UNANSWERED – HOW WILL WE GET INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT?: [/b]One of the key points in the president's speech was his promise to "encourage more international support" and attract more international military help. But only moments after that promise, he tried to revise history, claiming "at every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations to confront Saddam Hussein." The reality is, after promising to hold a U.N. vote on military action against Iraq, he reversed himself, and refused to hold a vote. Now the White House is circulating a new U.N. resolution that was "disappointingly sketchy" on how to internationalize the military operation, and would fail to "commit the Security Council to do anything in particular." While it might be easier to secure more multinational forces by giving the U.N. more control in decisions, that "possibility was ruled out" by the Bush Administration. You can find complete American Progress coverage on Iraq here http://www.americanprogress.o... . - http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Bush's Neo-Con Scam: You Call This "Sovereignty"??? ... |
| 05.25.04 (3:02 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" are taken for imbecilic idiots, fools and buffoons by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]who are laughing at us ("[i]all the way to the bank[/i]") and are vile traitors that deserve to be[i] impeached [/i]and tried at the Hague for[i] Crimes Against Humanity [/i]...[/b]
Last night's neo-con scam delivered by the brain-dead Bush who simply reads ([i]badly[/i]) Cheney-Rice-and-Rove's neo-con, neo-fascist screed, was a disgraceful Un-American display of arrogance, hypocrisy and dishonest rhetoric ... How many more lies, deceptions and falsehoods are we prepared to [i]put-up with[/i]???
[b]Read on ...[/b]
As violence continued in Iraq http://sg.news.yahoo.com/0405... , President Bush addressed the nation Monday night http://antiwar.com/news/?arti... about his plans for the June 30 "transfer of power." Bush offered preliminary details about Iraq’s forthcoming sovereignty http://www.whitehouse.gov/new... .
Iraqi "sovereignty" will apparently include a large U.S. military and advisory presence for the indefinite future. No date is set for coalition troops to leave Iraq http://www.reuters.com/newsAr... .
Speaking before an audience at the Army War College, Bush blamed the military for underestimating the number of troops needed for such a task.
"Our commanders had estimated that a troop level below 115,000 would be sufficient at this point in the conflict," he said. No comment yet from former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki http://www.theage.com.au/arti... .
"Given the recent increase in violence, we will maintain our troop level at the current 138,000 as long as necessary," he said, adding that he would send more troops if needed.
While Bush admitted that violence has worsened in Iraq, the news was not all bad. In a promising sign that the Iraqis understand the concept of sovereignty, the president noted, "In some cases, the early performance of Iraqi [military] forces fell short. Some refused orders to engage the enemy."
In response to recent torture scandals http://www.antiwar.com/news/?... , Bush pledged meaningful reform.
"America will fund the construction of a modern maximum security prison," he said. "When that prison is completed, detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then with the approval of the Iraqi government, we will demolish the Abu Ghraib Prison as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning."
As the president put it in his stirring conclusion, "We will persevere and defeat this enemy and hold this hard-won ground for the realm of liberty."
Related news and analysis:
... 12 killed in Najaf; Iraqi Governing Council president says draft U.N. resolution "fell short of our expectations." http://sg.news.yahoo.com/0405...
... The White House now says it’s considering moving the proposed Iraqi elections up, from next January to next fall. http://www.reuters.com/newsAr...
... "Bush is a scorpion": Iraqis react to the president’s plan. http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
... Critics remark on Iraq’s proposed "sovereignty lite." http://www.antiwar.com/ips/de...
... Deputy U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham says the resolution would give the Iraqis no power to make foreign troops leave. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/0405...
... U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will appoint a president, prime minister, two vice presidents and various ministers who will serve until the scheduled elections in January 2005. This new interim government will supposedly control the $10 billion Development Fund for Iraq http://quote.bloomberg.com/ap... , though a deputy in Iraq’s foreign ministry claims that the U.S. is actually skimming from the oil revenues http://english.aljazeera.net/... supplying the fund.
... France, Germany and others want the resolution to specify a date for coalition withdrawal http://www.smh.com.au/article... . British and U.S. diplomats say the mandate can be reviewed after a year.
... The U.S. will not pressure the new government to retain the interim constitution, which guarantees minority rights. Shi’ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has protested these guarantees as undemocratic; Iraqi Kurds have insisted upon them. http://news.ft.com/servlet/Co...
... Iraqi troops and police will remain under U.S. control. http://www.nytimes.com/aponli...
... Meanwhile, U.S. officials are backing away from plans to disarm militias. http://www.iht.com/articles/5...
... American and international advisers will stay on after the June 30 transfer http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... . Security issues for the new embassy, which will be one of the world’s largest, have not yet been resolved.
[b]Source:[/b]
"A Government to be Named Later: You Call This 'Sovereignty'?" by Matthew Barganier on http://antiwar.com/barganier2...
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| Bush's Feel-Good Iraq Plan Versus Reality: an Anti-B.S. Guide |
| 05.24.04 (3:36 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" surely are [i]not[/i] willing suckers, buffoons and fools ready to "buy" Bush's Bull-Shit [i]over and over and over again [/i]... What will [i]change[/i] and/or be [i]different[/i] for Iraqis in Iraq on 1 July 2004??? ... Hmmm ...[/b]
[u][b]Bush's Feel-Good Iraq Plan Versus Reality: an Anti-B.S. Guide[/b][/u] - http://www.democrats.com/view...
Tonight (5/24), Americans will be presented with Bush's "vision" for Iraq, a speech that should be retitled, "What the White House Wants You to Believe This Week." Various previews of the content of the speech have indicated that the "vision" is simply business as usual for Bush. Business as usual being, of course, hiding beneath a thin PR veneer constructed of half-truths and corporate doubletalk glued together by feel-good platitudes and evangelical exhortations against "evil."
Based on the "talking points" expected to be presented, here's an "anti-B.S." guide to Bush's Iraq plan
[b]Bush Plan[/b]:
Authorize a multinational peacekeeping force to maintain order.
[b]Reality[/b]:
The UN and individual nations have repeatedly said in recent weeks that until the situation in Iraq calms down, they WILL NOT send any forces into Iraq. So while "multinational peacekeeping forces" may sound good in a speech, the existence of such a thing on the ground in Iraq in the near future is highly unlikely.
In the wording of the UN Security Council Resolution just submitted by Bush and Blair, they refer to "multinational forces" as if they were already on the ground in one section, then speaks of the creation of a "multinational force" in a later section. What happened to "coalition forces?" Are they now interchangeable terms? This is just one example of the "intentional ambiguity" built into the resolution.
[b]Bush Plan[/b]:
The US will keep 130,000 troops in Iraq after June 30 to "keep peace."
[b]Reality[/b]:
Even some of America's European allies have warned that keeping such a large US force in Iraq would be proof to the Iraqis that the nation is still under US domination. That being the perception, any "peace" is highly unlikely in the near future.
[b]Bush Plan[/b]:
The future Iraqi government will be allowed to "review" the presence of the U.S.-led multinational force. The force's mandate would be reviewed in 12 months "or at the request of the Transitional Government of Iraq."
[b]Reality[/b]:
Notice that the phrasing of the resolution proposed by Blair and Bush calls for a multinational force. And because, as stated above, a multinational force is highly unlikely to exist for some time to come, this is a meaningless "sound good" phrase at best - a cynical corporate trick of rhetoric at worst. Afterall, Bush can claim later that US forces - as opposed to a multinational force - is NOT subject to any review.
And speaking of cheap corporate tricks of rhetoric, how about the phrases "future Iraqi government" and "transitional government"? As the "Baltimore Sun" pointed out on 5/24, "It wasn't immediately clear whether this was a reference to the interim government that will take over on June 30 or the government chosen by the Transitional National Assembly due to be elected by Jan. 31." The Bush administration has continually used the "open to interpretation" trick to manuver and change the rules as it goes along. I would call this modus operandi the "label now, redefine later bait and switch game." And by floating several different terms (coalition gov, interim gov, transitional gov) at once, the White House is insuring (intentionally) maximum confusion in the public mind.
[b]Bush Plan[/b]:
The US will remove its troops if the present coalition government asks it to.
[b]Reality[/b]:
The present coalition government, having been hand-picked by the Bush administration, is hardly likely to ask the Bush administration to leave. And as the offer to "leave if asked" apparently applies only to the Coalition government, this means Bush can later say NO if the Interim Government picked by Brahmini asks the US to leave. It will be interesting to see how Bush qualifies this - or if he does.
[b]Bush Plan[/b]:
The new interim government would be given "control" over oil and gas resources -- as well as a fund now in the hands of the United States and Britain where oil revenue has (allegedly) been deposited.
[b]Reality[/b]:
Again we have corporate rhetoric. "Control" on paper for the new government is not the same as real control. The real control of Iraq's oil and gas resources is in the hands of the western corpora | |
