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| The Costs of Bush's War ... |
| 06.30.04 (5:58 pm) [edit] |
[b]It is [i]not [/i]too early for "We the People" to come to terms with the horrendous costs in lives and treasure that have taken a heavy toll on the United States of America and Iraq ... [/b]The corrupt Bush administration has betrayed us with their insane neo-con pre-emptive power-grab resulting from their treasonous neo-fascist lusts for imperial power and infinite riches ...
The Bush Administration, in a stealthy move designed to minimize anticipated insurgent attacks, yesterday handed "sovereignty" to Iraq's interim government two days before it had been scheduled to do so on June 30th.
The premature hand-off--or what might be called a sovereignty scam--means that the Bush Team's PR offensive is certain to kick into high gear in the coming weeks. (When Bush http://www.thenation.com/dire... learned that Paul Bremer had formally relinquished his authority to the Iraqi government, he added an Orwellian touch to a hand-written note that his national security advisor Condi Rice had just sent him. His note said: "Let Freedom Reign!")
Now more than at any time since Bush http://www.thenation.com/dire... invaded Iraq, journalists need to give Americans a clear assessment of the [u]mounting costs[/u] http://costofwar.com/ of this war. This is a great opportunity for the media to redeem itself for malpractice in the run-up to war when, as [i]Washington Post[/i] ombudsperson Michael Getler wrote this month http://www.washingtonpost.com... in a tough rebuke to his own paper---and the larger media world, "...the press, as a whole, did not do a very good job in challenging administration claims...Too many public events in which alternative views were expressed...were either missed, underreported or poorly displayed."
The costs are now detailed in a [u]devastating report[/u] http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/co... just released by the Institute for Policy Studies http://www.ips-dc.org/ (IPS) and Foreign Policy in Focus http://www.fpif.org/ (FPIF). It is an extraordinary compilation of the mounting human, economic, environmental, security and other costs of this war of choice.
In human terms, seven hundred US servicemen and women have died since Bush declared "the end of major combat" in his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech in May 2003, while more than 5,000 soldiers have been wounded since the war began. Many of them, as Michael Moore documents in his provocative new film[i] Fahrenheit 911[/i], have lost arms and legs.The cost to the Iraqi people http://www.iraqbodycount.net/... has also been tragic. Up to 11,317 Iraqi civilians have died [some studies cite over 16,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed thus far] in the conflict so far--many of them children whose only crime was to be caught living in the middle of a war zone.
In financial terms, the costs to the American taxpayer are massive. The US has already spent $126 billion on the war, costing every American family approximately $3,400 each. As the Campaign for America's Future http://www.ourfuture.org/ recently pointed out, this Administration has socked it to hard-working families on two fronts: Bush passed his massive tax cuts that gave a huge tax break to the wealthiest individuals and corporations, and then when he went to war, he asked the same working-and middle-class families who bore the brunt of the tax cuts to pay for the conflict. Meanwhile, companies like Halliburton are making a mint in Iraq after receiving no-bid contracts from the federal government.
A [u]new report[/u] http://www.christian-aid.org.... by Christian Aid--a non-profit group that seeks solutions to poverty--makes clear who has been the real beneficiaries of the invasion and occupation. It shows that "a majority of Iraq's reconstruction projects have been awarded to US companies, which charge up to ten times more than Iraqi firms." (Also check out Naomi Klein's recent[i] Nation [/i]column http://www.thenation.com/doc.... detailing how during the run-up to this "handover" the US occupation powers have been "unabashed in their efforts to steal money that is supposed to aid a war-ravaged people.")
By the end of 2004, according to the [u]IPS/FPIP report[/u], http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/co... Bush will have spent approximately $151 billion to wage his crusade in Iraq. That money could have paid for 23 million housing vouchers for poor and working-class Americans, and given America's elementary school children three million new teachers. It could have provided healthcare for 27 million uninsured Americans and allowed 20 million more children to enter the Head Start program.
Floridians alone will have to shell out almost $8 billion to pay for W's war in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Bush Team is providing Florida only half that amount for initiatives in such vital areas as education, environmental protection and community block grants in a state where nineteen percent of the children currently live below the poverty line.
If there is any good news, it is that Americans are at long last recognizing that this President is untrustworthy and dishonest. Today, the latest[i] New York Times/CBS [/i]poll was released showing that Bush's job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, while the most recent [i]Washington Post/ABC News[/i] poll http://abcnews.go.com/section... shows that by a margin of 52 percent to 39 percent, Kerry is seen as more honest and trustworthy. And just last week a[i] CNN/USA Today/Gallup [/i]poll http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO... found that a majority of Americans for the first time believe that invading Iraq was a mistake.
More and more Americans are understanding that the country is paying a very high price for this war and occupation and that this "war" president hoodwinked both Congress and the people.
[b]Source:[/b]
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor's Cut, The Nation, http://www.thenation.com
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| The Screed We Need ... (F9/11) ... |
| 06.29.04 (11:47 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" should be taking account of the [i]dog-fights[/i] over[i] 'Fahrenheit 9/11' (F9/11)[/i] because they say something about the nature of [i]debate[/i] today in our society ...[/b]
Rage is all the rage in the [i]F9/11 [/i]era. Christopher Hitchens started the shouting match with his much-forwarded, widely-blogged attack on Michael Moore http://slate.msn.com/id/21027... . That one got Michael Taibbi downright[i] ticked.[/i] In his [i]New York Press [/i]response, http://www.nypress.com/print.... Taibbi raises the volume a notch, not just taking Hitchens to task but also the entire field of journalism.
He writes:
... [i]"[u]All[/u] journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year's worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn't represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor." [/i]...
Point being, journalists (himself and Hitchens included) don't have the guts to make media what media ought to be. And Moore is filling that gap; serving that essential role, exposing the hidden/buried truths. He continues:
... "[i]I'm enraged by the numerous attempts at verbose, pseudoliterary, "nuanced" criticism of Moore this week by the learned priests of our business. (And no, I'm not overlooking this newspaper.) Michael Moore may be an ass, and impossible to like as a public figure, and a little loose with the facts, and greedy, and a shameless panderer. But he wouldn't be necessary if even one percent of the rest of us had any balls at all[/i]." ...
Polemics upon polemics upon polemics. The blood boils, no matter who you agree with in this case. One point many can agree on -- Taibbi's hunger for nuanced crticism. And for that, we turn to the ever conscientious voice of Chicago Reader's [i]Jonathan Rosenbaum[/i], who says http://www.chireader.com/movi... all this anger is to be expected. In fact, it's what makes[i] F9/11 [/i]so darn good. - http://www.alternet.org/media...
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| October Surprise??? ... |
| 06.29.04 (12:36 pm) [edit] |
[b]The[i] New York Times [/i]is reporting that the new Iraqi government will put Saddam Hussein on trial "in the next few months." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... In other words, before Election Day. Obviously, the president and his aides have been looking at the same poll numbers Kevin Drum has.[/b]
What makes this such a good manuever is that it is perfectly plausible on its own terms—why not put Saddam on trial as soon as the new government gets on its feet? And having the former dictator in a courtroom, subject to justice, militates against earlier images of President Bush as a cowboy bent on getting his man [i]dead or alive[/i] (Whatever happened to Osama bin '[i]Forgotten[/i]'-- the one who attacked us on 9/11?). Expect the trial to make frequent appearances in Bush's stump speech this fall and likely at the Republican convention, as the incumbent proclaims that he has made the world safer from terrorism by bringing down Saddam and forcing him to face justice at the hands of the formerly ruled.
Shouldn't Poppy Bush, Cheney and Rummy Rumsfeld be [i]put in the dock along-side [/i]their good-buddy Saddam without whom he [Saddam] wouldn't have had the [i]ways-and-means-and-sup port to commit the crimes [/i]against his own people that he is being charged with? "We the People" should be asking the corrupt Bush regime this question! ...
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| Who is Dick Cheney, Really??? ... |
| 06.28.04 (6:53 pm) [edit] |
[b]What do "We the People" [i]really[/i] know about Dick[i] 'Fuck-Yourself' [/i]Cheney??? ... [/b]Bush [i]isn't[/i] the "brightest guy in the world" (... even his supporters won't claim [i]that[/i] ...) ... Cheney is the [i]power behind the throne[/i], and does not like being asked questions and/or being held accountable http://www.tblog.com/template... ... Is this really the type of regime that we [i]need[/i] for our nation??? ... Take a look around at all of the[i] many, many [/i]heinous crimes committed by this gang of neo-con thugs & neo-fascist goons [i]here at home and abroad [/i]... "We the People" [i]can and must [/i]do better than [i]this [/i]...
We are all up in arms right now, it seems, about Vice President Dick Cheney, and the fact that Cheney told one of the more irenic of Democratic senators to "f--k off" in a brief exchange on the Senate floor last Tuesday because the senator in question, Pat Leahy (Democrat of Vermont) had earlier had the temerity to raise questions about lucrative no-bid Iraqi contracts secured by his former employer Halliburton.
Certainly, Cheney and his partisans deserve the knuckle-rapping they're now getting. And it's entertaining to watch avatars of dignity, good order and responsibility like Bill Frist http://www.newsday.com/news/p...,0,2505742.story?coll=sns-ap-politic s-headlines and the folks over at the White House http://www.team4news.com/Glob... call Cheney's antics good clean fun and politics as usual.
But for those who have few good things to say about the vice-president, I think, the correct response is less outrage than the sort of grim (or perhaps not so grim) satisfaction one feels when a malign character unwittingly reveals himself to a larger audience. Because even if Cheney "felt better" http://www.washingtonpost.com... after his outburst, this wasn't a show of strength but one of desperation or, perhaps, impatient impotence.
I think Joe Klein has it right in the title of his new column in[i] Time [/i]-- ("[i]Plenty More to Swear About: Bush's security team faces a barrage of criticism as the facts about Iraq come to light[/i]" http://www.time.com/time/colu...,9565,658285,00.html ). As Klein writes, last week's "assorted temper tantrums appeared to be a leading indicator of a gathering summer storm confronting this presidency."
Consider for a moment. Who is Dick Cheney, [i]really[/i]? What do we know of him? None of us like being questioned or critized. But in him the disinclination runs particularly deep. He prefers to act in secrecy and is a man to whom government transparency has all the allure that a shaft of sunlight has to a vampire. When challenged, violence seems always to be his preferred method of response, that of first resort --- often a literal sort on the world stage, but with bureaucratic (viz. Plame) and what we might call verbal violence at home. By verbal violence I mean specifically tough talk and threats meant to frighten people away from challenging him further, to knock them on their heels. Even this new case -- saying Leahy et al. had it coming http://seattletimes.nwsource.... -- is but another example. When that doesn't work, he gets sloppy.
Cheney et al. can see all sorts of bad business coming down the pike in the next few months -- much of it already on the public radar screen, some of it still clogged up no doubt in back channels, newsrooms and new rounds of dirty-tricksterism. It seems clearly to be getting to them.
[b]Source:[/b]
Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo. http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
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| SCOTUS Slams POTUS ... |
| 06.28.04 (3:48 pm) [edit] |
[b]The [i]CBS Evening News [/i]reports tonight ([i]Monday, 06/28/04[/i]) that American detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be seeking legal counsel in order to fight their cases in the U.S. Courts ... The Supreme Court[i] seems [/i]to have handed down a decision today that does not permit the [i]out-of-control [/i]Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] Executive http://www.commondreams.org/h... to simply detain U.S. Citizens indefinitely, denying them their rights to legal counsel and seeking justice through the U.S. Courts ... [/b]
"We the People" should [i]watch the developments very carefully[/i] however, because the corrupt Bush regime is out to destroy our rights under the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ...
[u][b][i]Hamdi[/i] and [i]Padilla[/i] Appear to be a Huge Loss for the Government [/b][/u]
This is based upon a very cursory first read, but it appears to me that[i] Hamdi [/i]and[i] Padilla [/i]in conjunction are a huge loss for the Government. (Lyle Denniston will be providing further analysis shortly.) The Government, recall, acknowledged that detention of these persons was necessary and proper principally for purposes of interrogating them for intelligence reasons. (Hence the denial of counsel, etc.; see the Jacoby Declaration in Padilla.)
In [i]Padilla[/i], it appears that only four Justices reach (or even discuss) the question of the lawfulness of the detention. Justice Stevens writes that "the Non-Detention Act, 18 U. S. C. §4001(a), prohibits -- and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, 115 Stat. 224, adopted on September 18, 2001, does not authorize -- the protracted, incommunicado detention of American citizens arrested in the United States." He continues:
"[i]At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. Even more important than the method of selecting the people's rulers and their successors is the character of the constraints imposed on the Executive by the rule of law. Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber. Access to counsel for the purpose of protecting the citizen from official mistakes and mistreatment is the hallmark of due process. Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no consequence. For if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny[/i]."
In[i] Hamdi[/i], four Justices, including Justice Scalia, conclude that Hamdi's detention itself is unlawful -- a result that Hamdi himself barely argued for (his briefs being more focused on the opportunity to challenge his enemy-combatant status). Four other Justices -- Justice O'Connor, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy and Breyer -- conclude that Congress's 9/18/01 authorization of military force (AUMF) authorizes detention of a "narrow" category of persons: those who are "part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners" in Afghanistan and who "engaged in an armed conflict against the United States there." They read the AUMF to authorize detention of such persons "for the duration of the particular conflict in which they were captured" (because, says the plurality, such detention "is so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the 'necessary and appropriate force' Congress has authorized the President to use").
The plurality goes on to emphasize, however, that the detention must be "to prevent a combatant's return to the battlefield," which the plurality views as "a fundamental incident of waging war." This means that Hamdi can be held, the plurality concludes, not until the end of the "war on terror," which the plurality acknowledges may not come in Hamdi's lifetime, but only until the end of the "active combat operations in Afghanistan." And here's the key sentence: "Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized."
This should mean that Padilla's detention -- which the Government acknowledges is principally for the purpose of interrogation -- likewise is not authorized. Even if Justice O'Connor's opinion might not conclusively dictate that result, there are (at least) five votes for it: the four dissenters in Hamdi, as well as Justice Breyer, who joins the Stevens dissent in Padilla.
[b]Source:[/b]
SCOTUSBlog, http://www.goldsteinhowe.com/...
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| Bush's Rape of Iraq: "Take-the-Money-And-Fly" ... Leaving on a Jet Plane ... |
| 06.28.04 (9:48 am) [edit] |
[i][Saddam Hussein] had an established relationship with al Qaeda[/i]. – Vice President Dick Cheney, 6/25/04
[i]"The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no 'collaborative relationship' between Iraq and al Qaeda[/i]." – Washington Post, 6/17/04
[b]Why [i]exactly[/i] did Bush illegally & immorally invade Iraq, creating death, misery, mayhem and chaos left in the wake of their [i]"quicky" escape [/i]on a jet plane today??? [/b][i]Supposedly[/i] to disarm Saddam Hussein of massive stockpiles of WMDs [i]supposedly[/i] posing an so-called "imminent threat" to our national security ... It was a pack of traitorous lies perpetrated upon the American people and the entire world community by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]who then desperately tried to imply that phony "links" existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda, when instead Saddam Hussein and Osama bin ([i]Forgotten[/i]) Laden were [i]actually [/i]enemies ...
"We the People" and the People of Iraq have been ruthlessly swindled out of precious lives and raped of our treasures by the corrupt neo-con Bushies and their neo-fascist corporate-take-all cronies, all of whom should be sent to the International Court at the Hague to be tried for [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]...
[b]In a move highlighting the severe threat the insurgency poses to security in Iraq, chief U.S. administrator Paul Bremer formally transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government two days early.[/b] The "near secret" ceremony was attended by just "a half dozen Iraqi and coalition officials held in the heavily guarded Green Zone." The acceleration of the transfer date was "an apparent bid to surprise insurgents and prevent them from trying to sabotage the step toward self-rule." President Bush – in Turkey for a NATO summit – "marked the transfer with a whispered comment and a handshake with British Prime Minister Tony Blair." After handing a few legal document to Iraqi chief justice Mahdi al-Mahmood, Bremer immediately "left Iraq on a U.S. Air Force C-130." But the early handover does not change the reality on the ground – Iraq's newly-sovereign government is beset by a growing insurgency, faced with enormous political challenges, and tasked with taking over the management of a tumultuous transition. Today, American Progress released a new plan http://www.americanprogress.o... outlining clear steps the Bush administration should take to promote peace and stability after the transition.
[b]BREMER IMPOSES HIS WILL:[/b] Before flying off into the sunset, Bremer "issued a raft of edicts http://www.washingtonpost.com... revising Iraq's legal code." The new rules – which will be difficult, if not impossible, to overturn – will "restrict the power of the interim government, and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic transition." Controversially, Bremer empowered an appointed electoral commission to "eliminate political parties or candidates." Another last minute edict gave "U.S. and other Western civilian contractors immunity from Iraqi law while performing their jobs in Iraq" – a provision that outraged many Iraqis because it "allows foreigners to act with impunity even after the occupation." Bremer also capped the tax rate at 15 percent, amended an industrial-design law to protect microchip designs, and stipulated the use of car horns be permitted in "emergency conditions only."
[b]NATO ASSISTANCE STILL UNDEFINED:[/b] In a positive development, NATO leaders "tentatively" agreed to help provide training for Iraqi security forces. But the [i]Wall Street Journal [/i]reports that details of the agreement remain elusive, "threatening to undermine the impact of a diplomatic victory for President Bush." Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) – in Istanbul with the president – conceded that no one knows the extent of the NATO commitment. There is still concern within NATO – which already has forces in Afghanistan – "about NATO's ability to sustain several operations at once." On [i]Meet the Press [/i]yesterday, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5... American Progress CEO John Podesta discussed how the Bush administration's move towards internationalism is long overdue.
[b]$20B IN OIL REVENUES NOT ACCOUNTED FOR:[/b] A new report by Christian Aid – a non-profit that seeks solutions to poverty – reveals that Bremer left Iraq "without having properly accounted for what it has done with some $20 billion of Iraq's own money," http://www.christian-aid.org.... accumulated from oil sales. The actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) appear to violate U.N. resolution 1483, which mandated that "Iraq's oil revenues should be paid into the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), that this money should be spent in the interests of the Iraqi people, and [that it] be independently audited." Bremer did not even appoint an auditor until April 2004, and the report is not expected until mid-July – long after the CPA has been dissolved. In the meantime, the CPA has refused to provide even basic information about how the money is being spent. Christian Aid also notes that a "majority of Iraq's reconstruction projects have been awarded to U.S. companies, which charge up to 10 times more than Iraqi firms."
[b]IRAQ OPERATIONS STOKE RAGE:[/b] Bush touted the war in Iraq as an effort not just to oust Saddam Hussein, "but to begin transforming the Middle East." But U.S. and foreign officials say the way the administration has handled the invasion and occupation of Iraq has "led to rage at the United States across the Islamic world and beyond." As a result, "Al-Qaeda's recruitment has been stoked and would-be reformers drowned out." A new report by Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/s... concludes that the United States "is now vulnerable to strategic reversal in the region."
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| America at Last??? ... |
| 06.27.04 (7:55 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" should be grateful for our good fortune to have such an eminent national treasure in our midst: the historian, polemicist and essayist, screen-writer and novelist, [i]Gore Vidal [/i]...[/b]
[b]America at Last? — [i]Gore Vidal[/i][/b]
It is very easy to discuss what has gone wrong with us. It is not so easy to discuss what should be done to correct what has gone wrong. It is absolutely impossible in our public discourse to discuss why so much has gone wrong and, indeed, has been wrong with us since the very beginning of the country, and even before that when our white tribes were living elsewhere. There are two subjects that we are not permitted to discuss with any seriousness — race and religion, and how our attitudes toward the first are rooted in the second. Since these two subjects are taboo, we are never able to get to the root of our problems. We are like people born in a cage and so unable to visualise beyond our familiar bars of prejudice and superstition. That Opinion which the Few create in order to control the Many has seen to it that we are kept in permanent ignorance of our actual estate. Now things fall apart.
I am a radical reformer. The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonised by our masters, and no one in politics dares even to use the word favourably, much less track any problem to its root. But then a ruling class that was able to demonise the word ‘liberal’ in the last ten years is a master of controlling — indeed stifling — any criticism of itself. Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis which means ‘pertaining to a free man’. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon. In this, as in so much else, J. Edgar Hoover was ahead of his time — he never ceased to denounce pseudo-liberals.
Meanwhile, the word ‘isolationist’ has been revived to describe those who would like to put an end to the national security state that replaced our republic a half-century ago while extending the American military empire far beyond our capacity to pay for it. The word ‘isolationist’ also has very sinister overtones. In the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, many Americans — and I was one — were isolationist. We thought that, as we had gained nothing from the First World War — except an erosion of our civil liberties and the prohibition of alcohol — why should we again help England and France against Germany? There is now a myth that the isolationists were pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic. This is nonsense. Practically every socialist in the country, starting with Norman Thomas, was an isolationist, while agrarian populists, like Senators Wheeler and Nye, tended to be wary of foreign wars and entanglements. Also, the only foreign power that we were hostile to — and feared — was Hitler’s enemy, the Soviet Union, the exporter of godless and atheistic communism. America Firsters ranged from the historian Charles Beard to the young Kingman Brewster, not to mention a brilliant young football coach at Yale, Gerald R. Ford. The pro-German anti-Semites were at home in the German-American Bund, not in the America First Committee. Hitler’s infamous final solution was not known as of 1940 and did not figure into the debate. As it turned out, no American majority ever favoured American intervention in the European war. Had the Japanese not been inspired — or, perhaps, incited — to attack us, we might never have gone to war at all.
In retrospect, I suspect that we should have supported the Allies with everything except troops. But I tend to be, consistently, a non-interventionist though hardly an isolationist in the new sense.
To call someone an isolationist today is to imply that he is probably an anti-Semite and certainly a simpleton who believes in retreating behind the walls of fortress America. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to isolate ourselves from our creditors. But the word has now been trotted out this year to describe the likes of Pat Buchanan who is — or was — causing great distress to the managers of our National Security State when he says that America must abandon the empire if we are ever to repair the mess at home. Also, as a neo-isolationist, Buchanan must be made to seem an anti-Semite.
[b][i]Gore Vidal [/i]is one of the best-known living literary writers. For a quarter-century he has served as the literary and political critic of the [i]New York Review of Books[/i]. This passage has been taken from his annual Lowell Lecture in 1992, called, “[i]America First? America Last? America at Last[/i]?”[/b] - http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/...
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| Vice President Cheney Unhinged on Senate Floor ... But Why??? |
| 06.26.04 (12:27 pm) [edit] |
[b]Veep Dick Cheney on Civility ... [/b]
[b]NOW:[/b]
[i]“Go F___ Yourself'' [/i]- Dick Cheney to US Senator Patrick Leahy, 6/23/04
[b]THEN:[/b]
"[i]Governor Bush and I are also absolutely determined that [we] will restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington[/i]." - Dick Cheney, 8/4/00
"[i]I look forward to working with you, Governor, to change the tone in Washington, to restore a spirit of civility and respect and cooperation[/i]." - Dick Cheney, 7/25/00
"[i]My administration pledged to bring civility and high standards to Washington[/i]." - George W. Bush, 8/3/01
[b]"We the People" should look a little more closely at[i] 'the-story-behind-the-sto ry' [/i]of Veep Cheney's obscenity directed against Senator Leahy ... [/b][i]Why[/i] did Cheney become [i]unhinged[/i] and behave like some mafia Tony Soprano [i]thug[/i]??? ... We deserve some [i]answers to the very valid questions [/i]posed by Senator Leahy!!! ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
Mounting criticisms of war profiteering by Halliburton have apparently struck a chord with Vice President Cheney. At an otherwise congenial photo session earlier this week, the vice president lashed out at Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) for his pursuit of the matter, in addition to discussions about judicial nominees, bluntly telling Leahy, [i]"F--- yourself," [/i]according to aides who witnessed the exchange. Leahy and others are investigating charges that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. government millions of dollars for Iraq services and may have received improper assistance in winning contracts. Cheney's office confirmed the vice president's coarse phrasing but offered no apologies or explanation for his untoward behavior.
[b]1. Rather than cursing out lawmakers, Cheney should explain to Congress his involvement with no-bid contracts for Halliburton.[/b] We now know the vice president's chief of staff received a Pentagon briefing in October 2002, one month prior to directing Halliburton to develop a secret plan for restoring and operating Iraq's oil infrastructure. The vice president's office was also made aware of a second sole-source contract worth up to $7 billion awarded to Halliburton four months later for implementing this plan.
[b]2. The administration must come clean about any remaining contacts or involvement with Halliburton.[/b] The repeated assertion by Cheney that he was not informed about the Halliburton contracts is disingenuous. The full extent of the vice president's contacts and arrangements with the Pentagon on any matters dealing with Halliburton contracts should be fully disclosed.
[b]3. Cheney should apologize to Americans for sullying the U.S. Senate. [/b] During the 2000 campaign, Cheney said he wanted "to change the tone in Washington, to restore a spirit of civility and respect and cooperation," and that he was "absolutely determined [to] restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington." The vice president should live up to these promises and restrain himself in public discourse.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| The Frightened, The Clueless, and the 'F-word' ... |
| 06.25.04 (4:40 pm) [edit] |
[b]What a week ... [/b]The Bush regime supposedly releases [i]"all" (not)[/i] torture-related documents and we come to find that they[i] only [/i]released [i]partial and selected [/i]documents prior to April 2003 ([i]before[/i] the torture at Abu Ghraib took place) http://www.tblog.com/template... ... Clinton's book[i] 'My Life' [/i]is released and the right-wing[i] launch firestorms [/i]of hysterical [i]ad hominen [/i]attacks against[i] him [/i]and [i]every liberal they can name [/i]... Michael Moore's film [i]'Fahrenheit 9/11'[/i] opens and the neo-cons[i] go mad [/i]calling Moore everything from a "fat boy" to a "communist" to a "traitor" ... Next we'll be told that Clinton and/or Moore were "dealing" with Saddam Hussein and/or Al Qaeda ([i]Are "We the People" simply waiting for Dick Cheney & Karl Rove to [u]decide[/u] in order to tell Bush which one(s) to claim [/i]...) ...
There are too many interesting things going on this week according to[i] AlterNet [/i] http://www.alternet.org to simply focus on one. So here's a smattering of stories about the [i]Frightened[/i], the [i]Clueless[/i], and the "[i]F-word[/i]":
I'll spare you the jokes about how the controversy over "F-9/11" is "heating up" but the particulars are worth a mention. The Federal Elections Commission, http://www.thehill.com/news/0... in addition to its own internal recommendation that it prevent "F-9/11" ads after July 30 from mentioning Bush (or using his image), is considering a complaint, filed by a Republican group, alleging that the film amounts to a glorified campaign ad and as such violates campaign finance laws. Yeah, I'm sure that's what McCain-Feingold had in mind...
DailyKos reports that Ralph Nader is getting some much needed help in building a strong and lasting progressive movement -- from conservative groups in Oregon. From a "Citizens for a sound Economy" phone banking script: http://dailykos.com/story/200... "Ralph Nader needs 1,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot and we need to ensure he gets them...Ralph Nader is undoubtedly going to pull some very crucial votes from John Kerry, and that could mean the difference in a razor-thin Presidential election."
Finally, the latest Gallup poll brings good tidings to Kerry and anyone interested in removing the Bush. In a space of three weeks, Americans went from believing that it was[i] not [/i]a mistake to send troops to Iraq by a margin of 58-41, to believing that it was, 54-44. Even more devastating for Bush is the fact that these numbers precede the devastating events http://www.tblog.com/template... of the past couple of days. The number of registered voters who believe the war has made us safer has gone from 56% in December to 37% now.
But the bottom line is how the states line up. According to poll-expert [i]Ruy Teixeira[/i]: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... "Bush (is) ahead by 8 points in the solid red states (won by Bush by 5 points or more in 2000), but Kerry (is) ahead by 14 in the solid blue states (won by Gore by more than 5 points) and ahead by 9 in the purple states (decided by less than 5 points in 2000). And Kerry is carrying independents nationwide by 10 points and moderates by 24 points."
So what's it all add up to? Bush gets all snippety with an Irish journalist who, unlike too many of his American counterparts, has the gall to seek an actual answer to his question while Cheney opts to keep it simple telling Sen. Patrick Leahy to "[i]F--- yourself[/i]" http://www.washingtonpost.com... .
[b]What are "We the People" [i]to think [/i]about Bush and Cheney [i]by now[/i]??? ...[/b]
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| The Bush Regime is Not Being Candid on Torture Documents ... |
| 06.25.04 (9:58 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" surely cannot accept the partial and selective release of documents that the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] are ([i]ab[/i])using to manipulate ignorant and/or ill-informed people in America into believing that they have been candid regarding their sordid & squalid attempt to break the law and trample on international treaties (meant to protect our own prisoners when captured [i]too[/i]) ... The traitorous Bushies do not want to be implicated in the horrific murder, torture, rape and abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib) carried out at their direction, but they must be held accountable for their heinous [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]... [/b]Please contact Congress http://www.congress.org to demand that the Bush regime be required to hand-over [i]ALL[/i] documents, memos and internal material related to their position on the treatment of all prisoners held under US jurisdiction on foreign and domestic soil.
Earlier this week, the White House released a selection of documents that it claims shows the administration's commitment to the humane treatment of detainees in the global war on terrorism. The documents, however, confirm the administration's elaborate legalistic parsing on the meaning of torture and show its tacit approval of illegal and immoral interrogation techniques.
[b]1. The Bush administration paid lip service to the humane treatment of prisoners under U.S. custody.[/b] The administration's February 2002 memo limits humane treatment of detainees "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity." Yet, the "military necessity" exception is so broad and vague it effectively allows the Geneva conventions to be ignored at will. The memo also says the United States should extend these values even to "those who are not legally entitled to such treatment." But as the [i]New York Times [/i]reports, the White House was unwilling or unable to say "what part of American law denies humane treatment to anyone."
[b]2. The administration must release all documents related to its decisions and authorization of treatment of detainees.[/b] As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) noted after the release of the documents, the White House provided "only 3 of the 23 documents that Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee requested and tried to subpoena last week, and of those 3 documents, 2 were already available worldwide on the Internet."
[b]3. President Bush must prove to the world through his words and actions that the United States does not condone torture of anyone, anywhere, at anytime, for any reason.[/b] The moral authority of the United States has been severely compromised over the past few months. The president must now do everything in his power to provide full transparency and accountability – even for those at the highest levels of the military and government – for the deplorable actions perpetrated in our name.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.congress.org
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| Over 500 Signers of Harvard Law's Impeachment Letter ... |
| 06.24.04 (4:11 pm) [edit] |
"[i]As members of university faculties in law, international relations, diplomacy, and public policy, we write to register our objection to the systematic violation of human rights practiced or permitted by authorities of the United States within occupied Iraq during recent months: we request Congressional action to ensure accountability for such violations and to safeguard against such egregious abuses in the future. Current circumstances require that all transcend partisan politics or considerations. Action by Congress is necessary to promote a rule of law produced and enforced through a democratic process and to protect the physical and psychological integrity of all people consistent with the traditions of our nation[/i]." - http://www.iraq-letter.com/
[b]If [i]only[/i] "We the People" were as conscientious at demanding that the rule of law supercede the insane power grab and unconscionable corruptions perpetrated by the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta, [/i]as US Diplomats http://www.pww.org/article/ar... , Constitutional Scholars and Legal Experts http://www.iraq-letter.com/ ...[/b] Please contact Congress http://www.congress.org and attach this letter demanding that Bush & Cheney be [i]impeached[/i] and that Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz and the neo-cons be[i] fired [/i]-- and that they all be put on trial for treason and then be sent to the Hague to be tried for their heinous Crimes Against Humanity ...
[b]Consider ...[/b]
[b]Talk about consensus:[/b] it's no small feat to get over [i][b]500 academics [/b][/i]to agree on anything, let alone sign their names to it. But that's exactly what's happened. Led by professors from Harvard Law School, more than 500 scholars in law, international relations and public policy have signed a letter calling for Congress to assess the executive branch's accountability—and, if appropriate, proceed with [i][b]removal or impeachment [/b][/i]of top officials. "We write to register our objection to the[i][b] systematic violation of human rights [/b][/i]practiced or permitted by authorities of the United States within occupied Iraq during recent months," the letter reads. The signatories represent 110 institutions in 40 different states.
[b]READ THE LETTER:[/b] http://www.iraq-letter.com/
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| Behind Closed Doors ... |
| 06.24.04 (12:27 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" should be extremely alarmed and outraged at the wrong-headed and disappointing decision handed-down today by the corrupt Supreme Court http://www.commondreams.org/h... siding with Cheney in keeping secret his meetings with his Corporate Energy Cronies including Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay ... [/b]Corporations are[i] not [/i]permitted to illegally profit from influencing governmental policy and harming consumers ... Moreover, governmental policy-making is not proper[i] without [/i]oversight and accountability into the decision-making process; and yet, that is just what has happened by allowing Cheney to keep secret meetings intended to establish Energy Policy for the United States of America ...
Please write to Congress http://www.congress.org expressing your concern about the horrific direction that our nation is headed, because without [i]"transparency in government"[/i] we are destined to be transformed by the corrupt Bush/Cheney regime into a neo-fascist 3rd world military [i]junta[/i] ...
[b]Consider ...[/b]
[b][i]Statement of John D. Podesta[/i]
Regarding the Supreme Court decision in Cheney v. United States District Court
June 24, 2004[/b]
While today's decision may have vindicated the Vice President's litigation strategy, allowing him to continue to conceal information regarding his secret energy task force, it will only add to the growing perception — heightened by the reluctant and selective release of secret White House torture memos over the past few days — that this is an administration that operates behind closed doors, accountable to no one.
- [i]Read the Decision (PDF)[/i] on http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/...
------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----
The Center for American Progress submitted a brief in the case, together with the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Center for American Progress, Common Cause, the National Security Archive, People for the American Way, the Society of American Archivists, and the Special Libraries Association.
- [i]American Progress Files Amicus Curiae Brief in Cheney v. U.S. District Court [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b]John Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress.[/b] http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| The Bush Administration is Out to Lunch ... |
| 06.24.04 (9:01 am) [edit] |
[b]What is more important that the health, prosperity and well-being of a nation's citizenry??? ... [/b]For the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i], it is brutish corporate profiteering: resulting in heinous neo-con war(s) for war-profiteering-- and neo-fascist corporate rape of employees, shareholders and "We the People" ...
For a stark example, refer to:
[b]On Food Safety, the Bush Administration is Out to Lunch[/b]
This coming Fourth of July, families across the country will gather to barbeque hot dogs and hamburgers. Parents trust that this food is safe for their children. The U.S. Department of Agriculture gives its seal of approval to all meat products.
Unfortunately, our food-inspection system has significant holes. Every year, contaminated food sickens 76 million people, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Stronger safeguards and tougher enforcement could significantly reduce this risk. However, food manufacturers have steadfastly resisted increased oversight, and the Bush administration has declined to take them on. On the contrary, food manufacturers have been allowed to call the shots.
Consider the administration's response to mad cow disease. At first, the administration virtually ignored the threat of mad cow – which has killed at least 137 people, mostly in Great Britain – and then declined to significantly increase testing when, in December 2003, an infected cow was discovered in Washington state. At the same time, the administration has failed to take decisive action to prevent the spreading of the disease among cows and ensure that central nervous tissue – where the disease is found – does not make it into the food supply.
Moreover, it was recently disclosed that the USDA violated its own ban on importing ground beef from Canada, where an earlier case of mad cow had been discovered. At the urging of large American meatpackers with plants across the border, the agency permitted 33 million pounds of Canadian processed beef to be sold in the United States, according to the Washington Post.
Other examples raise similar concern as to whether the administration is putting food manufacturers ahead of American consumers. In one case, USDA cracked down on John Munsell, http://www.whistleblower.org/...%20the%20Giant%20Final%20 PDF.pdf hen owner of the family business Montana Quality Foods, Inc., after he alerted the agency that meatpacking giant ConAgra had shipped him beef contaminated with dangerous E. coli bacteria. Instead of taking action against the politically connected ConAgra, USDA blamed Munsell and placed Montana Quality Foods under tighter surveillance than any other plant in the beef industry, eventually forcing Munsell to sell his business. Later, lab tests confirmed Munsell's claims, and a full six months after he alerted USDA, ConAgra was forced to recall 19 million pounds of ground beef; CDC linked contaminated meat from ConAgra with at least one death and 35 illnesses during the first month after the recall.
Unfortunately, this does not appear to be an isolated example. In 2001, USDA routinely allowed negligent companies to sell meat and poultry to American consumers after violations were detected, according to a report by the General Accounting Office http://www.gao.gov/new.items/... .
Nonetheless, in spite of this record, USDA has boasted about its recent performance. In late 2003, the agency claimed it had achieved a one-year 12 percent reduction in Salmonella and a 25 percent decline in Listeria. "These data validate our scientific approach to protecting public health through safer food," said Elsa Murano, USDA's undersecretary for food safety, in a press release just before Thanksgiving.
However, on closer inspection, these numbers turned out to be highly misleading. Barbara Kowalcyk, a biostatistician at the University of Wisconsin whose son died of E. coli poisoning, discovered that USDA was doctoring the data to pump up its performance. "[USDA is] going around using sound science as their selling point, yet they're really not using it," Kowalcyk told Food Chemical News. "The fact is that they misled the American public and Congress by issuing these press releases, and it's irresponsible."
The Bush administration has similarly undermined science on other threats to our food supply. For instance, the administration imposed a gag order on EPA scientists and regulators from publicly discussing perchlorate – which is found in rocket fuel – after two independent studies from the spring of 2003 strongly suggested that the chemical is contaminating the nation's lettuce supply.
This has been the pattern during the Bush administration across a range of areas – from auto safety to consumer protection to worker health to the environment. As documented in a report released last month by our organizations – prepared on behalf of a coalition called Citizens for Sensible Safeguards (see the report at www.sensiblesafeguards.org - http://www.sensiblesafeguards... ) – the administration has repeatedly undermined crucial public safeguards at the behest of special interests, and then suppressed information and scientific findings that would call its decisions into question.
This agenda puts the public at significant risk while undermining our democratic ideals. We need to get back to a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The health and safety of our children is too important to sacrifice to special interests.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Labor vs. Capital ... |
| 06.24.04 (8:23 am) [edit] |
[b]LABOR vs. CAPITAL... [/b]Here's another interesting graph (from Brad DeLong http://www.j-bradford-delong.... ) comparing the total share of national income going to corporate profits vs. the share going to labor compensation. The share going to labor plummeted abruptly in 2001 and is now at its lowest point in 40 years.
![]() =http://img27.photobucket.com/...
This behavior is quite a bit different than that in the previous recession of 1990-91, which showed a much more gradual decline. Is the difference due to Bush's capital-friendly tax cuts in mid-2001 and 2003?
I don't know, but whatever the reason it's probably why the economy seems worse than the headline growth and unemployment numbers indicate. The economy is growing, but the vast majority of workers aren't seeing any benefit. As the other chart in Brad's post shows, employment levels are still very low, and as this chart shows, the people who are employed are either treading water or losing ground. That's not a combination that makes for a happy electorate.
Slave labor wages in order that the fat-cats & top-dogs can live like Emperors Caligula and Nero, while the skyrocketing gap between the[i] hyper-rich-haves [/i]and the[i] rest of us being impoverished into have-nots [/i]is at the highest level in over 75 years. CEO pay has risen by over 300%-500% over the last decade (If minimum wage had risen at the same rate, it would be between $15-$36/hour [i]today[/i].) Such an unfair, unjust and corrupt distribution of profits to enrich the gluttonous plutocrats and place undue burdens upon working people is dangerously harmful to the health of our nation and the prosperity that "We the People" all have a right and responsibility to use to maintain a civilized society ...
[b]Source:[/b]
TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
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| Sovereignty for Iraq??? Under Bush, No Way In Hell ... |
| 06.23.04 (1:39 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" should all be required to [i]look-up [/i]the definition of "sovereignty" again in the dictionary ... [/b]Of course, the corrupt Bush regime will still occupy Iraq on 1st July with over 138,000 US troops http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/art... even though 98% of the Iraqi people want us out of their country -- and the Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is still in control of Iraqi[i] Oil [/i]-- and these neo-con neo-fascists still [i]tell (i.e. order) [/i] the Iraqi ministers what to do ...
By the way the dictionary [i]definition[/i] of "sovereignty" is: "[b]government free from external control[/b]" ...[i] [b]Hmmm[/b] [/i]...
[b][u]Iraq ministers told only US can impose martial law[/u][/b]
The US-led occupation authority in Baghdad has warned Iraq's interim government not to carry out its threat of declaring martial law, insisting that only the US-led coalition has the right to adopt emergency powers after the June 30 handover of sovereignty.
Senior American officials say Iraq's authorities are bound by human rights clauses in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, prohibiting administrative detention.
But they say the recent United Nations Security Council resolution 1546 sanctions the use by foreign forces in Iraq of "all necessary measures" to provide security.
A senior coalition official in Baghdad said: "Under the UN resolution, the multinational force will have the power to take all actions traditionally associated with martial law." He said they had raised their legal objections with Iyad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister.
Mr Allawi on Tuesday appeared to back away from remarks made on Sunday that the government would assume emergency powers after the handover.
"No, I didn't specifically say martial law meaning martial law," he said, adding that the government was developing a "public safety law" which would allow it to implement curfews, searches, and "apprehend the enemies of Iraq".
The coalition's warning highlights growing tension between the US-led multinational force and Iraq's appointed government over how to handle counter-insurgency after the handover.
US advisers are concerned about the security powers sought by Mr Allawi, a one-time Baath party member, and are struggling to check the ambitions of his ministers to rebuild and re-arm Iraq's forces.
"Iraq will have a lightly-armed standing army and no heavy field artillery," says Jacinta Caroll, director of defence policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority. If tanks and attack aircraft were needed, Iraq would have to rely on US-led forces, she said.
Frustrated Iraqi officials say reliance on US-led forces will undermine public confidence in the restoration of sovereignty and re-ignite claims that they are lackeys of the occupying forces.
To curb Iraq's access to heavy weapons, observers say the occupation authorities have signed a $259m contract with US company Anham Joint Venture to be sole supplier of arms to Iraq's armed forces for the next two years.
Alarmed that the deal could leave Iraq's forces outgunned by an enemy with mortars and rockets, Mr Allawi this week vowed to refurbish the old Iraq army's arsenal, and appealed to neighbouring states to provide military hardware.
All but 20 per cent of the defence ministry's 2004 $1.5bn budget stems from US funds, say coalition officials, and Iraq's share is earmarked for the payment of salaries, not equipment. In addition, the coalition has impounded Iraq's remaining heavy weapons and is hampering the issue of end-user certificates for fresh supplies, say western security experts.
An American defence adviser in Baghdad this week said that Iraq also remained under "a partial UN weapons embargo". - http://news.ft.com/servlet/Co...
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| ... Torture for Profit ... |
| 06.23.04 (10:54 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" are confronted with the ugly reality that the corrupt Bush regime is responsible for the heinous murder, torture, rape and abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq (including but not limited to Abu Ghraib) ... [/b]It is time to contact Congress http://www.congress.org and demand that Bush & Cheney be [i]impeached[/i] and Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their neo-con cabal of war criminals be [i]fired[/i] and[i] tried for treason[/i]-- and that this entire vile gang of traitors be[i] sent [/i]to the Hague to be[i] tried [/i]for their atrocious Crimes Against Humanity ...
White House officials released a flurry http://wireservice.wired.com/... of documents today in the hopes of changing the impression that Bush and company condoned, implicity or explicitly, the torture of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba. Nothing was said about Amnesty International's call for an independent investigation into the abuse.
And on the civilian front, human rights groups took the unusual step http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... of filing a racketeering lawsuit this month against U.S. civilian contractors who worked at Abu Ghraib prison. The suit alleges contractors conspired to execute, rape and torture prisoners during interrogations to boost profits from military payments.
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| Mission (Still) Unaccomplished ... |
| 06.23.04 (8:30 am) [edit] |
[b]More than a year after Congress authorized the president to invade Iraq, Americans are wondering why we went to war in the first place, thanks to fact-finding http://www.tompaine.com/artic... by the 9/11 commission and others.[/b] Whether or not they supported the war initially, everyone but the most ardent Bush loyalists agree the invasion failed. Yet, President Bush continues to make rosy public statements about developments in Iraq. [i]TomPaine.com [/i]columnist Corn wonders if these are motivated by politics or ignorance. "We the People" should be wondering[i] too [/i]...
[b]David Corn writes the Loyal Opposition twice a month for [i]TomPaine.com[/i]. Corn is also the Washington editor of[i] The Nation [/i]and is the author of [i]The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception [/i](Crown Publishers).[/b]
Ronald Reagan is in the ground , and, soon (though not soon enough) Clintonmania will pass. Then Iraq will likely take center stage and be, once again, the operational fulcrum of the presidential campaign. Bush’s springtime freefall in the polls was interrupted by Reagan’s death, the selection of a new government in Iraq, the D-Day memorials and an uneventful G8 summit. But the reality on the ground in Iraq—the likely cause of Bush’s slide in public opinion surveys—has not been altered. There is a new government, and the handoff of sovereignty (partial, full, or whatever) is still on track for June 30. But the core conflicts remain, and Bush has not shown the ability to handle them any better now than he did a month ago. The only strategic shift under consideration in the White House appears to be a limited disengagement, with the Bush administration increasingly declaring, “Hey, it’s not our problem, go ask the new Iraqi government,” even as it maintains 138,000 troops in Iraq and haphazardly pours billions of dollars into the country.
In the meantime, Bush keeps doling out the happy talk about Iraq. When he appeared before U.S soldiers at Fort Lewis, Wash., last week, he made it seem as if everything in Iraq was going according to plan. “The future of a free Iraq is now coming into view,” he proclaimed. The Iraqi people, he said, “are making steady progress.” Political parties have been formed, electric power is being restored and newspapers started. (Baghdad residents are still only receiving nine hours of power a day. And wasn’t it anti-American articles in Muqtada Sadr’s newspaper that led to the U.S. battle with this insurgent cleric?). “At one Iraqi university,” Bush remarked, “a team is translating the great works of democracy into Arabic.” He also declared, “There are now 200,000 Iraqis on duty or in training in various branches of the Iraqi security operations.”
Now I don’t expect Bush to shout woe-is-me—or, more importantly, woe-is-Iraq—in front of television cameras during an election season. But, as others and I have noted before, he really needs to read the newspapers. Yet, as [i]Washington Times [/i]reporter Bill Sammon writes in his book, [i]Misunderestimated[/i] , “Bush thinks that immersing himself in voluminous, mostly liberal-leaning news coverage might cloud his thinking." Cloud his thinking? Bush’s “thinking” could use more than a few buckets of rain.
If Bush bothered to look at the occasional news story, he might pick up some useful information. For example, while there may be, as Bush said, 200,000 Iraqis “on duty or in training” for the nation’s security forces, this number is misleading and the actual figures, as reported in the papers, are less heartening. The Iraqi army has about 3000 troops. The problematic Civil Defense Corps, which is slated to become part of the military, has 37,500 troops. Altogether there may be about 60,000 troops—many of questionable status—which can be deployed against the insurgency. This is not a large force, especially given the viciousness of the enemy. For over a year, the Bush administration has overstated the size and capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. The tradition continues.
But if I could tie the president up and force him to read one article—and please, do not alert the Secret Service—I would place in front of him a[i] Washington Post [/i]front-page story written by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that chronicles the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority. To anyone who has paid attention to media coverage of the occupation, there is little in the piece that would come as a surprise. But the gathering of these facts in a single account was eye-popping. Here is a sampling:
[b]1.[/b] The United States promised to use $18.6 billion in aid to employ at least a quarter of a million Iraqis by now in reconstruction projects. About 15,000 Iraqis have been hired for these projects.
[b]2.[/b] According to a recent poll conducted by the United States, 85 percent of Iraqis had no confidence in the CPA. Chandrasekaran writes, “The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.”
[b]3.[/b] In an interview, L. Paul Bremer, the CPA chief, said that among his biggest accomplishments in Iraq was lowering tax rates. Critics within the CPA, Chandrasekaran writes, “faulted Bremer for working to advance a conservative economic agenda of tax cuts and free trade instead focusing on the delivery of basic services.” In other words, ideology trumped common sense.
[b]4.[/b] The Bush administration hired hacks instead of experts for CPA posts. “A few development specialists,” according to the Post, “were recruited from the State Department and nongovernmental organizations. But most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with jobs going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House.” Dick Grasso wasn’t available?
[b]5. [/b]Occupation officials have isolated themselves from Iraqis. "We don't know the outside," a senior adviser to Bremer told the newspaper. “How many of us have gone out to buy a bottle of milk or a pair of socks?" CPA officials shop in a special bazaar in the Green Zone; they do not visit local markets. Chandrasekaran writes, “Limited contact with Iraqis outside the Green Zone has made CPA officials reliant on the views of those chosen by Bremer to serve on the Governing Council. When [Lakhdar] Brahimi, the UN envoy, asked the CPA for details about several Iraqis he was considering for positions in the interim government, he told associates he was ‘shocked to find how little information they really had,’ according to an official who was present.”
In a companion piece, Chandrasekaran interviewed John Agresto, a longtime educator and neocon culture warrior hired by the Bush administration to oversee and revive Iraq’s higher education system. Upon his arrival in Iraq, Agresto, the former president of St. John’s College in New Mexico, inspected the schools, found them in a devastating state of disrepair, and concluded that the universities needed $1.2 billion to be viable. The Bush administration requested $35 million—less than 3 percent of what was needed. Worse, the Republican-controlled Congress appropriated a measly $8 million—or two-thirds of 1 percent of the amount needed to do the job right. And what does Bush say publicly about universities in Iraq? He proudly points out that scholars at one college are translating “the great works of democracy into Arabic.”
It’s a bad joke. Bush cites this one exercise as progress. Agresto requested 130,000 desks from the U.S. Agency for International Development; he received 8,000. And when Iraq is in such a state that American journalists and occupation officials cannot venture beyond the (relative) safety of the Green Zone, Bremer boasts of lowering Iraq’s tax rates.
I crib so much from Chandrasekaran to make a point. It only takes one or two in-depth newspaper articles to puncture the upbeat assessment Bush tosses out. As Chandrasekaran reported, “Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. ‘Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?’ a senior CPA official said. ‘Nobody here believes that.'"
The coming transfer of sovereignty is change, not necessarily progress. There is no indication that the new government will be able to sort things out more than the failed CPA. The insurgency seems to be intensifying. (Is that only because the handoff is coming, as Bush officials have suggested? Or is something else afoot?) The political infighting among the Iraqis is high. (Look at the Kurds threatening to secede and moving to occupy Arab-held territory they claim as ancestral property outside the designated Kurdish areas.) And if the United States maintains 138,000 troops in Iraq, all this will continue to be Bush’s problem, whether or not he has an interim government to point a finger at. Let’s hope that Bush’s public statements about developments in Iraq are motivated by politics not ignorance. If it is the latter, that may be good news for Democrats—for it means he is incapable of effectively dealing with the tough issues of Iraq. But it also is bad news, for it indicates the guy in charge of such a difficult and combustible situation is misinformed—and, as Sammon suggests, on purpose. After all, you can bring a president a newspaper, but you can’t make him read it.
[b]Source:[/b]
TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
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| Will The Commissioners Cave Into VP Dick Cheney's Intimidation Tactics??? |
| 06.22.04 (2:38 pm) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush regime is well-known for using ugly coercion, threats and intimidation tactics to achieve its' sordid and squalid [i]neo-con aims [/i]... [/b]The Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] will lie, cheat, steal and murder if they deem it necessary as the [i]insane means [/i]to their deadly, traitorous and destructive [i]neo-fascist ends [/i]... It is time for "We the People" to stand-up [i]enmasse[/i] and [i]push-back [/i]by demanding that Congress http://www.congress.org insist upon enforcing the rule of law as per the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights by establishing an independent commission to investigate the War Crimes committed by Bush and Cheney relating to their criminal lies, fraud and treason: (1) phony claims of WMDs in Iraq used to take our nation to war, (2) non-existent links between Al Qaida & Iraq (who had nothing to do with 9/11) used to instill fear into our citizens, and (3) the murder, torture, rape and abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib) ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
[b]Will The Commissioners Cave?[/b]
Will the Sept. 11 Commission follow the example set by Congress and the Intelligence Community and let itself be intimidated by Vice President Dick Cheney?
Now that the commission’s staff report has pulled the rug out from under the notion so successfully fostered by the administration that Iraq played a role in the attacks of 9/11, no one should be surprised if the commissioners pull the rug out from under the staff.
[u]There are disquieting signs that this has already begun to happen[/u].
The stakes could not be higher for the president and vice president. Arguably, the commission is in position to play in 2004 a role analogous to that played by the Supreme Court in 2000 in ensuring the election of George W. Bush and Cheney. This, I believe, accounts for the dyspeptic reaction of the two to the staff report and the press play accorded it last week.
[i]New York Times [/i]pundit William Safire is also outraged. In his column today he lashes out at the commission chairman, Republican Tom Kean, and the vice chairman, Democrat Lee Hamilton, for letting themselves be “jerked around by a manipulative staff.” Safire drives home the point that the staff conclusion concerning Iraq and 9/11 was “not a judgment of the panel of commissioners,” but rather “an interim report of the commission’s runaway staff.”
[b]Republican Commissioners Fall Into Line [/b]
Appearing Sunday on ABC’s [i]This Week[/i], Sept. 11 commission chairman Kean fell in line, saying repeatedly that the staff report is only an “interim report.” Not only did he note it is “not finished,” the commissioners themselves have not been involved in it so far and the final report will include whatever “new information” becomes available.
It is not hard to see what is coming. On Thursday Cheney told the press that he “probably” had more intelligence information than had been made available to the commission. Commissioner John Lehman, another Republican stalwart, told [i]Meet the Press [/i]Sunday “the vice president was right when he said that he may have things that we don’t have. And we are now in the process of getting the latest intelligence.”
Flash back, if you dare, to other “intelligence” promoted by Cheney: the aluminum tubes that turned out not to be suitable for fashioning nuclear materials after all; the mobile “biological warfare labs” that produced nothing more lethal than hydrogen for weather balloons; the infamous report, based on forged documents, alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.
[b]The Perils Of Partisanship [/b]
What is clear is that Washington is in for a month of partisan wrangling among the commissioners and staff before the July 26 deadline for the report—partisanship of the kind demonstrated at the grilling of former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clark. This time it will all take place behind closed doors. Lehman conceded on [i]Meet the Press[/i], “We’re under tremendous political pressure…in this election year.”
Indeed, the commission was highly politicized from the get-go, with its work carefully choreographed. Subpoena power, for example, requires a majority vote among the five Republican and five Democrat commissioners. And, as the public hearings have already shown, the White House can count on seasoned protection from heavy hitters like Fred Fielding, legal counsel to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, as well as from Lehman and the other Republican commissioners.
Once again, “intelligence” will be front and center, with Cheney in the background as super-analyst. CIA Director George Tenet is packing his bags for his July 11 departure, and there is zero chance his well-mannered deputy, John McLaughlin, will depart from what has become customary practice—at the CIA and elsewhere— and stand up to the vice president.
[b]The Neuralgic Point [/b]
When [i]Meet the Press’ [/i]Tim Russert quoted [i]The New York Times’ [/i]contention that the commission staff report “directly contradicts public statements by Bush and Cheney regarding Iraq and 9/11,” Lehman, borrowing from Cheney’s lexicon, branded the [i]Times[/i] report “outrageously irresponsible journalism.” Echoing Kean’s remarks, Lehman added parenthetically, “And, again, this is a staff statement; the commissioners have not yet addressed this issue.”
Democrat Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste had just told Russert, “There was no Iraqi involvement in 9/11. That’s what our commission found. That’s what our staff, which included former high-ranking CIA officials, who know what to look for (found).”
Interesting. Ben-Veniste saying it is what the commission found; Kean and Lehman saying the commissioners have not yet addressed the issue. A harbinger of the wrangling to come.
[b]That Troublesome Constitution Again [/b]
Most observers are familiar with the rhetorical landscape with which Bush and Cheney persuaded a large majority of Americans that Iraq played a role in the attacks of 9/11, and many shrug this off as familiar spin by politicians inclined to take liberties with the facts. So far little attention has been given to the fact that a constitutional issue is involved.
On March 19, 2003, the day the war began, President Bush sent a letter to Congress in which he said that the war was permitted under legislation authorizing force against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” If the staff’s finding that there is “no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States” is allowed to stand, the Bush administration will be shown to have gone afoul of the Constitution yet again.
[b]Watch For New “Intelligence”[/b]
So expect new “intelligence” (and hope against hope that there is time to give it the smell test). Lehman’s assurance that the commission report will be updated with new intelligence “right up until we go to press” is by no means reassuring. If it is the truth that is sought, there should by now be widespread awareness of the pitfalls of cherry-picking unevaluated, uncorroborated, “this-just-in” pieces of intelligence.
Also watch for administration attempts to change the final draft report, if the Republican commissioners do not succeed in neutralizing offending passages.
Tim Russert called attention Sunday to reports that the White House had been allowed to review the staff reports just made public, and asked if that was appropriate. Ben-Veniste indicated that the purpose of reviewing the reports is supposed to be to find and eliminate any classified information. He also said, though, that the White House “went somewhat beyond that and took issue with some of what the staff had concluded.”
Indeed, an early draft of one draft report was changed, according to[i] Newsweek[/i]. A passage expressing skepticism about the account of Cheney getting Bush’s approval for the shoot-down order was reportedly removed after the White House objected.
Ben-Veniste told Russert that the White House will review the final report before it is made public. Thus, there will be considerable opportunity for the manufacture of “insurmountable” classification problems, for delay and for other mischief—given the potential political explosiveness of the commission’s final report.
It will not be surprising if the final report is not made public until well after the target date of July 26 (the same day the Democratic Convention opens in Boston). If the report does meet that target, it is likely that it will appear in significantly truncated form.
. [b]Ray McGovern (RRMcGovern@aol.com), a CIA analyst for 27 years, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity[/b].
[b]Express your outrage regarding the criminal VP Dick Cheney's lies, treason and intimidation tactics used to cover-up the mendacious Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] heinous Crimes Against Humanity to Congress on http://www.congress.org ...[/b]
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| Democracy and the Cult of the 'Free Market' Don't Work ... |
| 06.22.04 (10:27 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" must commence to [i]re-think [/i]our system of government, because we have been hijacked by corrupt corporate-owned toadies & rapacious puppets who represent corporations and wealthy plutocrats-- And the United States of America is being transformed into a heinous Global Corporate Empire that does[i] not [/i]represent working people and the values of the majority of Americans and/or those who are ruthlessly exploited around the world to enrich the few hyper-rich oligarchs (the neo-slave owners who are sucking the blood out of the Middle Class, Working & Poor People, their neo-feudal serfs) ...
Democracy isn't working ...
It is the west's calling card, but its global applicability is now in doubt [/b]
However implausibly, President Bush continues to reiterate his commitment to the early introduction of democracy in Iraq. Indeed, the idea of democratic reform in the Arab world has been central to the Anglo-American position on Iraq. There should be nothing surprising in that. Democracy has become the universal calling card of the west, the mantra that is chanted at every country that falls short (when politically convenient, of course), the ubiquitous solution to the problems of countries that are not democratic.
The boast about democracy is largely a product of the last half-century, following the defeat of fascism. Before that, a large slice of Europe remained mired in dictatorship, often of an extremely brutal and distasteful kind. The idea of democracy as a western virtue was blooded during the cold-war struggle against communism, though its use remained highly selective: those many dictatorships that sided with the west were happily awarded membership of the "free world"; "freedom" took precedence over democracy, regimes as inimical to democracy as apartheid South Africa, Diem's South Vietnam and Franco's Spain were welcomed into the fold. Following the collapse of communism, however, "free markets and democracy" became for the first time - at least in principle - the universal prescription for each and every country.
Democracy is viewed by the west in a strangely ahistorical way. It is seen as eternal and unchanging, neither historically nor culturally specific, but a kind of universal truth. But, of course, nothing is eternal. The western model of democracy, like everything else, is a distinct phase in history, which depends upon certain conditions for its existence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it should not be assumed that it is of universal application, nor that it will always exist.
Russia is a classic test of the western shibboleth. For the west, the simple answer to Russia's ills after the collapse of communism was a combination of the free market and democracy. The free market never happened; worse, the attempt to engineer it under Yeltsin produced, with western blessing, the theft of Russia's most valuable natural resources by its leader's cronies. The country is paying a terrible price for following western advice. Meanwhile, democracy has been shaped and constrained by the personal power of Putin, a reminder of the country's long, despotic past. The lessons? History and culture leave an indelible imprint on the nature of any democracy; the market similarly.
The west, in its enthusiasm for democracy, suffers from historical amnesia. Britain has only enjoyed universal suffrage for about 80 years, by which time it was already highly industrialised. For many west European countries it was even later. The great majority of countries that have experienced economic takeoff, including Britain, have done so under forms of authoritarian rule. The most successful recent examples of takeoff, those in east Asia, were similarly achieved under authoritarianism: the legitimacy of these regimes has depended on economic growth rather than the ballot box.
Democracy, historical experience suggests, is not that well-suited to achieving the conditions necessary for economic takeoff. Given that democracy is now the universal western prescription for developing countries, this is rather ironic. It does not mean, of course, that authoritarian rule is necessarily good at achieving takeoff: the Latin American model has proved extremely poor, the East Asian very effective. Nor does it mean that democracy can't deliver economic takeoff: India is a case in point. Clearly, though, democracy is not a universal formula for economic success, irrespective of a society's state of development.
The west is the traditional home of democracy. The fact that western countries share various, usually unspoken characteristics, however, is often ignored. They were the first to industrialise. They colonised a majority of the world, invariably denying their colonies democracy. They were overwhelmingly ethnically homogeneous. Developing countries, for the most part, have faced the opposite circumstances: takeoff in the context of an economically dominant west; the absence, in the context of colonial rule, of indigenous democratic soil; and far greater ethnic diversity.
The west remains oblivious to the profound difficulties presented by ethnic diversity. As Amy Chua points out in World on Fire, democracy is far from a sufficient condition for benign governance in the kind of multiracial societies that are common in Africa and Asia. Democracy, the politics of the majority, allows the majority ethnic group to govern, potentially without constraint. Multi-ethnic societies, like Malaysia or Nigeria, require, for their stability, a racial consensus: democracy, resting on majorities and minorities, is deaf to this problem.
Moreover, democracy works very differently in different cultures. In Japan, the Liberal Democrats have formed every government, apart from a brief interruption, since democracy was introduced more than 50 years ago. The political arguments that count take place between unelected factions of the governing party rather than between elected parties. The Japanese model of democracy - or the Korean or Taiwanese - may have the same trappings as western democracy, but there the similarities largely end.
If it is mistaken to regard western democracy as a universal abstraction that is equally applicable across the world, it is also wrong to see it as frozen and unchanging. Indeed, there are grounds for believing that western democracy, as we have known it, is in decline. The symptoms have been well-rehearsed: the decline of parties, the fall in turnout, a growing disregard for politicians, the displacement of politics from the centre-stage of society. These trends have beenobservable more or less everywhere for at least 15 years.
The underlying reasons are even more disturbing than the symptoms. The emergence of mass suffrage and modern party politics coincided with the rise of the labour movement, which drove the extension of the vote and obliged political parties to engage in popular mobilisation. The rise of the modern labour movement, moreover, provided societies with real choices: instead of the logic of the market, it offered a different philosophy and a different kind of society. The decline of traditional social-democratic parties, as illustrated by New Labour, has meant the erosion of choice, at least in any profound sense of the term. The result is that voting has often become less meaningful. Politics has moved on to singular ground: that of the market.
The influence of the market is manifest in multiple ways. The funding of parties now moves solely to its rhythm: big business and the rich are as important to New Labour as they are to the Conservatives. The same interests fund, and therefore influence, the parties. Big money calls the tune. Nowhere is this truer than in American politics, which has become a plutocracy mediated by democracy, rather than the reverse. As the media has displaced traditional forms of discourse and mobilisation, ownership of the media has become increasingly important in the determination of political choices and electoral results. The most dangerous example is in Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi's ownership of the bulk of the private media has enabled him to transform Italian democracy into something verging on a mediaocracy, leaving politics and the state besieged by his immense personal power and wealth.
Perhaps these developments point to a deeper problem incipient in western democracies. Far from the free market and democracy enjoying the kind of harmonious relationship beloved of western propaganda, democracy grew in fact as a constraint on the market, holding it at bay and enabling a pluralism of values and imperatives. What happens when this healthy tension becomes a dangerous imbalance, in which the market is dominant and consumerism is established as the overriding ethos of society, permeating politics just as it has invaded every other nook and cranny of society? Democracy comes under siege. In Italy it is already gasping for breath. In the US it is deeply and increasingly flawed. Democracy is neither a platitude nor an eternal verity - either for the world or for the west.
•: [b]Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre [/b]- http://www.guardian.co.uk/com...,3604,1244327,00.html
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| Bush's White (House) Lies ... |
| 06.22.04 (9:56 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" must contemplate upon how we can continue to conduct a civil debate in this neo-orwellian environment with a president and his neo-con cabal of neo-fascists who continue to perpetrate heinous lies, deceptions and falsehoods upon us ...
How civil should debate be if the president of the United States is not telling the truth about life-and-death issues?[/b]
Why is it so difficult to hold a president accountable for not telling the truth? Over a year after President George W. Bush took the country to war by falsely claiming that intelligence "leaves no doubt" that Saddam Hussein possessed significant weapons of mass destruction, Bush continues to enjoy better poll numbers on integrity than John Kerry. Moreover, as the Senate Intelligence Committee prepares to release a report that will blast the CIA for committing serious errors while preparing the prewar intelligence on Iraq's WMDs -- that is, for overstating the case -- Bush's defenders are ready to make outgoing CIA director George Tenet the fall guy, even though Bush's before-the-war assertions about Hussein's unconventional weapons went much beyond what the CIA errantly reported. It's indisputable: Bush routinely exaggerated the CIA's exaggerations. Yet the nation -- or the lot of political commentators -- still argues over what should be a proven point: Bush showed little regard for the truth in his campaign for war. And a highly charged question continues to be debated: Is Bush a liar?
Most recently, this argument heated up when the independent, bipartisan 9/11 committee declared it had found no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. In reply, Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney continued to insist there had been. In brief remarks to reporters, Bush declared, "We did say [before the war] there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; for example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda, in Sudan." Those contacts, Bush did not say, had occurred in 1994, and the 9/11 commission had reported nothing came of them. Before the war, Bush had gone much further and had said of Hussein, "He's a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda." Note the verb tense. To justify the coming invasion, Bush proclaimed that Hussein was currently in league with al Qaeda. But in response to the 9/11 commission, he referred to decade-old contacts. Wasn't this strong evidence that Bush had spoken dishonestly before the war?
Bush's advocates have done a good job of countering the general accusation that the president is a liar. I know, because I have been on the receiving end of their spin and obfuscation. In September 2003, a spate of books critical of Bush were published and landed on the best-seller list. Three had the word "lies" in the title, including my own, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. At the time, left-of-center advocacy groups -- most notably MoveOn.org -- initiated public campaigns questioning Bush's truthfulness. Bush's defenders fought back, dismissing these books as irrational expressions of a phenomenon they belittled as Bush hatred. On CNN's Crossfire, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson described the anti-Bush books as written to cater "to the paranoid and craziness of the far left" and "selling because the Democratic Party has gone completely insane with Bush hatred." Conservative columnist David Brooks opined, "The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves."
Even non-ideological writers bemoaned the anti-Bush books as the latest indication that the nation's embittered and deteriorating political culture was degenerating further. Time magazine pointed to my book as more evidence of "the rise of the anger industry." New York Times Magazine's James Traub observed, "Hatred is delicious. But the sudden rash of jeremiads and their stunning popularity raises a question: Why are so many liberals, including sane and sober ones, granting themselves permission to hate the president?.... Buying a book that has 'Bush' and 'lie' in the title...is a deeply cathartic, ideology-affirming experience. It's satisfying; but I don't see how it can be a good thing, either for public debate or ultimately for the electoral prospects of the Democrats, to have liberals descend to the level of rabid conservatives." Another New York Times Magazine writer, Matt Bai, took the same line: "A new strand of vitriol has consumed the Bush-hating left.... The new leftist screeds seem to solidify a rising political culture of incivility and overstatement.... The various expressions of liberal fury are a direct imitation of what the right has been doing for more than a decade.... Hate isn't much of a message."
But these critics have overlooked the main point: the case against Bush. The essential issue is not whether Bush detractors hate the man or are angry with him. What matters is whether their indictments are persuasive and well-founded. After all, if Bush has indeed misled the public about his far-ranging tax cuts, global warming, homeland security, stem cells research, the reasons for war and other serious topics, isn't anger an appropriate response? But often commentators (mainly of the right-wing variant) have preferred to focus on what they perceive to be the emotions of Bush's antagonists. It has been an easy way to dismiss the bill of particulars. They self-servingly decry the decline of civil debate and avoid the question: How civil should debate be if the president of the United States is not telling the truth about life-and-death issues? (One exception is columnist George Will, who has at least urged Bush to acknowledge his untrue prewar assertions about the weapons of mass destruction.)
Other Bush-backers have tried to diminish the case against Bush by adopting an everybody-does-it stance. In the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, Andrew Ferguson observed, "If presidents have been liars from George Washington to Chester A. Arthur to Bill Clinton....this in turn raises the fatal suspicion that maybe George W. Bush isn't so bad." Such reasoning is a weak defense of Bush. The more sophisticated attack comes from Bush-critic critics who claim that Bush's "lies" are not really lies, that they are fudge-able policy statements common to politicians. And more than one conservative radio talk-show host has said to me that if Bush believes his spin then it cannot be considered a lie. After all, didn't it seem as if Bush truly thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
This defense of Bush does not take into account that a president has the responsibility to ascertain the truth and do his best to guarantee that the information he shares with the public is as accurate as can be. Too often, Bush has embraced and put forward misinformation to support and advance his policy desires. Did he know the information was false? That is not an excuse. In the case of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Bush, according to the White House, did not even bother to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Produced in October 2002, this 90-page report summarized the intelligence community's information on Iraq. Had Bush perused it, he would have seen that the evidence regarding Iraq's WMDs was often inconclusive and disputed by various US intelligence analysts and that the overall picture of Hussein's WMD capabilities was unclear. And Bush would have had good reason to question his own melodramatic, black-and-white statements about Iraq's WMDs.
If a president recklessly abandons his obligation to determine whether he is in possession of good, solid information, and then accepts incorrect or misleading material and presents it to the public because doing so serves his own ends, he is engaged in a deceptive practice that can be considered the functional equivalent of lying. Bush has yet to face any consequences for promoting deceptions crucial to his agenda, and he has not assumed responsibility for actively misleading the American public and the world. So the debate over his truth-defying ways will continue until Election Day.
[b]Source:[/b]
David Corn, Washington editor of [i]The Nation[/i], is author of the best-selling [i]'The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception[/i].' This article is excerpted from the new and expanded paperback edition of the book.
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| Bush's Disastrous U.S. Occupation of Errors ... |
| 06.21.04 (2:23 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" will probably not succeed in [i]impeaching[/i] the corrupt Bush regime ([i]due to a corporate-owned-and-paid- for GOP Congress who have betrayed our nation[/i]), although they deserve it for their illegal and immoral fiasco in Iraq including death, massacre, mayhem, chaos, misery, torture, rape, abuse and other crimes including the embezzlement of Iraq's natural resources (oil) ... Bush and Cheney should both be shipped-off to the International Court at the Hague to be tried for Crimes Against Humanity ... [/b]
The American people have been terrorized into betraying our great heritage and allowing the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]to commence their destruction of our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... Once and for all, [i]at minimum[/i], Bush & Cheney should be[i] ousted [/i]in the November presidential election for[i] sheer-and-utter incompetence [/i]...
As the June 30 handover looms large, a review of the 15-month U.S. occupation reveals the extent of the CPA's unmitigated failure in Iraq. This must-read [i]Washington Post [/i]article http://www.washingtonpost.com... documents how the Bush administration took a situation that had some potential for success and turned it into an unmitigated disaster, by prioritizing loyalty over experience and ideology over reality.
According to the [i]Post[/i]:
... "[i]Several current and former CPA officials contended that key decisions by Bremer favored a grandiose vision over Iraqi realities and reflected the perceived prerogatives of a military victor. Critics within the CPA also faulted Bremer for working to advance a conservative economic agenda of tax cuts and free trade instead of focusing on the delivery of basic services[/i]." ...
The measures of the CPA's failure are many and damning: The Iraqi army is one-third the expected size; only15,000 Iraqis have been hired to work on U.S.-funded projects compared to the 250,000 jobs promised; electricity generation remains stuck at around 4,000 megawatts, resulting in less than nine hours of power a day; attacks on U.S. forces and foreign civilians now average more than 40 a day, three times higher than the rate in January.
No wonder more than 80 percent of Iraqis see the CPA as a symbol of betrayed promises and bad faith.
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| Bush Boys: Rigged Elections & Lost Votes ... |
| 06.21.04 (10:22 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" should be asking the United Nations to oversee the 2004 November presidential election in the United States of America in order to avoid the [i]disastrous debacle that occurred in 2000[/i], leaving us saddled with a corrupt, incompetent and lawless Bush regime who has instigated horrendous death, misery and chaos [i]here at home and abroad [/i]...[/b]
Our Republic depends upon our citizenry[i] voting [/i]and that the[i] votes are counted [/i]correctly ... The traitorous Bush Crime Family are working diligently to rig the upcoming election in November (Jeb is taking potentially illegal actions in Florida by putting valid voters likely to vote Democrat on lists so that they will be unable to vote) ... Please contact Congress http://www.congress.org and demand that paper ballot voting be implemented and that UN oversight is requested in order to avoid another horrendous fiasco like the banana republican coup d'etat of 2000 that undermined our democratic system of government ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.
This year, it could get worse.
These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-'round.
How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It's easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.
While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played -- with black voters the predetermined losers.
Florida's Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in "Al Gore." Optical reading machines rejected these because "Al" is a "stray mark."
By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee's white- majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.
In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.
But let's not get smug about Florida's Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.
Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, "It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. --
about 1 million votes -- were cast by nonwhite voters."
This "no count," as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures.
Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the "spoiled" votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It's not surprising that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled.
The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation's worst spoilage rates. That's not surprising. Boss Daley's Democratic machine, now his son's, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago's black vote.
How can we fix it? First, let's shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida's black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote.
This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county's procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage.
In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking.
It is about to get worse. The ill-named "Help America Vote Act," signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.
California decertified some of Diebold Corp.'s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.
And once again, the history of computer-voting glitches has a decidedly racial bias. Florida's Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.
Going digital won't fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts.
In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote- spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters' ballots.
[b]Greg Palast is the author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - the New Expanded Election Edition," from which this article is taken.[/b] - http://www.zmag.org/content/s...
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