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"You get America out of Iraq and
Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."
- Cindy Sheehan |
P I C T U R E
O F T H E D A Y |
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©SOTT JK |
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By Greg Szymanski
William Cooper, a former military intelligence officer and world-reknown lecturer and writer, was killed in a suspicious 2001 police shootout in his Arizona home. Author of the best selling underground book of all time, Behold A Pale Horse, his top secret intelligence document discoveries provide proof positive the Illuminati intends mass destruction of half the world's population, reaching its diabolical goal in what the author terms 'the age of deception.'
26 Dec 2005 To better understand what the New World Order has planned for 2006 and the years to come, it’s wise to review the life and works of writer and lecturer, William Cooper, killed in a Nov. 6, 2001, police shootout in his Arizona home.
Cooper, 58, author of more than 20 books including “Behold A Pale Horse,” the best selling underground book of all time, was also a highly popular worldwide radio talk show host, his show, “The Hour of the Time,” appearing on shortwave and the internet on the Worldwide Christian Radio station out of Nashville.
After Cooper’s untimely and suspicious death, Mills Crenshaw, a KTALK radio host out of Salt Lake City, put the sad event into perspective:
“William Cooper may be one of America’s greatest heroes and this story may be the biggest story in the history of the world.”
This week in the minds of many people, starting a new year is like wiping life’s slate clean, starting anew, with fresh ideas, with important new goals and renewed interests in becoming useful each and every day of the year.
So, with the New World Order gathering momentum, it’s useful to remember a page out of Cooper’s life by embracing in the final days of 2005 the efforts of one lone, brave man who dedicated his entire existence to exposing the Illuminati’s diabolical plans to destroy America, as well as the rest of the world.
In one of his 1997 writings entitled “Majestytwelve,” Cooper draws this conclusion:
“If you wish to remain Free you will have to fight for it... not because we want to fight, or you want to fight, but because the traitors (within our government) will give us no choice in the matter. There will be either a revolution (the Marxist's choice) or there will be a serious attempt to restore Constitutional Republican government under Law (the Patriots choice). In any event there WILL BE WAR between the Citizens of the United States of America and the Marxist minions of the subversive corporate United States' new world order.”
In Cooper’s final years, he worked alone in his Arizona home with his two dogs, rooster and chicken, sending his family out of the U.S. in 1999 for their security. Prior to several years of Arizona desert solitude, Copper became known as a world class lecturer, appearing at Wembly Hall in London as well as lecturing in every state of the Union during a 10 year period.
Known as a consummate researcher, backing his New World Order theories with hard data from his days in U.S. Navy Intelligence, Cooper always struck fear in the eyes of Presidents, including Clinton, who mounted an FBI attack to silence Cooper’s views.
Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, Rush Limbaugh read a White House memo on the air during his broadcast, calling William Cooper, “...the most dangerous radio host in America”. Cooper was later quoted as saying Clinton's pronouncement was “the greatest compliment that he has ever received.”
Further, Cooper's FBI file which included references to his security clearances while in military service, was one of those unlawfully in possession of the White House in what has become known as, "Filegate". Shortly after this discovery, President Clinton ordered all federal agencies to begin investigation, persecution, and prosecution of Mr. Cooper to shut him up.
While engaged in ongoing federal battles with the FBI over free speech issues and the IRS who tried to put a financial stranglehold on his affairs, Cooper went to work full steam, creating several documentaries about the JFK assassination and the government’s UFO hoax in order to strike fear in Americans.
Cooper also believed in empowering Americans with free thought through newspapers and the airwaves, starting the CAJI News Service, VERITAS national full size newspaper, The Intelligence Service, Harvest Publications, and has helped over 700 low power FM affiliate stations get equipped and on the air, including the station he managed as Trustee for the Independence Foundation Trust, 101.1 FM Eagar, Arizona, broadcasting to 7,000 people.
Under his leadership, his company also ventured into the publishing trade. The first book published being Oklahoma City: Day One by Michele Marie Moore... the definitive classic on the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995.
But to really understand Cooper’s philosophy an where he obtained much of his secret information to be used in his later works, it’s necessary to understand his military background, the place he became all to familiar with the real intentions of the New World Order
Cooper first served with the Strategic Air Command, United States Air Force, holding a secret clearance working on B-52 bombers, KC-135 refueling aircraft, and Minuteman missiles.
After the Air Force, he joined the United States Navy fulfilling a dream previously frustrated by chronic motion sickness. He served aboard the submarine USS Tiru (SS-416), USS Tombigbee (AOG-11), Naval Support Activity Danang RVN, Naval Security and Intelligence Camp Carter RVN, Danang Harbor Patrol RVN, Dong Ha River Security Group RVN, USS Charles Berry (DE-1035), Headquarters Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet, USS Oriskany (CVA-34).
Cooper was a member of the Office of Naval Security and Intelligence serving as a Harbor and River Patrol Boat Captain at Danang and the Dong Ha River Security Group, Cua Viet, Republic of Vietnam, being awarded several medals for heroism during combat.
He also served on the Intelligence Briefing Team for the Commander In Chief of the Pacific Fleet, designated KL-47 SPECAT operator in the CINCPACFLT Command Center at Makalapa Hawai1 where he held a Top Secret, Q, SI, security clearance.
Being privy to top secret information for many years, Cooper later would call on his military background and expertise as a centerpiece for much of his writing, deciding to tell the truth and be a man of conscience instead of selling his own soul to the New World Order thugs.
Although Cooper’s works are immense, covering almost every possible element of what is amounting to a global takeover by the Illuminati, anyone reading the following excerpts from a top secret documents uncovered by Cooper will conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that America’s destruction is underway from within and the only way to get back the country staring in 2006 is by a revolution of the people.
In the article referenced above, entitled Majestytwelve, Cooper’s words make the hair on anyone’s head stand up:
“The following is fact. It is not a theory it is a genuine conspiracy. I witnessed the Top Secret/Magic documents from which this information is excerpted while a member of the United States Navy attached to the Intelligence Briefing Team of Admiral Bernard Clarey, Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet.
“I certify that the following information is true and correct to the best of my memory and the research that I have accomplished. I will swear to it in any court of Law.
“I can produce the names of approximately 38 U.S. Navy officers and enlisted men who witnessed these documents while in the service of their country… I can produce the names of approximately 80 others whom I suspect have witnessed these same documents. I will not reveal the names except in a court of Law that is willing to prosecute the People and organizations involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States of America to bring about a socialist totalitarian world government.”
After Cooper went to great lengths to add authenticity and credibility to his discovery while in the military, he went on to delineate the intentions of the diabolical forces behind the secret military documents.
“Many years ago I had access to a set of documents that I eventually realized was the plan for the destruction of the United States of America and the formation of a socialist totalitarian world government. The plan was contained within a set of Top Secret documents with the title "MAJESTYTWELVE". There was no space between majesty and twelve. The term honored the planned placement of ultimate power in a body of wise men who are destined to rule the world as the disciples of a Messiah front man. This “Messiah will serve as a buffer between the wise men and the sheeple. I discovered these documents between 1970 and 1973 while I was a member of the Intelligence Briefing Team of the Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet.
“MAJESTYTWELVE was in a tall thin font style...imagine the title squeezed together between the M and E with all of the letters stretched vertically. The key to access was a Top Secret (Q) (SCI) security clearance with the compartmentalization of "MAJIC" (not magic). I cannot remember the exact font except that it is a tall thin version of San Serif... the exact name escapes me after all these years... but it is a key to access.
“The plan outlined the formation of a world totalitarian socialist government. It is to be ruled by a behind-the-scenes council of wise men. A so-called benevolent dictator, will be presented as the Messiah.
“The Constitution for the United States of America and its Bill of Rights will be scrapped. A parliamentary form of government will take its place. All military forces and individuals are to be disarmed except for an internal police force which will carry only the minimum weapons needed to maintain internal order.” Although Cooper only lived to see a little more than a year of the Bush Presidency, he was a firm advocate that President Clinton, although posing as a man of the people, was in fact one of the biggest and most diabolical front men for the New World Order.
And to prove his point, the following two Clinton quotes illustrates his true intentions:
“When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities." Said President Bill Clinton on MTV on March 3, 1994.
He further stated on several days later in a USA Today interview: "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans…”
Besides pointing the finger at Clinton, Cooper claimed the true source of the global conspiracy based in fact was to be found in a body known as the Illuminati, a group made up of the highest level of the so-called secret orders and secret societies. Explaing their origin and purpose, Cooper wrote:
They are bound together by blood oaths, a secret religion, and the promise of an elite status within regional government, or the world supra government. Their religion is based upon the Kabbalah, the Luciferian Philosophy, and the worship of the Sun. They are not bound by any oath or allegiance save their own. They are loyal to no government or People save their own. And they are Citizens of no country save their already in place secret world government. In their own words, "If you are not one of us you are nothing." To garner some sense of “feel” for the concept see the movie “They Live.”
“It is a largely 'open' conspiracy, in that much of its membership, structure, methods, and operations, are matters of public record, however scattered and obscure. Its manner of coordination is atypical. Two nuclei - the elite core of the Wall Street clique (orbiting the House of Rockefeller) and the elite core of the European financial clique (orbiting the House of Rothschild) - coordinate this global conspiracy by waging psychological warfare on the rest of the conspirators, telling each no more than is necessary for him to fulfill his designated role, often with explicit recognition neither of his role, nor of the unarticulated rules that govern him.
“Thus, the overwhelming bulk of the conspirators do not know, but only suspect, that they are part of and in service to 'a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
In his article about the secret military documents, he delves into the inner workings of the Illuminati, showing how some candidates rise to the top, hand picked for progress beyond the 13th Degree (York Rite) or 32nd Degree (Scottish Rite). Cooper claims those ‘chosen few’ disappear behind the veil and become one of the "Thousand Points of Light," are more properly known as the "Magi.”
Looking back at history, Cooper adds:
“The process of initiation and blood oaths have always been the protection of the Illuminati in a Christian world that has had a tendency to "burn at the stake" those who differed in belief or philosophy. The "burning alive" of Jacques DeMolay, the persecution of men like Gallileo and Giordano Bruno by the Catholic Church, and the persecution of their Orders has resulted in the "Brotherhoods" hatred of Christianity and the goal of the extermination of all religions save theirs.
"You may verify the goal of the Illuminati by visiting the home page of Freemasonry's Grand Lodge of Scotland (if that link does not work click here). You will notice the flag of the Grand Lodge of Scotland and the "Universal" flag of Freemasonry is displayed. The "Universal" flag of Freemasonry is the United Nations Flag. (We thank those of you who responded with affidavits confirming this paragraph.) Since this paragraph has become well known the Grand Lodge of Scotland has replaced the United Nations Flag (Universal Flag of Freemasonry) on their WebPages with a graphic of the earth.”
And buried deep in the documents uncovered by Cooper, which he vigorously tried to expose until his untimely death, was the call for a mass extermination in what he termed the “goal in the age of deception.”
If anyone ever wonders on the dawn of this new year where the U.S. is headed after Oklahoma City and 9/11, listens to Cooper’s predictions based on what he learned from years working in the military intelligence field:
“This is the age of deception. The world is on the razor. One half is scheduled to be exterminated if these people have their way, and the other half is scheduled to be enslaved when the mystical union between the moon IS (Isis or Church) and the sun RA (Osiris or Doctrine) greets the Son of the morning EL (Horus or full body of Adepts) on the horizon (Horus risen) in the New Dawn (ISRAEL or realization of the New World Order).
“When the process is complete a new worldwide Soviet Union will emerge to thin the herd, shear the sheople, and march them off to enslavement or slaughter depending upon their individual ability to accept and adhere to their reeducation.
As Cooper ponders the fate of America and the world, his 1997 words appear to be coming true as we enter 2006.
“There will be no individual Rights only privileges. These will be granted or denied at will by the world supra government. All property is to be owned by the State. There will be a redistribution of wealth. They plan to eliminate class differences and reduce the standard of living to a lower level in the advanced nations, such as the United States, and to a higher standard of living in the so-called third world nations.
“This leveling of the standard of living will be accomplished through a global economic collapse which is in its beginning stages. The economic collapse will fulfill the goal of Marx and Engles' Communist Manifesto mandating the elimination of the middle class. The graduated income tax was the first implementation of this process and is one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto. NAFTA and GATT are a part of this process encouraging industry to move into third-world nations in order to exploit cheap labor.
“All existing religions will disappear. The only religion will be the state religion (humanism or illuminism).
“All County and State governments will be eliminated and replaced with regional government. These regional governments (Home Rule) are already in place. Regionalism is gradually taking control throughout America.
“There will be no more cash. Trade will be accomplished by a system of computer credits with accounts accessed through debit cards or computer chip implants. The cards or implants will also serve as personal identification, drivers license, and etc. When this is completed the human race will be shackled to a computer in a never ending cycle of debt. No action or movement will ever again be private.”
Further delving into the age of new world order deception, Cooper points to the UFO and alien hoax thrust on America, finding within the Majestytwelve secret documents the entire plan for the creation of a socialist world government is protected by an artificial extraterrestrial threat from space. He adds the entire UFO phenomenon and the uFOOLogy movement has been created to further the protection and activation of the plan, outing Coast to Coast talk show host Art Bell, as one of the main Illuminati spokesman.
“Within MAJESTYTWELVE is Operation Majority justifying the plan by presenting an extraterrestrial threat as the reason for the necessity for world government ala "Who speaks for planet Earth... Argentina?" Exactly the manner in which Stanton T. Friedman ends his UFOs Are Real lectures,” said Cooper.
“When I saw Operation Majority while serving in the Navy I believed the alien threat was real just like everyone else. It was not until I had performed many years of research that I was able to fully understand exactly what it was that I had seen. It was extremely difficult for me to believe that my government and the United States Navy had used me, especially since I had dedicated my life to government and military service. Most government and military personnel cannot and will not believe such and idea.
“The plan is real. The extraterrestrial threat is artificial. The threat is presented through the use of secret technology originally developed by the Germans in their secret weapons programs during WW-II, by geniuses like Nikola Tesla, and many others.”
Concerning Bell’s role in the New World Order agenda, Cooper again relies on the “age of deception” theory, as well as decoding Illuminati signs and symbols in order to find out the real truth among the many messages of deception. Referring to Bell’s well-known logo of a gold pyramid in a deep blue sea with his name at the top of the pyramid, Cooper illustrates his point about Bell’s role:
“I have long recognized that Art Bell is a shill for the New World Odor. It is confirmed in his book . World government is, in fact, the theme of the book.
“Did you know that the sea (mare or Mary) is a symbol of vast numbers of People, the masses in Marxist symbology? Did you notice that the pyramid rises from the sea (People) and dominates the scene as a promise, or savior? Did you know the pyramid missing the capstone represents the Great (unfinished) Work of the Mystery School? Did you know that the Great Work represents social engineering (socialism) working toward the apotheosis of the race (perfected man, sixth root race) as promised to Adam and Eve by Satan, and a New World Order?
“Did you notice that the name Art Bell straddles the capstone signifying that he is the Light Worker, or Illumined Man, or Master Mason, or Horus, or perfected god-Man, or Savior, who completes the Great Work? Did you notice the Bright Star fallen from heaven just above the capstone? Do you know who or what it represents? Do you see the Thousand Points of Light working in silence behind the veil (clouds) in the heavens. Illuminism is Marxism. It is a false promise that the human race will be perfected bringing a perfect utopian society through social engineering. This is a brainwashing mechanism whereby an ignorant slave race may be created to be ruled by a totalitarian socialist world government.
“Art Bell is a Freemason. He is a member of the Illuminati. Art Bell's book ‘The Quickening’ is one of the most blatant, in your face, pieces of new world order propaganda that I have ever seen. In it Art Bell, claiming to be a patriotic American, shamelessly advocates the formation of a world totalitarian socialist government.”
With most people heading into the new year with the thought of another terrorist attack on the horizon, Cooper claims these attacks are a new world order strategy to tell Americans any opposition will be met with brute force.
“Ruby Ridge, the Waco Massacre, the attack against Patriots and Militias, and other acts of aggression against the American People who might combat this fraud are acts of war. These acts are designed to demonize fundamentalist Christians, Jews, Moslems, the lawful Militia, and anyone else who might fight in defense of the Constitution or Freedom.
“These terrorist acts deliver a message to the American People that any opposition to the new world supra government will be met with overwhelming force and the complete genocide of the enemies of socialism.”
And as everybody has a New Year’s Eve toast, while wondering where the next terrorist “shoe will drop,” listen to Cooper’s concluding analysis and ominous 1997 predictions, making anyone reading immediately want to pour another stiff drink.
“MAJESTYTWELVE stated that the first terrorist attack in the United States would occur in a large city such as New York or Los Angeles. Based upon that statement I accurately predicted that it would occur in New York, and it did when the World Trade Center was bombed.
“MAJESTYTWELVE stated that terrorism would continue until the American People consented to be completely and thoroughly disarmed. The document stated that the second major target would be, "somewhere in the heartland such as Oklahoma City". The actual target was not named. Since the document was not specific as to the actual target and its location I did not predict Oklahoma City... but my prediction of continued terrorist attacks including major attacks upon the "heartland" of America was accurate.”
Writing before 9/11, he further predicted the following:
“If these acts of terror do not succeed there will be more bombings, chemical, or biological attacks. They will escalate in the destruction, maiming and killing of men women and especially children. More shootings at shopping centers, restaurants, and schools will occur. As a last resort, if all else fails, the Illuminati are prepared to detonate an atomic weapon in a large American city such as New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.” |
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Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Let's talk about death now. Sure, I know, nobody wants to talk about death. But I have in mind some very interesting deaths that ought to be talked about for a lot of reasons.
The first death I want to talk about is the "apparent suicide" of Morris K. Jessup. The problem with Morris Jessup's suicide is that it was too obvious. He was found in his station wagon in a Dade County Park, Florida, on the evening of April 29, 1959. A hose had been attached to the exhaust pipe of the station wagon and looped into the closed interior. The whole set-up had been accomplished during daylight hours, in a public park. Ever since, researchers have said that Jessup's death was the price he paid for getting too close to the truth. You see, Jessup's death is SO apparent a suicide, that everyone just KNEW that it was NOT a suicide. And, of course, as a consequence, an entire mythos was born about something called the Philadelphia Experiment having to do with Time Travel. There has always been an element of "high strangeness" to the "UFO mystery" that has been the subject of endless debates among researchers. Anyone who has seriously begun to delve into such matters, or who has experienced certain manifestations, is aware of the weird guys who dress in black, big-foot type critters, strange, hooded figures, poltergeist type events, and crazy electronic glitches in telephones, televisions and radios. Often, the type and level of such experiences can become quite frightening, or at the very least, disorienting. Very often, these effects are trotted out as proof that the UFO phenomenon is nothing other than the product of the spirit realm. Others will suggest that this proves that it is "observer created" reality flux.
There are cases where UFOs have appeared in conjunction with all kinds of violent and frightening phenomena, and often, those who experience such things run screaming into the arms of anything that will offer protection, usually religion of one sort or another, drugs, or psychiatry.
Anybody, under the best (or worst) of such circumstances, may come to the idea that there is some bizarre sort of conspiracy directed at them as an individual, and, according to the Cassiopaeans, they won't be far wrong. As they have said, "nobody is a nobody," and it is "no trouble at all for such forces to give seemingly individualized attention." After all, a single, small group of so-called aliens, with mastery over time, could be responsible for all such phenomena. All they would have to do would be to return to the same time over and over again, selecting only a different place and a different individual to harass, and all of the victims, being IN time, would have their experiences "simultaneously."
In reading cases of abduction, one becomes aware that there are many instances wherein the individual has no missing time, no memory of anything unusual, but has developed something like a phobia and goes to a therapist for help. One case involved a man who suddenly began to experience a serious reaction to a lonely stretch of road he had to travel every day to and from his job. It was a complete mystery to him why he was having panic attacks every time he approached this section of the highway, and he was quite shocked to have a "roadside" abduction come back to his memory under hypnosis. In other cases, the individual thinks they have experienced a "ghostly encounter," or for no apparent reason they have suddenly begun to manifest "psychic" abilities. (The reader might wish to have a look at Nick Pope's interesting book The Uninvited for elements of such cases from UK, along with some astute commentary.)
What this means is that anybody could be an "abduction victim" and they might never suspect it. And, as Jacques Vallee points out, the numbers who do have awareness of an unusual event who do NOT report it, when extrapolated from those who DO report encounters, could run into the multiple millions. And of course, there are still those who want us to believe that this is a government mind-control experiment. Yeah, right!
It is possible, of course, with the electronic technology of the present time, that multiplied millions of people could be - in certain respects - "programmed" via television, radio, music, video games, and so forth; that their subconscious could be taught a "binary code language" of electronic signals that are inaudible to the normal range of hearing; and that they could thereby be constantly picking up signals of some sort that are "unpacked" in their subconscious mind and emerge into their conscious mind as their own thoughts. We have even studied some specific technology of this type, and it is frightening in its implications. Using a binary code, speeding up the signal, entire books of information can be transmitted in almost no time at all, and the percipient would be certain that they were just "thinking it." It can even be individually directed with the addition of a personal "activation code." In this way, even "memories" could be introduced into the mind which would be accepted as the person's own experiences.
So, it is certainly true that human technology could produce a major phenomenon of belief system modification by simply broadcasting an inaudible signal over the globe, assuming that the recipients know the language and have been involved in activities whereby the "code" can be subliminally "taught."
This does not, of course, address the historical issue of "other-worldly beings." And we notice a large effort to distract attention away from those cases as though there is a program to gradually cover them up and induce belief in the idea that this is an "extra-terrestrial" phenomenon in strictly material terms. We have already mentioned the function of "memes" as mass mind viruses introduced by the Matrix in an effort to distract attention away from the true source of the phenomena. In short, all kinds of possibilities exist, even including mass hypnosis via such coded signals. And there are many, many people who prefer such an explanation to that of hyperdimensional realities and mind marauding, time-traveling critters with BO and questionable fashion statements.
I would suggest, of course, that such an explanation, placing the blame on human beings, leaves a lot to be desired since very often the effects of poltergeist type phenomena can be photographed, leave physical traces, and no one has yet seen the "man behind the curtain." I find it hard to believe that the "field work" of such a conspiracy could be carried out so effectively that no mistakes have been made, and nobody has ever caught any government agents toting Susy Smart out the back door in a state of drug induced insensibility, nor can any explanation be found for how such a program could operate logistically over such vast areas of space and time without a single "leak" of insider info. And when people "escape" from mind programming projects, or so they claim, we have to ask why? When we consider the capabilities and ethics of such programmers, the very idea that they would allow such escape and release of "inside info" raises serious questions about its authenticity. Anybody who has read any serious literature on the subject realizes how easy it is to put a period to the existence of a "squealer." Karen Silkwood was only ratting on safety in a nuke facility and she conveniently had an accident on a lonely road.
Having said all of that, there does seem to be a major "human interface" to the matter, with certain agencies or individuals of agencies, acting in strange ways that suggest either they know what they are doing, or they are some sort of "robotoid" type of individual who can be activated at will to perform various functions. The so-called "Greenbaum Program" is a case in point. Then, of course, there are cases such as the Cathy O'Brien situation. Did she really escape, or was she "allowed" to escape? Was her escape designed to emphasize the "human elements" of the Matrix and distract attention away from the hyperdimensional players? Is her story supposed to suggest that there are "glitches" in the program that give us an "inside view" of human mind control projects that suggest a vast social engineering program?
In September of 1953, Albert K. Bender claimed that he had received certain information that provided the missing pieces for a theory concerning the origin of UFOs. He wrote it all down and sent it to a trusted friend. Shortly after, he received a visit from "Three Men." One of them held the letter he had written in his hand. They told him that he had, indeed, stumbled on the answer, and then they purportedly filled him in on the details. He became so ill he was unable to eat for three days. A couple of other UFO researchers, Dominick Lucchesi and August C. Roberts, tried to persuade Bender to talk. He would only repeat "I can't answer that."
Finally, in 1962, Bender declared that he would tell the story and wrote a book entitled Flying Saucers and the Three Men. It described astral projection to a secret base in Antarctica inhabited by male, female and bisexual creatures. Researchers were perplexed and wondered if the whole thing was just contrived to hide something more sinister. Lucchesi said that Bender was a "changed man" after the three men had visited him. He said "it was as if he had been lobotomized." Bender was obviously frightened, and suffered from extreme headaches whenever he even thought about speaking about his experiences and what the three men had told him. He withdrew completely from UFO research, and went to work managing a hotel, and refused to discuss anything about such matters ever again.
Not too many months after Bender's silencing, Edgar R. Jarrold, organizer of the Australian Flying Saucer Bureau, and Harold H. Fulton, head of Civilian Saucer Investigation of New Zealand, had received similar visits and disbanded their organizations. Just recently, I was informed of a fascinating case where another UFO discussion group was broken up by the arrival on the scene of a psychopathic "contactee" who later involved the leader of the group and several members in a murder. I hope to get a full report on this case soon and will keep the readers posted.
Broadcaster Frank Edwards who wrote a best selling book, Flying Saucers, Serious Business, was a highly successful radio host. He was warned to abandon the subject of UFOs, and refused. He was fired. In spite of thousands of letters in protest of his dismissal, his ex-sponsor, the American Federation of Labor, stood firm. George Meany, then president of the AFL said Edwards had been dropped "Because he talked too much about flying saucers!" It was later suggested that the Defense Department had put pressure on the AFL.
Edwards was only temporarily silenced. He soon had a syndicated show that dealt almost exclusively with UFOs and related phenomena. Shortly after, the news of the sudden death of Frank Edwards on the anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting near Mt. Rainier, Washington was announced. Some people claimed that Edwards had been ill, was overweight, and so forth. Those closest to him said he had never been ill. The obituary said that death was "apparently" due to a heart attack, and we wonder how many other researchers have died of an apparent problem that had never before been apparent?
This brings us back to the problem of Morris Jessup's "apparent suicide." One of the most pervasive UFO-human conspiracy stories is that of the Philadelphia Experiment which explicates that, in 1943, the U.S. Navy secretly accomplished the teleportation of a warship from Philadelphia to a dock near Norfolk by successfully applying Einstein's Unified Field Theory.
The story tells us that the experiment began in an attempt to develop radar invisibility, but something unexpected happened: the ship became invisible, and when it returned, several of the crewmen burst into flames, and others had portions of their bodies melded into the steel structures of the ship. Of those who survived, most of them spent the rest of their lives in psychiatric hospitals. That's handy. I had a guy kidnap me when I was four years old who was conveniently "shielded" in a Navy psychiatric hospital. Any connection? Possibly.
The Navy denies the reality of the Philadelphia Experiment, but the rumors persist, and they are very powerful rumors. Researchers continue to hear accounts from eye-witnesses or purported family members of those who died or went insane. I was even told a story about the Philadelphia Experiment by my ex-husband who swore he had heard it from a guy in Key West when he was young. And this was long before I ever knew anything about the mythos of the Philadelphia Experiment proper!
It was the death of Morris Jessup that gave credibility to the rumors of the Philadelphia Experiment. In fact, the "details" of the experiment all began with the series of letters Jessup was purported to have received from a Carlos Allende.
When you try to track the story back to its beginnings, you discover that even the story about the purported annotated copy of Jessup's book emerged only AFTER his death as a "rumor" in Washington social circles. The fact that Allende mentioned sodium pentothal in his letters is quite telling. That he was aware of the existence of sodium pentothal at that early date suggests that he was aware of mind control research being conducted by the Navy during the war, which suggests that he was a victim, or a handler of such projects.
Gray Barker, editor of The Saucerian Bulletin, loved a good mystery. He was author of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and The Silver Bridge. Barker had become involved in UFOlogy around 1950 when a strange creature with glowing eyes appeared in front of several eyewitnesses, floating about the ground, and giving off a terrible odor. Barker later discovered that there were physical marks in the nearby soil, and became convinced that an alien craft had landed in rural Flatwoods, West Virginia.
Barker tells us that his first contact with Morris Jessup was when he received a letter from him on November 5, 1954. Barker had sent Jessup a copy of his magazine, The Saucerian. This was just shortly before Jessup's first book was published. We discover from Jessup's letter that Barker was apprised of his existence and work by John Bessor who was, apparently, a subscriber to the magazine. Jessup wrote:
Yes, I'm doing a book. It is far along in the final draft stages, and we are hoping to get it in the hands of the publishers sometime next week. It is rather conservative as compared to some of the wild things so far printed, but I have tried to keep it factual, and have confined it to phenomena in the pre-Arnold era - particularly around 1875-1885. Altogether it makes quite a formidable array of proof and background.
Gray Barker describes Jessup as "a most cordial person, and greatly enthusiastic about finding some solution to the UFO mystery - though he indicated that in his professional writing he felt it necessary to take a more conservative approach. This conservative, scientific attitude, demonstrated in his first two books, may have been the reason that his writings were not popular with many saucer "fans.""
Jessup wrote to Barker on December 16, 1954:
There is so damned much nonsense being put out by silly people that one gets disgusted with a lot of it. I do feel that we are in a remarkable phase of human experience and that the waters should not be muddied by stupidity - the problem is tough enough without any Adamski's in the picture.
And then on December 20th, along with two articles he sent to Barker, Jessup wrote:
The Mexican craters are real - I found them myself, and I've seen the air force negatives. [...] The extension of the motive-power theme to include some jolts ro religion are rather obvious. This space race COULD be our GOD. They COULD have left the Earth millennia ago. Our book will hint at how Sun-worship may be connected with the space denizens.
I read your report regarding Albert K. Bender with great interest. Looks like SOMETHING did happen. He probably did stumble onto the truth. I will be glad of any additional information you may uncover.
In my humble opinion, you are absolutely correct in your thought that the power source is the key to the whole UFO deal. I am convinced of it from my own introspection and reading.
Jessup's reference to Bender was made before Bender told his story. Jessup's little book The UFO and the Bible did not sell well and is now out of print. It was originally part of his book The Expanding Case for the UFO, but the publisher rejected that section. Jessup himself did not complete the final drafts for his books, such as UFO Annual. His agent simply took files of clippings and organized them into book form. A short story from a magazine happened to be among the clippings, and the agent included it as fact, resulting in Jessup's critics pointing this out to discredit him.
From the beginning of his research, Jessup evidently thought that UFOs were propelled by anti-gravity applications. Regarding the early developments of the factors that contributed to the emergence of the myth of the Philadelphia Experiment, Gray Barker tells us:
According to Riley Crabb, the annotated copy [of Jessup's book] was addressed to Admiral N. Furth, Chief, Office of Naval Research, Wshington 25, D.C., and was mailed in a manila envelope postmarked Seminole, Texas, 1955. In July or August of that year the book appeared in the incoming correspondence of Major Darrell L. Ritter, U.S.M.C., Aeronautical Project Office in ONR. When Captain Sidney Sherby reported aboard at ONR he obtained the book from Major Ritter. Captain Sherby and Commnder George W. Hoover, Special Projects Officer, ONR, indicated interest in some of the notations the book contained.
I first learned of the annotated copy when I was talking to Mrs. Walton Colcord John, director of the Little Listening Post, a UFO and New Age Publication in Washington. Speaking over the telephone, Mrs. John told me of a strange rumor going around to the effect that somebody had sent a marked-up copy to Washington, and that the government had gone to the expense of mimeographing the entire book, so that all the underlinings and notations could be added to the original text. This was being circulated rather widely, she told me, through military channels.
She had not, of course, seen a copy of it, and didn't know too much about it, but somehow she seemed to connect it with an alleged Naval experiment wherein a ship had completely disappeared from sight. I couldn't make too much out of all this until later I also heard about the strange Allende Letters, which told of such an experiment in a most horrifying way.
The publication of the mimeographed edition is established, but I have been unable to confirm whether or not it was actually paid for by the government. It is established that the Varo Manufacturing Company, of Garland, Texas, actually produced the mimeographed edition. I have been unable to find out much about this company, except that it has been said that it engaged in "secret government work."
Apparently, Mr. Crabb in some way came into possession of a copy. [...] In his correspondence with me of September 24, 1962, Crabb clears up the mystery of how he happened to obtain a copy of the original Varo edition. It was the copy that the Navy originally gave to Jessup, and apparently was given to Crabb by Jessup. This copy, however, rather mysteriously disappeared in April, 1960, when Crabb mailed it to himself from Washington, and apparently he no longer possesses any copy at all.
Crabb tells us: I understand that 25 copies were reproduced... Michael Ann Dunn, the stenographer who did the editing, explains why in the introduction. She's married now, living in Dallas, and won't answer her phone. [...] Varo, by the way, is a small manufacturing firm in electronics and up to its neck in space age business. Apparently it has succeeded in developing some kind of a death ray gadget, judging from a guarded press release of last fall when a group of Congressmen visited there for a demonstration.
Now, first of all, we notice that Gray Barker is apprised of the existence of the book via a rumor that is supposed to be coming down from military circles! Jessup never told him about it, and apparently, it was only after Jessup's death that the rumor began to be circulated. We notice that Riley Crabb claims to have had a copy - that this copy was the one the Navy gave to Jessup - but conveniently, it has disappeared in a weird mailing exercise.
Ivan Sanderson had been a close friend of Morris Jessup, and Barker tried to get some information from him when he ran into him in New York sometime later. He tells us that Ivan would not discuss the suicide at all, but he was more than willing to talk about the Varo edition of Jessup's book. Barker asked Sanderson why Jessup had never publicized the matter of Allende and the annotated book. (It seems that the only evidence we even have for this story is hearsay AFTER Jessup's death!) Sanderson apparently told Barker that Jessup was "just dumbfounded" to be called to Annapolis and shown the annotated edition.
The story from Ivan is that six months before his death, Jessup had visited him bringing along the annotated edition of his book that had come from the Navy. Ivan claimed that, during the course of the evening, Jessup had requested Ivan to bring three other persons (never identified) into Sanderson's private office where Jessup showed them the Varo edition, to which he had added his own notes. He asked them to read it and then lock it up in a safe place "in case something should happen to me." Sanderson never said what the notes were, remarking only that "after having read this material, all of us developed a collective feeling of a most unpleasant nature. And this was horribly confirmed when Jessup was found dead in his car."
What happened to this annotated copy? Sanderson told Gray Barker that it was left in his keeping. Sanderson is dead now, and no one has ever located such a copy in his effects. Yet Riley Crabb ALSO claimed to have been the recipient of Jessup's very own annotated copy.
I smell a rat.
In the years following Jessup's "suicide," almost everyone in the UFO field had forgotten him. During his life, Jessup was not a best-selling author. He was mentioned in Charles Berlitz's book " Without a Trace," and this revived a bit of interest. As a result of this book, Gray Barker received a phone call from a woman in Miami who had the idea that Jessup did not commit "suicide." He sent her a copy of the annotated edition which he had acquired by then (as have a lot of other people, though I am not sure how anybody can assume that it is authentic!) along with The Strange Case of Dr. M.K. Jessup. This woman, Ann Genzlinger, became obsessed with the matter, and undertook to investigate. Surprisingly, she found "doors eagerly opened for her" and the utmost in cooperation by both the staff and Examiner of the Medical Examiner's office in Dade County. Ordinarily, medical records aren't available to the public, yet she was allowed complete access to them, and was permitted to voice copy them onto tape. Strangely, after ten years, when the records should have already been moved to storage, they were right there in the "current section."
The Medical Examiner himself seemed to be interested in Jessup's death since he had written to Barker inquiring if he knew of any instances of the use of hallucinogenic drugs as techniques in UFO investigations. This convinced Barker that the examiner might have thought that Jessup had been made to commit suicide.
As it happened, no autopsy had been performed. The body had been donated to the University of Miami School of Medicine, which was in violation of the Florida State Code that lists instances in which autopsies are mandated. Apparently, even if the examiner was "interested," he wasn't interested enough to obey the law and perform an autopsy.
The homicide officer who investigated the death, Sgt. Obenchain, commented:
The job was too professional. And I've been on homicide a long time and I feel I can make such a judgment. For example, the ordinary suicide by monoxide poisoning doesn't take the time to wet down all the articles of clothing and to stuff them in the back window to make it more airtight. Most suicides use an ordinary garden hose. But the hose used in Jessup's car was larger in diameter, and similar to one on a washing machine. It was not just shoved into the car's exhaust pipe. It was wired on. And all this had been done in broad daylight, just off a well-traveled road, at the height of the rush hour when traffic was leaving the park. The water could hardly have been applied to the rags at the scene, or some second party had removed the evidence. The closest body of water was 200 yards away. There were no containers for carrying water to the car. Jessup's clothes were not wet, yet the rags used for stuffing the window were saturated with water.
While the police were trying to revive Jessup, a Dr. Harry Reed just strolled into the park, though it was after closing time, examined Jessup, and pronounced him dead. There was no Dr. Reed in the Miami telephone book, and none listed in the state licensing records.
Jessup's wife, Rubye, refused to view the body because she was so certain that her husband would not have committed suicide. Homicide Sgt. Obenchain's wife stayed with Rubye for three days after the death, and during this time Rubye told her about unusual telephone calls Jessup had been receiving right before his death. She said that these calls upset him, though he would not tell her what they were about. If Jessup was out and she answered the phone, the caller would hang up. The calls ceased immediately upon the death of Jessup. After three days of repeating over and over again that it was not her husband, suddenly Rubye Jessup asked Mrs. Obenchain to leave, stating that she no longer wanted to talk about the matter.
The person who did, eventually, identify Jessup's body was a fellow named Leon a. Seoul who claimed to be a friend of the family. Unfortunately, none of the family ever heard of him.
So, what do we have? We have someone who purportedly sent some weird letters to Morris Jessup, about which he was reportedly curious, but not terribly excited. All the "impressions" that are attributed to Jessup regarding these letters are from hearsay, AFTER his death. We have a story about the Varo edition of his book, that only emerged as a "rumor" after his death. The rumor was claimed to be from "military circles," as though this would give it credibility. The only people who seem to claim any "inside info" are Riley Crabb and Ivan Sanderson, both of whom claimed to have been in possession of the copy given to Jessup, on which he had made notes of his own. But this copy disappeared, and somehow, there are copies circulated from somewhere because I have two of them. The end result is that, due to this series of rumors, which seem so obviously concocted after Jessup was no longer alive to refute any of it, we have people declaring that Jessup was silenced because he was on the verge of proving that the Philadelphia Experiment really did take place exactly as Carlos Allende described it!
Every detail and element of the Allende story, the Varo edition of Jessup's book, and the purported strange events preceding his death just reeks of manipulation; all of it propagated after he was no longer present to deny any part of the story. After looking into the matter carefully, one gets the strange impression that a dead man was used to create a myth. Or at least, the "right" version of the story - the version that the Powers that Be want everyone to believe. And, at the center of the myth we find Ivan Sanderson and Riley Crabb, who seem to be responsible for spreading the whole story. Later, as a most telling coincidence, a long-time associate of Sanderson, Al Bielek, comes along and breathes new life into the story by creating "Montauk," followed by Phil Schneider, and others.
We come back again to the death of Jessup: a suicide that was so obviously"set-up" to look like suicide, that everyone KNOWS it was murder by persons or agencies unknown. Ann Genzlinger concluded: "I was motivated by a strong feeling that Dr. Jessup did not take his own life. But after my long investigation, I have concluded that he did - but not while in possession of his faculties. He was under some sort of control."
That, of course, does NOT explain the problem of the wet rags stuffed in the back window of the Station Wagon.
Nevertheless, the result of all of this is that the Philadelphia Experiment, as explicated by the Carlos Allende letters, and the story about the Varo edition of Jessup's book, is now firmly ensconced as fact in the minds of many people.
On January 17, 1996, Phil Schneider was found dead in his apartment. He had been dead for about a week. After a lot of fooling around by the medical examiner, it was decided that Phil had committed suicide by strangling himself with a rubber hose of the medical type. Yeah, right!
Phil was a well known speaker on the patriot and UFO lecture circuit. His main shtick was underground base activities. As a geologist, he claimed to have been involved in the construction of secret government bases, including Area 51 and the base at Dulce, New Mexico. As it happened, for two years before his death, Phil had stated in his lectures that there were constant attempts being made on his life. These attempts were described as staged accidents, running gunfights, loosened lug nuts on his vehicle and so forth. Phil further claimed that his father was a German U-boat captain who had been captured by the Allies and inducted into the U.S. Navy under the CIA's Operation Paperclip program in which Nazis were given new identities and became U.S. citizens.
Loosened lug nuts?
I read that part to my kids - movie buffs all - and they looked at each other and then at me and said: "Yeah, right! The Secret Government according to Homer Simpson." The reader may wish to read Alexandra Bruce's well-researched book "The Philadelphia Experiment Murder," for the many confusing details of Schneider's background and claims that were brought to light which cast doubt on his stories, but still raise confusing issues.
In the end, the question is: was Phil Schneider a crank who took his own life because of paranoid hallucinations, or was he murdered by agents of the government for giving out classified information? Was he murdered to shut him up? Or, could there be another reason: the same reason Morris Jessup was murdered? Were they both murdered to give credibility to stories that were, in fact, FALSE?
Phil's death is seen by conspiracy buffs as proof that what he was saying was true. In the same way, Jessup's death is seen as proof that the claims of Carlos Allende about the Philadelphia Experiment are true. And in both cases, what seems to be an obvious murder poorly disguised as a suicide is the common factor of conviction that persuades the many believers in the stories surrounding the two figures.
The problem is that we all know that those boys in Black Ops can do better than that when they want to! If they want a death to look perfectly natural, if they want to just shut you up, you can be sure that they can do it. By the same token, if they want a death to look like a murder disguised as a suicide, they can do that, too. It is patently absurd for Schneider to have announced on numerous occasions that the secret government had made over a dozen "attempts" on his life. Such agencies do not make "attempts" on a person's life. They do the deed, and it looks exactly the way they want it to look. Don't delude yourself by thinking otherwise. There are occasional "leaks" and "embarrassing" stories about such agencies, but I can just about guaran-damn-tee that they are planned. Nothing like creating a reputation for being a bumbling bunch to cover up the fact that, at the deepest levels, very little bumbling takes place.
What this means is that the deaths of Jessup and Schneider were very likely engineered for the express purpose of promoting disinformation.to inspire belief in something connected to them either after their death, or promoted by them before their death. And if that is the case, then we have to seriously suspect the stories that are propagated in connection with their deaths, and assume that they may be disinformation. |
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Donald Hunt
December 26, 2005
Gold closed at $505.90 an ounce on Friday, up less than 0.1% from $505.50 the week before. The dollar closed at 0.8425 euros last week, up 1.2% from 0.8323 at the previous Friday's close. That put the euro at 1.1869 dollars, compared to 1.2015 the week before. Gold in euros would be 426.24 euros an ounce, up 1.3% from 420.72 euros an ounce the Friday before. Oil closed at 58.43 dollars a barrel Friday, up 0o.6% from $58.06 the week before. Oil in euros would be 49.23 euros a barrel, up 2.1% from 48.23 euros a barrel the Friday before last. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.66 Friday, down 0.6% from 8.71 at the previous Friday's close. In U.S. stocks, the Dow closed at 10,883.27 on Friday, up less than a tenth of a percent for the week from 10,875.59. The NASDAQ closed at 2,249.42, down 0.1% from 2,252.48 the week before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.38%, down six basis points from 4.44 the week before.
Friday saw the release of the U.S. new housing sales numbers for November. The numbers were surprisingly bad: New Home Sales Plummet in November
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer
Sales of new homes plunged in November by the largest amount in nearly 12 years, providing the most dramatic evidence yet that the red hot housing market over the last five years is starting to cool down.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that new single-family homes were sold at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.245 million units last month, a drop of 11.3 percent from October, when sales had surged to an all-time high.
Last month's decline was even bigger than the 8.7 percent drop-off that Wall Street analysts had been expecting. While sales of both new and existing homes are still on track to set records for a fifth straight year in 2005, analysts are forecasting sales will decline in 2006 as the housing boom quiets down. Prices for houses declined as well, an unsold inventory is building up rapidly.
The New York transit strike dominated the news in the early part of the week, with the corporate media attacking the workers for being heartless and greedy. To put that charge in perspective, we need to look at those workers in the context of the whole New York economy: Christmas in New York
Billions in bonuses for Wall Street execs; mayor denounces "selfish" transit workers
By Jerry Isaacs
23 December 2005
Earlier this week New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg denounced striking transit workers as overpaid and selfish "thugs" who were indifferent to the impact of their walkout on the city's working poor. These comments were rather rich coming from a mayor who, with a net worth of $5 billion, is rated number 34 on Forbes magazine's list of wealthiest Americans.
But Bloomberg wasn't speaking just for himself. The transit strike was viewed as a virtual slave rebellion by New York's entire financial elite, which has been enriching itself beyond imagination for the last quarter century.
For transit workers, already struggling to make ends meet in one of the costliest cities in world, this Christmas will be a toned down affair, particularly with the threat of heavy fines hanging over their heads, including the loss of two days pay for every day on strike. For Wall Street executives, however, this will be a very merry Christmas.
December is the month for year-end bonuses for Wall Street's traders, brokers and investment bankers and this year the top layers are expected to pocket some $17 billion in incentive payouts. According to Johnson Associates Inc., a compensation consulting firm, the average bonus for a managing director will be $1.2 million, with top investment bankers and prime brokers seeing checks padded by as much as 20 percent more than 2004's bonuses. Specialists in energy markets, hedge funds and proprietary trading will likely earn even more.
According New York magazine, Goldman Sachs has put aside $11 billion for bonuses. With 22,000 employees worldwide, that would amount to $500,000 a piece. But not everyone makes the same. Goldman's top officials - 250 partner managing directors - get an average bonus of $2 million to start. Top producers can expect incentive awards of up to $40 million. The next tier of management - executive managing directors - can ring in 2006 with bonuses of up to $3 million.
After the Enron and other corporate scandals there was a certain media and legal attention paid to the massive payoffs on Wall Street. As the scrutiny of such excesses has all but disappeared, so has any reticence over grabbing as much as possible.
"People have had enough of listening to bad news," said Glenn Mazzella of World Wide Yacht Corporation. "They want to go yachting, and they want to go skiing and they want to drive a Maybach (a German car that retails for $325,000). They're tired of feeling embarrassed."
"There's someone on Wall Street that's taking 20 of his closest buddies for his bachelor party, renting a yacht, cruising the Caribbean and ending up in Sandy Lane in Barbados on the golf course," says Tatiana Bryon, president of the New York event planner 4PM Events. The cost: $200,000.
The windfall has also sparked sales of Hummer sport utility vehicles and luxury sports cars. John Bruno Jr., general sales manager of Hummer of Manhattan, says he sold 29 percent more of the General Motors Corp.-made sport utility vehicles this September compared with a year ago. The majority of sales are of the H2, with luxury packages starting at more than $61,000, and the military-specification H1, which sells for $129,000 or more. "We get a lot of Wall Street guys," says Bruno.
The $200,000 Italian-made Lamborghini Gallardo is this year's hottest car at Gotham Dream Cars LLC, says Noah Lehmann-Haupt, president. Clients including mortgage brokers and traders pay $1,750 a day to drive the 200-mile-per-hour machines. Lehmann-Haupt says he is planning to almost double the Upper West Side exotic car rental company's fleet next year to 11, including the new Gallardo Spyder.
The mayor of New York has nothing to say about this grotesque consumption while he denounces transit workers who earn $50,000 a year. Bloomberg, like the rest of New York's elite, lives in an entirely different universe from the working class of the city who struggle to meet the high cost of living.
According to salary.com, New York is the least affordable metro area in the US. "Employers in New York typically pay 15.5 percent higher than the national average, BUT the cost of living in New York is 94 percent higher. This means that an average worker currently earning $50,000/year in the average US city would have to earn approximately $37,000 more a year in New York to maintain his or her standard of living. A $37,000 raise is a hard thing to come by, even in the Big Apple."
It's a hard thing to come by for most, but it's a pittance for some, particularly on Wall Street.
On the transit picket lines, workers readily answered the billionaire mayor's remarks. "Bloomberg is a jerk," said Grant, a train repairman in Queens. "He's talking like we're his servants and we're getting out of hand. They have all the money. They'll never see the wear and tear on their bodies that we go through. They work in clean rooms, in cushy chairs, with temperature control. On some days during the summer it's over 100 degrees in the depot. It's like you're in a box and have to be bent over every day.
"What's Christmas like for New York's elite? They fly their friends to the Bahamas and buy their girlfriends drinks costing thousands of dollars, like the one I saw on TV that is a glass of diamonds with alcohol poured over them. In one drunken night some of these guys spend more money than we earn all year.
"More than half of our incomes go for housing. It costs $1,500, $1,600 or $1,700 a month for rent. People are going to have to live in group communes just to afford the rent. Then you have to pay higher prices for food, gas and things our children need. We work to pay our bills so we can go to work again. There's never enough just to go to a movie or buy some new shoes or take the kids where you really want to go.
"Four percent wage increases hardly keep up with the rate of inflation of food and other costs. Now they want to mess with our pensions so one day when you're in a nursing home they'll just shove you in the street when you run out of money.
"That's why we went on strike. We shut down the city to show them that we won't take any more."
Now why would Goldman Sachs alone pay out 12 billion in bonuses? That's more than the annual revenue of all but the largest corporations. This money comes directly out of the pockets of investors (including large institutional funds like pension funds). Can there be any doubt that Wall Street siphons too much out of the system through parasitical, yet mostly legal, insider schemes? Some will argue that the year-end bonuses are compensation for performance. But why so much? But even if you accept that, why does Wall Street and its mouthpieces in the media begrudge transit workers the subsistence wages they are earning? Here is some of what the media mouthpieces were pushing: Behind the media onslaught on the transit workers
By Peter Daniels
23 December 2005
While New York City's striking transit workers were winning broad sympathy and support from millions of working people this week, the mass media swung into action with a predictably unanimous campaign of hysterical slanders against the strikers.
This may have been predictable, but it was no less significant. Both print and broadcast media, in every case the organs of billion-dollar corporate empires, did their best to ignore the public support for the workers, while manufacturing their own version of public opinion.
Rupert Murdoch's New York Post was perhaps the crudest along these lines, with an overline, "A message from New York commuters to striking workers," followed by the screaming two-word headline, "You Rats."
On television, ABC News found someone unable to get to his brother's wake, which was blamed on the strikers. Television reporters cornered an emergency medical technician and attempted to get him to say that the workers had endangered the life of a patient whose trip to the hospital was slowed by traffic. Several individuals were featured in 20-second sound bites with one-word punch lines like "outrageous" and "unconscionable," referring to the strike. No transit workers or supporters were interviewed on camera.
The Daily News, owned by multimillionaire Mortimer Zuckerman, took the prize for rabid labor-baiting verging on incitement to violence, with an editorial entitled, "Throw Roger from the train!" referring to TWU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint.
"Roger Toussaint, we dare you to take to the Brooklyn Bridge this morning to tell the cold, walking throngs why you chose to disrupt the lives of millions, jacked up the expenses of tens of thousands, shuttered and crimped business, opposed the subway system to terrorism and generally threatened the public health and welfare," the News editors shrieked.
"It would be delicious watching you try to justify the reckless, lawless transit strike that you have inflicted on the city - assuming your fellow New Yorkers didn't hurl you over the railing into the icy waters before you got a word out ..."
In fact, although those crossing the Brooklyn Bridge no doubt include some disgruntled middle class and wealthy commuters, it's a safe bet that transit workers would also be met with warm support there, as evidenced by drivers honking in support of transit pickets, and even in numerous letters to the same papers whose editors denounced the workers.
What passes for the "liberal" press joined in the attacks on the union. The New York Times headlined its nervous editorial, "An Unnecessary Transit Strike," while Newsday denounced this "outrageous and illegal action."
The media attacks against the workers fall into two main categories: First, the transit workers, averaging more than $50,000 annually in wages, are greedy. Second, in the pious and hypocritical words of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "we live in a country of laws where there can be severe consequences for those who break them."
Talk of greed is a bit ironic from a man who just spent more than $70 million to buy his reelection, or more than $100 for each ballot cast in his favor. Bloomberg is mayor of the capital of world finance for one overwhelming reason - his enormous wealth. No one who stops to consider his background and qualifications, even accepting his claims to managerial expertise, can doubt for a moment that he would never have been considered for the post, nor would his name even be known to the vast majority of the population, if not for his wealth. He convinced his fellow billionaires that he would do an effective job in defending their interests, and he then bought the election, something that was not very difficult considering the nature of the American two-party system and the complete political disenfranchisement of the working class majority.
Shameless is too mild a word to describe the arrogance of the billionaires who scream greed against workers who are paid barely enough to live on while carrying out work that is physically and psychologically stressful. Meanwhile, at this very moment, the Wall Street brokerage houses are handing out million-dollar year-end bonuses to several thousand traders whose work includes nothing productive.
It is interesting to note, by the way, that in recent years the newspapers have generally trumpeted the appearance of these year-end bonuses in the financial services sector, pointing to them as a sign of vitality for the local economy. This year, in the midst of the strike of the "greedy" transit workers, the Wall Street bonus story seems to have disappeared.
What about the charge of illegality? We are ruled by a government in Washington that was illegal and illegitimate from its first day in office nearly five years ago. The figurehead for this cabal is a man who has been secretly authorizing illegal wiretapping of thousands of US citizens over the last several years. Last weekend George W. Bush proudly reaffirmed his right to make his own rules and ignore laws he opposes.
None of the newspaper reporters covering the transit strike has asked Bloomberg, the Republican mayor, for his opinion on the rule of law in this case. Perhaps that is what he meant when he said that "there can be severe consequences" for breaking the law. It does not follow automatically. The workers who courageously defy an anti-strike law, a law comparable to the laws defied by the millions who organized trade unions in the 1930s and fought against Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, must be punished. A president who moves toward the destruction of the most basic democratic rights is another matter entirely.
Behind the lies spread against the transit workers are very definite material interests and a definite strategy being pursued by dominant sections of the US political and financial establishment. The aims are spelled out in the Wall Street Journal, the mouthpiece of extreme reaction.
The December 21 editorial explains what is at stake in the transit strike. The editors are somewhat contemptuous even of Republican Governor George Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg for having "caved" to the municipal unions in the past. By this they mean that the big business politicians have been unable to push through the kinds of attacks on the wages and benefits of public employees that are deemed necessary.
The incredible polarization and explosion of wealth for a tiny handful on Wall Street is not enough to assure the health of the capitalist system. The system, by its own admission, in the words of the Journal, requires a relentless and unending series of attacks on every gain that has been made by working people over the past century. The editors seethe with fury over workers' salaries of $50,000 a year. Pensions and health care also have to go, especially to set a precedent for literally millions of government workers elsewhere. Public transit itself has to go, according to the Journal. "Pataki and Bloomberg ... could use this strike as an opportunity to end the public transit monopoly by legalizing all forms of private competition - including jitneys." And this type of society, pathocratic investment capitalism (where those who trade various instruments of ownership rights take home everything while the people who make things and make things run can barely make ends meet) is spreading to Europe, too. "Life is good for the wealthy"
Germany: Social inequality is constantly growing
By Dietmar Henning
19 December 2005
A new report has found that the gap between rich and poor in Germany has grown considerably and will continue to do so. The report, published recently by the Economics and Sociological Institute (WSI) of the trade-union financed Hans Böckler Foundation, was titled "Life is good for the wealthy."
Dr. Claus Schäfer, author of the WSI report, presents various statistics that show the level of social inequality in Germany today, as well as the growth of inequality under the previous Social Democratic Party (SPD)-Green Party coalition government. The policies of the incoming grand coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democrats will further widen the gulf between wage earners and those with property or incomes from business activities.
The overall share of wages as a proportion of income of all types has fallen constantly since 2000, dropping below 70 percent last year, for the first time since 1990. In the first half of 2005, it amounted to only 65.7 percent.
The net wages ratio - the proportion of wages and salaries (after the deduction of social security contributions and payroll taxes) as a share of all income - and which approximates to how much disposable income remains in workers' pay packets, has followed a similar pattern. It has dropped from 48.1 percent in 1991 to 41.5 percent last year. In the first half of 2005, the net wages ratio sank even further, to under 39 percent. How far workers' disposable incomes have fallen can be seen by the fact that in 1960 the net wages ratio amounted to 55.8 percent.
While wages and salaries are falling, incomes derived from business profits and wealth are rising. Since the stock market collapse in 2000 and 2001, such incomes have risen strongly, both relatively and absolutely, with a net share of the national income of approximately 32 percent (29.3 percent in 1992, 24.4 percent in 1960).
…Company profits are hardly subject to taxation in Germany today. Some 25 years ago, in 1980, company profits were taxed on average at a rate of 32.7 percent. In 1990, the year of German reunification, this had fallen to around 21 percent. Under the SPD-Green Party government, this fell temporarily to 6.3 percent, with the virtual abolition of corporation taxes in 2001 and 2002. Last year, the rate had risen to 9.2 percent, but is still at a "historically extraordinarily low level," according to the report's author, Claus Schäfer. Moreover, it is a well-known fact that for a long time the largest companies, like DaimlerChrysler, have paid no taxes at all.
Schäfer notes that only a few countries have such low levels of corporation tax as Germany: "At 1.3 percent of GDP, this level of corporation tax places Germany in 29th position out of all OECD countries, making it a tax haven - above Iceland or Latvia or Lithuania."
Schäfer also points out that the repeated lowering of business taxes has had quite a different effect than government propaganda would make out. The result has not been an inflow of new investments and the creation of new jobs, but "a continuous increase in payments to shareholders" as well as the "rising acquisition of financial assets and increasing executive board salaries" - in other words, an enormous redistribution from below to above.
Schäfer deals only briefly with the record gains of companies listed on the German DAX stock exchange, and the corresponding number of jobs being slashed. A recent media report by the news station N24 announced on November 29, "In the third quarter, large companies like chemicals giant BASF, auto concern BMW or sports goods manufacturer Adidas-Salomon have reported excellent profits." However, "The classical rule that companies with rising profits invest more and create new jobs no longer functions."
...
Increasing poverty
The spending cuts contained in the coalition agreement between the CDU and SPD will lead to a further rise in poverty in Germany. This applies not only to cuts in social expenditure, directly affecting the unemployed, the sick or pensioners, but also indirectly through other austerity measures.
For example, savings by the federal state on public transport will be passed on to the customer. Fare increases or the abandonment of whole routes - like the increase in value-added tax - will above all be to the detriment of low- and average-wage earners. The wealthy do not need a welfare state or public services.
According to the government, approximately 13.5 percent of all Germans already count as poor. Schäfer puts this number even higher, since it is calculated on the basis of positive incomes. Some 8 percent of the population who are considered highly indebted are not taken into consideration. Although their income lies over the poverty line, their debts mean they struggle to survive, making the real level of poverty somewhere between 13.5 and 21.5 percent.
The credit agency Schufa recently pointed out that serious personal debt is increasing drastically. They note that some 10 percent of the 62 million people for whom they have records - approximately 6 million - experienced financial difficulties in the past three years. Approximately 2.6 million people are registered with Schufa under the "red" risk level, and cannot receive a cent in credit because they have already initiated private insolvency proceedings or have declared bankruptcy.
When the SPD-Green Party government came to office in 1998, it initiated an accelerating downward social spiral: the public purse "becomes impoverished" because of one-sided tax breaks for the wealthy and big business. The empty public coffers and rising national debt then serve as the reason for a new round of savings and a more unequal distribution of fiscal charges. The grand coalition under Angela Merkel (CDU) has set itself the task of increasing the rate of this downward spiral and breaking any resistance to it.
For this reason, a word should also be said regarding the conclusions that the report draws. Schäfer, who was employed by the trade-union-financed Hans Böckler Foundation, suggests a national solution for the problems of rising poverty and social polarisation: the strengthening of domestic demand. According to this argument, it is only necessary to reverse the redistribution process - e.g., by "reviving wealth tax, increasing the taxes on inheritance, businesses and those with high private incomes, while lowering the tax burden for employees," etc.
Schäfer expressly rejects the significance of international factors: "It is not ‘uncontrollable' external forces such as globalisation that are responsible for the lack of German growth and the job market misery, but a counterproductive national policy that has weakened the domestic demand of private households and the public sector," he concludes.
This is absurd, as can be seen from the fact that there is not a single government worldwide - either social democratic, liberal or conservative - that follows the prescriptions suggested by Schäfer. The globalisation of production, trade and the financial markets has undermined the mechanisms which in the past ameliorated social contradictions within the national framework. More and more, a powerful international finance oligarchy, which does not accept any restrictions on increasing the rate of profit, determines policy in each individual country. It would react to higher taxes and state spending by withdrawing its capital, throwing the economy into a deep crisis. If this is happening in the heart of social-democratic western Europe, then we really can see the operation of a "powerful international finance oligarchy."
Given the fact that the proceeds of any economic growth, anywhere on earth, will only go to the super-rich owners, why should we be happy when we read articles like the following touting the fact that the economy is growing? Given the way the elite have acted and spoken in New York, it doesn't look like they are going to let any wealth trickle down. In any event, notice that this headline, which looks like good news, is referring to the third quarter of 2005 and that the numbers were adjusted downwards from the earlier published estimates. Economy Grows at Fastest Pace in 1 1/2 Years
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer
The U.S. economy turned in a remarkably strong performance in the summer despite surging energy prices and the battering the Gulf Coast states took from hurricanes, although business growth was slightly lower than the government previously estimated.
The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that the gross domestic product, the nation's total output of goods and services, rose at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in the July-September quarter. It was the fastest pace of growth in 1 1/2 years.
While down slightly from the 4.3 percent GDP estimate made a month ago, the new figure demonstrated that the economy kept expanding at a strong pace during the summer, led by solid increases in consumer demand, especially for autos, and business investment.
The third quarter performance was up substantially from a 3.3 percent GDP growth rate in the April-June quarter and was the best showing since the economy expanded at a 4.3 percent rate in the first three months of 2004.
The Bush administration, which has been on a concerted campaign to highlight the economy's strong points to bolster the president's approval ratings, said the 4.1 percent GDP growth rate was evidence of a vibrant economy.
"Today's GDP is more proof that businesses are booming and investors are confident," Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said in a statement. "The U.S. economy demonstrated its resilience in the last several months."
Analysts believe growth has slowed substantially in the current quarter to between 3 percent and 3.5 percent, reflecting slower increases in consumer spending now that attractive auto incentives have been removed. So after trumpeting last summer's good growth numbers, only when we read deeply into the article do we see that growth has dropped "substantially" in the fourth quarter. ...An inflation gauge tied to the GDP rose at a rate of 3.7 percent in the third quarter, the fastest pace in more than a year and up from a 3.3 percent rate of increase in the second quarter.
However, excluding food and energy, the GDP inflation measure was up a more moderate 1.4 percent, the slowest increase in almost two years. Prices by this inflation measure had been estimated to have increased by an even lower 1.2 percent a month ago. They want us to look at how good the inflation numbers are if you exclude two of the three necessities of life: food and energy. That leaves housing, and we can't look at a drop in housing prices as good news for the economy!
While the news out of Europe and the United States is bad, things are looking up, at least for now, in Latin America. The election in Bolivia of Evo Morales can only be a good thing. Here is a translation of one of his speeches: Evo Morales: "I Believe Only in the Power of the People"
The Bolivian indigenous leader's speech at "In Defense of Humanity" forum in Mexico City
Recorded by Adam Saytanides
Translated by Ricardo Sala
October 25, 2003
Thank you for the invitation to this great meeting of intellectuals "In Defense of Humanity." Thank you for your applause for the Bolivian people, who have mobilized in these recent days of struggle, drawing on our consciousness and our regarding how to reclaim our natural resources.
What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than 500 years. The will of the people was imposed this September and October, and has begun to overcome the empire's cannons. We have lived for so many years through the confrontation of two cultures: the culture of life represented by the indigenous people, and the culture of death represented by West. When we the indigenous people ¬ together with the workers and even the businessmen of our country ¬ fight for life and justice, the State responds with its "democratic rule of law."
What does the "rule of law" mean for indigenous people? For the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the "rule of law" means the targeted assassinations and collective massacres that we have endured. Not just this September and October, but for many years, in which they have tried to impose policies of hunger and poverty on the Bolivian people.
Above all, the "rule of law" means the accusations that we, the Quechuas, Aymaras and Guaranties of Bolivia keep hearing from our governments: that we are narcos, that we are anarchists. This uprising of the Bolivian people has been not only about gas and hydrocarbons, but an intersection of many issues: discrimination, marginalization , and most importantly, the failure of neoliberalism.
The cause of all these acts of bloodshed, and for the uprising of the Bolivian people, has a name: neoliberalism. With courage and defiance, we brought down Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada - the symbol of neoliberalism in our country - on October 17, the Bolivians' day of dignity and identity. We began to bring down the symbol of corruption and the political mafia.
And I want to tell you, companeras and companeros, how we have built the consciousness of the Bolivian people from the bottom up. How quickly the Bolivian people have reacted, have said - as Subcomandate Marcos says - ¡ya basta!, enough policies of hunger and misery.
For us, October 17th is the beginning of a new phase of construction. Most importantly, we face the task of ending selfishness and individualism, and creating - from the rural campesino and indigenous communities to the urban slums - other forms of living, based on solidarity and mutual aid. We must think about how to redistribute the wealth that is concentrated among few hands. This is the great task we Bolivian people face after this great uprising.
It has been very important to organize and mobilize ourselves in a way based on transparency, honesty, and control over our own organizations. And it has been important not only to organize but also to unite. Here we are now, united intellectuals in defense of humanity ¬ I think we must have not only unity among the social movements, but also that we must coordinate with the intellectual movements. Every gathering, every event of this nature for we labor leaders who come from the social struggle, is a great lesson that allows us to exchange experiences and to keep strengthening our people and our grassroots organizations.
Thus, in Bolivia, our social movements, our intellectuals, our workers - even those political parties which support the popular struggle - joined together to drive out Gonzalo Sánchez Lozada. Sadly, we paid the price with many of our lives, because the empire's arrogance and tyranny continue humiliating the Bolivian people.
It must be said, compañeras and compañeros, that we must serve the social and popular movements rather than the transnational corporations. I am new to politics; I had hated it and had been afraid of becoming a career politician. But I realized that politics had once been the science of serving the people, and that getting involved in politics is important if you want to help your people. By getting involved, I mean living for politics, rather than living off of politics.
We have coordinated our struggles between the social movements and political parties, with the support of our academic institutions, in a way that has created a greater national consciousness. That is what made it possible for the people to rise up in these recent days.
When we speak of the "defense of humanity," as we do at this event, I think that this only happens by eliminating neoliberalism and imperialism. But I think that in this we are not so alone, because we see, every day that anti-imperialist thinking is spreading, especially after Bush's bloody "intervention" policy in Iraq. Our way of organizing and uniting against the system, against the empire's aggression towards our people, is spreading, as are the strategies for creating and strengthening the power of the people.
I believe only in the power of the people. That was my experience in my own region, a single province - the importance of local power. And now, with all that has happened in Bolivia, I have seen the importance of the power of a whole people, of a whole nation. For those of us who believe it important to defend humanity, the best contribution we can make is to help create that popular power. This happens when we check our personal interests with those of the group. Sometimes, we commit to the social movements in order to win power. We need to be led by the people, not use or manipulate them.
We may have differences among our popular leaders - and it's true that we have them in Bolivia. But when the people are conscious, when the people know what needs to be done, any difference among the different local leaders ends. We've been making progress in this for a long time, so that our people are finally able to rise up, together.
What I want to tell you, compañeras and compañeros - what I dream of and what we as leaders from Bolivia dream of - is that our task at this moment should be to strengthen anti-imperialist thinking. Some leaders are now talking about how we - the intellectuals, the social and political movements - can organize a great summit of people like Fidel, Chávez and Lula to say to everyone: "We are here, taking a stand against the aggression of the US imperialism." A summit at which we are joined by compañera Rigoberta Menchú, by other social and labor leaders, great personalities like Pérez Ezquivel. A great summit to say to our people that we are together, united, and defending humanity. We have no other choice, compañeros and compañeras - if we want to defend humanity we must change system, and this means overthrowing US imperialism.
That is all. Thank you very much. So, what's in store for Evo Morales? For some clues, here is a song, since it's Christmas, about Jesus from Woody Guthrie, the man who fought fascism with a guitar: Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, "Give your money to the poor,"
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave
Jesus was a man, a carpenter by hand
His followers true and brave
One dirty little coward called Judas Iscariot
Has laid Jesus Christ in His Grave
He went to the preacher, He went to the sheriff
He told them all the same
"Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the poor,"
And they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.
When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
And the people held their breath when they heard about his death
Everybody wondered why
It was the big landlord and the soldiers that they hired
To nail Jesus Christ in the sky
This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
© 1961 (renewed) and 1963 (renewed) by TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc.  |
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By Mark Weinraub
Reuters
Sat Dec 24, 5:47 PM ET
CHICAGO - U.S. retailers faced slower-than-expected traffic in stores on the last shopping day before Christmas as extended hours and steep discounts failed to draw a big crowd of shoppers.
"I don't think the day is the kind of day that retailers thought it would be," said Britt Beemer, head of America's Research Group, which surveys consumer spending habits. "Christmas Eve is seldom the big day because of the fact that so many consumers ... want to be home."
U.S. retailers were counting on strong demand on Saturday to make up for solid but unspectacular sales so far this holiday season. The Saturday before Christmas has become the busiest shopping day of the year as consumers hold out for last-minute discounts.
Many retailers had opened their stores before 7 a.m. to take advantage of Christmas Eve falling on a weekend.
But most shoppers did not get an early start. The parking lot at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was only about half full around noon, Hendrix said.
Sales picked up as the day wore on but the stores were not filled with traditional holiday shoppers of mothers and children.
"Our clientele has changed today to be more men," said Audrie Thompson, general manager of Northpark Mall in Ridgeland, Mississippi.
Retailers said stores were jammed on Friday evening, with many people crossing the last items off their holiday shopping list before hitting the road for the weekend.
Analysts said retailers cut prices more this year than they did last year in the hope of luring cost-conscious consumers, many of whom are grappling with steep gasoline prices and bracing for bigger winter heating bills.
WAL-MART ON PACE
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which set the tone for a fiercely competitive holiday shopping season with discounts including a laptop computer for under $400, said it was on pace to meet its December sales forecast.
The retailer said sales were starting off well on Saturday, but were not as strong as on Friday night. It predicted steady sales right up until closing time.
Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, said December sales were tracking within its forecast for 2 percent to 4 percent growth at its U.S. stores open at least a year -- also known as same-store sales.
Rival Target Corp. said earlier this week it expects to meet its goal of 4 percent to 5 percent growth.
Wall Street will have to wait until early January for official reports on holiday sales, which account for about one-fourth of annual retail sales and a big chunk of profits.
In Chicago, Marshall Field's opened at 7 a.m. on Saturday and offered specials including cashmere gloves for $24.99. J.C. Penney Co. Inc. also opened at 7 a.m., with deep discounts on leather coats, sleepwear and blankets.
Gift cards were a popular item for shoppers who had procrastinated until Christmas Eve.
"It is an easier last-minute gift," said Scott Krugman, spokesman for the National Retail Federation. "For people that are trying to avoid the long lines or as the apparel selection starts to thin out, I think you will see more people turning to gift cards today."
Retailers record revenue from gift cards only when they are redeemed, not when they are sold, so January has become a more important sales month in recent years. |
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Editorial
NY Times
December 26, 2005
It might seem counterintuitive that many credit card companies would inundate the recently bankrupt with solicitations for new cards. It's especially perplexing that those same companies would do so after having spent more than eight years and $100 million lobbying Congress to protect them from irresponsible borrowers with a draconian new bankruptcy law.
But the truth is that credit card companies aren't all that interested in customers who pay their bills in full every month. They really want the so-called revolvers, people who don't cover their balances and pony up those juicy interest payments and fees. The tighter repayment provisions in the new law will encourage companies to trawl for even less-qualified customers. This is all a stark reminder of just how one-sided the new bankruptcy law is. While access to Chapter 7 bankruptcy has been sharply curtailed in the law, which went into effect in October, credit card companies are welcome to keep stuffing mailboxes with pre-approved cards.
Legislators ignored the five billion solicitations for new cards sent out last year alone. They pretended that the blame for the rising number of bankruptcies and delinquencies lay solely at the doorstep of debtors who recklessly used bankruptcy courts to dodge their responsibilities. This year, we've set a record with more than two million people in this country declaring bankruptcy. And many of their doorsteps are littered with direct mail offering new, high-interest cards.
At the very least, the credit card industry shares responsibility for this surge in bankruptcy filings. And with the reams of data and advanced risk-modeling tools available to financial companies, it is fair to argue that they deserve the better part of the blame.
The industry would have you believe that lending to the recently bankrupt is a service. "The people coming out of bankruptcy need an opportunity to get back on their feet," a spokeswoman for the American Bankers Association was quoted as saying in a recent article in The Times. It is the standard excuse for irresponsible lending: serving the underserved.
Indeed, with the help of these second-chance Samaritans, bankrupt Americans can quickly assume a new millstone of debt - only this time it will be even tougher to escape. If Congress is going to leave its bankruptcy law on the books, it should at least demand as much responsibility from the lenders as it is forcing on the borrowers. |
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by Mark S. Tucker
26 Dec 2005
There was a period in which Jack Kemp vaguely mattered. That was a long time ago. Now he’s practically unknown. There’s a multitude of excellent reasons for that, the best of which can be perused in his Dec. 22, 2005, column entitled “Washington Fails to Embrace Supply-Side Truths”. In it, he’s hoping like hell you haven’t a clue about economics. He’s expecting you were as miserable a student as our President-select, a man whose grasp of business produced a long string of horrifyingly ineptly run businesses, and, thus, you won’t know enough to parse his, Mr. Kemp’s, utter gibberish for the semantic folderol it is. In the annals of columnist gobbledygook, there have been some gems, but rarely so lustrous as this one. Step behind the curtain with me, won’t you? Kemp gaffes himself no sooner than the fifth and sixth words in, baiting the title to this untidy mess. ‘Supply side’ is a piece of Rhetoric signaling the business community to a highly sympathetic slab o’ tripe being indited, though the semantic bias would make it seem to lean to populism.
The phrase is just an oblique way to sidestep saying ‘business positive’, a euphemism for stench-generation.
Pursuing his thread, in the pertinent economic theory, there’s ‘supply and demand’, a phrase already an example of misframing: demand precedes supply and thus should appear first, any well-established history of economic doublespeak be damned.
‘Demand’ is from the people, ‘supply’ is from business; thus, you can guess why the nameplate is textbooked the way it is. ‘Supply side’ means business somehow becomes primary, a reversal of reality, not to mention democracy, and an odd way to refer to the reactionary side of the equation. If you know the most basic economic rudiments, you understand that people initiate (demand), business reacts (supply); hence, there are no ‘supply side truths’. Truths issue from the demand side. The supply side only caters, indeed panders, to demand.
Supply’s only “truth” is sheer naked profit and how to get it as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, ethics and society trampled underfoot. Nothing revelatory there; hardly a truth, merely opportunism.
What can we next expect, do you suppose, given such an egregious launch? Well, every sentence is an alarming exercise in glossolalia, something that would be expected of a Bedlamite, but we’ll unpack a few salients before growing ill.
Kemp bases his farrago by lamenting the abandonment of Reagan-Bush supply side lunacy, noting the “paradoxical” adoption of it in Russia. He states this because the actions he refers to were, in his words, an “economic miracle” (Repuglicanese for ‘planned disaster’) but sober assessments and history itself some time ago revealed that they were highly advantagist maneuvers snake-oiled to the Russians, rigged by the U.S. and others, a bum’s rush into our pat little perversion of capitalism by the usual predatory mercanto-cabal gutting what little had survived in that bedeviled country from preceding years. The Reagan-Bush miracle knew another continental mark when it saw one, having just finished an orgy at home, buggering the slumbering American public amongst a trash-heap of riches tripling the national debt before it left office.
But Kemp isn’t really wanting to stick to alleged miracles; no, he’s changing his mind in mid-aberration, instead now talking about the “supply-side precepts that drove the Reagan economic revolution” [emphasis mine], a much more earthshaking event, obviously; it only appears to be the selfsame “miracle” to the unindoctrinated - those who thought Reagan, long before his Alzheimer’s, was just a doddering regurgitron puppeted like his even more brainless successor three kings hence: King George II. Mr. Kemp tells us that unless we heed the connoted wisdom of this revolution, we “will confront a crisis of unsustainable big government and a declining economy”.
Will??? Which “unsustainable big government” and which “declining economy” might those be, the ones you refer to in the future tense, Mr. Kemp? The exact same charades we’re suffering now and have been since the day the ‘caine-n-brewski besotted christo-conservative the Supreme Court legislated into office began his coup? The stultifying engulf-and-devour program based precisely on a resuscitation of the principals of the Reagan-Bush ravenings? The program that, after Herr Gipper’s astounding 3X feat, Apollo-launched the national debt through the accountancy roof? That one? Funny, but we don’t see Mr. Bush’s, nor any, name here in your piece in relation to this. Odd. Oh, but we do see Mr. Clinton’s.
Kemp imputes that “it was the Clinton tax increases rather than the Republican Congress’ supply-side tax reductions that restored economic vitality after the Clinton recession”. Let’s see now, would that have been the same Clinton years that produced the leviathan federal surplus which Bush gifted to shilling corporations the moment he was jurisprudentially commandeered into The High Seat, rebates to those funding and running not only the long dirty slog to dictatorship but the crowning ”Florida miracle” as well, a holy rite replicated again in Ohio in ‘04, rebates that guaranteed America would have no least prayer of economic sanity, much less a small ace in the hole in a time of need (i.e., every nanosecond since Inauguration 2000)? Is that the “economic vitality” in question, Mr. Kemp? More “supply side“ bequeathing us with a man who has proven to be remarkably, indeed unbelievably, inept at everything he sets his tutor-bought Ivy League C-minus mind to?
This recession Kemp speaks of most definitely occurred...after Bush Inc., LLC, successfully captured the White House, not during the Clinton years. At this point, Jack may wish to make a memo: most of the country, except for the very uppermost crust of the business class, is desperately yearning for a return of the imputed “disasters” Mr. Clinton wrought upon the land, “catastrophes” Mr. Gore, despite his obviously much weaker positions, would have continued had Bush not been pirated into his new Skull and Bones boho frat party.
The degree of Kemp’s bizarre word play is seen when he suddenly reverses the previous Repuglican claims of “supply-siding” imputed to be derived from Keynes. He doubles back and now refers to a previously untouted “demand-side Keynesianism”. The concept’s an interesting one and much closer to what the Repugs should’ve been attentive to in John Maynard...but then, they could have cared less about Keynes or any other inconveniently intelligent theory-based fellow, now could they? Their plan, as plainly seen, was purest economic rape and one need merely have read as introductory a text as Robert Heilbroner's classic The Worldly Philosophers to understand what the even more erudite work of Harrington, Gailbraith, and Reich makes increasingly understandable.
Sorry, but that’s all I can handle, multiplying headaches just trying to sort it all out. In the end, Kemp’s mindlessly dogpiling, joining the yattering fray led by Lummox Slanthead (Hannity) and Heroin Hillbilly (Limbaugh), hoping against hope that sheer weight of numbers will prevail and that he, amongst them, will be allowed to feed at the trough during The Political End of Days. He may have a good gamble in that, too: so far, the ruse has succeeded, though not through drunken parrots like him. The conservative agitprop media built the freeway, Kemp and cohorts merely travel it, throwing loaded dice (to mix metaphors appropriately). He’s opportunistic, as is the entire Repuglican Party, but the grease under the wheels of the coterie is supplied by the thoroughly accommodationist Dimocrat Party, lest any think there are two sides here.
Kemp’s spiel is pure business duck-gabble, the kind of smarmy circular unspeak Scott McClellen excels at when he and George aren’t busy swapping militarystud.com trading cards at midnight in the White House backrooms with Jeffy Gannon-Guckert-Whatever. And we remember the Prime Verity, do we not?: “Q. How do you know a businessman’s lying? A. His mouth’s open.” Adam Smith went to his grave bitterly damning businesses and men like Kemp and the multitudinous merry bands of thieves, excoriating how they’d tortured and neutered his work. Nothing has changed. “Supply-side truths” are just literary Alzheimer’s.
We’re trudging through one of Kemp’s buddies’ nightmares, Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America. Are you happy with the Repuglican Revolution, America? No. Then you know what to make of these horsedung “truths”. We could disencode the entire excretion but even a vicious polemicist like myself can stand only just so much nausea. Kemp cites himself, through the very conservative Copley News corporation, as a co-director of some outfit cognomened Empower America, which sounds like another in an endless line of rhetorically reversed conservative think-tanks, though I’m not going to waste one second investigating the ploy. The drivel contained in his aimlessly perambulating manifest would make even a Libertarian blanch, and Gawd himself knows what a stretch that is. One way or the other, though, Kemp needs a check-up from the neck up if he thinks anyone other than Joe Cornpone is going to swallow this, let alone begin to understand it. Read it, o’ moaning soul, and know the horrors of the damned.
Mark S. Tucker, a critic, presently writes for Perfect Sound Forever on-line. Retired from aerospace, he tutors Language Arts in Palos Verdes, California, while working on several books: a re-design of English grammar, a tome on San Diego radical architect James Hubbell, etc. He can be reached at progdawg@hotmail.com. This article is originally published at opednews.com. Copyright Mark S. Tucker, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached. |
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Dec 22, 2005
Asia Times
BEIJING - A mammoth revision in gross domestic product (GDP, the most widely accepted estimate of the size of an economy) figures by statisticians in Beijing has officially turned China into a much larger economy than previously thought.
While the new figures, which reflect a modernization of calculation methods, are widely accepted by outside analysts, who have argued for years that China has been underestimating the size of its service sector, there is some uncertainty about China's new position in the world GDP rankings. Initial press reports on the statistical readjustment, made before the release of official results on December 20, had stated that China would supplant the UK as the world's fourth-ranked economy. However, when the actual figures appeared, the government only claimed sixth place. There are several possible explanations for the discrepancy. First, the early reports could simply be inaccurate; for example, a widely cited December 13 story in the South China Morning Post predicted a 20% increase in stated GDP, but the actual number turned out to be 16.8%. Second, the Chinese government apparently did not include Hong Kong and Macau in its calculations; the two special administrative regions, which are counted separately for most statistical purposes, have a sufficient economic weight to lift the revised ranking from 6th to 4th. Third, the UK, France and Italy (4th, 5th and 6th, respectively, in 2004, according to World Bank figures) are bunched together closely enough in the rankings for relatively small differences in calculations to change the position.
It should be noted, also, that the rankings referred to are US dollar rankings which are affected by exchange rate fluctuations, eg, the revaluation of the yuan; other calculation methods, such as the widely cited purchasing power parity (PPP) method, can yield quite different results (in PPP rankings, China has been No 2 for some time).
Understating the case?
Some observers considered it curious that China would produce revised figures that arguably still understate the country's economic heft - as No 6 rather than No 4 - especially given the criticality of economic growth to the legitimacy of the Chinese regime. The explanation may lie in the government's desire to curtail nervousness abroad about the implications of growing Chinese economic power. Many recent government statements are consistent with this interpretation: for example, the "peaceful rise" policy referred to many times by top officials in recent months. In addition, at the same news conference where the GDP revision was announced, top statistician Li Deshui conspicuously drew attention to China's per-capita GDP ranking, which is generally below 100 (along with economic midgits like Paraguay and Vanuatu).
The official announcement
On December 20, Li announced that China had revised its GDP for 2004 to 15.9878 trillion yuan (US$2 trillion), up 2.3 trillion yuan, or 16.8%, from the preliminary figures. The announcement was made at a press conference of the Information Office of the State Council, citing the result of a national economic survey. The government stated that accordingly, the country has overtaken Italy as the world's 6th biggest economy.
As expected, the increase was primarily due to a revision of service industries. The value-added for tertiary (service) industries was 6.5018 trillion yuan, 2.1297 trillion more than the annual preliminary estimation announced earlier this year. And the industry's share of GDP rose from the earlier estimated 31.9% to 40.7%, an increase of 8.8 percentage points. The increase in service sector output accounted for the largest part, 93%, of the total GDP increase.
Li said China had long used the Material Product System (MPS), which was developed under the centrally-planned economic system, in its national account statistics, resulting in "very weak" statistics for the service sector. The scope of tertiary industries is becoming wider and more complex with a large number of units that have no accurate methods for accounting and statistics, he said.
Meanwhile, along with its economic reforms, China has seen a diversified economic development in terms of ownership, and in particular, a dynamic development of private and individually-run service activities. "It is very difficult to conduct statistical surveys as [service businesses] are very scattered with frequent changes, resulting in a certain degree of under-coverage," said Li. While many new services are mushrooming, data on their activities are often underestimated, he acknowledged. Li added that some of the services affiliated to manufacturing or construction enterprises are estimated but classified into the secondary industry category, while others are neglected.
The value-added of secondary industries (mainly manufacturing) was 7.3904 trillion yuan in 2004, 151.7 billion more than the original data, while the industry's share in the GDP shrank from the preliminarily estimated 52.9% to 46.2%, a drop of 6.7 percentage points. "Through the survey, we [were] able to remove the 'water' from the statistics of the manufacturing sector, in particular, from small-sized enterprises," Li said.
Analysts say some small firms, including township enterprises in the rural areas, have been exaggerating their output figures to help local governments and officials showcase their "political achievements" and seek promotion.
Li said the GDP share of primary industries was still based on the figure from the annual preliminary estimation, as the sector was not covered in the new survey. The value-added of primary industries was 2.0956 trillion yuan, and the industry's share in the GDP was 13.1%, 2.1 percentage points lower than the preliminary figures.
The results from the latest survey will not affect the nation's macroeconomic policies, Li said. "The changes in the figures do not mean the traditional statistics have misled China's policymaking."
The survey's leading group was set up under the State Council, China's cabinet, and headed by Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan, with governments at all levels and concerned departments participating in the event. More than 3 million enumerators and supervisors were recruited, and another 10 million statisticians and accountants from government agencies, enterprises and institutions were mobilized to participate in the survey, according to Li. More than 30 million questionnaires were collected in the survey with more than 1.06 billion raw data records, Li said, adding that a sample survey showed that the comprehensive reporting error was only 4.9 per thousand, within the 1% target.
Business confidentiality
"In the publication, utilization and analysis of the survey results, departments and local governments concerned should continue to abide by the Statistics Law and the Regulations on National Economic Survey, to protect business confidentiality and privacy of the respondents, and to honor earnestly the commitments [to] not levy any penalties on the respondents on the basis of survey information," stressed Li.
The NBS is working on the revision of data back to 1993 on the basis of the revised GDP figures in the survey year, using the trend deviation method widely adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). "Results of the revision will be released on another occasion," Li said.
According to the State Council's decision, the survey results will be used as a basis for the central government and for local governments in compiling 2005 national account statistics, in highlighting economic and social development for the 10th Five-Year Plan period (2001-2005), and in preparing the 11th Five-Year Development Program and the 2006 annual development plan, he said.
Don't break out the champagne yet
The chief statistician noted that although the revision has led to a considerable increase in the total GDP, the ranking of China's per capita GDP is still below 100th in the world. By the end of 2004, roughly 100 million peasant farmers and more than 20 million city dwellers, nearly 10% of the country's total population, were in need of financial support from the government, Li noted, adding that China's population living in poverty outnumbers the total populations of most countries in the world.
Li also noted that China's GDP growth has been at the cost of excessive energy use. According to the revised figures, China produced 4.4% of the world's total GDP in 2004, yet the crude oil it devoured accounted for 7.4% of the world's total; coal, 31%; iron ore, 30%; rolled steel, 27%; and cement, 40%. |
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Reuters
Mon Dec 26, 2005 12:28 AM ET
TOKYO - The Nikkei share average rose to fresh five-year highs on Monday as retail stocks advanced on bright prospects for the industry after Seven & I Holdings Co. Ltd. said it planned to buy a department store group. [...]
The Nikkei rose 0.83 percent, or 131.79 points, to 16,073.16 as of 0436 GMT. It earlier rose to 16,098.59, its highest intraday level since October 2000. The broader TOPIX index gained 0.70 percent to 1,649.41.
Seven & I, Asia's biggest retailer by market value, said on Monday it would buy a 65.45 percent stake in Japanese department store group Millennium Retailing Inc. for 131.1 billion yen in cash, making it Asia's biggest retailer group by sales, surpassing Aeon Co. Ltd
Hiroichi Nishi, general manager of equity marketing at Nikko Cordial Securities, said the news was well received in the market.
"Behind this move are strong corporate capital spending and buoyant consumer spending," Nishi said.
Susumu Abe, a manager at Mito Securities' information and investment department, said investors, inspired by the merger plan, were buying retailers with solid earnings prospects such as Fast Retailing Co.
"The takeover is underscoring prospects for the sector, which has been benefiting from a recovery in consumer spending," Abe said.
Seven & I was untraded with a glut of buyers at 4,910 yen, up by its daily limit of 500 yen or 11.3 percent.
Aeon was up 0.5 percent at 3,000 yen.
Credit Saison Co. Ltd., the second-biggest stakeholder in Millennium Retailing, was up 10.5 percent at 6,330 yen after hitting a lifetime high of 6,550 yen. [...] |
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By DOUG THOMPSON
Dec 23, 2005
Congress gave the nation a Christmas present Thursday, adjourning for the year and getting the hell out of Dodge with most of its business unfinished.
President George W. Bush did the same, hightailing it to Crawford for yet another vacation.
Yes, the nation and world are much safer places when these clowns leave town. For a few weeks, we can breathe easier, content in knowing that members of Congress are off junketing at some lobbyist’s expense and our phony cowboy President is in Texas pretending, once again, to be something that he is not.
Which leaves the rest of us to wonder just how in the hell we got into this mess? How, for example, did the world’s oldest surviving Republic end up with a government so scandal-ridden, so ineffective and so reviled by both its own citizens and the rest of mankind?
How did this nation re-elect a President who lies to justify an illegal invasion of another country, ignores the Constitution that is supposed to provide the foundation for our freedoms, orders spying on Americans by our own government and sends thousands of American soldiers as well as countless numbers of innocent civilians of other countries to their deaths?
How did we end up with a Congress so corrupt that lobbyists roam the halls like predators, buying favor and access with big campaign donations, securing votes with lavish vacations and perks and subverting the sadly outmoded idea that our elected representatives are supposed to serve the will of the people?
How we got into this mess is easy to explain. We, as Americans, sat on our collective asses and let it happen. As long as we had two cars in the garage, a Tivo recording shows for our high-definition plasma TVs and junior occupied by a Gameboy, we didn’t really give a damn what was happening in Washington. We might bitch and moan about the cost of filling the tank on our SUVs but, hey, life is good and who cares what those morons are Washington are doing as long as it doesn’t affect us?
Well it was affecting us then and it is affecting us more than ever now. While we sat on our couches and watched reality shows until our brains fried, our government – the one that is supposed to be “of the people and for the people” – turned into an all-powerful monster that snoops into our private lives, lives large at our expense and drives this nation into bankruptcy with mounting deficits and out-of-control spending.
When it came time to speak as voters, too many of us stayed home, allowing a minority of those who actually voted to decide who runs the country and our lives. Those who did vote did so mostly to support the status quo and it is that status quo that is destroying a once-great nation called America.
Yes, our nation and the government that controls it are out of control. It got there because, in the end, the final check and balance is us – the people who vote these clowns in and out of office. Had we been paying attention and doing our jobs, we might not be in the mess we have right now.
As a journalist, I can rant and rave about the injustices and scandals and misuse of power until the cows come home but, in the end, that’s all I can do. I can shine the light of truth on these miscreants but the truth cannot set anyone free unless they seek the freedom.
In the end, the voters hire these morons and only the voters can fire them. Given the poor turnout of past elections, it is also the voters who chose not to vote who share most of the blame. If we don’t do our jobs, then we have no one but ourselves to blame if the turkeys that make it into office don’t do theirs.
Because of our action, or inaction, we are saddled with a government that can’t get the job done.
So it’s time for us to do our jobs and find someone who can. |
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By DALIA SUSSMAN
ABC News
20 Dec 2005
Nine in 10 Americans Believe in Heaven, but a Quarter Say It's Christians Only Vast majorities of Americans believe in heaven and think they're headed there. But elbow room won't be a problem: About eight in 10 believers envision heaven as a place where people exist only spiritually, not physically.
Eighty-nine percent in this ABC News poll believe in heaven, which is consistent with data going back 30 years. Among believers, 85 percent think they'll personally go there — mainly in spirit, since 78 percent say it's a place where people exist only spiritually.
Who gets in is another matter. Among people who believe in heaven, one in four thinks access is limited to Christians. More than a third of Protestants feel that way, and this view peaks at 55 percent among Protestants who describe themselves as very religious.
Among all adults, 79 percent are Christians, 14 percent have no religion, and the rest, 5 percent, are non-Christians. Among Christian groups, Catholics account for 21 percent of adults; evangelical Protestants, 19 percent; and non-evangelical Protestants, 13 percent.
There are fewer differences among religious groups on the question of whether heaven is a physical or spiritual place. Belief that it's a physical place peaks at 22 percent among Protestants who describe themselves as very religious.
As noted, people without a religion are the least likely to believe in heaven (51 percent do, 46 percent don't), followed by people who describe themselves as not religious (72 percent of them do believe, 26 percent don't). Non-religious people who do believe in heaven are slightly less likely than others to think they'll personally go there, but it's a still high 77 percent
Another way to look at views on heaven is among all Americans, rather than just those who believe in heaven. Among all Americans, 75 percent think they'll go to heaven. The rest include 5 percent who believe in heaven but don't think they'll get there; 9 percent who believe but aren't sure they'll get in; and 10 percent who don't believe in heaven.
Christians View Heaven as Exclusive
Similarly, among all Americans, 21 percent think that only people who are Christians can go to heaven. Among the rest, 60 percent think both Christians and non-Christians can get in, 7 percent are unsure and 10 percent don't believe.
There's a difference between the sexes: Eighty percent of women think they're going to heaven, compared with 69 percent of men. That's both because men are slightly less apt to believe in heaven in the first place, and among those who do believe, slightly less apt to think they're headed there.
But it's religion, again, that seems to be the driving force in the difference between the sexes: Women are 12 points more likely than men to describe themselves as religious, and being religious helps fuel belief in heaven, and the expectation of getting there.
METHODOLOGY — This ABC News poll was conducted by telephone Oct. 5-9, 2005, among a random national sample of 1,023 adults. The results have a three-point error margin. Fieldwork by ICR-International Communications Research of Media, Pa.
Click HERE for full Poll results in PDF |
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William Greider
20 Dec 2005
The political news from Connecticut did not seem earth-shaking on its face, but the New York Times and the Washington Post were both sufficiently alarmed to put the story on page one. Some upstart citizens are talking about challenging their warrior senator, Joe Lieberman, by running an antiwar candidate against him next fall. The Wall Street Journal went ballistic. Its hysterical editorial denounced the "liberal animosity" toward Wall Street's favorite Democrat.
Possibly, this rump-group assault on the established order will come to nothing, just another angry rant from frustrated Democrats. But it could be the start of something big--a David-and-Goliath challenge that encourages other nascent insurgencies around the country. Rebellion can be fun--who doesn't enjoy upsetting the mainstream media?--but in these dispiriting times it is also good for one's mental health. Even better, rebellion could revive the Democratic Party. |
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By ANDY SULLIVAN
Dec 23, 2005
As a U.S. lawmaker steps down for taking bribes and others face a separate corruption probe, the relationship between money and power in Washington is coming under increased scrutiny. California Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham faces 10 years in prison for taking $2.4 million in bribes to help secure Defense Department contracts.
The Justice Department also is seeking to prove that other lawmakers accepted campaign contributions, lavish trips and other gifts from former lobbyist Jack Abramoff in return for favorable treatment for his clients.
Abramoff's expected cooperation in the probe could spell trouble for Ohio Republican Rep. Bob Ney and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, also a Republican, who have ties to the lobbyist.
The investigation has highlighted the close relationship between the 535 members of Congress and the 27,000 registered lobbyists who shower them with sports tickets and other perks.
"It does seem like there's been a terrible gray area, a lot of money floating around Washington, and a lot of things that are borderline acceptable," said Penn State political science professor Frank Baumgartner. "It would not surprise me if a number of people end up implicated in this."
Lobbying firms took in $2.14 billion in 2004, up from $1.47 billion in 1999, according to the PoliticalMoneyLine Web site.
General Electric Co. alone paid $17.24 million to 17 different lobbying firms last year. "We think it's wise to ensure that our employees, retirees and investors are well-represented when there are issues that are discussed that affect them," company spokesman Gary Sheffer said.
Many lobbyists are former lawmakers or their aides, who can exchange contacts for hefty paychecks after leaving office.
Forty-three percent of the 198 lawmakers who have left for the private sector since 1998 have become lobbyists, according to the public-interest group Public Citizen.
When Louisiana Republican Billy Tauzin stepped down as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2004, he took a job heading a drug-industry trade group that reportedly pays him $2.5 million per year.
Top staffers now expect starting lobbyist salaries of $300,000, according to the Washington Post.
That sets up a conflict of interest, because lawmakers and staffers may be reluctant to push policies that hurt their future job prospects as lobbyists, Baumgartner said.
Lawmakers' relatives, including a son of Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and four sons of Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, often work as lobbyists.
Bonds between lobbyists and lawmakers have been tightened in recent years by a Republican effort to fill top lobbying jobs with congressional staffers and other party loyalists who can raise money and help Republicans stay in power.
With weak ethics oversight in Congress, it is no surprise that something like the Abramoff scandal would arise, said Mike Surrusco, director of ethics campaigns for the nonprofit group Common Cause.
Lawmakers have moved to clean up their act as Congress enters an election year. Several have returned campaign contributions from Abramoff clients; others have proposed tougher lobbying rules.
The House Ethics Committee plans to end its partisan gridlock and take up several reforms next year, said a senior Republican aide familiar with the issue.
"The Republicans need to demonstrate that there's a functioning ethics process in the House, and the Democrats ... they'd like to get some scalps on the wall," the aide said. |
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26 Dec 2005
WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday supported government eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants. Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Powell said he sees "absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions" to protect the nation.
But he added, "My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it."
The New York Times reported on its Internet site Friday that the NSA has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States. The program bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Powell said Congress will need to judge whether Bush is correct in his assertion that he could approve eavesdropping without first obtaining court orders.
"And that's going to be a great debate," Powell said.
Powell, who also is a former chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, had no reservations when asked whether eavesdropping should continue.
"Of course it should continue," he said. "And nobody is suggesting that the president shouldn't do this." |
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AP
Sun Dec 25, 5:46 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday supported government eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants.
Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Powell said he sees "absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions" to protect the nation. But he added, "My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it."
The New York Times reported on its Internet site Friday that the NSA has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States. The program bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Powell said Congress will need to judge whether Bush is correct in his assertion that he could approve eavesdropping without first obtaining court orders.
"And that's going to be a great debate," Powell said.
Powell, who also is a former chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, had no reservations when asked whether eavesdropping should continue.
"Of course it should continue," he said. "And nobody is suggesting that the president shouldn't do this."
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By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer
Sun Dec 25, 5:08 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become the most popular member of the Bush administration and a potential candidate to succeed her boss in the White House, even as Americans lose confidence in the president she serves and patience with the Iraq war she helped launch. Entering her second year as the country's senior diplomat and foreign policy spokeswoman, Rice has improbably shed much of her image as the hawkish "warrior princess" at
President Bush's side. The nickname was reportedly bestowed by her staff at the White House National Security Council, where Rice was an intimate member of Bush's first-term war council.
Rice resolutely defends the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism and the expansive executive powers that Bush claims came with it. She has lately sounded more optimistic than Bush about the progress of the Iraq war and the future for that country.
Yet, it is unusual to hear anyone talk about Rice as an architect of either of those two defining undertakings of the Bush presidency.
By a mix of charm, luck and physical distance from the White House, Rice has managed to escape the fate of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who saw their public approval ratings fall to historic lows before rebounding slightly recently.
Kurt Campbell, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, credits Rice's heavy travel schedule, an approach to diplomacy that is more pragmatic than other Bush advisers, and a measure of personal pluck.
"She appears to have sort of skated away" from controversies over U.S. intelligence failures and aggressive U.S. tactics in the hunt for terrorists, Campbell said, and from the perception that the United States is "slogging" along in Iraq.
"She appears at once to be close to the president but separate and detached from some of the foibles of the administration, and that's a very hard thing to pull off," he said.
Rice was as strong a public voice as any for going to war in Iraq. She once famously warned of Saddam Hussein's presumed weapons of mass destruction: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Although Rice's first-term record on Iraq, terrorism and other subjects made for a contentious Senate confirmation hearing last January, most Americans apparently do not hold her personally responsible.
A Pew Research survey in October found that 60 percent of respondents held either a very favorable or mostly favorable view of Rice, while 25 percent had a very or mostly unfavorable view — numbers others in the Bush administration can only envy.
Two years after ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was captured, 64 percent of respondents said the Iraq war was the right thing to do. An AP-Ipsos poll this month showed that only 42 percent now say it was the right decision, and support has also dropped for staying in Iraq until the country is stabilized.
As for Bush, 42 percent said in this month's AP poll that they approve of his job performance, while 57 percent disapproved. That was up from a 37 percent approval rating in November, but well below his stratospheric numbers after Sept. 11. [...]
There is a glamour factor to Rice's appeal, and curiosity about the first black woman to hold the nation's top diplomatic post.
Rice, 51, grew up in the segregated South. She tries to soften the brash image the United States often projects abroad by telling audiences the discrimination she faced is proof that America isn't perfect. [...]
She is fiercely loyal to Bush, and tries to downplay her own rising stock and his public slide. Although mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2008, Rice says she has never wanted to run for elected office. [...]
She declined to point to any specific accomplishments for which she takes personal credit, although she said she is pleased by developments including warmer US-European relations after a chill over the Iraq invasion.
"I'm a historian," Rice said in the interview. "I tend to see things in the big sweep of history and hope that at some point somebody is going to look back and say, oh, something that she did then mattered." |
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By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 26, 2005
President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.
The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics. Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, would not confirm the meeting with Bush before publishing reporter Dana Priest's Nov. 2 article disclosing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe used to interrogate terror suspects. Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, would not confirm that he, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman had an Oval Office sit-down with the president on Dec. 5, 11 days before reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that Bush had authorized eavesdropping on Americans and others within the United States without court orders.
But the meetings were confirmed by sources who have been briefed on them but are not authorized to comment because both sides had agreed to keep the sessions off the record. The White House had no comment.
"When senior administration officials raised national security questions about details in Dana's story during her reporting, at their request we met with them on more than one occasion," Downie says. "The meetings were off the record for the purpose of discussing national security issues in her story." At least one of the meetings involved John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and CIA Director Porter Goss, the sources said.
"This was a matter of concern for intelligence officials, and they sought to address their concerns," an intelligence official said. Some liberals criticized The Post for withholding the location of the prisons at the administration's request.
After Bush's meeting with the Times executives, first reported by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, the president assailed the paper's piece on domestic spying, calling the leak of classified information "shameful." Some liberals, meanwhile, attacked the paper for holding the story for more than a year after earlier meetings with administration officials.
"The decision to hold the story last year was mine," Keller says. "The decision to run the story last week was mine. I'm comfortable with both decisions. Beyond that, there's just no way to have a full discussion of the internal procedural twists that media writers find so fascinating without talking about what we knew, when, and how -- and that I can't do."
Some Times staffers say the story was revived in part because of concerns that Risen is publishing a book on the CIA next month that will include the disclosures. But Keller told the Los Angeles Times: "The publication was not timed to the Iraqi election, the Patriot Act debate, Jim's forthcoming book or any other event."
Bought Off?
The admission by two columnists that they accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff may be the tip of a large and rather dirty iceberg.
Copley News Service last week dropped Doug Bandow -- who also resigned as a Cato Institute scholar -- after he acknowledged taking as much as $2,000 a pop from Abramoff for up to two dozen columns favorable to the lobbyist's clients. "I am fully responsible and I won't play victim," Bandow said in a statement after Business Week broke the story. "Obviously, I regret stupidly calling to question my record of activism and writing that extends over 20 years. . . . For that I deeply apologize."
Peter Ferrara of the Institute for Policy Innovation has acknowledged taking payments years ago from a half-dozen lobbyists, including Abramoff. Two of his papers, the Washington Times and Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, have now dropped him. But Ferrara is unapologetic, saying: "There is nothing unethical about taking money from someone and writing an article."
Readers might disagree on grounds that they have no way of knowing about such undisclosed payments, which seem to be an increasingly common tactic for companies trying to influence public debate through ostensibly neutral third parties. When he was a Washington lawyer several years ago, says law professor Glenn Reynolds, a telecommunications carrier offered him a fat paycheck -- up to $20,000, he believes -- to write an opinion piece favorable to its position. He declined.
In the case of Bandow's columns, says Reynolds, who now writes the InstaPundit blog, "one argument is, it's probably something he thought anyway, but it doesn't pass the smell test to me. I wouldn't necessarily call it criminal, but it seems wrong. People want to craft a rule, but what you really need is a sense of shame."
Jonathan Adler, an associate law professor and National Review contributor, wrote that when he worked at a think tank, "I was offered cash payments to write op-eds on particular topics by PR firms, lobbyists or corporations several times. They offered $1,000 or more for an op-ed," offers that Adler rejected. Blogger Rand Simberg writes that "I've also declined offers of money to write specific pieces, even though I agreed with the sentiment."
Two years ago, former Michigan senator Don Riegle wrote an op-ed attacking Visa and MasterCard without disclosing that his PR firm was representing Wal-Mart -- which was suing the two credit card companies.
Porn, Privacy and Participation
Kurt Eichenwald says he knew he would take heat for his decision to urge a teenager involved in child pornography to give up the business and cooperate with federal investigators.
"We are sitting there facing a horrible reality," the New York Times reporter says. "Every day I'm sitting there working on the story, there are children being molested and exploited, and we have a source who knows who and where they are."
The lengthy Times report last week on Justin Berry, now 19, whose cooperation with the Justice Department has led to several arrests, was remarkable, not least because it was Eichenwald who persuaded the young man to give up drugs and stop performing sexual acts for paying customers in front of a webcam -- and even referred him to a lawyer. The reporter clearly crossed the line from observer to participant.
"I knew our profession would look at this and say this was a troubling result," Eichenwald says. "But every result was troubling. I'm interviewing a kid and he suddenly starts naming children and telling me where they are and what's happening to them. He knew which kid was under the control of which pedophile."
Slate media critic Jack Shafer is among those who have raised questions, writing: "Would a Times reporter extend similar assistance to an 18-year-old female prostitute? An 18-year-old fence? A seller of illegal guns? No way. . . . Will online pornographers and other allied criminals now regard reporters as agents of the state?"
At a July meeting with top editors and company lawyers, Eichenwald says, Executive Editor Bill Keller said that " 'we've got to do the right thing.' . . . It would have been easier to come up with all sorts of explanations of why we should walk away."
Eichenwald says he had to persuade Berry, an abused child who was lured into performing for the webcam when he was 13, to get out of the porn business and give up drugs for him to be useful as a source for the paper. The reporter says he personally provided information to the FBI about a 15-year-old boy being lured to a Las Vegas hotel by Berry's 38-year-old business partner, who was arrested before the planned rendezvous.
"I knew we'd be criticized for getting a source to become a federal witness," Eichenwald says. But he says he's had nightmares and, as a father, feels "an enormous amount of guilt" about other children in the porn ring that he did not try to help.
If all this sounds like a movie, Eichenwald got calls from Hollywood within hours.
Plunging Reputations
"The image consultant said, 'You've got to stop wearing those turtlenecks. I think you've got to start showing some cleavage.' I told her I didn't think America was ready for that." -- ABC's Judy Muller, quoted by Amy Tenowich in a Los Angeles Daily News column on female journalists baring more skin. |
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By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 26, 2005
Framing the battle against terrorism as a wartime emergency, Yoo redefined torture, reinterpreted the Constitution and classified as archaic the long-established humanitarian rules of the battlefield. John Yoo knows the epithets of the libertarians, the liberals and the lefties. Widely considered the intellectual architect of the most dramatic assertion of White House power since the Nixon era, he has seen constitutional scholars skewer his reasoning and students call for his ouster from the University of California at Berkeley.
Civil liberties advocates were appalled by a memo he helped draft on torture. The State Department's chief legal adviser at the time called his analysis of the Geneva Conventions "seriously flawed." Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, in a critique of administration views espoused by Yoo, "a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens."
Yoo has alienated so many influential opponents that he is considered unconfirmable for a judgeship or high office, not unlike a certain conservative jurist rejected by the Senate for the Supreme Court.
"Someone said to me that I was the Robert Bork of my generation," he reported the other day.
Yet Yoo, 38, an engaging and outspoken lifelong conservative who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, can be found at seminars and radio microphones, standing up for Bush administration legal arguments that will be studied for decades.
"The worst thing you could do, now that people are critical of your views, is to run and hide. I agree with the work I did. I have an obligation to explain it," Yoo said from his Berkeley office. "I'm one of the few people who is willing to defend decisions I made in government."
Those decisions, made when he was a mid-level Justice Department adviser, have been the most fiercely contested legal positions of the Bush presidency. Framing the battle against terrorism as a wartime emergency, Yoo redefined torture, reinterpreted the Constitution and classified as archaic the long-established humanitarian rules of the battlefield.
Yoo wrote a memo that said the White House was not bound by a federal law prohibiting warrantless eavesdropping on communications that originated or ended in the United States. When news of the program broke, members of both parties called for hearings.
Yoo believes he was correct, even if critics say the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks "threatens the very idea of America," as one editorial said. "It would be inappropriate for a lawyer to say, 'The law means A, but I'm going to say B because to interpret it as A would violate American values,'" Yoo said. "A lawyer's job is if the law says A, the law says A."
How Yoo, who has never met President Bush or Vice President Cheney, came to be a principal interpreter of laws and the Constitution for the Bush team is a story rooted in his conservative convictions and a network of like-minded thinkers who helped him thrive.
"He has succeeded and won people over and advanced his ideas," said Manus Cooney, who hired Yoo on to the Judiciary Committee staff of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) in 1995. "As far as conservative academics, I don't think there's anyone in the law whose contacts run deeper in the three branches, or higher."
Yoo traces his convictions in no small part to his parents, and Ronald Reagan. His father and mother are psychiatrists who grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War. They emigrated in 1967, when Yoo was 3 months old. They sought three things, he said: education, economic opportunity and democracy. They settled in Philadelphia because they admired Eugene Ormandy, then conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Coming of age in an anti-communist household, Yoo said, he associated strong opposition to communist rule with the Republican Party and was himself "attracted to Reagan's message." What he liked most in conservatism was "the grounding in reason and reasonableness."
Yoo attended Episcopal Academy, a private religious school where he studied history, Latin and Greek. Then came Harvard, where he discovered that many people he encountered "were very different-minded, who thought that conservatives were actually sort of stupid or backward." He studied diplomatic history and worked for the school newspaper, where in 1988 he wrote a presidential endorsement of George H.W. Bush rejected by the editorial board's liberal majority.
"It got even worse at law school," Yoo said, recalling the first meeting he attended at the Federalist Society, a national organization of conservatives and libertarians, which attracted all of nine people. Critical of some fellow students who, he said, considered abortion and affirmative action to be the era's most important questions, he settled on matters of war and peace.
With the help of his Federalist Society contacts, he landed a clerkship with U.S. Appeals Judge Laurence H. Silberman, known for his experience in national security issues. Soon after being hired at Berkeley, which Yoo described as the best school to offer him a tenure-track job, he left for the Supreme Court, where he clerked for Thomas and played squash with Justice Antonin Scalia.
Yoo reached the Judiciary Committee staff after Hatch began a search for bright, conservative up-and-comers. Cooney, the staff director, said Yoo maneuvered well: "His smarts are undeniable, but unlike others of similar or equal wattage, he has an appreciation for the political nature of D.C."
Returning to Berkeley, Yoo -- who had interned for the Wall Street Journal -- turned to his legal writings and op-eds. He earned tenure in 1999.
Along the way, he became a regular at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where he often found himself in sync with international law skeptic John R. Bolton, an ally of Cheney's and now ambassador to the United Nations. Yoo also testified to the GOP-led Florida legislature during the 2000 presidential recount.
Despite his rsum and connections, Yoo required a particular convergence for his views to become as influential as they did. He needed a well-placed position, a national crisis and a receptive audience. He quickly got all three.
Known for his belief in a strong presidency, he joined the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the attorney general and the White House, in July 2001. Two months later came the terrorist attacks and the rush to respond. Soon, Yoo found his audience in the highest echelons of the White House, where the president and vice president already tended to see the courts, Congress and international conventions as constraints on the conduct of foreign affairs and national security.
"He was the right person in the right place at the right time," said Georgetown University's David Cole, a constitutional scholar and administration critic. "Here was someone who had made his career developing arguments for unchecked power, who could cut-and-paste from his law review articles into memos that essentially told the president, 'You can do what you want.' "
In a series of opinions, Yoo argued that the Constitution grants the president virtually unhindered discretion in wartime. He said the fight against terrorism, with no fixed battlefield or uniformed enemy, was a new kind of war.
Two weeks after Sept. 11, Yoo said in a memo for the White House that the Constitution conferred "plenary," or absolute, authority to use force abroad, "especially in response to grave national emergencies created by sudden, unforeseen attacks on the people and territory of the United States."
In reasoning Bush cited last week in defending his decision to authorize warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens, Yoo's Sept. 25, 2001, memo said Congress granted the president great latitude on Sept. 14, 2001, when it supported the use of force in response to the attacks. The resolution specified the Sept. 11 plotters and their supporters.
"Nonetheless," the memo concluded, "the President's broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the Nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters."
The majority view among constitutional scholars holds that the Framers purposely imposed checks on the executive branch, even in wartime, not least in reaction to the rule of Britain's King George III. On such issues, Yoo's critics contend, he went too far. "It's largely a misreading of original intent," Cole said. "The Framers, above all, were concerned about a strong executive."
An Aug. 1, 2002, memo on interrogation, written largely by Yoo, drew the most intense criticism. Saying the administration was not bound by federal anti-torture laws, it declared that, to be considered torture, techniques must produce lasting psychological damage or suffering "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
Word of the memo sparked an outcry, causing the White House to back away.
"The idea that . . . Congress has no authority to impose limits on torture has little support in constitutional texts or history, or legal precedent," said University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein. Yet Sunstein, like many of Yoo's critics, called him "a very interesting and provocative scholar" who "doesn't deserve the demonization to which he has been subject."
Yoo thinks his critics should understand that he offered legal advice, while others made policy.
"I think people don't understand how difficult was the work we did, how difficult the questions, how recent the 9/11 attacks were," he said. "There was no book at the time you could open and say, 'under American law, this is what torture means.' "
"The lawyer's job is to say, 'This is what the law says and this is what you can't do,' " Yoo said. He advised the White House that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda or the terrorism fight, "but the president could say as a matter of policy we're going to apply them anyway."
Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, is among those who say Yoo deserves considerable blame. "The issues which have most disturbed Americans about the conduct of the executive branch in fighting terrorism can ultimately be traced to legal theories that he espoused in memos pushing the administration in that direction," she said.
Yoo draws inspiration from Thomas and Hatch, saying, "I've seen how they've persevered and still stand up for what they believe in and get their point across." It is a style affirmed by Bork, who wrote a glowing blurb for Yoo's new book, "The Powers of War and Peace."
"He's just being vilified. It's the usual conduct of business in this town right now," Bork said. "You argue your position. What else can you do? There's no tactic that can deflect criticism." |
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NBC, MSNBC and news services
Dec. 22, 2005
Approval in the House came on a voice vote in a nearly empty chamber after Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, refused to agree to a six-month extension the Senate had cleared several hours earlier. WASHINGTON - Congress gave the Bush administration's anti-terrorism powers one more month of life Thursday, with work finished by a lone senator sitting in the virtually empty Senate chamber.
Congress also finalized a defense spending bill that funnels extra money to the Gulf Coast and Iraq. The GOP-run Congress completed the two bills in a scramble to finish a year complicated by standoffs with Democrats and disagreements among Republicans.
The House had passed a one-month extension of the Patriot Act on Thursday and sent it to the Senate, which passed it Thursday evening, ahead of the Dec. 31 expiration date of some anti-terror law enforcement provisions.
Approval in the House came on a voice vote in a nearly empty chamber after Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, refused to agree to a six-month extension the Senate had cleared several hours earlier.
“We’re happy to agree to a shorter-term extension of the Patriot Act. The important thing is to strike the right balance between liberty and security,” said Rebecca Kirszner, an aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The Senate passage marked the latest step in a stalemate that first pitted Republicans against Democrats in the Senate, then turned into an intramural GOP dispute.
Plea from Bush
Without action by Congress, several provisions of the law enacted in the days following the 2001 terror attacks were due to expire. Bush has repeatedly called on Congress not to let that happen.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Bush would sign a one-month extension.
In a statement Thursday, the president said, “I will work closely with the House and Senate to make sure that we are not without this crucial law for even a day.”
The Senate vote Wednesday night marked a turnabout for GOP leaders, who had long insisted they would accept nothing less than a permanent renewal of the law. The House approved the measure earlier this month, but a Democratic-led filibuster blocked passage in the Senate, with critics arguing the bill would shortchange the civil liberties of innocent Americans.
Passage of a one-month extension means lawmakers will debate the issue early in 2006, and is certain to require concessions to the Senate critics who are seeking greater privacy protections.
The Senate's six-month extension came Wednesday night as Bush left Washington believing that Congress would not let the provisions expire.
‘We're still under threat’
“It appears to me that the Congress understands we got to keep the Patriot Act in place, that we’re still under threat,” Bush said just before boarding a helicopter headed to Camp David, Md., for a long holiday weekend with his family.
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who had led the Democratic filibuster against permanently renewing most of the law’s expiring provisions, said the six-month extension would “allow more time to finally agree on a bill that protects our rights and freedoms while preserving important tools for fighting terrorism.”
Most of the Patriot Act — which expanded the government’s surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers — was made permanent when Congress overwhelmingly passed it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. |
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By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 26 December 2005
Secret domestic wiretaps authorised by US President George Bush led to the National Security Agency gaining access to the country's main telephone switches in a vast operation to mine data from phone calls and emails.
The New York Times, the paper that broke the wiretap story, cited disclosures from current and former government officials that the surveillance operation was far broader than anything admitted by the White House and involved the co-operation of private telecoms companies. Mr Bush said a week ago that he had authorised the NSA to intercept "the international communications of people with known links to al-Qa'ida and related terrorist organisations". But The Times report indicated that it went much further than that and involved some sort of "pattern analysis" of all telecommunications passing through the US in an effort to detect suspicious behaviour.
That, in turn, implied that any US resident hooked up to the phone system or the internet might have been exposed to government surveillance - a shocking notion in a country with a lower tolerance of government secrecy than Britain.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has already said it would hold hearings into the President's decision to let the NSA go ahead without applying for a warrant from a secret court that handles sensitive national security questions. The court has granted thousands of surveillance requests since its establishment in the late 1970s, and has rejected almost none.
Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the committee, told The Times that clamour for such hearings would now be all the greater. "These new revelations can only multiply and intensify the growing list of questions and concerns about the warrantless surveillance of Americans," he said.
Mr Bush was quick to acknowledge the existence of the secret surveillance programme and argued that it carried legal authority because of a congressional resolution empowering him to fight al-Qa'ida in the wake of 11 September, and because of broad war-making powers granted to the president in the constitution. |
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By Jim Puzzanghera and Truong Phuoc Khánh
Mercury News
Posted on Sat, Dec. 24, 2005
Like many Americans, the Rev. Dan Hutt of Palo Alto was prepared to sacrifice some freedom for more safety in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
During those frightening weeks, Congress overwhelmingly passed the hastily drafted USA Patriot Act. It gave the federal government broad new counterterrorism powers, such as allowing investigators to comb library records and secretly search people's homes.
Hutt didn't object -- back then.
``I could understand how that happened,'' the 34-year-old said last week during a family outing at San Jose's Christmas in the Park. ``People were saying, `We need to look carefully at security in the country.' '' But more than four years after the attacks, many Americans appear less willing to give up their civil liberties in the search for terrorists.
A pair of San Francisco 49er season-ticket holders have sued the team, complaining that post-Sept. 11 pat-down searches of fans entering Monster Park violate their privacy. Attempts to enact long-term renewals of key provisions of the Patriot Act have been derailed because of a political dispute in Washington, D.C., over curtailing some of its powers, forcing a temporary extension last week. And President Bush is under bipartisan fire for authorizing electronic eavesdropping of U.S. citizens without court orders.
``It's a very dangerous precedent to allow the executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens without any oversight whatsoever,'' Hutt said. ``We'll rue the day we let it stand.''
But others are sounding a different warning: that the United States, with its fast-paced news cycles and Internet-time attention spans, may be forgetting the trauma of Sept. 11 and the threat that still lurks.
``None of your civil liberties matter much,'' Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said last week, ``after you're dead.''
As the United States considers recalibrating the war on terror, people from the Bay Area to the nation's capital are struggling to strike the proper balance.
Michael Cao, a 34-year-old staffing consultant from San Jose, exemplifies the conflict many people feel.
He said the revelations earlier this month that Bush ordered the National Security Agency to monitor international calls without court approval ``could violate Constitutional rights and privacy of citizens.''
``At the same time, it can serve to protect the country against terrorist acts,'' he added. ``We're in a new age and a new war. We have to submit to new orders, going through airports, opening our bags. We are put through a new scrutiny.''
Some of those restrictions lessened on Thursday as the Transportation Security Administration eased rules on objects passengers can carry onto airplanes, allowing small scissors and tools so screeners can focus on identifying more dangerous items. Some in Congress have criticized the move, noting that the Sept. 11 hijackers used box cutters to commandeer planes.
Hal Berry of Cupertino agreed. ``We don't need to relax those rules,'' he said.
But nothing demonstrates the change in attitudes over the past four years better than the ongoing battle over the Patriot Act.
Stunned by the inability of the federal government to detect the Sept. 11 plot, Congress granted authorities sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The Patriot Act eliminated a prohibition on sharing foreign intelligence with domestic law enforcement officers and opened new avenues in the hunt for terrorists, such as searching personal records from libraries, hospitals and businesses under secret warrants.
The legislation passed the House of Representatives 357-66 in October 2001. A day later, the Senate approved it 98-1. The votes reflected the public's mood at the time.
Independent pollster John Zogby said that immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, those polled had ``an almost unbelievable willingness'' to allow authorities to read their mail, search their cars and scan their e-mail. ``Six months later,'' he added, ``that dissipated.''
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, both supported the Patriot Act in 2001.
But on Dec. 14, Lofgren voted against the extension of some of its most controversial provisions, such as secret property searches and access to library records, before they expire on Dec. 31. The House approved the bill 251-174, but there were nearly three times as many ``no'' votes as in 2001. And Feinstein supported a Senate filibuster earlier this month that blocked the law's long-term reauthorization until some of its provisions are modified.
Bush has said it's vital to get the Patriot Act renewed.
``These senators need to explain why they thought the Patriot Act was a vital tool after the September the 11th attacks, but now think it's no longer necessary,'' he said at a news conference Monday before Congress agreed to a five-month extension to keep key provisions of the law from expiring at the end of the month.
David Furey, a massage therapist from Monterey, has an explanation. ``People have figured out what was passed wasn't better for the country, but better for a few powerful people,'' the 24-year-old said.
Lofgren, who helped write the initial Patriot Act, said the Republican-controlled Congress has not provided the oversight needed to prevent abuses -- something her constituents want.
``Most of the feedback I've had is that people are very happy with the position I've taken on this,'' she said.
Feinstein was a co-sponsor of the Senate version of the updated Patriot Act. But she joined the filibuster because she said it is important that some remaining disputes be resolved so the controversial law receives strong bipartisan support.
After what was described as a political game of chicken last week with the Dec. 31 deadline on 16 important Patriot Act provisions looming, congressional critics and the White House agreed to a short extension while negotiations on changes to the law continue.
Consensus on the Patriot Act is important so the country can find the proper balance between civil liberties and security, said Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who served on the bipartisan federal commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.
`` Getting to this balance before we're attacked again is absolutely paramount,'' he said. ``Because once we're attacked again, there'll be no rational balance where aggressive tactics meet respect for our Constitution.''
The dispute over the Patriot Act has been roiled by the revelations of domestic spying by the National Security Agency. Democrats and some key Republicans in Congress are calling for hearings into the wiretaps.
The reaction to the news would have been different in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Feinstein said.
``You want to strike back. You want to get them. You want to stop them,'' she said. But after passions cool, she added, ``Americans don't want to sacrifice basic liberties and protections.''
Berry, of Cupertino, is as concerned about the small erosions of civil liberties as the larger ones.
``Once you take a small step,'' he said, ``it's easier to take a bigger step.'' He said he doesn't make international phone calls -- the focus of the NSA monitoring -- but he doesn't want people who do to have their privacy violated.
Hassan Sedarat, a Santa Clara engineer originally from Iran, does make foreign calls. And he said he's going to be more cautious now.
``The good thing about this country is it's not a police state,'' said Sedarat, 47. ``What's been done here recently is very, very similar to what has been done in Iran.'' |
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By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 24, 2005; A03
CHALMETTE, La. -- Ronnie Nunez bought the weird pink house in the Battleground Subdivision to entice his daughter and baby granddaughter to come back to Louisiana from out of state. But they didn't stay with him long.
He thought he'd patch up his marriage there. That didn't work either.
The house is a bad renovator's jigsaw puzzle, with three roofs stitched together and an inexplicable interior bay window connecting separate wings. To tell the truth, he never much liked the place.
Soon it will be gone. A bulldozer is likely to arrive before the new year to scrape away Nunez's house, the first demolition in one of the first large-scale government bulldozing projects in the New Orleans area since Hurricane Katrina's Aug. 29 assault. Someone told Nunez that Katrina means "cleansing," and though he never bothered to look it up, he decided to believe it. The bulldozer will be his personal cleansing agent.
"I have a chance to start over," Nunez, a 61-year-old trucker and former Marine with a penchant for mirrored sunglasses, said one recent cloudy afternoon. "I said, 'Here I am. Take me down.' "
Bulldozing, with its crushing note of finality, is an approach heavy with emotions in post-hurricane Louisiana. It is so emotional that "No Bulldozing" campaigns are being waged to save the sodden homes in parts of New Orleans, where several thousand houses may be demolished soon. The battle over bulldozing is most fervent in neighborhoods such as the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, where skeptical residents fear that their communities will not be rebuilt.
But here in suburban, working-class, mostly white St. Bernard Parish, where the destruction was so complete that just 10 of 25,000 houses are inhabitable, there is a headlong rush to the wrecking ball. More than 300 houses have been tagged for a mass demolition project that will begin in the coming weeks, as soon as a monumental tangle of paperwork is unraveled. Yet that's just the start in a parish where the water rose so high -- 17 feet in some parts -- that nearly every house is considered a candidate to be knocked down.
Oil refinery workers and fishermen and suburban commuters line up each day, offering their stucco and brick and wood frames to be pulverized. Parish officials that aren't involved in demolition have grown so tired of interruptions that they post signs on their office doors to divert people who want the local government to wipe away their homes.
Requests by homeowners who want to memorialize their houses' final moments on videotape are piling up. The homeowners' enthusiasm is bolstered by assurances that they will be allowed to rebuild, a contrast with the situation just upriver in New Orleans, where leaders of the city's rebuilding commission have discussed abandoning parts of the city that suffered the worst flooding.
St. Bernard Parish -- known simply as "da parish" in Louisiana because of its inhabitants' syllable-blurring, Brooklynesque accents -- lives in the shadow of the irresistible charm of New Orleans. The parish touches the New Orleans line at the Lower Ninth Ward. The parish -- industrial to the east and marshy to the west -- always felt like "the bastard stepchild" of New Orleans, said Parish Council member Joey Difatta, who lives in one of hundreds of trailers clustered around the St. Bernard government complex.
Residents still bristle because St. Bernard was intentionally flooded during the Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 when the aristocrats in New Orleans dynamited a levee to save the city. "There's a lot of malice that went with it," Difatta said. "We know we were sacrificed for the sake of New Orleans." More recently, St. Bernard gained a measure of infamy during Katrina because more than 30 elderly people died after allegedly being abandoned in the St. Rita's nursing home there.
The parish was settled in the early 1700s by the French, who produced indigo used to make blue dye, and were followed late in the century by Isleos, immigrants from the Canary Islands who flocked there when Spain ruled Louisiana. The Isleos' descendants fill the parish now with names such as Fernandez and Perez and Rodriguez, though some of the pronunciations have taken on their own special "da parish" tenor. Here, Ruiz is "RUE-ez."
Nunez's family came from Portugal. An older cousin -- Sammy Nunez -- was once one of the most powerful members of the Louisiana legislature before being defeated after brazenly handing out casino campaign donations on the Senate floor. But Ronnie Nunez rose from a hardscrabble background. His father was a master barge pilot, whose skill with heavy loads was blunted by his affection for the bottle.
Nunez thought the pink house at 2707 Jackson Blvd. would be the perfect place to reinvent his life five years ago. There was enough room for him to live in one wing and for his wife of 33 years, Beverley Nunez, to live in the other when they weren't getting along, which was often. He kept his side dark, with thick curtains. "I like dark," he said.
The neighborhood is modest but historic, lined by graceful live oaks planted as part of a Works Progress Administration project during the Great Depression. It took its name, the Battleground Subdivision, because part of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 was fought there. The developer was the towering figure of modern St. Bernard history, an all-powerful sheriff named Joseph Meraux who was "a despot, but an enlightened despot" with progressive ideas and a love of education, according to parish historian Bill Hyland.
Nunez's house in Meraux's subdivision is a wasteland now, a nasty repository for soggy pink insulation and overturned tables. He offered it to the parish as a guinea pig for its demolition project, helping officials determine exactly how long it will take to scrape away a house and how much it will cost -- probably about $5,000 per house, reimbursable by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, parish officials say.
Nunez was too busy after Katrina -- earning the nickname "Superman" because he set up a camp for the displaced on a levee, subsisted on cans of tuna and shrimp from the Bumble Bee plant and made supply runs in his big rig -- to bother with any salvage work at his house.
"Y'all's problem is that y'all try to do everything legally," he said he told officials. "Just tell me what y'all need and get out of the way."
While he flitted around the parish, mold crept over the walls of his house and infused his record collection with a musty grime. His wife's room became a fashion warehouse turned upside down. "Look at this," he said, pointing at a lumpy pile. "Eighty-four purses and 200 pairs of shoes. Never could buy one of anything."
In the living room, he paused to marvel at a delicate curio cabinet, miraculously upright without a crack in its glass panels. He won't bother to save it. He wants everything to go. Still, he can't help but find something hopeful in its survival. Inside, he said, were shelves of figurines. Noah's Ark on one shelf and on the other, a row of angels. |
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December 19, 2005
By Brian Livingston
Two counties in Florida have terminated their use of Diebold computerized voting equipment after computer experts showed that vote totals could be changed by a single individual in a way that would be undetectable later.
The county commission of Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, voted on Dec. 13 to scrap its Diebold equipment and switch to a different manufacturer, at an estimated cost of $1.3 million. Three days later, the county council of Volusia County (Daytona Beach) approved a similar change. The switch will cost that jurisdiction at least $2.5 million, county officials said.
These actions, and the events that led up to them, can teach us a great deal about our dependence on computer procedures that are developed by flawed human beings. It's not just elections, of course, that are affected by programming errors and poorly understood code. Imagine your company purchasing a large development project from an outside firm. If that firm overcharges you, and you dispute the bill, can your mission-critical software be disabled at the push of a button by its developers until you pay up? It's a good idea to ask these questions before you invest your money in computerized solutions.
Testing the Vote-Counting Equipment
The revelations in the Florida counties were engineered by Herbert Thompson, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, and Harri Hursti, a programmer who lives in Finland. They examined optical-scan ballot counting equipment purchased by Leon County from Diebold Inc., a major maker of ATM and election equipment. The technicians were introduced to county supervisor of elections Ion Sancho by BlackBoxVoting.org (BBV), a nonprofit organization that critiques computerized voting.
Under Sancho's watchful eye, the computer experts ran the following demonstration, according to a BBV report.
• Initializing the counter. A Diebold-specified memory card, a device about the size of a credit card, was inserted into the optical-scan counting machine to initialize it. As is the case before every election, a "zero report" was run, showing that zero votes were recorded in each race.
• Inserting the ballots. Sancho and others marked optical-scan ballots by filling in circles on the printed cards. These forms were then inserted into the counter, as voters normally do after marking their ballots. The totals, counted by witnesses before the insertion, were Yes 2, No 6.
• Tabulating the vote. The totals tallied by the vote counter, however, were Yes 7, No 1. In addition, the totals accepted from the counter by the central tabulator, also made by Diebold, showed Yes 7, No 1. No alerts had been sounded by either machine.
How was the count changed? Hursti had added data to the memory card prior to its insertion. This subtracted votes from one position and added them to the other. The same change could be made by almost any dishonest election official, Hursti explained, without the need for any password or much specialized knowledge. Yet the tampering "will not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure," he said. A recount using the same memory card would deliver the same results.
How the Winning Candidate "Rolls Over" the Loser
In a PDF report released in July 2005, Hursti said the Diebold memory cards can hold "an executable program which acts on the vote data." In a well-designed election system, by contrast, the vote counting mechanism should contain only "the ballot design and the race definitions." In other words, initializing a counting machine should install only a list of the candidates and ballot measures to be tallied in each race.
In his report, Hursti indicates that the vote-changing trick can be accomplished using plain old integer math. The Diebold election machines are designed to count each position's votes up to 65,535, which is 1 less than a power of 2. When 1 more vote is counted, the tally "rolls over" to 0. The following vote brings the total to 1, and so forth.
The Diebold equipment, Hursti explains, can be secretly initialized so that Candidate A starts with 65,511 votes -- which is the same as minus 25 -- while Candidate B starts with 25. The "zero report" would blithely show 0 votes for each candidate. After more than 25 votes have been cast for Candidate A, there would be no indication that any tampering had occurred.
Let's say the exact same number of voters happen to cast ballots for each candidate. Congratulations, Candidate B -- you appear to have won by 50 votes. Multiply this by thousands of precincts in a state, all using identical memory cards, and you're talkin' real results.
Accomplishing the Trick in Actual Elections
Diebold, based in North Canton, Ohio, will not comment specifically on the rejection of its equipment by Leon County. But the manufacturer has sent a letter to county officials saying their testing was "a very foolish and irresponsible act" and may have violated the company's licensing agreements, according to a Dec. 15 Associated Press report.
In a development that may or may not be election-related, long-time Diebold chairman and CEO Walden O'Dell resigned for "personal reasons," effective immediately, according to a company press release dated Dec. 12. In September, Diebold was forced to pay California a fine of $2.6 million for installing uncertified software into the state's voting machines. The company's stock plunged more than 15 percent.
Unfortunately for voters, the trick demonstrated on Diebold's equipment by Hursti may very well have already been used in real elections:
• Partisan access. Several election officials have access to memory cards prior to elections. These officials tend not to be neutral. They're usually high-level partisans in the Democratic or Republican Party. For example, Diebold memory cards became an issue in Ohio after the 2004 Presidential election. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell ordered the cards and other election records sealed from public inspection until after the state's electors were sworn in, according to a Dayton Daily News article.
• Mysterious miscounts. In one incident that was widely reported in Florida after the 2000 Presidential election, a Volusia County precinct showed a final count of negative 16,000 votes for the Democratic candidate, Al Gore. The error was resolved by making a hand count of the ballots. But Leon County's Sancho now believes the "mistake" is evidence of a real fraud attempt that failed only due to sloppiness. "Someone with access to the vote center in Volusia County put it on a memory card and uploaded it into the main system," the election supervisor told Orlando's WESH-TV News in an interview.
• Impossible recounts. The recount in Volusia County was possible because the actual voting records had been preserved. But that isn't possible in a growing number of U.S. counties. In Florida, about half the state's voters now use touch-screen equipment with no paper ballot and no record of the votes other than a memory card, according to a Dec. 17 Miami Herald article. In addition, the Florida Legislature passed election laws in 2001 eliminating recount requirements for touch-screens and not requiring a paper audit trail, according to Law.com.
How Not to Write Code
Trustworthy vote counting is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. It's essential to any free country. The sloppy code and ludicrous back doors found in some computerized election equipment should be a wake-up call for all Americans -- and an object lesson to businesses everywhere in how not to outsource programming.
I wrote on April 5, 2005, that computer scientists had determined that the reported 2004 election totals in some states, including Ohio, were simply impossible to reconcile with scientifically valid exit polls taken the same day. That article became the top story at Daily Kos, America's most widely read political blog, and others.
Unfortunately, we're going to see a lot more stories like this about election fraud, and it won't be good news. It's bad for democracy and it brings shame on computer professionals who should be exposing these shoddy systems, not programming them.
With everything I've learned in my life about computers, I don't want any votes disappearing into a shiny metal box or an ephemeral memory card. The only way an election can be fair is when tangible, paper ballots are marked by hand by actual voters (with alternate provisions for disabled voters). You can tabulate the votes using any machine you want, as long as the paper ballots can be recounted as the final word. |
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By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Dec. 22, 2005
Every holiday season, we on "The McLaughlin Group" hand out news awards. Some categories, like "Biggest Winner," are easy (My choice was Chief Justice John Roberts, with the oil companies as runner-up). Others are a struggle to fill, like who to insult with the “Overrated” award.
In compiling this year’s list, I had the highest number of entries for the category, “Biggest Lie.” I chose the White House declaration that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had nothing to do with leaking the identity of a covert CIA agent. They were the principal participants in the effort to discredit former ambassador Joe Wilson because he had raised doubts about one of the pillars of their argument for war, namely that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium to make a bomb. Another favorite—heard all the time from the White House—is that “everybody saw the same intelligence we did.” Members of Congress don’t see the President’s Daily Briefing (one of them was the glossed-over pre-9/11 document that warned “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the U.S.”), and they didn’t see all the qualifying caveats about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, or the doubts about the credibility of the sources the administration was relying on.
Bush is good at stating the obviously untrue. “We do not torture,” he declared despite ample evidence to the contrary from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Vice President Cheney went to Capitol Hill repeatedly to lobby for the U.S. right to torture, capitulating only when the vote went against him 90 to 9. Sen. John McCain, who was tortured when held prisoner during the Vietnam War, took on Bush’s No. 2 and stood up for democratic principles. It’s a wonder Cheney has any credibility left after assuring the country in May, “the insurgency is in its last throes.”
The revelation that President Bush authorized spying on American citizens without warrants is a late entry to the year’s “Biggest Lies” list. Bush says he bypassed the law because of the need for speed. He may believe that, but the facts say otherwise.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 established a special FISA secret court designed to act expeditiously. The executive branch can tap anybody’s phone and not even get a warrant until 72 hours after the fact. The FISA court isn’t picky; it’s only turned down five requests out of 19,000 in its quarter-century existence. Bush publicly and proudly says he will continue to break the law. The Washington Post reported that one FISA court judge has resigned in apparent protest, and the others are asking why we have a secret court when it is ignored.
Bush’s explanation is riddled with lies. He says our enemies are watching and threatens The New York Times, which broke the spying story, with legal action. It takes a vivid imagination to believe that Osama bin Laden and his buddies are keeping up with the niceties of FISA courts and would otherwise have no idea their phones might be tapped. Bush says he talks to Congress all the time and that there was plenty of congressional oversight. Not true. The Gang of Eight (leaders of both parties in the House and Senate, plus the chair and ranking members of the Intelligence Committees) were forbidden to take notes or discuss what they were told with colleagues or staff. Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s hand-written letter to Cheney expressed uneasiness about the program. Rockefeller couldn’t have its legality evaluated by staff. He couldn’t even have the letter typed because of the secrecy. That hardly qualifies as congressional oversight.
The cavalier attitude toward the checks and balance of a democratic society is a pattern with this administration. Bush and Cheney regard Congress and the judiciary as obstacles, not as equal branches of government. The polls show that a majority of Americans no longer trust this team, which is why Bush and Cheney are hitting back hard at their critics. If they lose this round over spying, the spillover effect will be devastating for their war policy and on any domestic agenda they hope to salvage. We have no mechanism to deal with a president who has lost the trust and confidence of the American people and has three years remaining in office. Impeachment is a nonissue; it’s not going to happen with Republicans in control of the House and Senate.
What will happen is more open insurrection on the part of senators—both Democrats and Republicans. Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito are scheduled to begin the first week in January. In the weeks since being named by Bush, there have been a series of stories about Alito’s early writings as a member of the Reagan administration. Alito wants us to believe he was a callow young thirtysomething who advocated far-right positions to curry favor for a job. The White House is telling senators that Alito didn’t mean all those things he wrote about disregarding privacy rights and overturning Roe v. Wade—another big lie. No wonder this year’s list was so easy to put together.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc. |
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By Jean-Louis Turlin
Le Figaro
Translated By Pascaline Jay
December 24, 2005
With the Republican majority in Congress concerned about the 2006 elections, George W. Bush can't seem to get a break lately. According to this article from France's Le Monde newspaper, 'a President who has lost his aura and will no longer have to face the voters' is in retreat. After four years of parliamentary docility, a less popular President now faces a Congress with next November's mid-term elections on its mind.
George W. Bush ended 2004 on a cloud. Since he got himself elected without any possible questioning (this time), he thought he could count on solid Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, to complete the ambitious set of reforms on his political agenda. These include the privatization of pensions, the reinforcement of the Presidential powers, but also making tax cuts permanent. Today, he is in retreat on almost all fronts.
After a campaign - as unrestrained as it was vain - to change the opinion of a public that now distrusts Wall Street, the President is no longer talking about his plans for individual pension accounts. The vote to make tax cuts permanent for the highest incomes has been postponed and promises to be very hotly debated, since an exploding budget deficit and sharp cuts in welfare are providing a resurgent Democratic opposition with ammunition. And three recent setbacks in Congress regarding Iraq and the war against terrorism have shown the limits of executive power.
First, there was the McCain Amendment in the Senate, condemning the inhumane interrogation methods and treatment, in CIA prisons, of prisoners suspected of having links to al-Qaeda. After threatening to veto his bill under pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney, Bush had to make a deal with the Republican Senator, who was a victim of torture in Vietnam. At the same time, John Murtha, member of the House of Representatives and Democratic "hawk" who had supported the invasion of Iraq, threw a paving stone into the pond by calling for a withdrawal of the troops.
AN UNUSUAL HUMILITY
In the meantime, lawmakers were busy passing a resolution calling on the White House to keep Congress regularly informed of its objectives and the evolving situation in Iraq. Yesterday, Bush announced the withdrawal of two brigades of troops. But most surprising is Bush's drastic change in tone during a series of speeches before the Iraqi legislative elections, in which he admitted with unusual humility that the Intel on the presence of weapons of mass destruction was wrong, and that the task they have to accomplish there is huge.
Just when he thought he'd able to bask in the glory of the strengthening of democracy in Iraq - another official justification for the intervention - the matter of electronic eavesdropping in the war against terror came up and ruined the holidays for George W. Bush. A New York Times article revealed that wire tapping had been extended to domestic communications, without the proper judicial authorization needed from Congress. Lawmakers will hold hearings in January to determine whether or not the President was abiding by the law.
That was enough to kill the renewal of the "Patriot Act," which comes to an end on December 31st. This very controversial law that threatens individual liberties has only been extended for a month [five weeks, actually], whereas the President wanted an immediate and permanent renewal.
The other setback was the rejection by the Senate of a clause authorizing oil drilling in Arctic, something that a Senator from Alaska [Ted Stevens] had tacked onto the Defense budget. And if the Upper House ended up approving a $40 billion cut on social spending over the next five years, it only because Vice President Cheney interrupted his tour of Iraq and Afghanistan to use his honorary position as Senate President to tip the scales in favor of the decision. His vote broke a 50-50 tie, even though the Republicans control 55 seats out of a 100 seats in the Senate.
This shows that Bush not only has to face Democrats that are more united than they have been on over five years, but also moderate Republicans who are focused on the elections next November. Even the most conservative lawmakers are retreating back a step on things like immigration, with a President who has lost his aura and will no longer have to face the voters. |
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Sunday December 25th 2005
Kurt Nimmo
CNN tells us about a “covert” FBI snoop program to check “suspicious radiation levels outside more than 100 predominantly Muslim-related sites in the greater Washington, D.C., area, as well as various sites in other cities,” thus providing more anti-Muslim fodder for the undiscerning American public. “It is a waste of time, it is a waste of resources and it is causing us to be concerned about our citizenship, our constitutional rights,” Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told CNN.
Mr. Awad, however, is missing the point—the Straussian neocons don’t give a whit about the constitutional rights of Arabs in America and this “covert” program, obviously a “waste of time” that will turn up nothing, is not designed to protect us from dirty bombs but rather to further stigmatize Muslims as crazed terrorists. Snooping on “more than 100 predominantly Muslim-related sites” is intended to send a strong message—you can’t trust Muslims and you may be in danger if you live near a mosque.
It should be noted that CNN is a branch of the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council’s Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), “a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration’s Central America policies,” as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting revealed way back in 2000. OPD is a “vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory,” according to Miami Herald. Although we are assured OPD was shut down in the wake of revelations surrounding the Iran-Contra criminal conspiracy, “the 4th PSYOPS group still operates,” thus demonstrating there is not much in a name or bureaucratic designation.
FAIR continues:
An unofficial strategy paper published by the U.S. Naval War College in 1996 and written by an Army officer (”Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier”) urged military commanders to find ways to “leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate” for the purposes of “communicating the [mission’s] objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection.”
As former Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski informs us, the Straussian neocons currently hold sway over the Pentagon and presumably the 4th PSYOPS group and other disinformation and “deception” operations. Kwiatkowski was assigned to the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia bureau under the control of the execrable Zionist neocon Douglas Feith. Other appointees hailed from neocon “think tanks” such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have in common a close identification with the views of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel,” writes Jim Lobe.
Thus it can be assumed CNN—long infested with PSYOPS operatives and the corporate media long ago penetrated by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird—is running yet another propaganda campaign designed to stigmatize Muslims as the Straussian neocons, as the American branch of the reactionary and fascist Likudites, prepare the nation for “world war four” (as former CIA director and neocon James Woolsey deems it).
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By Nathan Guttman
The Jerusalem Post
December 23, 2005
Some people worry that the culture-war being waged in the U.S. to reassert the nation's Christianity could be bad for Jews. But according to this op-ed article from Israel's Jerusalem Post, the trend should prompt American Jews to realize why Israel is so precious. 'As Jerry Falwell reminds us: 'Because America is so Christian, Israel matters ever more.' I will be forgiven, I hope, for not participating in the panic about recent attempts to restore Christianity to Christmas in the United States. When Jerry Falwell offers legal aid to Americans who believe they've been persecuted for observing Christmas, or Georgia State Senator Ronnie Chance proposes to prohibit government agencies from barring their employees from saying "Merry Christmas," the news at least provides a chuckle, and welcome relief after a year of the tsunami, Katrina and (more) Iraq.
Now, some will say, this cavalier attitude is misplaced, for something much more insidious is transpiring. The real issue isn't just Fox News anchor John Gibson's organizing a boycott of Target and Wal-Mart for using the phrase "Happy Holidays." What we are witnessing, argue the hand-wringers, is the Christianization of America, a process that simply can't be good for the Jews.
Maybe. Yet behind the furor lies an assumption that at its core, America is not a Christian country, and that Jerry and John threaten that status quo. But that reading of America is myopic.
Approximately 80% of Americans define themselves as Christian, and more than 90% observe Christmas. America is Christian through and through, in symbol and in content, and American Jews would be well served by acknowledging that.
The First Amendment's "establishment clause" contributed immeasurably to the thriving of Jewish life in the United States. Ironically, though, by safeguarding Jews' comfort in America, the Bill of Rights also fostered an illusion that America was not really a Christian nation. The "Chrismukka" phenomenon (which originated, apparently, on the TV hit The O.C. but now gets 117,000 hits on Google) is proof that many Christians and Jews want to believe that there are no significant differences between our faiths. But if there is no real difference, then who cares if ours survives?
No longer surrounded by overtly threatening neighbors, American Jews thrived in every way - economically, intellectually and politically - except as Jews. American Jewish numbers seem to be shrinking, and the levels of Jewish literacy among 95% of American Jews, compared to what they were two or three generations ago, are abysmal.
Asked "why Jews should survive," the vast majority of today's American Jewish college students would have virtually nothing substantial to say. If that doesn't change, Jewish physical survival will be meaningless.
Which is why, I submit, Jerry Falwell has unintentionally done Jews an enormous favor. If Gibson and Falwell have accidentally reminded Jews that America is, without question, a Christian nation, they might prompt Jews to reflect and ask, "What do our children need to know and think about as they're growing up, if they're to survive in this environment?"
Such concerns might, if we're fortunate, lead to the desperately needed revitalization of American Jewish education and the questions at its core.
CHRISTMAS COULD help Zionism, too, by helping American Jews see what is truly important about Israel. American Jewish Zionists revel, too often, in images of Israeli power. As critical as Israeli military might is, when I hear about groups visiting Israel going to a military base and firing M-16s as part of their VIP missions, my stomach turns.
If these people went to visit England on vacation, would they add a British military base to their itinerary? Would they show "America" to visitors by taking them to Fort Bragg? Obviously not. Because Fort Bragg was built so that America can exist; America was not created to produce Fort Bragg.
The same is true here. We have an army to defend this country, not as an end in itself. When I point this out to my friends who've just returned from these shooting sprees, they ask (often sheepishly), then what would you have us see? Go to a bookstore, I tell them, and compare it to Barnes and Noble.
I'm serious. During "holiday season" at Barnes and Noble, there's often a table near the front marked "Judaica." Fifteen or 20 titles, selected from among thousands, geared to the Jewish patrons of the store, including many books which I'd love to read.
But compare that to an Israeli bookstore any day of the year. There, not on some army base, lies the real miracle of Israel. A store full of books written in a language that a century ago virtually no one spoke. With hundreds of new titles, written for a population less than that of Los Angeles, ranging from Pulitzer Prize-quality literature to the equivalent of Harlequin romances.
On these shelves the no-longer-religious Bialik shares shelf space with the newly religious Ehud Banai. Post-Zionists and rabid-Zionists are stacked side by side, and Jewish life fights - and flourishes - as it can only where Jews are the majority.
Jewish minorities flourished in the past, but back then, neither they nor their hostile neighbors pretended that the relationship was benign. It is the thorough decency of Protestant America that has destroyed Jewish cultural flourishing. The pockets of creative richness on the Upper West Side, or on the West Side of Los Angeles are extraordinary, but they bear no resemblance to American Jewish life as a whole.
Thus, Jerry Falwell reminds us: Because America is so Christian, Israel matters ever more. Not because it is so powerful, but because it is so Jewish. The point is not that one can't live a meaningful and creative Jewish life in the States, for one obviously can. Or that Jewish life in Israel is sufficiently rich, because it isn't.
The point, rather, is that the latest attempt to re-Christianize Christmas could well be a good thing. It could help us assess more accurately what we're up against in America, and provide clarity on why a richly Jewish Israel matters so deeply.
Imagine: Jerry Falwell gets all worked up, and the Jews become more serious about Jewish education and increasingly aware of why their one and only state matters. Might we be on the verge of another "holiday season" miracle?
The writer is vice-president of the Mandel Foundation - Israel. His next book, Coming Together, Coming Apart: A Memoir of Heartbreak and Promise in Israel, will be published in July. |
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By Matthias Gebauer
Der Spiegel
Translated By Hartmut Lau
December 21, 2005
America wants to prosecute Hezbollah terrorist Mohammad Ali Hamadi for 1985 hijacking and murder of a U.S. Navy diver. Germany says that Hamadi did his time, and under German law, he cannot be prosecuted twice for the same crime. Besides, according to this article from Der Spiegel, Washington failed to submit the proper paperwork! Berlin: When Mohammad Ali Hamadi walked out through the gate of Geldern Prison in North Rhine-Wesphalia as a free man last Thursday, he was feeling queasy. In his 19 years behind bars the aircraft hijacker had not forgotten that the United States still wanted to arrest him and bring him to trial for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet. "Especially after what we had read in the papers over the last few weeks about the U.S. kidnapping people, we almost had to expect something to happen," said his attorney, Gabriele Steck-Bromme.
[Editor's Note: TWA Flight 847was hijacked en route from Athens to Rome and forced to land in Beirut, Lebanon, where the hijackers held the plane for 17 days. They demanded the release of the "Kuwait 17" as well as the release of 700 fellow Shiite Muslim prisoners held in Israeli prisons and in prisons in southern Lebanon run by the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army. When these demands weren't met, hostage Robert Dean Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver, was shot and his body dumped on the airport tarmac. U.S. sources implicated Hezbollah].
The Lawyer consequently saw to her client's need for a very quick and, above all, low key departure. Hamadi was one of the most well known faces of Palestinian terror in the 1980s. Last Friday they drove to the Frankfurt Airport together and only after they had both cleared passport control and were seated on Lufthansa Flight LH3515 to Beirut did the newly released man feel truly free. After approximately three and a half hours in the air, he had returned home for the first time in 20 years.
At first, Hammadi's departure remained unnoticed. It was not until Tuesday that it became known that Germany's justice system, while not making a secret of it, had released Hammadi as quietly as possible. The only condition of his parole was that he immediately leave the country for Lebanon. Thus he flew to Beirut a free man and was met at the airport by his family. "He wants to start a new life now," said his attorney, who returned to Germany the next day.
U.S. DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO CAPTURE HAMMADI
However it is not yet certain Hammadi will be able to fulfill his desire to live quietly in Lebanon. As soon as the day of his release, the was criticism from Washington directed toward both the German justice system and German policy. From the reaction it became clear that the United States is unwilling to simply accept Hammadi's return to Lebanon. The case threatens to develop into an international incident between Germany and America. While the German side rests its case on the formal correctness of its decision, the American side makes an emotional argument. American opinion is that a terrorist like Hammadi should never be released.
Accordingly, the tone of yesterday's exchanges was harsh. "We are very disappointed that we didn't get custody of him at the time and that he was released now, before serving his sentence," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormak in Washington. McCormak also said that the U.S. would do "everything" to find Hammadi and bring him to trial before a U.S. court. The spokesman didn't want to say, "from this podium," whether or not the much-debated practice of rendition – kidnapping by the CIA – would be used. But nothing was excluded.
Members of the family of the American killed during the hijacking critized the decision by Germany's justice system in comments to The Washington Post. "It simply makes no sense," said the mother of victim Robert Dean Stethem, "to release him back to Lebanon where he can rejoin Hezbollah."
More concretely, she accused Germany of "negotiating" with the terrorists. Stethem had been shot to death in the hijacked airplane; subsequently the hijackers threw his body onto the tarmac while the world media's cameras rolled. These pictures are still very current in the American consciousness.
TECHNICALLY CORRECT, POLITICALLY SENSITIVE
By contrast, the German side acted deliberately unimpressed as if to suggest that the release of a man who had been in the headlines for years was an unimpressive event. Hammadi, having served 19 years, had simply been freed according to normal procedure. His attorney said that both prison authorities and the evaluation of an independent expert had concluded that he was no longer a danger. Consequently the State Court in Cleve decided on November 30, 2005 that he should be released and immediately deported to Lebanon. His lawyer emphasized that he had separated himself from terrorism, had learned a profession and, all in all, had become "a completely new person."
The Federal Ministry of Justice chose to low-key the event. They claimed that they didn't know whether or not the sensitive decision had been considered at the federal level. "He served his sentence", was the ministry's reaction, "And Germany is independent." Furthermore, the U.S. had not submitted a formal request for extradition. Such a request would not have delayed the process since, under German law, no extradition is possible for an accused who has already been convicted of the same crime in Germany. Thus everything was done correctly.
Germany had already rejected American requests for Hammadi shortly after he was captured in 1987. At the time Hammadi, was arrested at the Frankfurt Airport because he had liquid explosives in his possession. Germany rejected the American request for extradition because he would have been subject to the death penalty there.
Furthermore, Germany had nothing to gain from the extradition since a number of Germans, whose lives Germany didn't want to endanger by cooperating with Washington, were being held hostage by Hezbollah at the time. The thinking at the time was that it was better to try him and subsequently imprison him in Germany than to permit a spectacular trial and a death sentence in the United States.
ON AGENDA FOR MERKEL'S U.S. TRIP?
German was not much disposed to cooperate with the United States, even after his trial. The New York Times and The New York Post quoted numerous anonymous American officials who reported on lengthy trans-Atlantic consultations between Washington and Berlin. According to them, the Germans had consistently informed the Americans that an extradition after the completion of a prison term was impossible. In response, the United States tried to convince the German side to forbid any release on parole. On Tuesday, the Federal Ministry of Justice indicated that it had no knowledge of negotiations with the U.S. on the subject of Hammadi.
The event could become a new point of contention between Berlin and Washington. As early as yesterday, Tuesday, the German Cabinet's spokesperson had to deal with a question about whether or not the topic would be on the agenda during Chancellor Merkel's initial visit to Washington in January. Even if this was not the case, it is unlikely that the Hammadi affair will enhance trans-Atlantic relations between terrorist hunters. In Beirut, Hammadi himself will be closely following the words and threats coming out of Washington. Despite his release from German prison, there are considerable obstacles between him and a normal life.
Hammadi's attorney reacted with shock to demands for additional prosecution and extradition of her released client. "My client has served his sentence, even the U.S. should accept that," said Gabriele Steck-Bromme on Thursday. She noted that international law would exclude any additional prosecution against Hammadi. "I emphatically demand that the U.S.A. accept, and also follow, international law in this case," the lawyer said. A kidnapping by the United States would be a scandal, but would not be, after the revelations of the last months, a surprise. "I very much hope that the U.S.A. does not employ such means," she said. |
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EDITORIAL
Dagens Hyheter, Sweden
Translated Carl Bergquist
December 20, 2005
“Perhaps this humbler outlook will reverse the collapse in the president's approval ratings, but the address should be seen more as a premonition of upcoming battles in Washington.” "I know this war is controversial - yet being your president requires doing what I believe is right and accepting the consequences," George W. Bush stressed in a televised address to the American people on Sunday evening. [Dec. 18]
This is a statement that says quite a lot about Bush as president. At times he may be ridiculed, at other times he is not taken seriously, but he is obviously a politician who knows what he wants and often also how to get it.
Domestically, at least during the first term, things worked out fairly well. He gambled and in the end often achieved more than was thought possible, e.g. on tax cuts and judicial nominations.
In foreign policy, he has used a similar approach. The goals have been bold, and he has not been risk averse.
Resistance on the international stage has been strong, however. The supposition that others would follow when the sole superpower takes the lead proved wrong. Instead, the U.S. appeared arrogant and unwilling to listen. Washington has freely pursued policies, which essentially means that the U.S. doesn't need to adhere to the rules that others must respect.
The most prominent example of this is Iraq - and the problems that appeared following the invasion have been gigantic.
The American tone softened somewhat after Bush's reelection, and there is no doubt that the successful parliamentary elections [in Iraq] represents a very personal feather in Bush's cap. It has also dulled some of the harshest criticism.
Still, criticism remains, as do the demands for a speedy troop withdrawal. Even within the Republican Party, opposition has been persistent.
One can assume that this was one of the main reasons the president adopted a new tone in his [Oval Office] address. "This (the continued suicide bombings) proves that the war is difficult - it doesn't mean we're losing," he said, with a choice of words that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. Back then, there could be no hint that misjudgments had been made or that there were difficulties ahead.
The White House has evidently changed its strategy. The President is trying to reach out to those who are critical of the Iraq War, while forcefully striking back at those who believe that the "war on terror" has gone beyond the pale. He admits to mistakes, but will not budge from the conviction that the U.S. is on the right track, and that "victory" is within reach.
Perhaps this humbler outlook will reverse the collapse in the president's approval ratings, but the address should be seen more as a premonition of upcoming battles in Washington.
Presidential authority in the form of expanding executive power has become the focal point, and here opposition is mounting. Recently, Congress refused to extend the controversial Patriot Act, and last week the White House felt compelled to sign on to Senator John McCain's amendment on torture and the interrogation methods of the CIA. The New York Times recently revealed that Bush had permitted electronic eavesdropping without a court order.
"Even in a time of war, you have to follow the process, because that's what democracy is all about," Senator Lindsey Graham stated in relation to the wiretapping revelations.
Some say that the battle over executive power has only just begun. While Social Security reform - which was to be the big policy triumph during the second term - appears to be dead in the water, domestic power struggles tend to offer home field advantage to the president.
But the question is whether it is not too late. The president may have already gone too far in the "war on terror" for any hope of also declaring "victory" at home. |
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December 21, 2005
Khaleej Times
Arguing that spying on Americans could have prevented September 11, 'is as strange as it gets.' According to this op-ed article from the Khaleej Times of the United Arab Emirates, 'America's strength lies in its free spirit and respect for civil liberties. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney is always ready to defend the indefensible. Even as the administration finds it hard to deal with the political storm over domestic spying, Cheney has boldly justified the practice.
Instead of being overwhelmed by outraged public opinion, the vice president has slammed previous administrations, saying that if they had allowed domestic surveillance (spying on the Americans), September 11 attacks could have been averted.
This is as strange as it gets.
Instead of explaining something that has angered Americans on both sides of the political divide, the vice president has turned the argument upside down.
It's absurd to suggest that eavesdropping on its own citizens could have saved America from the terrorists. The Soviet Union collapsed like a house of cards, despite the fact that it had turned spying on its own people into an art form.
America, the nation that was built on the ideals of democracy, freedom and individual rights, must not turn to abominable practices such as surveillance and phone-tapping to protect itself. America's strength lies in its free spirit and respect for civil liberties. |
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Chicago Sun Times
November 4, 2005
BY CATHLEEN FALSANI RELIGION WRITER
"The Biblical record is clear. The scriptural witness on which our faith tradition stands speaks dramatically to God's concern for and solidarity with the poor and oppressed communities while speaking firmly in opposition to governments whose policies place narrow economic interests driven by greed above the common good." The morning after George W. Bush won his second term in office and many of his Republican colleagues also claimed victory last year, I received an e-mail from one of my dearest friends, Amanda.
It's a note that has haunted me since, a niggling at the back of my mind like an overdue library book or an insult hurled in anger that can't ever be taken back properly.
Amanda is one of the most moral, ethical, intelligent and kind people I know. She also happens to be a Jewish atheist, more or less.
We've known each other since we were teenagers, and the subject of faith -- the peculiarity of my born-again-ness and the absence of her faith in any religious way -- had been a perennial topic of discussion. I respect her deeply and care about what she thinks, particularly about spiritual matters.
"Help!" was the title of Amanda's e-mail. "I'm sad and angry today," she began. "Given your profession and your personal belief system, I am genuinely hoping you have something to say on this: How can people who claim to be voting on religious and moral values vote for a man who . . ."
Then she listed what she believed were President Bush's offenses:
# He supports the death penalty. He claims to be humble and ask for God's guidance, yet seemingly refuses to admit his fallibility or take advice from those who might have helped him avoid dragging us into an unjust war.
# He reversed the civilized world's abhorrence of preemptive war. He sold Americans a war based on lies. He willingly started an unnecessary war that has resulted in the deaths of (now more than 2,000) American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
# He, at least tacitly, condones torture. (Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib. And, we learned earlier this week, perhaps a number of secret CIA-run locations in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.) He ignores the human race's responsibility for preserving the Earth and its creatures.
# He is against stem cell research. He accuses dissenters of degrading the U.S. troops but does not push to fully fund Veterans Administration hospitals or health insurance for veterans. And he allowed the automatic assault weapons ban to lapse.
"How are these things reflective of a man with strong 'morals?' " Amanda asked. "How does 'morals' get to be defined as the things the right wants it to be? . . . Why isn't being anti-death penalty a moral issue? Why isn't being anti-war a moral issue? Why isn't being supportive of civil unions so that gay couples can, for example, obtain health insurance for each other and their children a moral issue?
"Please help me understand!" she pleaded.
For a year, I've not been able to bring myself to respond in any substantive way.
I'm reluctant to appear unduly partisan, at least not in print.
I don't want to paint one political ideology or another with a broad brush, and I am reticent always to judge the quality of anyone's faith (or heart), that of a president or anyone else.
But there comes a time when silence is immoral. Now, I believe, is that time.
Lost voice
While surely it is not solely Bush's doing, the moral morass facing (and, arguably, created by) his administration is as profound as any in our history.
Mired in political corruption of one variety or another, hamstrung (economically and spiritually) by an unjust war, and publicly shamed by the most despicable display of institutionalized racism since the slave era, as demonstrated in the unforgivably inept early response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has lost whatever moral voice it might have had.
And this week, as Republican leaders try to force a monstrous $50 billion budget cut designed allegedly to offset the mounting costs (currently in excess of $62 billion) of hurricane-related aid through Congress, it is clear that its moral compass also has been lost.
The proposed budget cuts, part of the so-called "budget reconciliation," would have devastating effects on the poorest, most vulnerable Americans, while allowing tax relief for the rich.
'Moral values'
The massive budget reductions would include billions of dollars from pension protection and student loan programs, Medicaid and child support enforcement, as well as millions from the food stamp program, Supplemental Security Income (read: senior citizens and the disabled) and foster care. Also attached to the "reconciliation" proposal is a plan that would allow oil drilling in Alaska's pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Nice.
Maybe Republican leaders should consider proposing an open season on the homeless or the resurrection of debtors' prisons while they're at it?
Is this the kind of leadership the majority of voters who, according to pollsters at the time, cast their ballots in 2004 based on "moral values," had in mind?
Is this what faith-based "compassionate conservatism" looks like? Is our nation more moral, more secure or spiritually healthier than it was a year ago?
And, to address my fellow Christian voters specifically, has the Good News been advanced in any way?
No. Absolutely not.
And it's not just a few left-leaning, ink-stained wretches such as myself who think so.
A travesty
For example, all 65 synod bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have signed a letter to members of Congress vehemently opposing the proposed budget cuts, saying in part, "The Biblical record is clear. The scriptural witness on which our faith tradition stands speaks dramatically to God's concern for and solidarity with the poor and oppressed communities while speaking firmly in opposition to governments whose policies place narrow economic interests driven by greed above the common good."
Evangelical Christian theologian and leader Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a national network of "progressive Christian" peace-and-justice activists, led an ecumenical gathering of religious leaders in a protest at the Capitol building Thursday, calling the proposed cuts "a moral travesty."
"Instead of wearing bracelets that ask, 'What would Jesus do?' perhaps some Republicans should ponder, 'What would Jesus cut?' " Wallis said.
The immorality (by any religious tradition's measure) of the proposed $50 billion budget reconciliation package is brazen.
If enacted, it would prove only to increase the suffering of the already-struggling poor, including tens of thousands who lost everything along the Gulf Coast.
Maybe immoral isn't the appropriate word.
Downright evil is a better description. |
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By Ellen Goodman
December 23, 2005
The Boston Globe
SO IT COMES DOWN to September 11, 2001. Again. The president has drawn a great dividing line through the country, separating his supporters from his critics. Again.
This time, those who see a presidency run amok are not just labeled ''defeatists." They are considered amnesiacs.
This time, those who oppose torture are diagnosed with short-term memory loss. Those who are outraged at domestic snooping are people who have forgotten to be afraid. The president's ''humble" speech from the Oval Office contained the inevitable line: ''September the 11th, 2001, required us to take every emerging threat to our country seriously." His decidedly unhumble wrestling with the media on the subject of domestic spying had no less than 10 references to ''this new threat [that] required us to think and act differently."
Meanwhile, what was Vice President Cheney's response when asked if he was concerned that 100 people had died in US custody? What actually worried him was that ''as we get farther and farther away from 9/11 . . . there seems to be less concern about doing what's necessary in order to defend the country."
It's as if the administration were waving a sampler embroidered with that old saying: If you are keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't know the seriousness of the situation.
We have been handed yet another in an endless series of false choices. Those who don't blindly trust the president are dismissed as amnesia victims. Americans who don't connect the dots from 9/11 to Iraq or spying or torture are cast as actors living in a foolish, fearless, fantasy world. Indeed, 9/11 was the day the president became the commander in chief. The words he often repeats were spoken to him by a rescue worker at the World Trade Center: ''Whatever it takes."
If there are Americans who have actually forgotten the attacks in all their searing horror, I don't know any. I remember the weeks when I would wake up and reach for the remote to see if we'd caught Osama. When did that expectation fade? I remember the just pursuit of Al Qaeda into its safety zone, Afghanistan. And the satisfaction in overthrowing the Taliban.
But gradually, 9/11 became the all-purpose excuse for . . . whatever it takes. The war in Iraq was conflated with the war on terror, and preemptive strikes were launched against weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. In ''The Assassin's Gate," George Packer, a liberal hawk, tries to assess why the United States really did invade Iraq. ''It still isn't possible to be sure -- and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War," he writes. ''Iraq is the Rashomon of wars" and all he can conclude is that it ''has something to do with September 11."
As recently as last February, 47 percent of Americans still believed that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Does the White House accuse its supporters of false memory?
And what of the president himself? In his news conference, he angrily attacked those who leaked the spy story. He asked reporters to guess what happened the last time there was a similar security leak. Then he stumbled over the answer, ''Saddam . . . Osama bin Laden changed his behavior." Memory loss?
Those who criticize the commander in chief wonder if he is the one who's forgotten 9/11. Has he forgotten when the country was united? Has he forgotten when the world was on our side? Has he forgotten that we were the good guys?
As for fear? My generation grew up under the threat of a mushroom cloud. There is an old theatrical adage that when there's a gun on stage in the first act, it will go off by the third act. We have no false sense of security in this dangerous world. Nor do we embrace the equally false belief that curtailing liberty automatically makes us safer. We have seen how the promise of protection becomes a protection racket.
''Whatever it takes" does not mean ''whatever the president says it takes." It does not mean becoming our own worst enemies. It does not mean approving torture or domestic spying. And it most certainly does not mean watching silently as a commander in chief takes on the uniform of a generalissimo.
Who owns September 11? The White House has built its own memorial and raised a stiff price of admission. It only allows in those who agree with the president. But the memory and meaning of 9/11 do not belong to any partisan. It's common ground waiting to be recaptured. Whatever it takes.
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com. |
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By THOMAS G. DONLAN
Barron's Magazine
Conservative Business Magazine, Barron's, Excoriates Bush for Committing a Potentially Impeachable Offense: "If we don't discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy -- in the mirror." AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers.
It was not a shock to learn that shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct intercepts of international phone calls to and from the United States. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the government to gather the foreign communications of people in the U.S. -- without a warrant if quick action is important. But the law requires that, within 72 hours, investigators must go to a special secret court for a retroactive warrant.
The USA Patriot Act permits some exceptions to its general rules about warrants for wiretaps and searches, including a 15-day exception for searches in time of war. And there may be a controlling legal authority in the Sept. 14, 2001, congressional resolution that authorized the president to go after terrorists and use all necessary and appropriate force. It was not a declaration of war in a constitutional sense, but it may have been close enough for government work.
Certainly, there was an emergency need after the Sept. 11 attacks to sweep up as much information as possible about the chances of another terrorist attack. But a 72-hour emergency or a 15-day emergency doesn't last four years.
In that time, Congress has extensively debated the rules on wiretaps and other forms of domestic surveillance. Administration officials have spent many hours before many committees urging lawmakers to provide them with great latitude. Congress acted, and the president signed.
Now the president and his lawyers are claiming that they have greater latitude. They say that neither the USA Patriot Act nor the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act actually sets the real boundary. The administration is saying the president has unlimited authority to order wiretaps in the pursuit of foreign terrorists, and that the Congress has no power to overrule him.
"We also believe the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander-in-chief, to engage in this kind of activity," said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The Department of Justice made a similar assertion as far back as 2002, saying in a legal brief: "The Constitution vests in the president inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that Constitutional authority." Gonzales last week declined to declassify relevant legal reviews made by the Department of Justice.
Perhaps they were researched in a Star Chamber? Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law. President Bush is stretching the power of commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy by indicating that he can order the military and its agencies, such as the National Security Agency, to do whatever furthers the defense of the country from terrorists, regardless of whether actual force is involved.
Surely the "strict constructionists" on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary eventually will point out what a stretch this is. The most important presidential responsibility under Article II is that he must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That includes following the requirements of laws that limit executive power. There's not much fidelity in an executive who debates and lobbies Congress to shape a law to his liking and then goes beyond its writ.
Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.
It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.
Some ancillary responsibility, however, must be attached to those members of the House and Senate who were informed, inadequately, about the wiretapping and did nothing to regulate it.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, told Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 that he was "unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities." But the senator was so respectful of the administration's injunction of secrecy that he wrote it out in longhand rather than give it to someone to type. Only last week, after the cat was out of the bag, did he do what he should have done in 2003 -- make his misgivings public and demand more information.
Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: "It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."
Wrong. If we don't discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy -- in the mirror.
Editorial Page Editor THOMAS G. DONLAN receives e-mail at tg.donlan@barrons.com. |
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December 25, 2005
NY Times Editorial
One of the shabbiest shell games of the year was played out in the closing hours of Congress in its now-you-see-it, now-you-don't offering of some badly needed winter heating aid to the nation's working poor. The climactic moment occurred when Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, huckstering his most treasured goal, tried to sell oil drilling in his state's pristine wildlife preserve by promising it would help finance a long list of shoppers' bonuses for his colleagues: extra money for flu vaccine, hurricane reconstruction, first-responder radios and - if you vote yes right away - $2 billion in extra heating aid for the poor this cold winter.
Mr. Stevens's cunning warning was that all those extras would die on the vine unless Alaska drilling was approved. His cynical flimflammery was deservedly rebuffed as enough opponents stood firm against the oil drilling. And soon enough the word went round that things like flu vaccine and hurricane aid were not endangered after all.
Not so the extra fuel aid for low-income families. There was a heating supplement tied to the Alaska proposal, as Mr. Stevens promised. But there was also a separate $2 billion appropriated for the same purpose elsewhere in the legislation - unconnected to the Alaska floor machinations - that somehow was struck from the final bill as lawmakers rushed to recess. Malice? Who can say? Obviously the poor can't afford a campaign donation PAC to catch Congress's attention for an answer.
The government's home heating supplement now stands at a half or less of what the poor will need if predictions of a harsh winter pan out and fuel bills increase 25 percent. Various studies have established that, in a pinch, the poor scrimp on food purchases in order to meet heating bills. Yet Congress's stinginess is being compounded by the administration's recent decision to reject a request from New York and several other states to increase food stamp outlays to the poor as fuel bills mount.
Lawmakers insist that the $2 billion supplement technically had to be cut - but may be restored yet again next month. Believe that and we have an oil derrick to sell you in Alaska.
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Jihad el Khazen
Al-Hayat
26/12/05//
When I and others said that a cabal had hijacked American foreign policy and began to run it in order to serve Israel, we were accused of promoting the idea of the "conspiracy." However, the then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell denied the existence of a cabal, which confirmed that it did exist. Recently, Powell's top aide, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, acknowledged the existence of this cabal.
More than 90% of this cabal's members are American Likudnik Jews, of the extremist variety. Sometimes they are the most venal of people, although the current leadership is held by two of the giants of the traditional American right, namely Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Usually, a person starts out with idealistic aspirations, on the left, and ends up on the right. However, these two individuals began on the right, so it's natural that they end up on the extreme right. A friend of the Bush family, Brent Scowcroft, who was the National Security Council adviser under George HW Bush, wrote a frank article in which he said that he no longer knew Cheney, with whom he served in Bush's Cabinet.
As for the Likudist background of the cabal, I'll rely on the work of Shadia Drury, a professor of philosophy at the University of Regina, in Canada, and specifically her book "Leo Strauss and the American Right," published in 1999, her later articles, and studies by her and on her. I was particularly impressed by an article of hers in which she warns of the striving for democracy around the world, which the Bush administration has used as a pretext for aggression and hegemony.
I telephoned Professor Drury last week and discovered that she's an Arab, of Egyptian origin. She wrote a book entitled "Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics and the Western Psyche." In it, she defends Islam (she's a Christian) and discusses the past and history or Christianity, making her a target of the extreme right.
Perhaps I have summed up the political thought of Leo Strauss based on my reading of Shadia Drury's works: Strauss called for a system of rule managed by a cabal of philosophers, which reminds us of today's cabal. Strauss hated liberal democracy to the extent that this hatred became central to this thought. He linked it to the democracy of the Weimar Republic in Germany between the wars, whose weakness led to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. Strauss, like many Jews, fled to the US and to the University of Chicago, where he convinced people like Allan Bloom, Henry Jaffa, Irving Kristol (the father of William Kristol), Paul Wolfowitz and many others of the evils of liberal democracy.
Shadia Drury says that liberalism doesn't mean that people are equal. Rather, each person is given an equal opportunity to work as much as possible for himself or herself; liberalism favors individual development over that of the group. Since liberalism doesn't believe in the absolute, but in the individual and his or her capabilities, it finds difficulty in grouping the society around common principles. Therefore, it remains weak and divided against itself - a demagogic leader like Hitler can easily dominate liberal democracy and follow it with Nazism and all of its crimes. Thus, Strauss saw liberal American democracy as a revival of the Weimar Republic, threatening all of humanity.
To quote from Dr. Drury: The students of Strauss and their students held high-ranking posts in the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, and they continue to play an essential role in the Republican Party. The most prominent of such individuals were Paul Wolfowitz, the US ambassador to Indonesia and then Deputy Secretary of Defense (and now president of the World Bank); Seth Cropsey, the speechwriter of Caspar Weinberger (Defense Secretary during the Reagan administration); John Agresto, the vice president of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Carnes Lord, National Security Council advisor; Alan Keyes, assistant secretary of state for international organizations; Judge Robert Bork; Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; former Education Secretary William Bennett; and finally, William Kristol the editor of The Weekly Standard, the mouthpiece of the neoconservatives, and chief of staff of former Vice President Dan Quayle.
As for myself, my interest in the neoconservatives began at the end of the 1980s, when Stephen Bryan was caught passing secret documents on Saudi military bases to a visiting Israeli delegation. Instead of being tried in court, Richard Perle brought him to the Pentagon, where there are even more secret documents. Since then, I've been following the interconnected interests of these members of the cabal.
If I draw on other sources, I can say that members of the cabal produced by the University of Chicago, along with Wolfowitz (Ph.D. 1972), are Ahmad Chalabi (Ph.D., 1969), Abram Shulsky, who headed the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which cooked the intelligence information to justify the war against Iraq (Ph.D. 1972), and Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to Afghanistan and then Iraq (Ph.D. 1979). Preceding this group were Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom, in the field of education, and I'll come back to these two later.
Dr. Drury says that the neoconservatives aren't a conservative movement, but a radical, reactionary one. This appears in the group's rejection of the bases of the American state and their attempt to start over. They are reactionary in their opposition to the existing situation and try to go back to a "golden age" that didn't exist in reality.
Strauss' recipe to fight the evils of liberalism is creating a single state religion as a means of returning to the absolute and fighting free thought, while strengthening the cohesiveness of society. Thus, Strauss always rejected pluralism when it came to religions or society's goals, out of a fear that society would disintegrate.
Such a regime is led, overtly, by "gentlemen" from the best families, promoting the values of honesty and fairness. However, they are figureheads and at the top of the pyramid, as Strauss would have it, is a cabal of atheist philosophers who know that religion is nonsense and only constitutes something for the ignorant masses to consume.
Dr. Drury is a professor of philosophy and her explanation might not keep the interest of the average reader. I'll suffice by saying that the proposed political regime doesn't differ much from Nazism or a communist system, with the existence of a secret cabal running things; this cabal's goal involves resisting the virus of liberalism.
If there were more space, I'd like to review some of the thought of Allan Bloom, a student of Strauss, and who in turn was a teacher of Wolfowitz. However, the topic is too complex to be treated in a few lines. Bloom has written a famous book about the defects and shortcomings of America, entitled "The Closing of the American Mind." He then became the focal point of a novel by Saul Bellow, in which he exposed his friend and intellectual partner as a person falling apart, and full of homosexuality. Bloom's partisans claim that he defends American family values, while his personal life, until his death from AIDS, was the exact opposite of this picture.
Bellow's novel is entitled "Ravelstein," i.e. Bloom, and Wolfowitz appears as a character named Phillip Gorman, Bloom's friend. I encourage people to read this novel and I'll continue the rest of this story tomorrow. |
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by Eric Alterman
December 22, 2005
The Low Bar the MainStream Media has set for Pres. Bush -- "No matter how many times they are deliberately misled by this mendacious administration, the Washington press corps continues to try to find some way to assure Americans that somehow everything’s going to be alright … this time." Now that the White House has decided to begin pushing back against its critics – reporters, especially – much of the media appears ready to cut Bush the slack he demands. Bush has given several major speeches over the last several weeks, ostensibly explaining his position on Iraq – Slate’s John Dickerson terms it his “monthlong march toward candor” – and the coverage is creating an impression that the president now has something approaching a plan for “victory.” Alas, if this were the case, one would be awfully hard-pressed to explain just what it might be or how we might know it when we see it.
The president’s prime time Sunday night speech from the Oval Office provides a case in point. Other than pleading for patience, the president provided virtually no information and nothing like a new strategy for progress. But to read the coverage of say, The New York Times’ David Sanger, Bush accomplished much more. Sanger’s piece carried the headline “In Sunday Speech, Bush Is More Humble, but Still Firm.” It bought into the frightfully low bar Bush has managed to set for himself regarding progress in his catastrophic misadventure. Sanger reports that the president “was far more humble about the mistakes he had made over the past two and a half years,” and refrained from “dismissing critics with a wave of the hand and an acid retort, as he often has.” Any policy changes to back this up? Apologies for attacking those who were right in the first place? Recognition that contemporary plans have failed? Not on your life. Just “humility” of an unnamed sort. (And what irony that this description should appear in the same newspaper that broke the story of Bush’s willingness to flout the Constitution and order the illegal spying on Americans on the basis of nothing more than his own, expansive reading of presidential power.)
The Times’ White House columnist Elisabeth Bumiller also stuck pretty closely to the script, writing on the same day as Sanger that the president “acknowledged his critics more than he has in the past, and adopted a more humble tone.” Oddly, Bumiller called the president’s tone “positive,” highlighting his most nakedly partisan line of the night: "Defeatism may have its partisan uses, but it is not justified by the facts.”
Similarly, The Washington Post’s Michael A. Fletcher noted that the president “struck a more deferential tone” while making a “direct appeal to war opponents, conveying a more humble tone in saying he understands their arguments but asserting that there is no choice but to forge on.” In other words, he understands he has critics and perhaps not all of them hate America. Gee, thanks. Fletcher also quotes, without refutation, the president’s simplistic and misleading contention that “Much of the [pre-war WMD] intelligence turned out to be wrong. And as your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.”
It’s here where a little reporting might have served these reporters well. Ryan Lizza, writing on The New Republic’s web site, actually takes a look at the substance of what the president said, and delineates Bush’s “casual dishonesties packed into the section where Bush summed up the history of the war in Iraq.” He writes, correctly, that the president’s speech effectively “subordinate[s] his role in the WMD fiasco to that of a passive dupe rather than active exaggerator.” Next he points out that in the passage in which the president described those whom the United States is fighting in Iraq as consisting of just two groups, “Saddam loyalists and foreign terrorists,” he oversimplified to the point of untruth. As Time’s Michael Ware has pointed out, there are many different groups with different agendas attacking American troops and slaughtering Iraqi civilians, and the vast majority of them have no fond memories of life under Saddam. Yet as with so much else, the president gets a pass for not understanding – almost three years into it – the realities of the war he launched.
And while neither the Times nor the Post coverage made mention of Vice President Cheney’s secret trip to Iraq and Afghanistan that just happened to coincide with the president’s speeches, neither noted what the Associated Press reported Sunday (in a story that wasn’t widely picked up anywhere), that U.S. troops fighting in Iraq might not be as convinced as the president of the progress we’re making in Iraq. During a Q&A with troops during Cheney’s surprise visit to Iraq, Marine Cpl. Bradley Warren said, "From our perspective, we don't see much as far as gains.… We're looking at small-picture stuff, not many gains. I was wondering what it looks like from the big side of the mountain – how Iraq's looking.”
Cheney, carrying the administration’s water and sticking closely to the script, told the soldiers not to believe their eyes, responding that in the future, “we'll see that the year '05 was in fact a watershed year here in Iraq.” “We're getting the job done. It's hard to tell that from watching the news. But I guess we don't pay that much attention to the news.”
And in the case of the president and vice president’s public pronouncements, they probably don’t have to. No matter how many times they are deliberately misled by this mendacious administration, the Washington press corps continues to try to find some way to assure Americans that somehow everything’s going to be alright … this time.
Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of six books. His most recent, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, was just published in paperback by Penguin. |
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By Ronald Brownstein
LA Times
23 Dec 2005
WASHINGTON — The frenzied action on Capitol Hill this week captured in miniature the strengths and limitations of the often-combative political strategy that has guided President Bush and congressional Republicans.
Since taking office, Bush has placed the highest priority on unifying his party behind an agenda of bold conservative change, even at the price of provoking intense resistance from Democrats and sharply polarizing the electorate. That strategy was evident this week in the high-stakes Senate showdowns over cuts in federal social programs, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and renewal of the Patriot Act. On each front, Republicans commanded high levels of party unity — but found that wasn't always enough to overcome almost united Democratic resistance.
The White House and GOP leadership fashioned bills that virtually guaranteed achingly close votes because they included provisions strongly opposed by most Democrats and some moderate Republicans.
In the past, that sort of brinksmanship has allowed Bush and the GOP to win big changes in policy with small legislative margins. That formula worked again this week when both chambers narrowly passed the budget-cutting legislation without a single Democratic vote.
Yet the same strategy produced two stinging defeats for the GOP when Senate Democrats, helped by a handful of Republicans, held together for filibusters that blocked the Arctic drilling and the long-term renewal of the Patriot Act. Sixty votes are needed to cut off a filibuster.
"What they are coming up against now is the limits of partisanship — the limits of dividing the country so decisively," presidential historian Robert Dallek said.
In other ways, the week underscored the magnitude of the GOP advantage in Washington.
Unified control of the executive and legislative branches has allowed Republicans to shift the terms of debate in their direction on almost every issue.
Democrats had to exert great effort to contest conservative priorities, and were unable to highlight any of their own.
In the budget debate, for instance, the question was how much to cut spending on Medicaid — not whether to expand it, as many Democrats prefer, to cover more of the increasing number of Americans without health insurance.
"This is still the Republican era and they are still in total control of the choices," Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek said. "What we've seen are the difficulties of concerted action on [the GOP] agenda, but you don't see any alternative agenda."
Yet Republicans remain stymied on many fronts by their inability to attract the defections among moderate Senate Democrats that the White House expected after Bush's reelection last year. That problem largely doomed Bush's top domestic priority this year: restructuring Social Security.
In the Senate's three major votes this week, Republicans won support from four Democrats on Arctic drilling, two on the Patriot Act and none on the budget that ultimately required a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Dick Cheney to pass.
Many GOP strategists say they expect the party to use these votes against Democratic candidates next fall, particularly the filibuster against the Patriot Act. Despite public warnings to that effect from key GOP figures, the Democrats maintained their filibuster.
"There's a recognition in the Democratic caucus that the only way we are going to compete … is if we stick together," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
For the White House, this week's mixed legislative results were a jarring bump after several weeks in which the president had regained some lost ground in public opinion.
After a series of reversals this year — including the collapse of his Social Security plan, the faltering federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and the indictment of a top Cheney aide — GOP strategists believe Bush has stabilized his position through speeches on Iraq and the election of a permanent government there this month.
Most recent polls have shown Bush's job approval ratings climbing from all-time low percentages in the mid-30s to between 41 and 47. That's still low compared with most reelected presidents at this point in their second term, but the increase has lifted the spirits of Republicans uneasy about the 2006 elections.
"We are still not out of the woods … but the president has turned the corner," said Warren Tompkins, a South Carolina GOP consultant.
Bush's recovery has been accompanied by a marked change in his tone, particularly in his speeches on the war. Until recently, his dominant note has been resolve — an insistence that progress is being made and an unyielding resistance to critics.
But in his latest addresses, particularly his nationally televised speech Sunday night, Bush has been more conciliatory. He conceded missteps in training Iraqi troops and rebuilding the country, acknowledged that many Americans opposed his decisions, and agreed with critics that the war had been "more difficult than we expected."
Mark McKinnon, principal media advisor for both of Bush's presidential campaigns, said that the signs of progress in Iraq — particularly the recent election — had provided the president more leeway to acknowledge the challenges.
"The most recent elections, for most Americans, suggest a light at the end of the tunnel," McKinnon said. "And at that time the president felt it was appropriate to evolve his message and talk about some of the difficulties we've had to encounter."
Bush has shown signs of adjusting his tactics in other ways too.
He has brought in congressional Democrats for meetings on the war. White House aides also have consulted more widely than in the past with GOP legislators on the party's 2006 agenda.
Yet for all his tactical shifts, Bush also has clearly signaled that he isn't contemplating a major change of direction — either in substance or in his style of leadership.
Though acknowledging missteps on Iraq, he has not endorsed any significant shift in policy there; instead, he has condemned calls from a growing number of Democrats to start the withdrawal of American troops.
Bush also has continued to assert an aggressive vision of unilateral presidential power. Faced with criticism from many Democrats and some Republicans over revelations that he authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping without warrants, Bush has defended the program in part by declaring that he has inherent authority as commander in chief to take steps he considers necessary against terrorists.
And, as this week's congressional struggles demonstrate, the White House remains comfortable with a legislative strategy that accepts — and at times appears to invite — sharp partisan division.
Democrats proved themselves equally willing to trade blows with the GOP, even on legislation that many had believed Democrats would be afraid to filibuster, such as the Patriot Act and the military spending bill to which the GOP had attached the Arctic drilling proposal.
In all these ways, December's confrontations suggest the two sides remain committed to strategies that promise more nailbiting congressional votes, more party-line confrontations and continued polarization in the polls. |
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by DAVID COLE
The Nation
January 9, 2006
When Congress authorized the President to use all "necessary and appropriate" military force to respond to the 9/11 attackers, little did members know that in George W. Bush's mind they were freeing him to wiretap innocent American citizens without probable cause or a judicial warrant, to hold indefinitely without charge US citizens arrested within US borders and to order torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of suspects.
Had the President forthrightly said this was what he was seeking, Congress would almost certainly have said no. After all, laws on the books forbid all such conduct. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act specifically limits warrantless wiretaps during wartime to the first fifteen days after a declaration of war and makes it a crime to conduct wiretaps except "as authorized by statute." The Non-Detention Act bars preventive detention of citizens except pursuant to statute. And the Convention Against Torture absolutely prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under all circumstances, expressly including wartime.
On December 19 Attorney General Gonzales admitted that the President did not seek to change the law because members of Congress said "that would be difficult if not impossible." So rather than risk rejection, the President simply assumed these powers unilaterally. The only authorizations he sought were the opinions of his yes-men attorneys, who argued that His Eminence's powers of course encompassed all this and more, and that therefore if Congressional statutes were interpreted to the contrary they would be unconstitutional. Bush's favorite lawyer, John Yoo, personally advised that the President had the power to order torture, to spy on Americans without a warrant and even to use military force against terrorists without any Congressional approval.
It has taken time, but Bush is learning the hard way that he acts without Congressional approval at his peril--even with a firmly Republican Congress. The Supreme Court sharply rebuffed his position on enemy combatants in June 2004, and this past fall the President ducked a Supreme Court test of his detention of José Padilla when another loss appeared likely.
In December Bush was forced to agree to an amendment offered by Senator John McCain banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in all circumstances. He had initially threatened to veto the measure outright, and then had sought an exemption for foreigners held by the CIA abroad. In the end he had no choice but to sign McCain's version, with only a small concession extending a "superior orders" defense to nonmilitary interrogators who reasonably believe they are following lawful orders.
And now the President faces a firestorm of controversy over a New York Times report that he secretly authorized wiretaps on hundreds of people within the United States, many of them Americans, without judicial or Congressional approval. Congress's anger over the National Security Agency spy program scuttled a bill to extend most of the Patriot Act's sunsetted provisions, and it has prompted bipartisan demands for a full investigation.
The momentum has plainly shifted. And for good reason. Why should we trust an Administration that secretly spies on Americans without judicial or Congressional authorization, disappears suspects into undisclosed "black sites" where they are subjected to waterboarding and other torture, unleashes the Pentagon to spy on antiwar demonstrators and issues tens of thousands of "national security letters" demanding telephone and e-mail information on innocent people without judicial review?
But there are still many battles to fight. Bush, perhaps realizing that his wiretapping orders may well constitute criminal conduct, has come out fighting, blaming those who leaked the story and claiming, without evidence, that the wiretaps saved lives. (The only individual he claims to have netted through the program is Iyman Faris, a truck driver who pleaded guilty to plotting to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with an acetylene torch, a plot that raises more questions about Faris's sanity than about our security.) Congress must demand accountability.
Meanwhile, the victories on the Patriot Act and the torture issue were both tainted. The struggle over the Patriot Act remains distressingly narrow, with no discussion of many of its most troubling provisions [see Cole, "The Missing Patriot Debate," May 30, 2005]. And while Senator McCain's amendment bans cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, another amendment, sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham, Carl Levin and Jon Kyl, would sharply limit access to courts for those held at Guantánamo to complain about torture and other mistreatment. Worse still, it would allow the use of coerced testimony in hearings to determine the status and the culpability of those detained there.
The veil of secrecy, however, is being lifted--if only by unauthorized leaks to the media. Every disclosure brings further confirmation of an Administration that thinks it can ignore the rule of law. We must continue to insist that in a democracy, it cannot. |
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by Kagro X
Fri Dec 23, 2005
Daily KOS
Reinforcements have arrived! In case you hadn't noticed, there's a small but growing buzz in the traditional media regarding what they're coyly calling, "the 'I' word."
Fineman's got it.
Froomkin's got it.
Editor & Publisher's got a round-up on it.
So maybe the conditions for the "resonance" we're looking for are here. By the way, just what is "resonance?"
Well, it's a game Newt Gingrich used to play with the press. During his days as an obscure back bencher, he knew he couldn't take his campaign against House Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX) right to the top of the MSM food chain. They thought he was crazy. Nobody knew who he was, and even if they did, nobody attacked the Speaker like that in those days.
So instead, when Newt was in some smaller market to give a speech or appear at a fundraiser for a colleague, he'd go see the local paper's editorial board, and make his case against Wright to them. He'd tell them the "big papers" were ignoring the story because they were too cozy with those in power, but that they could "scoop" the big guys if they'd look into the story. So they did. Then, he'd clip out their stories, and take them to slightly larger papers. And he'd ask them why they weren't covering this big story, when these other smaller papers were scooping them. So they'd run the story. Then he'd take the growing pile of clippings with him to even bigger papers. And so on, and so on, and so on. Finally, it got to the point where the volume of articles was so overwhelming that it couldn't be ignored by the big papers, and they began to look into it, too.
Similarly, we are building pressure from below. But we're not using the media to do it. We're talking directly (more or less -- ok, mostly less) to our neighbors. But then again, we're not necessarily trying to convince official Washington to join us. We're telling them we're going ahead without them. This "administration" has gone crazy, and we're not interested in allowing them to hijack our government anymore. True, we can't make you fulfill your duty to the Constitution, but we can let you know that your constituents are way ahead of you, and if you don't, we'll find someone who will.
We're hanging signs to let others know it's OK to be vocal about this. That they won't be alone if they decide to talk about impeachment. And to let them feel that the atmosphere is changing, because these terrible things they're reading about in the paper really did happen, and they really do have consequences, and that the rest of the country really does want those consequences to come to pass, just as they're beginning to think that maybe they do, too.
And so your signs will resonate with them. And they'll take it to the next level, by talking personally with others about the subject. And those people will take it to the next level by passing on stories about their conversations. And those people will write letters to the editor. And those editors will write stories. And those stories will generate more discussion. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Is impeachment impossible without changing control of the Congress? We used to think so. But then again, we used to think that Jack Murtha supported the continuation of the Iraq war. And he did, until he saw "the writing on the wall." And by the time he saw it, it was abundantly clear to him that the American people were way ahead of him already.
So now, we're writing on the wall again.
Let me bring this back around, now. I kicked this diary off by saying that reinforcements had arrived, and I pointed you to the newspapers. But then I told you that this wasn't really about the newspapers. It was about citizens talking to citizens. It helps, of course, when the newspapers cover what the citizens are talking about. And if enough of us are talking about it, they can't help but cover it.
So, are enough of us talking about it? Not if you're not talking about it. And by talking about it, of course, I mean making others talk about it, by posting signs. ...
I mean, holy crap! If you're not motivated to get out there with a few paper signs or stickers now, you're clinically dead! [...] |
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Editorial
NY Times
December 24, 2005
With the Bush administration claiming sweeping and often legally baseless authority to detain and spy on people, judges play a crucial role in underscoring the limits of presidential power. When the Senate begins hearings next month on Judge Samuel Alito, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, it should explore whether he understands where the Constitution sets those limits. New documents released yesterday provide more evidence that Judge Alito has a skewed view of the allocation of power among the three branches - skewed in favor of presidential power.
One troubling memo concerns domestic wiretaps - a timely topic. In the memo, which he wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Judge Alito argued that the attorney general should be immune from lawsuits when he illegally wiretaps Americans. Judge Alito argued for taking a step-by-step approach to establishing this principle, much as he argued for an incremental approach to reversing Roe v. Wade in another memo. The Supreme Court flatly rejected Judge Alito's view of the law. In a 1985 ruling, the court rightly concluded that if the attorney general had the sort of immunity Judge Alito favored, it would be an invitation to deny people their constitutional rights.
In a second memo released yesterday, Judge Alito made another bald proposal for grabbing power for the president. He said that when the president signed bills into law, he should make a "signing statement" about what the law means. By doing so, Judge Alito hoped the president could shift courts' focus away from "legislative intent" - a well-established part of interpreting the meaning of a statute - toward what he called "the President's intent."
In the memo, Judge Alito noted that one problem was the effect these signing statements would have on Congressional relations. They would "not be warmly welcomed by Congress," he predicted, because of the "novelty of the procedure" and "the potential increase of presidential power."
These memos are part of a broader pattern of elevating the presidency above the other branches of government. In his judicial opinions, Judge Alito has shown a lack of respect for Congressional power - notably when he voted to strike down Congress's ban on machine guns as exceeding its constitutional authority. He has taken a cramped view of the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional provisions that limit executive power.
The Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have had to repeatedly pull the Bush administration back when it exceeded its constitutional powers. They have made clear that Americans cannot be held indefinitely without trial just because they are labeled "enemy combatants." They have vindicated the right of Guantánamo Bay detainees to challenge their confinement. And they will no doubt have to correct the Bush administration's latest assertions of power to spy domestically. The Senate should determine that Judge Alito is on the side of the Constitution in these battles, not on the side of the presidency - which the latest documents strongly question - before voting to confirm him. |
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Nat Hentoff
December 23rd, 2005
The Village Voice
Praise for the president's yielding to John McCain ignored the awful details in fine print.
Expect to see an announcement by John McCain declaring his candidacy for the presidency — as he reminds us of the principled stand he and George W. Bush took to show the world how deeply the United States values human rights. "Now we can move forward and make sure that the whole world knows that, as the president has stated many times, we do not practice cruel, inhuman treatment or torture." John McCain, at the White House, December 15, sitting alongside George W. Bush
Concessions already obtained by the administration from Mr. McCain, and a separate amendment [agreed to by McCain] authored by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), could prevent any foreign detainee from seeking relief in a U.S. court in the event that he was tortured. . . . Mr. Graham and Senator Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) recently agreed [along with Senator McCain] to yet another administration provision that would—incredibly—allow evidence obtained by torture to be considered by military review panels (at Guantánamo.) Editorial, The Washington Post, December 16, the very day after Bush and McCain congratulated each other on ending human rights abuses, including torture, of U.S. prisoners anywhere in the world
Newspaper editorials after the McCain-Bush summit meeting celebrating America's dedication to human rights were glowing: "President Backs McCain on Abuse" ( The New York Times); "Bush Backs Down on Proposed Torture Ban" ( USA Today); "White House, McCain Reach Deal on Terror Suspect Torture Policy" ( The New York Sun); "Principled McCain Prevails Over the White House" ( Financial Times, U.S. edition, December 17/18)
In a few of the stories, those readers going beneath the headlines found harsh revelations of the shell game that McCain and Bush are playing. These discoveries add to the accelerating exposure of how George W. Bush—with the cooperation of the once principled John McCain and of other members of Congress—is engaging in the cruel and inhumane debasing of the values we are fighting for against homicidal terrorists.
To begin, McCain, before his White House rapprochement with the president, had accepted administration language in his human rights amendment to give paid legal counsel and a certain amount of legal protection to interrogators — including the CIA's — accused of abusing prisoners. Their defense would be that a "person of ordinary sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful." Also, as at the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the defendants would say they were only following orders.
But as Josh White pointed out in the December 16 Washington Post, if these orders were plainly illegal, they would have to be disobeyed. In that case, what penalties would the commanders themselves, who gave the unlawful orders, face— including the top of the command at the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the White House?
The Bush administration pressured McCain to accept this additional language in fear that, eventually, courts would decide that U.S. "coercive interrogations" have indeed violated U.S. law and international treaties we have signed. The ACLU and human rights organizations have already filed lawsuits making these claims against high levels of the administration.
Much more serious — and ignored by most of the media — is an amendment— voted for by McCain—to the Defense Authorization bill by Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Carl Levin (D-Michigan), and Jon Kyl (R-Arizona).
Tom Wilner, a constitutional lawyer who represents a number of Kuwaiti detainees (a/k/a prisoners) at Guantánamo, gets to the chilling core of the amendment:
"This amendment [which McCain has approved] tears the heart out of anything good that the McCain prohibition [against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment] does. It strips the right of habeas corpus from detainees at Guantánamo, prohibits them from suing U.S. officials for their treatment, and in new language slipped into the bill [during the House-Senate conference committee sessions] actually authorizes the tribunals at Guantánamo [for enemy combatants] to use statements obtained through coercion [including torture] as 'probative' [testimony]. That provision works a significant change of existing U.S. and international law and actually provides an incentive for U.S. officials or officials from other governments through [CIA] rendition [sending terrorism suspects to other countries to be tortured], to obtain such coerced statements." (Emphasis added.)
Accordingly, Tom Wilner tells me, this "McCain/Graham/Levin/Kyl package is a disaster — a giant step backward for human rights. . . . By eliminating the Great Writ [habeas corpus] and authorizing the use of coercion, this amendment un- dermines the very foundation of our system.
"These changes far out- weigh the language for which Senator McCain has been so complimented, prohibiting the government from torturing or engaging in cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment."
Furthermore, how does this administration actually define torture anywhere? From a December 16 Washington Post editorial after Bush's "surrender" to McCain: "Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice Department [Alberto Gonzales at the top] and the Pentagon [Rumsfeld et al.] have redefined both 'torture' and 'cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment' as not covering in all circumstances such CIA techniques as 'waterboarding,' or simulated drowning; 'cold cell,' the deliberate inducing of hypothermia; mock execution; and prolonged and painful 'short-shackling.' It has taken these positions, even though 'cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment' as defined by the Senate [passage of the McCain amendment] covers everything that also would be prohibited by the Constitution [against prisoners held in the U.S.]. . . .
"[Accordingly,] the administration has adopted logic that accepts, in principle, the idea that the FBI could constitutionally use them on U.S. citizens in certain circumstances." (Emphasis added.)
Eventually, I expect to see an announcement by John McCain declaring his candidacy for the presidency — as he reminds us of the principled stand he and George W. Bush took to show the world how deeply the United States values human rights. |
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by Nat Hentoff
December 19th, 2005
Condoleezza Rice now says U.S. policy has changed, and we must no longer abuse and torture our prisoners anywhere. So, there is no longer any need for secret CIA prisons, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" in detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo, or anyplace else. The CIA's kidnapping gangs executing "extraordinary renditions" will be disbanded. The president will urge Congress to immediately conduct an independent investigation, with subpoena powers, to make accountable and punish — throughout the chain of command to the very top—everyone who has committed cruel, inhumane, and degrading acts. And as the CIA's secret prisons around the world are closed down, the International Red Cross will be present to escort the surviving inmates back into the known world.
And, in recognition of this validation of America's rule of law, again an inspiration to the rest of the world, there will be a Nobel Prize for human rights to be shared by Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the head of the CIA, Porter Goss, who—bearing his newly minted presidential Medal of Freedom — will also be in Norway to become a Nobel laureate. Praise the Lord! "Around the world we are talking to people about the importance of the rule of law, and so we have to also live . . . under the rule of law." [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Brussels, December 8]
The United States said Friday that it would continue to deny the International Committee of the Red Cross access to "a very small, limited number" of prisoners who are held in secret around the world. . . . But [the Red Cross] has argued that no prisoners, not even those alleged to be terrorists, should fall into what it calls a "black hole" outside any protection under international humanitarian law. [The New York Times, December 10]
Does Anyone Believe Condoleezza Rice? Der Spiegel , influential German weekly, headline, December 7
On November 30, as the secretary of state was about to leave for a European trip, the headline in David Ignatius's Washington Post story, "Rice's Rising Star," was followed by: "Leaving the White House seems to have given her more space, emotionally and intellectually. . . . And she has proved increasingly effective."
But the star quality of the crisply articulate, seemingly tireless secretary of state faded during her European mission to manage the rising concern of Europeans, including official human rights monitors, that the CIA has been kidnapping terrorism suspects from city streets there and flying them to be tortured in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and other cooperating countries. There are also growing questions there about the CIA's own secret prisons around the world, including Europe.
Faced with a December 5 Der Spiegel report that 437 secret CIA flights through Germany had been logged by German air traffic control officials since 2001, our secretary of state assured German chancellor Angela Merkel that "it is against U.S. law to be involved in torture or conspiracy to commit torture. And it is also against U.S. international obligations."
To make herself perfectly clear while in Germany, Rice emphasized that "the United States does not use the airspace or the airports of any country for the purpose of transporting a detainee to a country where he or she will be tortured."
Voluminous reports to the contrary have been documented by Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, Human Rights First, the European press, Amnesty International, and many American journalists, including this one.
Answering charges that the U.S. violates the sovereignty of countries during these "extraordinary renditions," as the CIA calls them, Rice repeatedly declared that the U.S. always respects other countries' sovereignty. She added that renditions which do not involve torture are allowed under international law. (She did not explain why these suspects were being kidnapped rather than put into the U.S. justice system.)
In a sharp response, The Economist noted that certain transfers of prisoners are lawful "provided that the detainee has not been illegally abducted, and that he is not being sent to a country where he may be maltreated."
Then, explaining why many European countries are worried about the complicity of their own intelligence agencies in these brutal violations of international law,The Economist instructed our secretary of state that "helping another nation to violate international law is itself a violation of the law." The normally voluble secretary of state refused throughout her European trip to say anything about another concern of the continent's governments and citizens—the existence of hidden interrogation centers, operated by the CIA itself, on European soil.
On December 4, as Rice was about to leave for Europe, Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, underlined the administration's assurance that she would have a triumphant journey because "truth is our strength."
Once again, the administration was having acute problems in defining such terms as "torture," "rule of law," "our transparent democracy," and now "truth."
Condoleezza Rice's European mission began to fail fast the next week. I can't prove that she got an emergency message from the White House; but suddenly in Kiev, Rice made a surprising change of course on December 7.
Europe is well aware of John McCain's amendment to ban by law cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment by American forces anywhere, an amendment Bush had threatened to veto. But in Kiev, Rice more than implied that the senator from Arizona was greatly misinformed about the Bush administration's priorities.
"As a matter of U.S. policy," she proclaimed, "the United States' obligations under the C.A.T. [U.N. Convention Against Torture], which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment—those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are in the United States or outside the United States."
Reporting from Kiev for The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler was not conned: "In the past, however, the Bush administration has argued that the obligations concerning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment do not apply outside U.S. territory."
But Condoleezza Rice now says U.S. policy has changed, and we must no longer abuse and torture our prisoners anywhere. So, there is no longer any need for secret CIA prisons, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" in detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo, or anyplace else. The CIA's kidnapping gangs executing "extraordinary renditions" will be disbanded. The president will urge Congress to immediately conduct an independent investigation, with subpoena powers, to make accountable and punish—throughout the chain of command to the very top—everyone who has committed cruel, inhumane, and degrading acts. And as the CIA's secret prisons around the world are closed down, the International Red Cross will be present to escort the surviving inmates back into the known world.
And, in recognition of this validation of America's rule of law, again an inspiration to the rest of the world, there will be a Nobel Prize for human rights to be shared by Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the head of the CIA, Porter Goss, who—bearing his newly minted presidential Medal of Freedom—will also be in Norway to become a Nobel laureate. Praise the Lord! |
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by Sylvia Topp
December 23rd, 2005
I walked out of my Anglican-church confirmation classes when I was 13, thinking I'd put religion out of my life for good, because the "devout" Christians I was being counseled by couldn't hide the hate in their eyes. Still, because I do admire much of Jesus's teachings, I've been angry at George Bush for a long time for claiming to be a follower of Jesus while doing so many things that He would surely have disapproved of. So recently, blessed with many lazy beach hours on the island of Tortola, I decided the time had come to challenge Bush's version of Christianity. It was a deliciously ironic coincidence that back in the late '70s and early '80s, when Bush was just married and way before Christ had "changed" his heart, he would jog along this very beach on Sundays, heading from his friends' house to the tiny mustard-colored Methodist church, with its simple wooden cross propped at the pinnacle of its gabled roof, way at the other end of town.
I recently talked on the phone with the pastor who served there at the time. He claims no memory of George, though you'd think an exuberant white guy would have been painfully obvious sitting among the local little girls, in the same starched and frilly white dresses I wore at their age, the age when little girls want to go to church. Others in the area do remember his visits to Tortola but they are considerately silent, meaning of course that there's lots to tell. Perhaps Bush attended his first Methodist service there, after switching to Laura's religion, though if he'd taken a little more care he'd have discovered that Methodists are proudly anti-war, and indeed church bishops met with him early in 2003 to try to talk him out of going to Iraq. Maybe Bush told them to check their Bibles more closely. Indeed, since the ruins of Babylon, a biblically wicked city, are in Iraq, and since Bush feels that he's been chosen "to do the Lord's will" and that his election was "another manifestation of divine purpose," we may soon hear yet another justification for this war: the United States is engaging in the final battle between Good and Evil.
Since Bush famously claims Christ as his favorite philosopher, and since I distinctly remembered Jesus being a gentle man who preached endlessly about helping the poor, honoring little children, and the impossibility of the rich getting into heaven, along with blessing those who mourn and promising that the meek shall inherit the earth, I decided to spend some of my beach hours re-reading the copy of the New Testament that a Methodist church member kindly lent me, looking for perhaps long-forgotten verses that Bush might approve of. Of course, brilliant biblical scholars have long been busy exploring the contradictions between the teachings of Jesus and the actions of Bush and other Evangelical Christians, and there's a lot of fascinating literature out there. But my concern is more as an ordinary person who was taught as a child that one of the most important lessons of the Bible is to treat others as I would want to be treated myself. So when the debate monitor followed up Bush's "Christ" answer with a suggestion that he elaborate, and Bush said, "If you don't understand, it's hard to explain," I was really surprised. Even a biblical literalist, if that's what Bush is, could easily have found example after example of Jesus's caring philosophy. He could have cited, for example, his agreement with Jesus's very admirable acceptance of women as equals.
Now, if Bush had just stuck with God as his savior, instead of specifically naming Jesus, I wouldn't have been so upset, since he, of course, could find anything he wanted in the Old Testament. He clearly prefers the Ten Commandments to the Eight Beatitudes, but, as I discovered, Jesus was consciously transforming some Old Testament teachings. In the Gospel According to St. Matthew, Jesus says clearly: "Ye may have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever should smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (5:38-39), as well as "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you" (5:43-44). And just to top it off, "For if you love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans [great choice of word!] the same?" (5:46). Clearly Jesus had his own agenda. He is definitely one of history's great social reformers, in a class with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and for the most part he appears much closer to a pacifist communist (which most Christians will never acknowledge) than a stock-market gambler.
But I did indeed find Jesus a little contradictory. For instance, he shocked me by saying, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34). And then there's, "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you" (John 15:14), which I'm sure Bush loves, and "He that is not with me is against me" (Matt. 12:30), which Bush has repeatedly used (though I personally prefer the version in Luke 9:50: "He that is not against us is for us" ). "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13) could be used as a justification for sending young men to war, I suppose. And then there's "Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire" (Matt. 5:22), which Bush probably gets some comfort from today with all the critical stuff going on.
I suppose he could have decided to isolate the verses that seem to say that just believing in Jesus is enough ("He that believeth on me hath everlasting life," John 6:47, etc. etc.). In my childhood I did meet a number of Christians who believed Jesus taught that all they had to do was profess "faith" to be automatically good and moral, and it is possible to isolate that interpretation. But my minister emphasized that, as James reminded followers after Jesus's death, "It is not enough, my brother, to say you have faith, when there are no deeds…. O vain man … faith without works is dead." Bush and other Christians also seem able to completely ignore Jesus's warnings "That a rich man [kindly changed to 'person' in some new translations] shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 19:23) and "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God" (Matt. 19:24).
But surely these few Bible verses weren't enough to convince Bush to ignore Jesus's more dominant teachings, even though the evangelist who talked to him in 1984, fresh from a Guinness Book of World Records honor for wheeling a cross across six continents, must have been very convincing.
So, as I read on and on about Jesus demanding that his disciples forgo any thoughts of family or wealth, plus endless examples of behavior which surely must seem wimpy to Bush if he took them literally, I realized that what he might be finding "hard to explain" are the contradictions between Jesus's teachings and Bush's own actions. Maybe Bush had, of necessity, found a new way to interpret all this. If changing 'Thou shalt not kill" to "You shall not murder" somehow justifies all versions of war from self-defense to pre-emptive, plus the death penalty and even timely torture, maybe the same sleight of hand could be used more extensively. After all, Christianity has gone through so many revisions in 2000 years that it's possible in our day for believers to be as polarized in their teachings as Martin Luther King and Pat Robertson.
I did find a few obvious verses that Bush could reinterpret: With "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matt. 5:9), he could say he's bringing peace to Iraq. "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal" (Matt. 25:46) is a good one, since righteousness is so subjective, and Jesus does seem willing here to inflict punishment. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32) depends of course on your definition of truth, while "Be not afraid" can be applied to suit any situation.
Many other verses are confusing enough to elicit any meaning Bush might want: "But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first" (Matt. 19:30 and 20:16); "For whosoever exalted himself shall be abased: and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted" (Luke 14:11); "He that loved his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal" (John 12:25); "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it" (Matt. 16:25); and on and on.
And then of course there are the confounding parables. Take the one about the "talents" in Matthew. After a man complains that one of his servants didn't invest the money he was left while the master was away—so that "I should have received mine own with usury"—the shocking conclusion is: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." The Christians I asked for an interpretation, after reminding me that of course it's only a pesky parable, mumbled a Jesus-friendly interpretation such as, "We should not bury our skills and riches, but instead use them wisely." Or, as the New International Version of the Bible explains this passage: "Those who seek spiritual gain in the gospel for themselves and others will become richer, and those who neglect or squander what is given them will become impoverished, losing even what they have." (There doesn't seem to be an attempt to explain the ending to this parable, where, as one new translation has it: "And as for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.")
The soldier stuff seems particularly hard to misunderstand. But could Bush and Cheney have chosen to avoid combat, I ask with tongue not too far in cheek, because they decided to literally believe verses such as: "For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matt. 26:52)? And, since Jesus's advice to soldiers to "Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages" (Luke 3:14) is "clarified" in one new translation by omitting the "do no violence" part, Bush could perhaps find here a justification for his resistance to increasing soldiers' pay.
But as you can see, much of what I found would have to be severely distorted for Bush to claim any strong affinity with Jesus. So, after all my research, I am still in shock. I still have no idea how it has been possible for him to so grossly distort my devoutly religious parents' teaching of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
I've been thinking for some time now that perhaps, when Bush and Robertson accuse Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez of undermining his country's economy by sharing some of its oil riches with the poor, Chavez, a good Catholic, should say he is simply implementing Jesus's teachings. And now apparently Chavez has taken my advice. When Jesse Jackson visited Venezuela recently, Chavez said to him, "You can be sure we will continue fighting for the ideas of Martin Luther King, for Christ the Redeemer's idea of loving one another and building a society of equals through our peaceful and democratic revolution."
So, to carry on in this vein, when Bush accuses Canada or Spain, say, of not doing their share in the War on Terror, perhaps they should remind him that Jesus taught us that a more effective approach is to love our enemies. And when Bush brings up the very real horrors inflicted on the United States in 2001, the countries that opposed the Iraq war as a solution could remind him that Jesus was against retaliation, always insisting, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone" (John 8:7). Also, it might be an intelligent new approach for those running in 2006 against Bush's policies to point out that a true New Testament literalist would automatically provide health care and decent wages for everyone.
Of course, there's another even wilder explanation of the disconnect between Jesus's teachings and Bush's claim to be a follower. It could just be that, always proud to proclaim himself a nonreader, he never really got around to reading the whole New Testament. At the very least he should spend some vacation time refreshing himself. Then he would surely discover the gentle Jesus of my childhood and, instead of congratulating a woman for being such a great hard-working American when she explained that she needed three jobs to support herself, he might finally give us the four-day work week that was being promised way back in the 1950s.
We are far too complacent, allowing ourselves off the hook by pretending that we aren't involved in the acts that our leaders perform. We should be outraged. We should never again let Bush forget Jesus's scary warning: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Matt.16:26). The United States still has the potential to be the greatest influence for good the world has ever known. And Bush himself, if he so chose, could lead us there. Let us and Bush not forget that Jesus said simply, "If a man love me, he will keep my words" (John 14:23). |
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by John Gravois
December 16th, 2005
What's life like for a child of the Patriot Act? This semester at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, a professor kicked off a seminar on newspaper reporting by asking his students a few questions. One woman, he knew from his files, had attended the University of South Florida. "Were you there when that professor was arrested?" he asked.
The student — a very pretty, serious-looking young woman with dark eyes and a turquoise and blue hijab—paused for a moment and then, somewhat haltingly, recounted for the class the controversy surrounding an outspoken computer- engineering professor who rose to national prominence in the movements for Palestinian independence and immigration- policy reform during the 1990s (winning audiences with Karl Rove and several members of Congress on the latter subject), before being indicted, imprisoned, and put on trial on charges of conspiring with Palestinian terrorists in the wake of 9-11.
Later, when the class took a break, the student went up to her professor. "You caught me off guard," she said quietly, "Because the professor you mentioned is actually my father."
With that, Laila Al-Arian—who is 24 and aspires to be a Mideast correspondent—began a semester of learning how to be a proper witness to history while simultaneously being mugged by it. The trial of her father, Sami Al-Arian, was then winding into its fourth month in a Tampa, Florida federal courthouse, and was expected to produce a verdict sometime around final exams, in December. Reluctant to have her fellow student-journalists turn their notebooks on her, Laila resolved to keep quiet at school about her father's trial, which has been considered a dry run of the Patriot Act's expansion of prosecutorial powers. "I generally haven't divulged," she said sitting in her apartment this November, adding with a blush, "One of my roommates doesn't know."
The low point of the academic season, without a doubt, came just before Thanksgiving, when Laila made a weeklong trip back home to Tampa for closing arguments. (Her class was studying court-reporting; she figured she had it covered.)
There in a cavernous federal courtroom, Laila listened to Cherie Krigsman, a blond-haired fortyish woman with bangs, deliver the prosecution's closing remarks in a tone of belligerent folksiness. Sami Al-Arian "can dish out the whoppers as easily as you and I say good morning," the prosecutor said. "When you're deliberating the evidence, remember just how educated and sophisticated these defendants are."
Regarding a wiretapped phone call Al-Arian made to the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 1994, Krigsman said, "He picked up the phone and called Fathi Shiqaqi just like you and I pick up the phone and order pizza." Regarding the absence of evidence that Al-Arian ever even knew about attacks before they happened, she granted that he didn't involve himself directly with violence, "just like Sam Walton didn't stock the shelves at Wal-Mart."
By the time Krigsman's argument reached its climax — a comparison between Al-Arian's academic enterprises and Tony Soprano's waste disposal business — Laila had fled the courtroom. "I felt like throwing up," she said.
The defense's argument, which followed, was unabashedly high-toned. William Moffitt, a large, bald-pated black man with a moustache that droops down past the corners of his mouth, recited generous portions of the Declaration of Independence. He argued that Al-Arian was merely being pilloried for agreeing publicly with the most vociferous opponents of Israel's occupation of Palestine. Moreover, he said, even though the Patriot Act had made available to the prosecution 472,000 secretly wiretapped phone calls, all that evidence was sufficient only to show that Al-Arian agreed with those views passionately, frequently, and mostly before 1995. (Also that he sometimes disagreed with them.)
Still, looking over at the jury, which had been selected largely on the basis of its members' disinclination to read the news, Laila worried over Moffitt's approach. "I don't know how it's going to resonate with them," she said.
She was largely pessimistic as she returned to classes in Morningside Heights that week and as the 13 jurors set about their deliberations. Nor did it help her outlook when a poll by the Tampa Tribune, reporting that 87 percent of readers expected a guilty verdict, accidentally found its way into the jury room. Deliberations did, at least, stretch on a long time.
Early last week, Laila was attending the second-to-last meeting of her reporting seminar, getting ready to pose for the yearbook class photo, when two cell-phone calls came in rapid succession from her older brother and younger sister. She quickly fired text messages back: "In class. Any news?" Within seconds, her sister replied, "Yes call now."
Twenty-four hours later, Laila was sitting in court with her entire family—her brothers, sister, and mother on a bench alongside her, and her father several feet ahead of them in the defendant's chair, the back of his bald head one seat away from Moffitt's. The judge began with the most serious charge, conspiracy to murder and maim abroad. Bracing herself, Laila grasped the hand of her 15-year-old brother. Her body tensed.
"Not guilty," came the words.
She began weeping in the instant.
The judge went on to read eight more counts (the jury had deadlocked on nine others), and Laila cried through them all. "I just couldn't believe my ears," she said. "He just kept saying 'Not guilty.' "
"It was the happiest I've ever been, " she said.
A few days later, Laila was back in a newly-snowy Manhattan, struggling to finish the final project for her reporting class — a narrative reconstruction of a murder trial—before deadline. On Saturday, she happened to run into the School of Journalism's dean of students. "Well, it's been a big week for you, huh? Congratulations," he said. After she thanked him, he asked her, "Do people here know?"
The strange thing was, after keeping silent for so long, she wasn't really sure. |
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Last Updated Sun, 25 Dec 2005 18:00:56 EST
CBC News
The U.S. military says it won't relinquish control over the prisons it runs in Iraq until officials there raise their level of care.
Iraqi authorities still haven't demonstrated they can meet American standards, U.S. military officials say.
Their comments came weeks after scores of abused and neglected prisoners were revealed to be in two detention centres run by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. " We will not pass on facilities or detainees until they meet the standards we define and that we are using today," Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, who oversees U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, told the New York Times in a report published on Sunday.
Gardner said the American detention centres have "come a long way" since Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
The huge detention centre near Baghdad achieved worldwide notoriety after photographs emerged showing the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by some U.S. soldiers.
"Abu Ghraib was criminal and I was appalled," said Gardner, who assumed command of the prisons on Nov. 30.
The U.S. military says it is facing serious overcrowding in most of the prisons that it is operating in Iraq.
In late December, its facilities were holding about 14,000 prisoners – up from about 8,000 in January of 2005.
Pentagon leaders are said to be eager to relinquish care of the detainees to Iraqi authorities.
But a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, said the United States might have to delay its plan to hand over control of the prisons in 2006.
"A specific timeline for doing this is difficult to project at this stage with so many variables," Johnson told the Associated Press on Sunday.
"The Iraqis are committed to doing this right and will not rush to failure. The transition will be based on meeting standards, not on a timeline."
Sunni Muslims in Iraq have long leveled allegations of abuse and torture in prisons run by Iraq's Interior Ministry, which is dominated by Shia Muslims. |
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4 December 2005
Eliot Weinberger
London Review of Books
In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking lots, that thousands of sandbags had been filled with dirt and archaeological fragments, that a 2600-year-old brick pavement had been crushed by tanks, and that the moulded bricks of dragons had been gouged out from the Ishtar Gate by soldiers collecting souvenirs. I heard that the ruins of the Sumerian cities of Umma, Umm al-Akareb, Larsa and Tello were completely destroyed and were now landscapes of craters.
I heard that the US was planning an embassy in Baghdad that would cost $1.5 billion, as expensive as the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, the proposed tallest building in the world.
I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’
I heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’
I heard that 47 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 and 44 per cent believed that the hijackers were Iraqi; 61 per cent thought that Saddam had been a serious threat to the US and 76 per cent said the Iraqis were now better off.
I heard that Iraq was now ranked with Haiti and Senegal as one of the poorest nations on earth. I heard the United Nations Human Rights Commission report that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled since the war began. I heard that only 5 per cent of the money Congress had allocated for reconstruction had actually been spent. I heard that in Fallujah people were living in tents pitched on the ruins of their houses. I heard that this year’s budget included $105 billion for the War on Terror, which would bring the total to $300 billion. I heard that Halliburton was estimating that its bill for providing services to US troops in Iraq would exceed $10 billion. I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000.
I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone.
Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to take over the security of the country; I heard Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are 130,200 who have been trained and equipped. That’s a fact. The idea that that number’s wrong is just not correct. The number is right.’
I heard him explain the discrepancy: ‘Now, are some getting killed every day? Sure. Are some retiring at various times or injured? Yes, they’re gone.’ I remembered that a year before he had said the number was 210,000. I heard the Pentagon announce it would no longer release Iraqi troop figures.
I heard that 50,000 US soldiers in Iraq did not have body armour, because the army’s equipment manager had placed it at the same priority level as socks. I heard that soldiers were buying their own flak jackets with steel ‘trauma’ plates, Camelbak water pouches, ballistic goggles, knee and elbow pads, drop pouches to hold ammunition magazines, and load-bearing vests. I heard they were rigging their vehicles with pieces of scrap metal as protection against roadside bombs, since the production of armoured Humvees had fallen more than a year behind schedule and the few available armoured vehicles were mainly reserved for officers and visiting dignitaries.
I heard that the private security firm Custer Battles had been paid $15 million to provide security for civilian flights at Baghdad airport at a time when no planes were flying. I heard that US forces were still unable to secure the two-mile highway from the airport to the Green Zone.
I heard that the President’s uncle, Bucky Bush, had made half a million dollars cashing in his stock options in Engineered Support Systems Inc, a defence contractor that had received $100 million for work in Iraq. Bucky Bush is on the board of directors. I heard Dan Kreher, vice-president of investor relations for ESSI, say: ‘The fact his nephew is in the White House has absolutely nothing to do with Mr Bush being on our board or with our stock having gone up 1000 per cent in the past five years.’
I heard that a Pentagon audit of only some of the Halliburton contracts had found $212 million in ‘questionable costs’. I heard that eight other government audits of Halliburton were marked ‘classified’ and not released to the public.
I heard that African-Americans normally form 23 per cent of active-duty troops, but that recruitment of African-Americans had fallen by 41 per cent since 2000. I heard that a US Military Image Study prepared for the army had recommended that, ‘for the army to achieve its mission goals with Future Force Soldiers, it must overhaul its image as well as its product offering.’
I heard that the military was developing robot soldiers. I heard Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon say: ‘They don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot.’ I heard him say: ‘I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it.’
*
In March, on the second anniversary of the invasion, I heard that 1511 US soldiers had been killed and approximately 11,000 wounded. There was no way of knowing exactly how many Iraqis had died.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Well, if you have a country of 25 million people and you have x thousands of criminals, terrorists, Baathists, former regime elements who want to blow up things and make bombs and kill people, they can still do that. That happens in most major cities in the world, most countries in the world, that people get killed and there’s violence.’
I heard that, along with banning photographs of the caskets of American soldiers, the administration was actively preventing photographs being taken of the wounded, who were flown in from Iraq late at night, transferred to military hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances.
I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’
I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’
I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to fight’ in Iraq. I heard him say: ‘You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. I like brawling.’
I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had created his own intelligence agency, the Strategic Support Branch, ‘designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary’s direct control’, without the oversight laws that apply to the CIA, and that it was employing ‘notorious figures’ whose ‘links to the US government would be embarrassing if disclosed’. I heard about the practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’, by which suspected terrorists are kidnapped and flown to countries known to torture prisoners, or to secret US prisons in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.
I heard that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib prison, as a fitting symbol of Iraq’s new beginning’. I heard that outside the prison there is a sign that reads: ‘No Parking. Detainee Drop Off Zone.’
I heard that some American soldiers had made a heavy metal music video called ‘Ramadi Madness’, with sections entitled ‘Those Crafty Little Bastards’ and ‘Another Day, Another Mission, Another Scumbag’. In one scene, a soldier kicks the face of an Iraqi who is bound and lying on the ground, dying. In another, a soldier moves the arm of a man who has just been shot dead, to make it appear that he is waving. I heard a Pentagon spokesman say: ‘Clearly, the soldiers probably exercised poor judgment.’
I heard that the army released a 1200-page report detailing the torture of Iraqi prisoners at a single military intelligence base during a few months in 2003. In response to the report, I heard Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Martin say: ‘The army’s a learning organisation. If we have some shortfalls, we try to correct them. We’ve learned how to do that process now.’
I heard a US soldier talk about his photographs of the 12 prisoners he had shot with a machine-gun: ‘I shot this guy in the face. See, his head is split open. I shot this guy in the groin. He took three days to bleed to death.’ I heard him say he was a devout Christian: ‘Well, I knelt down. I said a prayer, stood up, and gunned them all down.’
*
In April I heard General Richard Myers say: ‘I think we’re winning. OK? I think we’re definitely winning. I think we’ve been winning for some time.’
I heard Major General William Webster, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, say: ‘We think the insurgency is weakening over time. Some of these attacks appear to be very spectacular and well co-ordinated, but, in fact, are not.’
I heard Lieutenant General James Conroy of the marines say that American troop withdrawals would soon begin, because ‘Iraqis are starting to take care of their own situation.’ I heard Rear Admiral William Sullivan report to Congress that there were 145,000 ‘combat-capable’ Iraqi forces. I heard Sabah Hadum, a spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, say: ‘We are paying about 135,000, but that does not necessarily mean that 135,000 are actually working.’ I heard that as many as 50,000 may be ‘ghost soldiers’ – invented names whose pay is collected by officers or bureaucrats.
I heard Staff Sergeant Craig Patrick, who was training Iraqi troops, say: ‘It’s all about perception, to convince the American public that everything is going as planned and we’re right on schedule to be out of here. I mean, they can bullshit the American people, but they can’t bullshit us.’
As many countries pulled their small numbers of troops out of Iraq, I heard the State Department announce it would no longer use the phrase ‘Coalition of the Willing’.
I heard that of the 40 water and sewage systems in Iraq, ‘not one is being operated properly.’ I heard that of the 19 power plants that had been rebuilt by the US, none works correctly. I heard a US official blame this on the ‘indifferent work ethic’ of Iraqis.
I read, in the New York Times, that thanks to the ‘sustained momentum’ of the ‘military operation’, the ‘administration’s goal of turning Iraq over to a permanent, elected Iraqi government’ was ‘within striking distance’. I heard General Richard Myers say: ‘We’re on track.’ And I heard Major General Adnan Thabit say: ‘We are gaining more victories because people are now co-operating more with us.’
I heard General John Abizaid predict that Iraqi security forces would be leading the fight against the insurgents in most of the country by the end of 2005. I heard General George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, say: ‘We should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces.’
I heard that the insurgents had been driven out of the cities and into the desert and that they were having trouble finding new recruits. I heard Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno say: ‘They’re slowly losing.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘We don’t have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy.’
*
A few weeks later, I heard Lawrence di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman, admit that ‘there’s been an uptick’ in violence. I heard Pentagon officials dismiss this as ‘desperate attacks by desperate individuals’, but I heard General Richard Myers now say about the insurgents: ‘I think their capacity stays about the same. And where they are right now is where they were almost a year ago.’
I heard that a report by the CIA National Intelligence Council had stated that ‘Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of “professionalised” terrorists,’ providing ‘a recruitment ground and the opportunity for enhancing technical skills’. I heard that it said that Iraq was a more effective training ground than Afghanistan, because ‘the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980s.’
I heard that the State Department refused to release its annual report on terrorism, which would have shown that the number of ‘significant’ attacks outside Iraq had grown from 175 in 2003 to 655 in 2004. I heard Karen Aguilar, acting co-ordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, explain that ‘statistics are not relevant’ to ‘trends in global terrorism’.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Goodness knows, it doesn’t take a genius to blow up a building.’
I heard that in the month of April there were 67 suicide bombings. I heard Colonel Pat Lang, former chief of Mideast operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency, say: ‘It’s just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We’ve been in a civil war for a long time.’
I heard that 1600 US soldiers were dead. I heard that every week more than 200 Iraqis were dying in the suicide bombings.
I heard Condoleezza Rice, on a surprise visit to Iraq, say: ‘We are so grateful that there are Americans willing to sacrifice so the Middle East will be whole and free and democratic and at peace.’ On that same day, the bodies of 34 recently killed men were found in a mass grave; a high official in the Ministry of Industry was shot dead; a leading Shia cleric was shot dead; and the governor of Diyala province survived a suicide bombing, though four others in his entourage did not and 37 nearby were wounded.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld, asked whether we were winning or losing the war in Iraq, reply: ‘Winning or losing is not the issue for “we”, in my view, in the traditional, conventional context of using the words “winning” and “losing” in a war.’
I heard a truck driver named Muhammad say, ‘With my own eyes I’ve seen the Americans, when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb, open fire on all the civilian cars around them,’ and another driver, from Fallujah, say: ‘If Bush is a real man, he should walk down the street alone!’
I heard that the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, has 3000 Kurdish peshmerga soldiers stationed around his house.
I heard the President proclaim a ‘critical victory in the War on Terror’ with the capture of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, whom the President said was a ‘top general’ and the number three man in al-Qaida. I heard him say: ‘His arrest removes a dangerous enemy who was a direct threat to America and for those who love freedom.’ A few days later, I heard that the man had probably been confused with someone else with a vaguely similar name. I heard that a former associate of Osama bin Laden in London had laughed and said: ‘What I remember of him is that he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying.’ I never heard this reported in the American press.
At the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, I heard the President compare his War on Terror with Lincoln’s war against slavery.
I heard the President say that Iraqi forces now outnumber their American counterparts.
*
In May I heard that there were three suicide bombings every day.
I heard a journalist ask the President: ‘Do you think that the insurgency is getting harder now to defeat militarily?’ And I heard the President reply: ‘No, I don’t think so. I think they’re being defeated. And that’s why they continue to fight.’
I heard a human rights worker say: ‘In Baghdad today, four clerics (three Sunni and one Shia) were assassinated. The bodies of two other Sunni clerics who had been abducted last week were found. A suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle in the Abu Cher market killing nine Iraqi National Guard troops and injuring 28 civilians. Two engineering students were killed when a bomb (or rocket) struck their classroom at a local school. The dean of a high school in the Shaab neighborhood was assassinated. One judge, two officials from the Ministry of Defence and one official investigating corruption in the previous interim government were assassinated. In all, 31 dead, 42 injured and 17 abducted. Rumours abound in Baghdad about who is responsible for all the attacks but no one has claimed responsibility. And yet compared to some days in recent weeks here in Baghdad the number of dead and injured was fewer. So comparatively speaking it was a fairly quiet day here in Baghdad.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘We don’t do body counts.’ But then I heard the Pentagon releasing body counts. It said 1600 insurgents had been killed last year in Fallujah, but then I heard that the marines had discovered ‘few bodies’ after the city was captured, and months later a ‘martyrs’ cemetery’ was found to contain only 79 graves. I heard that the army had completely destroyed a ‘guerrilla training camp’ near Lake Tharthar, killing all 85 insurgents, and I heard the television news report that this was ‘the single biggest one-day death toll for militants in months, and the latest in a series of blows to the insurgency’. But then I heard that some European journalists visited the camp the next day and the insurgents were still there. Then I heard US officials claim that the insurgents must have dragged away their own dead. But then I heard a reporter ask how all 85 dead insurgents could have dragged themselves away. And I heard Major Richard Goldenberg reply: ‘We could spend years going back and forth on body counts. The important thing is the effect this has on the organised insurgency.’
I heard about despair. I heard Colonel Joseph DiSalvo, commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, say: ‘What we’re seeing is the terrorists are in desperation.’ I heard him say: ‘By the end of the summer, the terrorists will be captured, dead or, in the least, severely disrupted.’
I heard Dick Cheney say: ‘The level of activity that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.’
I heard Porter J. Goss, director of the CIA, say that the insurgents were ‘not quite in the last throes, but I think they are very close to it.’
I heard Dick Cheney later explain: ‘If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period. When you look back at World War Two, the toughest battle, both in Europe and in the Pacific, occurred just a few months before the end. And I see this as a similar situation, where they’re going to go all out.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Last throes could be a violent last throe, or a placid and calm last throe. Look it up in the dictionary.’
*
I heard Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican from Nebraska, say: ‘Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.’
I heard Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Wellman say of the insurgents: ‘We can’t kill them all. When I kill one, I create three.’
I heard that Congressman Walter Jones, Republican from North Carolina and the man who renamed French fries ‘freedom fries’, was now calling for the withdrawal of US troops. I heard him say: ‘The American people are getting to a point here: how much more can we take?’ I heard Congressman Mike Pence, Republican from Indiana, explain why he is opposed to a timetable for withdrawal: ‘I never tell my kids when my patience is going to run out, because they’ll usually try it.’
I heard Condoleezza Rice speak about a ‘generational commitment’ in Iraq.
I heard the President say: ‘We have put the enemy on the run, and now they spend their days avoiding capture, because they know America’s armed services are on their trail.’
I heard him tell the American people: ‘As we work to deliver opportunity at home, we’re also keeping you safe from threats from abroad. We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens. Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home.’
I heard the President say: ‘See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.’
*
I heard that US troops had killed the number two man in al-Qaida in Iraq. I heard that US troops had killed another man who was the number two in al-Qaida in Iraq. I heard that US troops had killed yet another man who was the number two in al-Qaida in Iraq.
I heard that in Baghdad 92 per cent of the people did not have stable electricity, 33 per cent did not have safe drinking water, and 25 per cent of children under the age of five were suffering from malnutrition. I heard that there were two or three car bombings a day, on some days killing a hundred people and wounding many hundreds more.
I heard General William Webster say: ‘Certainly saying anything about “breaking the back” or “about to reach the end of the line” or those kinds of things do not apply to the insurgency at this point.’
I heard a ‘high-ranking army officer’ say: ‘There’s simply not enough forces here. There are not enough to do anything right; everybody’s got their finger in the dyke.’ I heard that the soldiers of Marine Company E had set up cardboard dummies of themselves to make it appear that they had more men in battle.
I heard the President say: ‘I’d say I spend most of my time worrying about right now people losing their life in Iraq. Both Americans and Iraqis. I worry about my girls. I used to worry about my wife, until she hit an 85 per cent popularity figure. Now she’s worried about me. You know, I don’t worry all that much, other than what I just described to you. I attribute that to – I’ve got peace of mind. A lot of it has to do with my particular faith, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that a lot of people pray for me and Laura. I’m sleeping pretty good. Seriously. I get asked that. There’s times when I hadn’t been. I’ve got peace of mind.’
*
In 2005 I heard about 2001. I heard that on 21 September 2001, the PDB (President’s Daily Brief), prepared by the CIA, reported that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the September 11 attacks.
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al-Qaida and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al-Qaida. Or we could take a bolder approach.’
I heard Karl Rove say: ‘Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said we must understand our enemies.’
In 2005 I heard about 2002. I heard that on 23 July 2002, eight months before the invasion, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, reported in a secret memo to Tony Blair that he was told in Washington that the US was going to ‘remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD’. However, because ‘the case was thin, Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran . . . the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’
I heard that this ‘Downing Street Memo’ was a scandal in the British press, but I didn’t hear it mentioned on American network television for two months. During those two months, ABC news had 121 stories on Michael Jackson and 42 stories on Natalee Holloway, a high-school student who disappeared from a bar while on holiday in Aruba. CBS news had 235 stories about Michael Jackson and 70 about Natalee Holloway.
I heard that in the second half of 2002, the US air force and the RAF dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq as they had done in all of 2001. I heard that the objective was to provoke Saddam into giving the allies an excuse for war.
I heard that the primary source of information about Saddam’s mobile biological weapons labs and germ warfare capability, used by Colin Powell in his presentation at the United Nations and in the President’s 2003 State of the Union address, was an Iraqi defector held by German intelligence. The Germans had repeatedly told the Americans that none of the information supplied by this defector, an advanced alcoholic, was reliable. He had been given the code-name Curveball.
I heard that the primary source of information about the tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons buried under Saddam’s private villas and under Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad and throughout Iraq was a Kurdish exile called Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. He was sponsored by the Rendon Group, a Washington public relations firm that had been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon to promote the war. (Rendon, among other things, had organised a group of Iraqi exiles in London, called them the Iraqi National Congress, and installed Ahmad Chalabi as their leader.) I heard that after al-Haideri failed a lie-detector test, administered by the CIA in Thailand, his stories were nevertheless leaked to journalists, most prominently Judith Miller of the New York Times, which published them on the front page.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Well, you never know what’s going to happen. I presented the President a list of about fifteen things that could go terribly, terribly wrong before the war started. And the fact that the oilfields could have been set aflame like they were in Kuwait, the fact that we could have had mass refugees and dislocations and it didn’t happen. The bridges could have been blown up. There could have been a fortress Baghdad with a moat around it with oil in it and people fighting to the death. So a great many of the bad things that could have happened did not happen.’ I heard a journalist ask him: ‘Was a robust insurgency on your list that you gave the President?’ And I heard Rumsfeld reply: ‘I don’t remember whether that was on there.’
In 2005 I heard about 2003. I heard a US marine, who was a witness to the event, say that the story of the capture of Saddam Hussein was a fiction. Saddam had been caught the day before in a small house, and then placed in an abandoned well, which was invented as the ‘spider hole’ where he was hiding. I never heard about this marine again.
In 2005 I heard about 2004. I heard that, during the attack on Fallujah, the President had suggested to Tony Blair that the headquarters of the al-Jazeera network in Qatar should be bombed. I heard that Blair persuaded him that it wasn’t such a good idea.
*
Because it was difficult for the military to attract new recruits, I heard that an army directive recommended ‘alleviating the personnel crunch by retaining soldiers who are earmarked for early discharge during their first term of enlistment because of alcohol or drug abuse, unsatisfactory performance, or being overweight, among other reasons’. I heard that the Pentagon had asked Congress to raise the maximum age for military recruits from 35 to 42.
I heard that the US military was actively recruiting in Latin America, offering citizenship in exchange for service. I heard that Hispanic-Americans make up 9.5 per cent of the actively enlisted, but 17.5 per cent of those given the most dangerous assignments.
I heard that the government had offered $15,000 cash bonuses to National Guard personnel who agreed to extend their enlistment. I heard that the government never paid, and cancelled the offer after many had signed up.
I heard that in veterans’ hospitals, the only televison news that is permitted is the Pentagon Channel, a 24-hour news station that features programmes like Freedom Journal Iraq.
I heard Rory Mayberry, a former food manager for Halliburton in Iraq, say that they routinely served the troops food that had expired by as much as a year. I heard that they would salvage food from convoys that had been attacked. I heard him say: ‘We were told to go into the trucks and remove the food items and use them after removing the bullets and any shrapnel from the bad food that was hit.’
I heard that, in a poll of American soldiers in Iraq, more than half rated their unit’s morale as ‘low’ or ‘very low’.
I heard the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine say that one in four veterans required medical treatment and that it expected that as many as 240,000 would suffer from some form of post- traumatic stress disorder. I heard a soldier say: ‘My nightmares are so intense I woke up one night with my hands around my fiancée’s throat.’
I heard that members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas were demonstrating at the funerals of soldiers who had died in Iraq, claiming that the war was divine retribution for American immorality. I heard that they held signs depicting ‘homosexual acts’, with the words ‘God Hates Fags’; ‘God Hates America’; ‘Thank God for IEDs [roadside bombs]’; ‘Fag Soldiers in Hell’; ‘God Blew Up the Troops’; and ‘Fags Doom Nations.’
I heard that headstones in Arlington National Cemetery were now being inscribed with the slogans ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ and ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ along with the traditional name, rank and date of death of the deceased soldier. I heard Jeff Martell, who makes headstones for the cemetery, say: ‘It just seems a little brazen that that’s put on stones. It seems like it might be connected to politics.’
*
On the first anniversary of the ‘transfer of sovereignty’, I heard that there had been 484 car bombs in the last year, killing at least 2221 people and wounding at least 5574. I heard 890 US soldiers had been killed in the last year and that there was now an average of 70 insurgent attacks a day. That same day I heard the President say: ‘We fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand. So we’ll fight them there, we’ll fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.’
I heard him say: ‘Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania.’
I heard him say: ‘Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world’s terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the War on Terror.’
And I remembered that, three years before, to justify the invasion, he had said: ‘Imagine a terrorist network with Iraq as an arsenal and as a training ground.’
*
I heard Tom DeLay, then still the House majority leader, say: ‘You know, if Houston, Texas was held to the same standard as Iraq is held to, nobody’d go to Houston, because all this reporting coming out of the local press in Houston is violence, murders, robberies, deaths on the highways.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say that the Shias ‘are reaching out to the Sunnis and allowing them to come into the constitutional drafting process in a very constructive and healthy way. So there’s an awful lot good that’s happening in that country.’
I heard Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, say: ‘I think we have a clear strategy for success, and there is great progress being made on the ground. We are succeeding and we will succeed.’
I heard the President say: ‘We have a clear path forward.’
I heard that Halliburton had built a wall around the Green Zone, made of 12-foot-high, five-ton concrete slabs, topped with concertina wire. I heard that mortars fired into the Green Zone often fell short and landed in the neighbourhoods just outside the wall, and that frustrated suicide bombers, unable to get into the Green Zone, would blow themselves up outside the wall. I heard Saman Abdel Aziz Rahman, the owner of the Serawan Kebab Restaurant, which is next door to a restaurant where a suicide bomber at lunchtime had killed 23 people, say: ‘We are the new Palestine.’ I heard Haider al-Shawaf, who lives on al-Shawaf Street, now bisected by the wall, say twice, in English: ‘It was very nice street. It was very nice street.’
I heard the President say: ‘America will not leave before the job is done.’ I heard Dick Cheney predict that the fighting would be over by the time the administration ends in 2009.
*
After Amnesty International compared American treatment of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners to the Gulag, I heard the President say: ‘It’s an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of, and the allegations by, people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble – that means not tell the truth.’
I heard that most of the insurgent violence in Iraq was personally directed by a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I heard that rumours of his presence had led to the US bombings of Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Samarra, and a village in Kurdistan, but each time he had narrowly escaped. I heard that he had been seen recently in Jordan, Syria, Iran and Pakistan. I heard that he was closely linked with Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the government of Syria. I heard that he was the bitter enemy of bin Laden, the secularist Saddam and the secularist Syrian government. I heard that he had died in Afghanistan. I heard that, after an injury in Afghanistan, his leg had been amputated in a hospital in Iraq, which was proof of Saddam’s connections to terrorism. I heard he was still walking on two legs. I heard he was one of the hooded men in a video showing the decapitation of a young American, Nick Berg, although the men never removed their hoods. I heard that he had died recently in Mosul when eight men blew themselves up rather than surrender to the US forces who had surrounded their house. I heard Sheikh Jawad al-Kalesi, an important Shia cleric in Baghdad, say that Zarqawi had been killed long ago, but the US was using him as a ‘ploy’. I heard the President compare him to Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I heard that he had fewer than a hundred followers in Iraq.
I heard that there could be as many as a hundred groups responsible for the suicide bombings and I heard that many of them were connected to Ansar al-Islam, which had many more followers in Iraq than Zarqawi and had actual ties to Osama bin Laden before the war. Ansar al-Islam was almost never mentioned in administration speeches or in the press, since it is a Kurdish group, and all Kurds are presumed to be allies of the US.
I heard that unemployment for young men in Sunni areas was now 40 per cent. I heard that the annual per capita income was $77, half of what it was the year before; and that only 37 per cent of families had homes connected to a sewage system, half of what it was before the war.
I heard General George Casey say: ‘Iraq slowly gets better every day.’ I heard Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Quarles, commander of the 4-3 Brigade Troops Battalion, say: ‘It’s hard to see all the progress that has been made. But things are getting better.’
I heard that the Pentagon was supposed to deliver a report to Congress on the training and capability of the Iraqi security forces, but that it had missed the deadline and was reluctant to release the report. I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘It’s not for us to tell the other side, the enemy, the terrorists, that this Iraqi unit has this capability, and that Iraqi unit has this capability. The idea of discussing weaknesses, if you will, strengths and weaknesses – “this unit has a poor chain of command,” or “these forces are not as effective because their morale’s down.” I mean, it would be mindless to put that kind of information out.’
I heard General William Webster say that the insurgents’ ability ‘to conduct sustained, high-intensity operations, as they did last year – we’ve mostly eliminated that.’ In the next few days, I heard that suicide bombings in Baghdad had increased, including one at a school that killed some two dozen children, and the explosion in the central square of a stolen truck of liquefied gas, killing at least 71 people and wounding 156 others. I heard that the highest-ranking diplomat from Algeria had been kidnapped. I heard that the highest-ranking diplomat from Egypt had been kidnapped and killed. I heard that no Arab country would send an ambassador.
I heard an unnamed ‘senior army intelligence officer’ say: ‘We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents, but they’re being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge.’ I heard him say that the US military was having a hard time understanding the insurgency’s unlikely coalitions of secular Baath Party members and Islamic militants.
I heard that, after a car bomb killed several children, the Task Force Baghdad 3rd Infantry Division released a statement quoting an ‘Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified’: ‘They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists.’ A few weeks later, after a car bomb killed 25 people near the al-Rashad police station, I heard that the Task Force Baghdad 3rd Infantry Division released a statement quoting an ‘Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified’: ‘They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists.’
I heard that the administration had decided it would no longer refer to a War on Terror. The new name was the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism.
I heard General Richard Myers say: ‘I’ve objected to the use of the term “War on Terrorism” before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution. And it’s more than terrorism. The long-term problem is as much diplomatic, as much economic – in fact, more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military.’
I heard that the administration had decided it would no longer refer to the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism, which was too long. The new name was now the old War on Terror.
I heard the President say: ‘Make no mistake about it, we’re at war. We’re at war with an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001. We’re at war against an enemy that, since that day, has continued to kill.’
I heard Abdul Henderson, a former marine corporal, say: ‘We were firing into small towns. You see people just running, cars going, guys falling off bikes. It was just sad. You just sit there and look through your binos and see things blowing up, and you think, man they have no water, living in the third world, and we’re just bombing them to hell. Blowing up buildings, shrapnel tearing people to shreds.’
*
I heard a ‘former high-level intelligence official’ say: ‘This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.’ I heard Condoleezza Rice say that an invasion of Iran ‘is not on the menu at this time’.
I heard that John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, had said: ‘There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power in the world – and that is the United States – when it suits our interest and when we can get others to go along.’ I heard that he keeps a bronze hand grenade on his desk.
I heard the President say: ‘This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table.’ I heard the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, say: ‘The President makes decisions based on what is right for the American people.’
I heard about despair. I heard the President say: ‘As democracy in Iraq takes root, the enemies of freedom, the terrorists, will become more desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard him say: ‘These terrorists and insurgents will fail. We have a strategy for success in Iraq. As Iraqis stand up, Americans and Coalition forces will stand down.’
I heard an unnamed ‘top US commander’ question how the current Iraqi Ministry of Defence, largely staffed by civilians appointed by the US, would be capable of maintaining an army: ‘What is lacking are the systems that pay people, that supply people, that recruit people, that replace the wounded and AWOL, and systems that promote people and provide spare parts.’ I heard that the ministry had deposited $759 million in the personal bank account of a former money trader.
*
I heard a White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, say: ‘The President knows one of his most important responsibilities is to comfort the families of the fallen.’ I heard Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey had been killed in Iraq, describe her meeting with the President.
I heard her say: ‘He first got there, he walked in and said: “So who are we honouring here?” He didn’t even know Casey’s name, he didn’t, nobody could have whispered to him: “Mr President, this is the Sheehan family, their son Casey was killed in Iraq.” We thought that was pretty disrespectful to not even know Casey’s name, and to walk in and say: “So who are we honourin’ here?” Like: “Let’s get on with it, let’s get somebody honoured here.” So anyway, he went up to my oldest daughter, I keep calling her my oldest daughter but she’s actually my oldest child now, and he said: “So who are you to the loved one?” And Carly goes: “Casey was my brother.” And George Bush says: “I wish I could bring your loved one back, to fill the hole in your heart.” And Carly said: “Yeah, so do we.” And Bush said: “I’m sure you do.” And he gave her a dirty look and turned away from her.’
As the President moved to his ranch for a six-week summer vacation, Cindy Sheehan camped out at the entrance, demanding another meeting, which the President refused. I heard him say: ‘I think it’s important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say. But I think it’s also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life. I think the people want the President to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy. And part of my being is to be outside exercising.’
I heard that privately he had said: ‘I’m not meeting again with that goddamned bitch. She can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.’
*
I heard that 82 per cent of Iraqis were ‘strongly opposed’ to the presence of foreign troops and 45 per cent supported armed attacks against them. Less than 1 per cent believed that the foreign troops had made the country more secure.
I heard ‘top military commanders’ say that we could expect ‘some fairly substantial reductions’ in troops by next spring. I heard them add that the reduction would come after ‘a short-term bulge in troop levels’.
I heard that 1100 bodies were brought to the Baghdad morgue in one month, many with hands bound and a bullet in the head. I heard that between 10 and 20 per cent were too disfigured to be identified. I heard that in the Saddam era the number was normally around 200. I heard that doctors were ordered not to perform post-mortems on bodies brought in by US troops.
On a single day, I heard that fighting had broken out between two Shia militias in Najaf, leaving 19 dead; that the bodies of 37 Shia soldiers, each killed with a single bullet to the head, had been found in a river south of Baghdad; that Jalal Talabani had escaped an assassination attempt in which eight of his bodyguards were killed and 15 injured. On that same day, I heard an ‘unnamed White House official’ say that the Iraqis were ‘making substantial and real progress’.
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘It’s a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that’s going on in parallel.’ I heard her say that the insurgency was ‘losing steam’.
As riots broke out in Baghdad over the lack of electricity, I heard Nadeem Haki, a shop-owner in Baghdad, say: ‘We thank God that the air we breathe is not in the hands of the government. Otherwise they would have cut it off for a few hours each day.’
I heard General Barry McCaffrey say, after returning from an inspection of Iraq: ‘This thing, the wheels are coming off of it.’
*
I heard that the President’s approval rating had fallen to 36 per cent, lower than Nixon’s during the summer of Watergate. I heard that 50 per cent now believed that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake. I heard Trent Duffy say that the President ‘believes that those who want the US to begin to change course in Iraq do not want America to win the overall War on Terror. He can understand that people don’t share his view that we must win the War on Terror – but he just has a different view.’ I heard that the President, at a strategy meeting, had said: ‘Who gives a flying fuck what the polls say? I’m the President and I’ll do whatever I goddamn please. They don’t know shit.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘It’s been alleged that we’re not winning. Throughout history there have always been those who predict America’s failure just around every corner. At the height of World War Two, many Western intellectuals praised Stalin. For a time, Communism was very much in vogue. Those being tossed about by the winds of concern should recall that Americans are a tough lot and will see their commitments through.’
I heard General Douglas Lute, director of operations at US Central Command, say that the US would withdraw a significant number of troops within a year. I heard him say: ‘We believe at some point, in order to break this dependence on the Coalition, you simply have to back off and let the Iraqis step forward.’ The day before, I heard the President say that withdrawal would ‘only embolden the terrorists and create a staging ground to launch more attacks against America and free countries. So long as I’m the President, we will stay, we will fight, and we will win the War on Terror.’
I heard the President, still on vacation at his ranch, say: ‘A time of war is a time of sacrifice.’ I heard a reporter ask him if he planned to do any fishing, and I heard the President reply: ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m kind of hanging loose, as they say.’
I heard that the US was now spending $195 million a day on the war and that the cost had already exceeded, by $50 billion, US expenses in all of World War One. I heard that $195 million would provide 12 meals a day for every starving child on earth.
*
I heard the President, at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego, compare the War on Terror to World War Two. I heard him quote the words of Captain Randy Stone, a marine in Iraq: ‘I know we will win because I see it in the eyes of the marines every morning. In their eyes is the sparkle of victory.’ In a long speech, I heard him briefly mention Hurricane Katrina, which had struck a few days before and which, at the time, was believed to have killed tens of thousands. I heard him say: ‘I urge everyone in the affected areas to continue to follow instructions from state and local authorities.’
I heard that the emergency response to the hurricane had been hampered because 35 per cent of the Louisiana National Guard and 40 per cent of the Mississippi National Guard, as well as much of their equipment and vehicles, were in Iraq. Approximately 5000 Guards and troops were eventually deployed; in 1992, following Hurricane Andrew in Florida, George Bush Sr had sent in 36,000 troops. I heard that the Guardsmen in Iraq were denied emergency two-week leave to help or find their families. I heard they were told by their commanders that there were too few US troops in Iraq to spare them.
A few weeks after the hurricane, I heard the President say: ‘You know, something we – I’ve been thinking a lot about how America has responded, and it’s clear to me that Americans value human life, and value every person as important. And that stands in stark contrast, by the way, to the terrorists we have to deal with. You see, we look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break. They’re the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people. It’s a War on Terror.’
*
On the day after an estimated 200,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington, a pro-war rally was held on the Mall. I heard Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican from Alabama, address the crowd: ‘The group who spoke here the other day did not represent the American ideals of freedom, liberty and spreading that around the world. I frankly don’t know what they represent.’ The crowd was estimated at 400.
I heard that, along with the $30 billion appropriated by Congress, the US Agency for International Development was also seeking private donations: ‘Now you can donate high-impact development assistance that directly improves the lives of thousands of Iraqis.’ I heard that USAID’s ‘extraordinary appeal’ had raised $600, but I heard Heather Layman, spokeswoman for USAID, say that she was not disappointed: ‘Every little bit helps.’
In 2003, Dick Cheney had said: ‘Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush’s vice-president, I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had, now, for over three years.’ I heard that he was still receiving deferred compensation and owned more than 433,000 stock options. Those options were worth $241,498 in 2004. In 2005 they were worth more than $8 million. Along with its $10 billion no-bid contracts in Iraq, Halliburton was hired to expand the prison at Guantanamo and was among the first to receive a no-bid contract for Hurricane Katrina relief.
I heard the President say: ‘At this moment, more than a dozen Iraqi battalions have completed training and are conducting anti-terrorist operations in Ramadi and Fallujah. More than 20 battalions are operating in Baghdad. And some have taken the lead in operations in major sectors of the city. In total, more than 100 battalions are operating throughout Iraq. Our commanders report that the Iraqi forces are operating with increasing effectiveness.’
An Iraqi battalion has about 700 soldiers. The next day I heard General George Casey tell Congress that the number of ‘combat ready’ Iraqi battalions had dropped from three to one. I heard him say: ‘Iraqi armed forces will not have an independent capability for some time.’ When asked when the American people can expect troops to be withdrawn from Iraq, I heard him reply: ‘I don’t want to get into a date. I wouldn’t even want to go there, wouldn’t even want to go there.’
I heard Colonel Stephen Davis, commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team 2, tell a group of Iraqis that the US was not leaving: ‘We’re not going anywhere. Some of you are concerned about the attack helicopters and mortar fire from the base. I will tell you this: those are the sounds of peace.’
I heard General George Casey say that the insurgency ‘is failing. We are more relentless in our progress than those who seek to disrupt it.’
I heard General John Abizaid say: ‘The insurgency doesn’t have a chance for victory.’
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We have made significant progress.’
I heard Major General Rick Lynch, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, say: ‘Zarqawi is on the ropes.’
As the administration celebrated the approval of the long-delayed constitution, I heard Safia Taleb al-Suhail – the daughter of a man who was executed by Saddam Hussein and who, in a staged moment during the State of the Union address, embraced the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq – say: ‘When we came back from exile, we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened – we have lost all the gains we made over the last 30 years. It’s a big disappointment.’
I heard an Iraqi Shia sergeant say: ‘Just let us have our constitution and elections in December and then we will do what Saddam did – start with five people from each neighbourhood and kill them in the streets and then go from there.’
*
I heard Melvin Laird, secretary of defense under Nixon during the Vietnam War, call for the withdrawal of troops. I heard him say of the President: ‘When troops are dying, the commander in chief cannot be coy, vague or secretive. His West Texas cowboy approach – shoot first and answer questions later, or do the job first and let the results speak for themselves – is not working.’
I heard Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser and a close friend of Bush Sr, say: ‘I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes. You encourage democracy over time, with assistance and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neo-cons do it.’ They ‘believe in the export of democracy, by violence if that is required. How do the neo-cons bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelise.’ I heard him say that America is now ‘suffering from the consequences of this brand of revolutionary utopianism’.
I heard Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, say that foreign policy had been ‘hijacked’ by the ‘Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal’. I heard him say that Rumsfeld was ‘given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere’. I heard him say: ‘If something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.’
*
I heard that 2000 US soldiers had been killed in Iraq; that 15,220 had been wounded in combat, including more than 7100 who were ‘injured too badly to return to duty’; and that thousands more had been ‘hurt in incidents unrelated to combat’.
I heard that a spokesman for the US military in Iraq, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, had sent an email to journalists asking them to downplay the marker of 2000 dead: ‘When you report on the events, take a moment to think about the effects on the families and those serving in Iraq. The 2000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives.’
I heard that 65 per cent of Americans now believed that the Iraq war was based on falsified information; only 42 per cent considered the President ‘honest and ethical’ and only 29 per cent considered Dick Cheney ‘honest and ethical’.
I heard the President say: ‘Anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. The stakes in the global War on Terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will.’
I heard Dick Cheney say: ‘The suggestion that’s been made by some US senators that the President of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.’
A few days later, I heard Dick Cheney complain that the ‘liberal’ media had distorted his remarks. As evidence, I heard him cite a headline that read: ‘Cheney says war critics “dishonest, reprehensible”.’ Then, in the same speech, I heard him say: ‘I will again say it is dishonest and reprehensible. This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety.’
*
I heard Congressman John Murtha, Democrat from Pennsylvania, a marine colonel decorated in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and a prominent military hawk, with tears in his eyes call for the withdrawal of US troops within six months. I heard Scott McClellan say: ‘It is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing.’ I heard Congressman Geoff Davis, Republican from Kentucky, say: ‘Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, as well as Abu Musab al Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can’t do that there, so they’ve brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.’ I heard Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, Republican from Ohio, say: ‘Cowards cut and run. Marines never do.’
I heard the President say: ‘Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing US forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake. Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done.’
I heard that, at an extraordinary ‘meeting of reconciliation’, a hundred Shia, Sunni and Kurdish leaders had signed a statement demanding ‘a withdrawal of foreign troops on a specified timetable’.
I heard that their statement also said: ‘National resistance is a legitimate right of all nations.’
I heard Congresswoman Jean Schmidt say: ‘The big picture is that these Islamic insurgents want to destroy us. They don’t like us. They don’t like us because we’re black, we’re white, we’re Christian, we’re Jew, we’re educated, we’re free, we’re not Islamic. We can never be Islamic because we were not born Islamic. Now, this isn’t the Islamic citizens. These are the insurgents. And it is their desire for us to leave so they can take over the whole Middle East and then take over the world. And I didn’t learn this just in the last few weeks or the last few months. I learned this when I was at the University of Cincinnati in 1970, studying Middle Eastern history.’
*
I heard that, in Fallujah and elsewhere, the US had employed white phosphorus munitions, an incendiary device, known among soldiers as ‘Willie Pete’ or ‘shake and bake’, which is banned as a weapon by the Convention on Conventional Weapons. Similar to napalm, it leaves the victim horribly burned, often right through to the bone. I heard a State Department spokesman say: ‘US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.’ Then I heard him say that ‘US forces used white phosphorus rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.’ Then I heard a Pentagon spokesman say that the previous statements were based on ‘poor information’, and that ‘it was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.’ Then I heard the Pentagon say that white phosphorus was not an illegal weapon, because the US had never signed that provision of the Convention on Conventional Weapons.
I heard that US troops had accidentally come across an Interior Ministry bunker in Baghdad with more than 170 Sunni prisoners who had been captured by Shia paramilitary groups and tortured, some with electric drills. I heard Hussein Kamal, the deputy interior minister, say: ‘One or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies.’ I heard a State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, say: ‘We don’t practise torture. And we don’t believe that others should practise torture.’
I heard that the Senate, after an hour of debate, voted to deny habeas corpus protection to prisoners in Guantanamo. The last time the US suspended the right to trial was during the Civil War.
I heard that a human rights organisation, Christian Peacemaker Teams, was distributing a questionnaire to inmates released from Iraqi prisons. Those surveyed were asked to check ‘yes’ or ‘no’ after each question:
Stripped of your clothing (nude)?
Beaten by hand (punches)?
Beaten by stick or rod?
Beaten by cables, wires or belts?
Held at gunpoint?
Hooded?
Had cold water poured on you?
Had a rope tied to your genitalia?
Called names, insults?
Threatened or touched by dogs?
Dragged by rope or belt?
Denied prayer or wudhu [ablution]?
Forced to perform sexual acts?
Were you raped or sodomised?
Did someone improperly touch your genitalia?
Did you witness any sexual acts while in detention?
Did you witness any rapes of men, women or children?
Urinated on or made to touch faeces, or had faeces thrown at you?
Denied sleep?
Denied food?
Witnessed any deaths?
Did you witness any torture or mistreatment to others?
Forced to wear woman’s clothes? [Question for men only]
Were you burned or exposed to extreme heat?
Exposed to severe cold?
Subjected to electric shock?
Forced to act like a dog?
Forced in uncomfortable positions for a
lengthy period of time?
Forced to stand or sit in a painful manner for lengthy periods of time?
Lose consciousness?
Forced to hit others?
Hung by feet?
Hung by hands or arms?
Threatened to have family killed?
Family members detained?
Witnessed family members tortured?
Forced to sign anything?
Photographed?
I heard a man who had been in Abu Ghraib prison say: ‘The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.’
*
I heard that the Lincoln Group, a public relations firm in Washington, had received $100 million from the Pentagon to promote the war. As well as bribing Iraqi journalists, often with monthly stipends, the Lincoln Group was writing its own articles and paying Iraqi newspapers to publish them. I heard that the articles, intending to have local appeal, had titles such as ‘The Sands Are Blowing toward a Democratic Iraq’ or ‘Iraqi Forces Capture al-Qaida Fighters Crawling like Dogs’. I heard a Pentagon spokesman, Major General Rick Lynch, say: ‘We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact, not based on fiction.’ I heard him quote the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri: ‘Remember, half the battle is the battlefield of the media.’
I heard that the average monthly war coverage on the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts, combined, had gone from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005.
I heard that 2110 US troops had died in Iraq and more than 15,881 had been wounded. Ninety-four per cent of those deaths had come after the ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, the first two sentences of which were: ‘Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of I
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By Melinda Liu
Newsweek
Dec. 22, 2005
Saddam Hussein’s top aides just released from prison may have stories to tell. But when it comes to Iraq, who should we trust? Dec. 22, 2005 - Shortly before the Iraq war began in March 2003, I didn’t believe Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash when she insisted, in an interview, that Saddam Hussein’s regime was not developing biological weapons. Dubbed by Washington “Mrs. Anthrax” or “Chemical Sally,” Ammash was then Iraq’s most powerful woman. She’d been accused by U.S. investigators of heading a program, into the mid-'90s, that involved the attempted weaponization of anthrax, smallpox and botulin toxin.
On Monday, her Baghdad lawyer confirmed that Ammash was one of around two dozen Saddam-era officials released from jail without charges. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad confirmed a number of so-called “high-value detainees” had been released because “they were not considered to be a security threat, and they were not wanted on charges under Iraqi law. So we no longer had any reason to continue detaining them.”
Ammash and another woman, Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha, a British-educated biological-weapons expert that American officials called “Dr. Germ,” were among Saddam’s most notorious scientists. They were believed to have run the Baathist regime’s biological-weapons programs. When Ammash was detained in early May 2003, I simply assumed she would go on trial for war crimes as one of the masterminds of a WMD program that was, after all, the reason why the U.S. and British governments had insisted on regime change in Baghdad.
When I interviewed Ammash, it was early March 2003 and Saddam was still in power. Ammash was tastefully dressed in Western clothes and jewelry—in contrast with the stern, headscarved image that later appeared as the Five of Hearts among the U.S.-issued deck of cards showing the 55 regime officials “most wanted” by the American-led Coalition. Ammash was the only woman in the deck, reflecting the fact that she was the only female on the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, Iraq’s top decision-making body.
During the interview, she declared: “To end one’s career in defense of Iraq is an honor.” Ammash laughed while recounting the anonymous phone calls that were bombarding her and other Saddam aides, urging them to defect and abandon the regime for the sake of their families. She said she’d received e-mails filled with computer viruses, as many as 18 in a single day. “It doesn’t fit the image of the U.S.,” she complained, evoking the notion that gentlemen don’t mess with a lady’s e-mail.
Articulate and well-mannered, Ammash had been educated in the United States; she received a masters from Texas Woman’s University in Denton and a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Missouri. She was said to have been a key figure in Saddam’s biotech and genetic research programs and to have been trained by Nassir al-Hindawi, the alleged father of Iraq’s biological weapons efforts. However Ammash told me her scientific work focused on the what she called the carcinogenic effects of depleted uranium, which had been present in some U.S. bombs and missiles during the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
Of course, I didn’t believe everything she said (and she probably didn’t believe I was a journalist acting in good faith, either). Although we talked for nearly two and a half hours over tea, this was hardly a normal interview. It was a chat on the eve of war. Ammash and I both knew that bombs would soon be falling on Baghdad and that Saddam’s regime was, most likely, in its last days.
One thing Ammash said did stick in my memory. She stressed that Iraqis remained fiercely proud of their civilization despite decades of violence and deprivation. “This country is Mesopotamia. Ninety-nine percent of the American people don’t know the country they’ll soon be bombing is Mesopotamia,” she said. “This nation has been serving civilization for 6,000 years. We invented the first alphabet … every American who enjoys education owes that to us.”
To be sure, the “Mesopotamia card” was part of a spiel that Saddam’s aides had propagated before the war in an effort to stir up international sympathies. But pride in their history is also one reason why even Iraqis who opposed Saddam remain so resentful of what they see as foreign occupation. When I was in Iraq on assignment for a couple of months this past summer, some Baghdad friends who’d welcomed the sight of American Marines in 2003 now nurtured a festering and deep-seated ambivalence about the U.S.-led occupation. Some said they actually preferred the yoke of an Iraqi autocrat such as Saddam to the rule of an American conqueror, even a benign one.
Today it’s obvious that many aspects of the U.S. presence in Iraq have been far from benign. When Ammash’s husband, Ahmed Makki Mohammed Saeed, told me in 2004 that he’d been “tortured” while being detained by U.S. authorities, I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. Revelations about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison had not yet surfaced. And his accounts sounded bizarre: being subjected to hours and hours of earsplitting American rap music laced with profanity and being doused with cold water, then forced to stand for hours in front of a freezing air-conditioner turned up full blast.
Still, the sheer weight of detail suggested to me that he wasn’t making it up. And subsequent tales of torture from other former detainees indicated that he might actually have been one of the luckier ones among them.
The Saddam-era officials who are now suddenly free will undoubtedly have their own stories to tell—assuming they feel safe enough to talk. (Some officials in the current Shiite-dominated government have already vowed to track them down.) Ammash’s husband earlier claimed that she had changed dramatically during detention. A petite woman to begin with, she’d lost nearly 20 pounds, and her once jet-black hair had turned white “nearly overnight,” he said. Her lawyer had argued for leniency on medical grounds because he said her detention brought on a recurrence of breast cancer.
A number of those freed were reported to have been flown out of Iraq aboard U.S. military aircraft out of concern that their lives are in danger. In addition to Ammash and Taha, the detainees released include former education minister Humam Abd al-Khaliq, whom United Nations weapons inspectors accused of trying to coverup Iraq’s nuclear weapons program before the 1991 war; Hossam Mohammed Amin, who’d headed the weapons inspections directorate, and Aseel Tabra, a former Iraqi Olympic Committee official and secretary to Saddam’s late son Uday.
Why now? In the wake of Iraq’s elections, U.S. officials hope to indicate to hard-line Sunnis and some former Saddam loyalists that they too have a stake in the new Iraq. Sunni insurgents often have demanded prisoner releases as a condition for ending their violent rebellion. A particularly ruthless group of Sunni kidnappers specifically demanded that Iraqi women detainees—Ammash and Taha key among them—be freed last year after Briton Kenneth Bigley was taken hostage. He was killed in September 2004 after the kidnappers’ deadline passed.
It’ll take more than a few prisoner releases to convince Sunni insurgents to lay down their arms. On Monday, an extremist group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq posted video on a Web site purporting to show a man being shot in the back of the head. It was impossible to identify the victim, though the video also showed an identity card belonging to American contractor Ronald Allen Schulz. Eleven days earlier, the group had claimed to have killed Shultz.
The timing of the gestures of leniency also came just a few days after President George W. Bush conceded that 2003 intelligence reports on Iraq’s purported WMD programs were flawed. Now we’re being told by media quoting a former Western arms inspector, that Ammash was cooperative in detention and provided U.S. interrogators with credible evidence that Saddam did not have an active WMD program before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. When Saddam was still in power, most of us journalists reporting in Iraq simply assumed it was impossible to get a straight story out of his officials. Now we know Saddam’s aides weren’t the only ones spinning the truth. It’s hard to know what to believe any more. |
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By Pepe Escobar
Dec 23, 2005
Asia Times
Iraq is a giant, messy albatross hanging from President George W Bush's neck. The faith-based American president believes "we are winning the war in Iraq". The reality-based global public opinion - not to mention 59% of Americans, and counting - know this is not true.
Bush felt that "God put me here" so he could conduct a "war on terror". Somebody up there must have a tremendous sense of humor - once again manifested in the way He allotted winners and losers in Iraq's December 15 parliamentary elections. United we stand
The Shi'ite religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) were the big winners - from 70% to 95% of the vote in the impoverished southern provinces; 59% in Baghdad; and nationally, well over 40% of the total (they've won in nine of Iraq's 18 provinces plus the capital). It's a relatively unexpected success considering the dreadful record of Ibrahim Jaafari's Shi'ite-dominated government.
All those intimately allied with the US invasion and occupation were big losers. The Iraqi National List of US intelligence asset and former prime minister Iyad Allawi, also known as "Saddam without a moustache", the man who endorsed the Pentagon bombing of the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf and Sunni Arab Fallujah - got a pitiful 14%.
Convicted fraudster and former Pentagon ally Ahmad Chalabi received less than 1% in Baghdad. The neo-conservatives of the American Enterprise Institute were predicting 5% for Chalabi (their overwhelming favorite) and 20% for Allawi; that's proof enough they have no clue about what's going on in Iraq.
Bush's new Iraq is pro-Iran. It will not recognize Israel. And it wants the Americans out; one of the first measures of an emerging, powerful parliamentary alliance between roughly 38 Sadrists of Shi'ite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and roughly 50 Sunni Arabs will be to call for an immediate end of the occupation.
The details to be ironed out hinge on whether the UIA majority aligns itself with the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, or with both in a government of "national unity" - as it is being called by the current vice president Abdel Mahdi (a free marketer) as well as current president Jalal Talabani, a Kurd.
"National unity" is improbable; the Shi'ites simply won't forgo their majority. The Kurds for their part know it will be a foolish move to try to break their strategic alliance with the UIA. Sunni Arab votes were split between the neo-Ba'athist National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak and the Islamist, Sunni National Accord Front of Adnan Dulaimi. But what matters is that they are both part of the Sunni Arab resistance. Their common line is that their presence in parliament develops a new political front - what we have called the Sinn Fein component of the Sunni Arab resistance.
It never happened
The big problem is that once again in Iraq Shi'ites voted for Shi'ites, Sunnis for Sunnis (they won in four provinces, Anbar, Salahuddin, Nineveh and Diyala, but got only 20% in Baghdad) and Kurds for Kurds (they also won in four provinces, including Kirkuk). Liberal democrats who were dreaming of a democratic, federal, anti-sectarian Iraq have been totally sidelined. Arguably no politician in Iraq is thinking about the future of the country as a whole. No national projects are being discussed.
The constitutional vote in October had already institutionalized the sectarian division - 80% of the Sunni Arabs in the four main Sunni provinces voted against what they saw as an American-designed charter. Washington believed the vote would undermine the resistance. The exact opposite happened. The December elections now paint a vivid picture of a country fractured on sectarian lines. But this is what the Americans wanted in the first place.
Elections or no elections, Iraq enters 2006 mired in the same, usual, gruesome rituals. The Pentagon believes it can subdue the Sunni Arab resistance by bombing them to death while the resistance keeps bombing, suicide bombing and assassinating en masse.
So the endless, gory stream will continue, not even making headlines - explosions at police stations, assassinations of "Baghdad officials", executions of collaborators, mortars over the Green Zone, scores of innocent civilian victims of car bombings, Marines killed in the Sunni triangle, Shi'ite death squads, Turkmen fighting Kurd for Kirkuk ...
Playwright Harold Pinter pulled a Beckett at his Nobel lecture. He offered to be Bush's speechwriter. Then Pinter impersonated classic Bush: "My God is good. [Osama] bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam Hussein's God was bad except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians." And this was even before Bush mixed up Saddam with bin Laden in a "we're winning in Iraq" speech.
Pinter observed, "The United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of World War II." He gave a lot of examples. But then, with devastating irony (a concept seemingly absent from the White House/Pentagon axis), he said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
Just like the suffering of Iraqis never happened. Robert Fisk, in his masterful The Great War for Civilization (Fourth Estate, London) remarks, "The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost 13 years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures ... When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were 'ghosted' out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was freedom'."
But Iraqis as a whole have not forgotten the sanctions - imposed by the US, carried out by the "international community" and responsible for the death of thousands of children. As much as the Shi'ites have not forgotten their betrayal by George Bush senior, who called for a Shi'ite uprising in early 1991 and then left thousands of men, women and children to be massacred by Saddam's gunships. There's no way these impoverished masses can trust anything related to American promises of "freedom".
How Bush is winning
There's some evidence that the murderous chaos unleashed by Shi'ite death squads may not be "an accident" but part of a carefully crafted American strategy, as the Bush administration has constantly added fire to the ethnic furnace as the best diversion to not address Iraq's tremendous social tensions.
An atomized and terrorized society is much easier to manipulate, while at the same time the non-stop bloodshed is the perfect justification for "staying the course". The incessant chatter in the US about a partial "withdrawal" is just chatter.
Already in June 2003, proconsul L Paul Bremer's coalition hands were hiring Saddam's Mukhabarat pals for "special ops" against the Sunni Arab resistance, while "torture central", Abu Ghraib, was again operating in full force under American management.
In the Shi'ite south, the Badr Organization - the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's (SCIRI's) militia - as well as Muqtadar's Mahdi Army were gaining ground. The Badr was finally formally incorporated into the Interior Ministry, where Sunni units had also been carving up their own turf (under the protection of Allawi).
The former Ba'athist Sunnis - and later the Shi'ites - benefited from the invaluable knowledge of American "counter-insurgency" experts who organized death squads in Colombia and El Salvador, as well as retired American Special Forces soldiers. Commandos operating in the "Salvador option" manner have been very much in the cards from the beginning, responding to a sophisticated, state-of-the-art command, control and communications center even while the majority of the Iraqi population had no electricity, no fuel and no medicine.
The pattern was and remains the same; people "disappearing" after they are accosted by groups of men armed to the teeth, in police commando uniforms, with high-tech radios and driving Toyota Land Cruisers with police license plates. Needless to say, the resulting murders are almost never investigated.
The objectives, from the point of view of the Bush administration, also remain the same; keep the Pentagon and its military bases inside an Iraq mired in sectarian bloodshed and with a weak central government.
The "follow the money" trail leads to an array of profitable privatizations, and the upcoming sale of Iraq's fabulous oil reserves to a few, select foreign investors. Abdel Mahdi of SCIRI, one year ago in Washington, had already laid down the script. He is a key player to watch.
No wonder that the real composition of the next Iraqi government will not be determined by the polls - at least not exclusively. The real kingmaker is the US ambassador, the White House pet, Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad.
The Bush administration will pull no punches to safeguard its "follow the money" interests, as well as its precious military bases. Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Baghdad on December 18, only three days after the election. He didn't even bother to tell Jaafari that he was in the country. First Cheney talked to Khalilzad and assorted American generals, and only then were Jaafari and President Talabani summoned to his presence.
How Bush lost it
The uprising of Muqtadar's Mahdi Army in 2004 was the definitive nail in the coffin of the Bush administration's dream of ruling Iraq. At the time the Pentagon repeatedly said it wanted to "kill or capture him". It did neither.
Muqtada became the man to watch much earlier than his newfound - by American corporate media - prominent role in post-election Iraq. After the bombing of Najaf, the Bush administration completely lost the plot. Then, after the January 2005 elections, the new Jaafari government quickly embraced Iran, received a pledge of $1 billion in aid, the use of Iranian port facilities, and help with refining Iraqi oil.
Sunni Arab regimes like Jordan and Saudi Arabia started to be haunted by the specter of a "Shi'ite crescent". A neo-conservative Iraq as a base to launch an attack on Iran disappeared as a mirage in the desert. As the US has to fight a relentless Sunni Arab guerrilla war, it cannot possibly risk alienating the Iraqi Shi'ite masses (more than they already are) with an attack on Iran.
No wonder military historian Martin van Creveld, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the only non-American author on the Pentagon's list of required reading for officers, called for Bush to be impeached and put on trial "for misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them".
Bush and his faithful ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have been playing the same scratched CD track: "We're better off now without Saddam." That is not true. The fall of Saddam led to the rise of al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers; and even Allawi admitted that human rights in Iraq now are no better than under Saddam. Not to mention that there is no reconstruction, unemployment is at 70%, and a country which in the late 1980s had one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world has been razed to a sub-Saharan level.
Whatever the Americans do - with "Iraqification" doomed to failure, as much as "Vietnamization" - the war in Iraq now is a rampaging beast that threatens to spill all over the Middle East.
"Bring 'em on," said Bush, and they did; the result is a new, deadly generation of global jihadis. Sunni-Shi'ite antagonism will spill over to oil-rich Sunni Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) with huge but heavily marginalized Shi'ite populations. Kurdish separatist dreams have tremendous implications for Turkey, Syria and Iran, especially if Iraq, through civil war, finally disintegrates.
So the most probable scenario for 2006 and beyond is a fragile central government in Baghdad bombarded by an intractable guerrilla movement - a chaotic and sectarian hornets' nest breeding one, 10, 100 mini (or maxi) al-Qaeda leaders able to convulse the Middle East. Maybe this is what the neo-cons meant by "creative destruction".
Al-Qaeda has a masterplan for the Middle East, and the next stages - apart from the Gulf emirates - are to be played in vulnerable Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and even Israel. As for the air war against the Sunni Arab resistance, it may buy a few votes at home but will do absolutely nothing to improve America's dreadful image in the Middle East - especially because civilian "collateral damage" will be enormous.
That bearded, vociferous guy
Saddam's trial - the outcome of which is already determined - will proceed as a purely sectarian propaganda coup. If this were a real trial, Saddam would be in The Hague in front of an international panel of respected judges, experts in human rights law.
Or the United Nations would have been commissioned to organize a special tribunal in a neutral country like Switzerland. Saddam's secrets, though, are so vast - and so extremely embarrassing for the US - that he cannot possibly leave the Green Zone, where he will certainly be executed. Saddam's trial will become the sorry mirror image of the sectarian politics let loose in Iraq at large.
Bush has opened a Pandora's box with his shock and awe tactics. The ultimate quagmire will keep mutating and unleashing its deadly new powers for years on end. And there is nothing anyone - not even the "indispensable nation" - can do about it. We have all been, and will remain, shocked and awed.
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B11608 / Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:14:27
This is from Saddam’s trial:
[Three witnesses testified on Thursday but, like others, said nothing directly implicating either Saddam or the other defendants in the Dujail killings.
One recalled the abuse he saw in Abu Ghraib prison.
“The beating was continuous,” he said. “They would take a group into the hallway, the guards would hit them with cables and ask the group to crawl. The women would watch this and scream because their kids were being hit.”]
So abuse at Abu Ghraib is used as evidence to convict Saddam; yet the abuse at Abu Ghraib under our watch is just the work of a few peon soldiers….. hmmm… |
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Monday Dec 26 10:38 AEDT
(Photo: AAP)
The top US military commander admitted Sunday that Iraqis wanted US and other foreign troops to leave the country "as soon as possible," and said US troop levels in Iraq were now being re-assessed on a monthly basis.
The admission by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Marine General Peter Pace followed a decision by the Pentagon to reduce the current level of 160,000 soldiers in Iraq by two army brigades, which amounts to about 7,000 soldiers.
" Understandably, Iraqis themselves would prefer to have coalition forces leave their country as soon as possible," Pace said in a Christmas Day interview on Fox News Sunday. "They don't want us to leave tomorrow, but they do want us to leave as soon as possible." Some US foreign policy experts have expressed concern that a new Iraqi government emerging from the December 15 parliamentary elections could ask American troops to leave, but officials have dismissed that forecast as unrealistic.
However, an opinion survey conducted in Iraq in October and November by ABC News and a pool of other US and foreign media outlets showed that despite some improvements in security and living standards, US military operations in the country were increasingly unpopular.
Two-thirds of those polled said they opposed the presence of US and coalition forces in Iraq, up 14 points from a similar survey taken in February 2004.
Nearly 60 percent disapproved of the way the United States has operated in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, with most of those expressing "strong disapproval," the poll found.
When asked to suggest a timing for the US pullout, 26 percent said US and other coalition forces should "leave now," while 19 percent opted for a withdrawal after the Iraqis formed a new government based on the results on the December 15 election.
Among those who support a delayed pullout, 31 percent said it should happen after security is fully restored, while 16 percent favored waiting until Iraqi security forces can operate independently, according to the survey.
Pace denied the US Defense Department had prepared a plan that calls for bringing the US troop level in Iraq below 100,000 by the end of next year.
But he said force requirements in Iraq are being regularly assessed by the top US military commander there, General George Casey.
"They do a very, very thorough analysis, literally once a month, in great detail," Pace said. "They then determine how many troops they need to get the job done."
But the chairman warned that "the enemy has a vote" in how fast US troops were being drawn down, and if attacks intensified, "you could see troop levels go up a little bit to handle that problem."
Two US soldiers were killed in Baghdad on Christmas Day by roadside bombs, the military announced.
In a move largely interpreted as the beginning of a gradual drawdown of US forces in Iraq, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced last week that one infantry brigade from Fort Riley, Kansas, and one mechanised brigade from Germany will not be sent to Iraq as initially planned.
The decision will reduce the number of US combat brigades in Iraq from 17 to 15.
Meanwhile former secretary of state Colin Powell, who headed the joint staff during the 1991 Gulf War, said Sunday he was certain there would be fewer US troops in Iraq a year from now.
"I don't think we can sustain this level of presence with the force size that we have," he said on ABC's "This Week" program.
To maintain the pre-election "baseline" of 138,000 troops in Iraq, the US military will have to dramatically overhaul rules governing deployments of the National Guard, whose members make up to 40 percent of the contingent.
Such an undertaking could be politically unrealistic, according to members of congress. |
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Jamie Wilson in Washington
Saturday December 24, 2005
The Guardian
“In Iraq they have had to make do with Christian hip-hop bands and sometime pop singer and reality TV star Jessica Simpson.” During world war two American troops away from home for Christmas were entertained by Marlene Dietrich, Bing Crosby and the Marx Brothers. Even in Vietnam Bob Hope was guaranteed to put in an appearance. But soldiers in Iraq are more likely to get a show from a Christian hip-hop group, a country singer you have probably never heard of and two cheerleaders for the Dallas Cowboys.
Just as the seemingly intractable nature of the war has led to a growing recruitment crisis, so the United Services Organisation, which has been putting on shows for the troops since the second world war, is struggling to get celebrities to sign up for even a short tour of duty.
It is a far cry from the days following the September 11 2001 attacks, when some of the biggest names in show business, from Jennifer Lopez to Brad Pitt, rallied to the cause. "After 9/11 we couldn't have had enough airplanes for the people who were volunteering to go," Wayne Newton, the Las Vegas crooner who succeeded Bob Hope as head of USO's talent recruiting effort, told USA Today. "Now with 9/11 being as far removed as it is, the war being up one day and down the next, it becomes increasingly difficult to get people to go."
Newton said many celebrities have been wary of going because they think it might be seen that they are endorsing the war. "And I say it's not. I tell them these men and women are over there because our country sent them, and we have the absolute necessity to try to bring them as much happiness as we can."
Fear is also a factor. "They're scared," country singer Craig Morton, who is in Iraq on the USO's Hope and Freedom Tour 2005, told USA Today. "It's understandable. It's not a safe and fun place and a lot of people don't want to take the chance."
The USO was founded in 1941 as a way of boosting morale for the military. For most of that time Bob Hope, who made his first appearance in 1942 and his last in 1990, was its most recognisable face, famed for putting on Christmas extravaganzas on aircraft carriers and American bases during the Vietnam war. Thousands of performers signed up to play the "foxhole circuit" during the second world war, but the USO has a much smaller list.
Some of the entertainers still willing to travel are die-hard true believers - rock musician Ted Nugent carried a Glock handgun to shows in Iraq last year and said in a radio interview that he manned a machine gun on a Humvee. But many of the USO's regular performers are fierce critics of the war, among them the comic and star of Good Morning Vietnam, Robin Williams, who told USA Today he would like to return to the Middle East in the spring for what would be his fourth tour since 2002. "I'm there for the [troops], not for W," he said in a reference to the president. "Go, man. You won't forget it. You'll meet amazing people," is his message to stars that ask him about the tours. But the comedian said he mostly tries to keep politics out of the show after he did a few jokes about Bush's brainpower at a base in 2003 and got a chilly reception.
Other critics of the war who regularly perform include the leftwing comedian Al Franken (who is headlining the current tour along with Christian hip-hop group Souljahz) and the punk legend and actor Henry Rollins, one of the Bush administrations most vocal critics.
The tradition of beautiful women thrilling the troops has continued - although while Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell showed up in Korea and Vietnam could boast Raquel Welch, in Iraq they have had to make do with sometime pop singer and reality TV star Jessica Simpson. |
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12/25/2005
The U.S. congress approved Friday the transfer of 600 million dollar in aid to Israel for joint defense projects, in addition to aid Israel already receives from America, Haaretz Daily reported.
The aid approved will be used to fund joint security projects between Israel and the U.S, according to media reports.
The main component in the package, according to the Jerusalem Post, is the Arrow anti-missile system, a collaborative project between Israel Aircraft Industries and Boeing.
Congress provided 133 million dollars for the arrow, 45 million more than what the U.S. government requested for this project, so that the extra money be used to increase the pace of the production of the Arrow components in the U.S, and thus enable Israel complete its anti-missile shield. Also some $10 million will be invested in developing a missile capable of intercepting short-range missiles.
It was reported earlier this month that Israel successfully tested its Arrow anti-missile system, in response to what the Defense Ministry officials described as the mounting threat of ballistic missiles in the region.
The 600 million dollar aid package also includes funding armor tiling for Bradley personnel carriers, for aircraft decoy systems and for the Hunter and Pioneer unmanned air vehicles, the Post stated.
"Congress is continuing its strong support for cutting-edge defense programs, which benefit the United States and Israel and strengthen their strategic partnership," said Josh Block, spokesman for AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobby, which accelerated the approval of the package. |
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SOTT
Hypothetical Newsdesk
After carrying out preliminary scans, Israeli doctors who had been planning a " minor heart operation" on Israeli PM Sharon have cancelled the operation.
"We conducted a routine pre-operation X-Ray and, to our surprise, we found that the Prime Minister doesn't actually have a heart", one of the doctors stated.
The discovery would seem to explain Sharon's ability to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women and children over the past 50 years without feeling any apparent empathy or remorse - emotions usually associated with the human heart.
"Everyone thought that the nickname 'the bulldozer' was just a reference to his aggressiveness, but it seems now that it was more of a literal description, the guy is more machine than man" one Israeli government insider, who wished to remain anonymous, said. |
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Joint Statement, ECCP, 21 December 2005
European organisations today defied the refusal of EU Ministers to publish a report compiled by their own diplomats regarding Israeli violations of international law with regard to East Jerusalem. Over 30 Jewish, Palestinian, peace and anti-poverty groups from around Europe will publish the suppressed Report on their websites.
The report, which states that "Israel's activities in Jerusalem are in violation of both its Roadmap obligations and international law" was shelved by EU foreign ministers at their 12 December Foreign Affairs (GAERC) meeting in Brussels, for fear of alienating Israel and reducing the EU's influence. Yet, protesting groups point out, only one day after the report's suppression, Israel announced the building of 300 new homes in the Maale Adumim settlement, the largest in the occupied territories, in violation of the Road Map and international law.
Pierre Galand, Senator in the Belgian Parliament and Chair of the European Co-ordinating Committee on Palestine (ECCP) said: "European diplomats had the courage to stress the alarming situation in East Jerusalem. In order to force the EU member states to respect their own commitment to International Law and Human Rights, we will publish the report on East Jerusalem on our websites, despite the EU refusal to do so."
Dan Judelson, Secretary of European Jews for a Just Peace said "The EU are burying their heads in the sand and are thus co-responsible while East Jerusalem residents face repeated violations of international law and of simple standards of humanity, all at the hands of the Israeli state. If the EU sits on this report, we see it as our duty to make it as widely available as we can."
Nick Dearden, Senior Campaigns Officer at War on Want said: "The desperation of Palestinians across the West Bank now threatens those who live in East Jerusalem, as Israel inflames and intensifies its Occupation. By suppressing the truth, which their own diplomats have made clear to them, European governments have sent a clear message to Israel that its aggression will be met only with silence."
More Information
# Pierre Galand, Tel. 32 2 223 07 56, Email: eccp@skynet.be, Chairman, European Co-ordinating Committee of NGOs on the question of Palestine; Dan Judelson, 44 (0) 779 339 2820, Secretary, European Jews for a Just Peace; Nick Dearden, War on Want, Tel. 44 (0) 7932 335464.
This statement is supported by: Alternative Information Centre, Bethlehem & Jerusalem; Arab Media Watch, UK; Association Belgo-Palestinienne; AIPPP Strasbourg; BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, Bethlehem; Civimed Initiatives, Strasbourg; Collectif judeo-arabe et citoyen pour la paix, Strasbourg; Committee for a Just Peace in the Middle East, Luxembourg; Coordination de l'Appel de Strasbourg; Een Ander Joods Geluid, Netherlands; Farrah France; Friends of Sabeel-UK; Humanistic Peace Council, Netherlands; ISM London; Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Israel; Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-UK; Jews for Israeli Palestinian Peace, Sweden; Jews for Justice for Palestinians, UK; Judische Stimme fuer gerechten Frieden in Nahost, Berlin; Just Peace UK; Netherlands Palestine Committee; Network of Jews against the Occupation, Italy; NUS Black Students' Campaign, UK; Palestine Forum in Britain; Palestine Solidarity Campaign, UK; Society for Austrian Arab Relations, Austria; Stop the Occupation, Netherlands; Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix; Union des Progresssite Juifs de Belgiques; War on Want, UK; and Women in Black, The Netherlands. |
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By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 25, 2005; Page A09
At Issue Is New Stance on Tehran's Nuclear Program
After years of unwavering support for the Bush administration, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC has begun to sharply criticize the White House over its handling of Iran's nuclear program.
In lengthy news releases and talking points circulated to supporters on Capitol Hill, AIPAC describes the Bush administration's recent policy decisions on Iran as "dangerous," "disturbing" and "inappropriate." One background paper suggests that White House policies are actually helping Iran -- a sworn enemy of the Jewish state -- to acquire nuclear weapons.The tough words from one of Washington's most well-connected and influential lobbies come at a difficult time for President Bush, who has been struggling with low poll numbers and growing public discontent over the war in Iraq.
Bush raised AIPAC's concerns in a recent telephone conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair when the two discussed Iran, U.S. officials said.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has tussled with past administrations -- Democratic and Republican -- but not with Bush, who has staked his presidency on a vow to bring democracy to a region dominated by Israel's enemies -- chiefly Iran, Iraq and Syria.
At issue for AIPAC is Bush's decision last month to hold off on pushing to report Iran's nuclear case to the U.N. Security Council. The president and Israel have favored reporting it for the past two years. But with little support from other key U.S. allies, Bush reversed course and endorsed a Russian offer that would allow Iran to conduct some, but not all, of the nuclear work it says it needs for an indigenous nuclear energy program.
Iran has not been receptive to the Russian offer. Iranian diplomats met with their European counterparts in Vienna on Wednesday to discuss the offer. Diplomats said there were no breakthroughs, but the parties agreed to meet again in January.
If Iran accepts the terms, it would be allowed to produce unlimited quantities of converted uranium. That material would be shipped to Russia for enrichment and then returned to Iran to fuel a nuclear power reactor.
In a statement to members of Congress, AIPAC said that it "is concerned that the decision not to go to the Security Council, combined with the U.S. decision to support the 'Russian proposal,' indicates a disturbing shift in the Administration's policy on Iran and poses a danger to the U.S. and our allies."
National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said he hopes the plan "may provide a way out" of a two-year crisis over a nuclear program that Iran says is peaceful but was secretly built over 18 years.
Critics of the Russian plan, including some inside the administration, argue that it would allow Iran to master a critical component that could be diverted for atomic weapons work. Converted uranium, if enriched to bomb-grade, can be used for the core of a nuclear device.
U.N. nuclear inspectors are on the third year of an investigation of Iran's nuclear program. They have not found proof of a weapons program, but mounting evidence suggests that the Iranians have spent the past two decades acquiring the knowledge and technology that could be used to build an atomic bomb.
"This decision will facilitate Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and undermines international efforts to stop Iran from achieving such a capability," AIPAC told supporters and policymakers in a paper circulated after Thanksgiving. The position paper urged the Bush administration to work quickly toward reporting Iran's case to the Security Council, where it could face sanctions or an oil embargo.
AIPAC, which describes itself as nonpartisan, has criticized nearly every administration's Middle East policies, often speaking out when Israeli government officials express private frustration with U.S. policies.
But the news releases mark the first major criticism of the Bush White House and come as the administration is focused on problems in Iraq and has no clear path on Iran.
At the same time, Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has become increasingly hostile toward Israel. In October, two months after he took office, Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be "wiped off the map." Earlier this month, he told Iranians in a nationally televised speech that the murder of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II is "a myth."
"AIPAC is taking the public statements seriously. They're alarmed by a nuclear capability, and the administration appears to be adopting an approach that isn't changing Iranian behavior," said Dennis Ross, a U.S. envoy to the Middle East during the Clinton administration.
Ross said the criticisms, though serious, are unlikely to lead to an all-out rift between AIPAC and the administration. "At the end of the day, every administration does what it needs to do, but obviously they will have to pay attention to this," he said. |
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Jürgen Gottschlich, Der Spiegel
December 23, 2005
Are the USA planing a rocket attack against targets in Iran? In secret discussions Washington was preparing the Allies for appropriate air strikes in 2006, agencies disclosed to day. Especially in the NATO country Turkey, speculations about an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities are taking place.
Istanbul/Berlin - The News exploded like a Bomb in the tranquil prechristmas mood. Washington was preparing close allies for air strikes against Iran. This was disseminated today by the German Depeschenservice in a text by the former "FAZ" editor - Head and Secret Service Expert Udo Ulfkotte - however substantial doubts on this matter are certainly justified. As source given by the not undoubted journalist Ulfkotte "Western security circles" without naming specifics. According to his statements, CIA-Chief Porter Goss in the Turkish Capital Ankara asked M.P. Recep Tayyip Erdogan to support the air strikes against Iranian Nuclear and Military Installations especially with uninhibited exchange of secret information. At the present plan the attacks were planned for 2006.
In recent weeks The governments of Saudi-Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Pakistan have been informed about the implementations of military plans. The air strikes were described as "possible option" a specific point in time was however, not mentioned.
CIA Chief Gloss was now to have provided the Turkish Security Administration in Ankara with three information packages, one of which supposedly includes that Teheran cooperate with the terror organization Al-Qaida. A further transferred info pertains to the progress of the Iranian nuclear Armament, it was said. According to statements from German security agencies, in Ankara Goss assured the Turkish Government they would be informed a few hours before the possible Air Strike and to give Turkey already the green light for this particular day to attack depots of the separatist PKK on Iranian territory - a curious "Green Light" however, because the PKK does not maintain any military bases, but operates primarily in North Iraq.
The possible critical move in that situation - DDP reports - dependent mainly on the latest antisemitic outbursts of the Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinedschad, whose scathing verbal attacks against Israel, prompted the American governments stronger impression, that Teheran would not yield in the nuclear - disagreement and were stalling for time. The News Agency cited a high ranking German Military official, anonymously: " I would not surprise me, if the Americans in short would not capitalize on the opportunity delivered by Teheran. The Americans would have to Attack Iran, before they have developed nuclear weapons. Afterwards it would be too late.
If US plans for attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities exist, or how detailed they are is hard to estimate. Last the American discovery annalist Seymour Hersh, reported about this in January 2005 in the "New Yorker" that secret US Commando Groups were active in marking military targets.
The Bush Government did not deny Hersh's report at that time. They only played it down: The article was full of "false statements" it was said in Washington. That the central issue in the report were false, was not disputed. Bush himself added explicitly, he didn't want to exclude the "War" option.
Air attack after New year?
Is a military action, possibly a war in the region about to happen? In Berlin the subject is moderated down. During the visit of defense minister Franz Josef Jung with Donald Rumsfeld this week in Washington, the possible Air Attack by the US on Iran did not come up as "a subject", a speaker for SPIEGEL ONLINE said.
However, the speculation on US attacks against Iran refers primarily to happenings in Turkey. Last week there was actually a mighty assembly of high ranking Security Personnel from the USA and from NATO in Ankara. Within a couple of days there was first the Chief of the FBI, then the Chief of the CIA and last the Secretary General Scheffer in Turkey. After her visit in Germany Coondoleezza Rize travelled to Turkey, too.
In fact Turkey's newspapers in connection with these visits have speculated too, that an attack on Iran was being prepared. But the assumptions in Turkey were not based on hard facts. Following the meeting of Porter Goss with Tayyip Erdogan the leftist Cumhuriyet headlined: "Now its Iran's turn". Substantiations: None.
The Paper noted, however, that the meeting between the CIA-Chief and Erdogan lasted unusually over an hour, even though Goss met beforehand with the Chief of the Turkish Secret Service. Because of that the Turkish public deduced that it had to be something very important - detailed facts: Wrong conclusion. Just about all media speculates over the possibility that Erdogan and Goss could have discussed a mutual action against the PKK in North Iraq. Possibly that Goss requested in exchange requested Turkish secret service photographs. A possible Air Attack on Iran would certainly not be staged from the Turkish base Incirlik, it is of course plausible that the USA informed Turkey, to test their reaction.
Ankara is skeptical. In the past the government in Ankara was skeptical concerning military actions by the USA to the point of directly opposed. An offensive by US ground troops in Northern Iraq against Saddam's Regime was even prevented by Ankara in 2003 - the lack of this second front was blamed by Donald Rumsfield over and over for military problems in Iraq.
Now the Turkish commander in chief and the probable future chief of staff Yasar Buyukanit both spent two weeks in Washington. Afterwards he commented that the relationship between the Turkish Army and the US Army were again excellent. This is therefore remarkable, because Buyukanit is one of the Hawks in the fight against the PKK and in the past had already considered, to himself march into North Iraq - in case the USA and the North Iraqi Kurds would not prevent the PKK from staging attacks against Turkey.
The Turkish - Iranian relations have been chilled for a long time. Teheran criticizes for years, that Turkey has good relations with Israel and is even cooperating with the Israeli Military. About the anti Israeli transgressions by Ahmadinedschad, Turkey was still not bombarded by the news media as it was the case in Germany - they just shook their head (shrugged their shoulder).
MP Erdogan has, however, just recently called his Israeli college Aril Sharon and congratulated him to his recovery - The long rather withheld contact by Erdogan with Sharon has in recently become much closer. Sharon had recently declared, if in doubt, he would go combat those in-love-with-nuclear Mullahs alone.
In spite of that The Turkish government spoke repeatedly against military action against Iran and Syria. Because at least with respect to the Kurdish question Turkey Syria and Iran are united, that there may not be an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq. An alliance concerning these interests does not seem to exist between Washington and Ankara. However, if the USA plans a missile attack against Iran, Turkey must come aboard - active or passive.
But Erdogan and his military harbor the worst fear for the whole region, in case the USA would actually go against Iran. Western experts, too, consider the success of a military action against nuclear installations in Iran in no way guaranteed. Just the opposite: An attack would probably miss its aim to stop the nuclear program and provide Ahmadinedschad with even more supporters. |
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12/26/2005
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the army to establish a no-go zone for Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip, BBC reported.
Sharon gave the order at a meeting with cabinet colleagues and security officials.
Israeli radio reported that the prime minister said he decided on an "energetic response" to stop Palestinian fighters from firing rockets.
"We must make sure that [Palestinian militants] won't act against us, this is my policy and my instructions," SHARON was quoted as saying.
The Palestinian resistance says the rockets are to avenge Israeli raids and targeted killings in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Under the new measure, Israeli occupation soldiers at the border will shoot at any Palestinian entering the no-go zone.
Reports say the zone would be about 2.5km deep and run along the northern and eastern edge of the Gaza Strip. However, Israeli officials claim that there are no plans to re-occupy the territory it left earlier this year after a 38-year occupation.
Palestinian officials rejected the Israeli operation.
Interior ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu-Khusah said the Palestinian Authority (PA) would "not yield to Israeli dictates and attempts to impose the zone by fire and bombardment", Palestinian radio reported.
Israel has stepped up its military operations in the West Bank since the Islamic Jihad resistance movement claimed responsibility for a bomb attack in the coastal city of Netanya earlier this month.
The cross-border violence soured any hopes that the so-called GAZA WITHDRAWAL could ease tensions in the region and pave the way for peace talks.
Another cycle of violence would be politically damaging to both Palestinian President MAHMOUD ABBAS and Israeli Prime Minister ARIEL SHARON.
ABBAS is struggling to instill order and heal rifts in his Fatah party ahead of a January legislative election in which Fatah faces a challenge from HAMAS, while SHARON is seeking re-election in March as head of a new centrist party he recently founded. |
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By Mike Odetalla
palestinechronicle.com
Palestinians in Bethlehem's refugee camps have lived in abject poverty ever since being expelled from their homes in 1948 during the creation of the state of Israel.
Today, ringed by Jewish settlements and the 30-foot high concrete wall that strangles Palestinian cities and villages, Bethlehem is virtually cut off from the rest of Palestine, its lands, water and other resources expropriated by Israel in a relentless effort to make life ever more unbearable for the Palestinians who call it home.
How fitting that the Virgin Mary, seeking refuge from the mighty Roman army and a safe place to give birth, came to this town.
Today, pregnant Palestinian women must endure the degrading Israeli checkpoints in order to reach a hospital. While the Virgin Mary found refuge in a humble stable, many contemporary mothers-to-be are forced to stand endless hours at checkpoints manned by teenage soldiers who couldn't care less about a woman in labor.
Many have given birth in taxis or in streets choked with dust in summer and swimming with mud in winter, waiting at checkpoints for a soldier to arbitrarily decide whether they "look pregnant or only fat." And many children and mothers have died when not allowed to pass in time.The birth of a human being is a momentous and joyous occasion for the parents, even those who suffer the pain and anxiety of checkpoint deliveries. Still, a growing number of Palestinian infants are named "Hajez" (from the Arabic for "checkpoint") as a bitter reminder of their birthplace.
I fail to grasp what benefit such inhumanity bestows upon the Jewish state. The bitter truth is that 2,000 years after Mary gave birth to Jesus under Roman occupation, Palestinian mothers in Bethlehem and elsewhere in occupied Palestine still seek safe refuge to deliver their infants.
So, when you hear O Little Town of Bethlehem this Christmas, pause to remember the Palestinians for whom this town is home. The Christian and Muslim children of Palestine will observe Christmas this year, but they will have little to celebrate behind the high concrete walls that imprison them.
Fear and hunger will keep them awake through the night, not the anticipation of gifts as in other lands. While the rest of the world celebrates, Bethlehem's children, like all Palestinian children, will pray for some brief respite from the fright of the killings, abuse and destruction that is life in Palestine.
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Posted: 26-12-2005 , 10:14 GMT
Israel's Ministry of Housing published on Monday tenders for 228 new housing units in the West Bank, 150 of which are for the West Bank settlement of Beitar Illit, outside of Jerusalem, while another 78 are to be built in the Efrat settlement.
The left-leaning Israeli political group, Peace Now, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of taking advantage of upcoming Israeli elections, scheduled for this March, to publishing the tenders.
"In the shadow of the elections," a statement from the group said, "Ariel Sharon is undertaking political hijacking and permitting the construction of hundreds of housing units in the (occupied) territories."
"The move is in clear violation of the Road Map (peace plan) and harms the interests of the State of Israel," the statement added. According to the group, 1,131 housing-unit tenders have been published since the beginning of 2005, 803 of which have been published since the decision of early elections was announced in Israel.
Last week, Peace Now revealed that Israel's Ministry of Housing had published 117 tenders for housing units in the Ariel settlement outside of Jerusalem, and another 20 in the Karnei Shomron settlement.
The group stated that "Sharon was adorning himself with the image of the Road Map, but in essence, he has yet to undertake the most basic of its demands: the cessation of settlement construction."
In March, the group claimed that the Israel Land Administration had announced that it would permit the Ariel settlement housing tenders after seven months in which no new housing tenders in the West Bank had been published. |
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By Jose Antonio Roman and Ciro Perez
La Journada
Translated by Carly Gatzert
December 20, 2005
New 'anti-immigrant' legislation being taken up in the U.S. Congress is the latest in a series of 'affronts and insults' from 'our northern neighbor.' According to this article from Mexico's La Jornada, the Vice President of the Mexican Senate believes, 'continuing to support this relationship of dependence on the U.S. will carry our nation to disaster.' The Mexican Senate urged Vicente Fox’s government to increase the pressure on the U.S. Senate to halt passage of anti-immigration legislation that plans to extend the wall along the border by at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] and designate undocumented workers as criminals.
Vice President of the Senate Board of Directors [Vice President of the Senate], Cesar Jauregui Robles, acknowledged that little can be done at the parliamentary level, which is why the Government should work on making improvements within Mexico by strengthening the national economy and creating more jobs while on the diplomatic front, the Foreign Secretary [Luis Ernesto Derbez] continues to work to halt [U.S. Congressmen] James Sensenbrenner’s initiative in the U.S. Senate.
In an interview, the National Action Party (PAN) Senator expressed regret over the position of the U.S. House of Representatives. “Not only have we failed to achieve understanding between our nations, but this bill assigns stigma and punishment to a sociological problem. This does not in the least help the relationship between neighbors. We must reexamine the ways in which Mexico has conducted this relationship (with the United States), because despite all of our efforts, we are in a more precarious situation now than we were six years ago.”
Considering the circumstances, Jauregui said that Mexico should seek to solve its problems internally because the alternative, continuing to support this relationship of dependence on the U.S. “will carry our nation to disaster. We should also look to the south, Asia, Europe, and other nations with whom we have better relations and who have not caused us to suffer daily affronts and insults, as our northern neighbor has.”
The PAN Party Senator said that the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. today is worse than it was five years ago, when the two countries spoke of joint investments, and bringing maquiladoras [export assembly plants] to the south of the country to help develop this region. “Today we see that nothing has come of this talk. These plans were merely pipe dreams. Instead we see the construction of walls that, as history suggests, are destined to collapse sooner or later.”
Meanwhile, the national head of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) claimed yesterday that the construction of a wall along the northern border is an act that defies the most basic principals and human rights, in addition to contradicting the free market philosophy that the U.S. promotes across the world.
“Just as the U.S. defends the free exchange of goods and money, a free economy should also be founded upon the uninhibited transit of human capital and the freedom to seek work opportunities. It is a contradiction to defend the free flow of goods and money, but at the same time deny people the right to work and the freedom to hire,” maintained PRI spokesman Eduardo Andrade. |
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Christmas Message From Buzzflash
25 Dec 2005
Does BuzzFlash Believe in God?
Yes, a God who manifests the divine in the good deeds and good will exchanged between people on a daily basis. In Judaism, there is an expression that it is the duty of a believer to engage in "tikkun olam," the healing of the world.
But our qualification is that those who defile the works of the divine by engaging in lying, killing, ill will, spiteful words, hate, bigotry, profiteering in death, corruption, arrogance, and the diminishment of the common good -- our qualification is that these people do the bidding of another master, a master who is at war with the revelation of the divine in the world; these people betray God.
That is because the revelation of the divine comes from those who would leave the world a better place than when they were born into it. Christmas is the holiday of the majority of Americans, it is true. And, as so, at it's best, it has become a symbol for the glory of the divine spark of life -- of the celebration of the warmth of friends and family.
As a nation, we are secular, although we are each entitled to our own faith, our own explanation of this great mystery called life.
Let us remember that there is no one religion -- and Christianity is a minority religion in the world.
Faith should make us better people, not more evil and hateful. It is a positive, affirming force for most Christians -- as the idea of God is for most people of other faiths. We just got the runt of the Christian litter running our country right now. They are the spokespeople for those who would battle the obligations of the divine in the name of God -- when they are doing the work of the devil.
So, to all our readers, we want to convey this. If our lives are manifestation of a divine force, than we bear responsibility for our lives and the good that we do, not God. It's our responsibility, not his or hers. And if we bear responsibility for our lives, then we are accountable for our behavior. And if we are accountable for our behavior, then we must live a life of good deeds, benevolence, love and peace.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanzaa -- and to all the other faiths of the world and your holiest days, we say remember this: the divine lives in those who walk amongst us.
Treat your neighbor, your friends, your families, and the strangers you meet as you would treat God, for God is in all who inhabit this planet. We -- the earth we live on and all of its creatures -- are the divine.
Remember this and you will truly celebrate this holiday season as it should be celebrated -- a celebration of a life and love that does not live in the shadow of fear and darkness. |
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Drudge Flash
Sat Dec 24 2005 12:33:41 ET
The chief of Russia's strategic forces on Saturday attended the deployment of a new set of state-of-the art intercontinental ballistic missiles, boasting of their capability to penetrate any prospective missile defense, news reports said. Col. Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, took part in a ceremony that marked the commissioning of the latest set of Topol-M missiles at a missile base in Tatishchevo in the Volga River's Saratov region.
Solovtsov said Saturday that the new missile "is capable of penetrating any missile defense system," the RIA Novosti and Interfax news agencies reported.
Russian officials have called prospective U.S. missile defenses destabilizing and boasted repeatedly that Russia's new missiles could pierce any nation's missile shield.
The Topol-M missiles, capable of hitting targets more than 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) away, have so far been deployed in silos. The mobile version, mounted on a heavy off-road vehicle, is to enter combat service next year, Solovtsov said.
The deployed Topol-Ms have been fitted with single nuclear warheads, but officials have considered plans to equip each missile with three individually targeted warheads. |
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Scotsman
26/12/2005
MORE than 4,000 British soldiers have been flown home from Iraq for medical treatment since the start of the war in 2003 - but not one has received a visit from the Prime Minister in hospital on their return. |
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Last Updated: Monday, 26 December 2005, 05:07 GMT
Countries around the Indian Ocean have begun commemorations marking one year since the tsunami which killed some 200,000 people.
In Indonesia, which was hardest hit, the province of Aceh observed a minute's silence at 0816 (0116 GMT) - the moment the first waves struck.
Sri Lanka's president led mourning at the site where a train was engulfed. Hundreds of Swedes are among other Western mourners attending ceremonies in Thailand's beach resorts.
An earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, believed to be the second-biggest on record, sent giant waves thousands of kilometres across the ocean.
Countries as far apart as Malaysia and Somalia were affected.
Heaviest losses
Aceh was closest to the epicentre of the earthquake and a third of the total number of people who died across the region died there.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called the minute's silence at a ceremony on a jetty outside the city of Banda Aceh, where around 1,000 invited guests sat in front of a specially erected stage.
A haunting recitation from the Koran opened the commemorations, the BBC's Rachel Harvey reports - then a siren rang out across the flattened landscape, marking the moment when the first wave struck.
The president paid tribute to those who had tried to rebuild their lives over the past year, saying they were a reminder that "life is worth struggling for".
In Sri Lanka, President Mahinda Rajapakse led a tribute in the southern village of Peraliya, where a train was swept off the tracks by the waves with the loss of at least 1,000 lives.
After a two-minute silence at 0930 (0330 GMT) - the time the tsunami struck - the president unveiled a monument to the country's 31,000 dead.
Local Buddhist monks were preparing for a day of chanting while butchers hung up their knives in a sign of respect for all life, an Associated Press correspondent reports.
Emotional return
Thousands of people have been taking part in commemorations in Thailand on a stretch of coast known as Khao Lak.
The official death toll there stands at 5,395 - two-fifths of them foreign tourists including 126 Britons and 543 Swedes, making the Scandinavian country the worst affected state outside the region.
"I think you need to come back," Swedish survivor Pigge Werkelin, who lost his two young sons and his wife in the disaster, told Reuters news agency.
"You need to go to the beach, you have to see children on the beach, you have to see everything... I must do it and then afterward I can put it behind me."
One ceremony in Khao Lak was taking place in the shadow of a Thai marine police boat which was plucked out of the sea by the tsunami and dumped hundreds of metres inland.
Mourners, local and foreign, were laying white flowers on an altar towering above the crowd - a symbol, they say, that the Thai people stand tall in the face of this disaster and are now ready to move on.
Aid model
Around 1.5m people were left homeless in the region after the wall of water stripped away trees, houses and whole communities, and reconstruction could take between five years and a decade.
But just as the scale of the devastation was shocking, the BBC's Catherine Davis notes, so the international response was unprecedented.
The United Nations says it was the most generous and most immediately funded emergency relief effort.
About $12 billion is estimated to have been raised and the massive aid effort has also acted as a test case for how the international community responds to disasters. |
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December 25, 2005
Islamabad | A 5.2-magnitude quake jolted various parts of northern Pakistan Sunday. No damage was reported. |
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Dec 25, 2005
Jakarta - An 4.6-magnitude earthquake rocked Nias Island off the western coast of Indonesia's Sumatra on Sunday morning, triggered panic among the islanders but there were no immediate reports of injury or structural damage, officials said. |
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CNN
Sunday, December 25, 2005
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Get ready for a minute with 61 seconds. Scientists are delaying the start of 2006 by the first "leap second" in seven years, a timing tweak meant to make up for changes in the Earth's rotation. The adjustment will be carried out by sticking an extra second into atomic clocks worldwide at the stroke of midnight Coordinated Universal Time, the widely adopted international standard, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said this week.
"Enjoy New Year's Eve a second longer," the institute said in an explanatory notice. "You can toot your horn an extra second this year."
Coordinated Universal Time coincides with winter time in London. On the U.S. East Coast, the extra second occurs just before 7 p.m. on New Year's Eve. Atomic clocks at that moment will read 23:59:60 before rolling over to all zeros.
A leap second is added to keep uniform timekeeping within 0.9 second of the Earth's rotational time, which can speed up or slow down because of many factors, including ocean tides. The first leap second was added on June 30, 1972, according to NIST, an arm of the U.S. Commerce Department.
High-speed communications systems among other modern technologies require precise time measurements.
Since 1999 until recently, the two time standards have been in close enough synch to escape any need to add a leap second, NIST said.
Although it is possible to have a negative leap second -- that is, a second deducted from Coordinated Universal Time -- so far all have been add-ons, reflecting the Earth's general slowing trend due to tidal breaking.
Deciding when to introduce a leap second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, a standards-setting body. Under an international pact, the preference for leap seconds is December 31 or June 30. |
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18 Dec 2005
PARIS
AFP
Alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters the year just ending brought its share of unusual, outrageous and tragi-comic and just downright silly news items. A selection of the stranger items:
- The authorities running a cemetery near Tel Aviv were bemused to find tourists beating a path to the grave of a 19-year-old British soldier who died in fighting 66 years earlier. His name, engraved on the headstone, was
Harry Potter.
- A German inventor had the idea of placing a specially adapted mobile phone in the coffins of the dead. That way relatives could call up and speak to their dear departed without having to leave home.
- In Japan, police were so upset to hear that a student who was caught up in a traffic accident had to get to an important exam that they gave him a full escort with sirens, arriving with 10 minutes to spare.
- Police in Newcastle, Australia, reported a spate of frozen chickens smashing into house roofs with great force. They suspected a prankster with a powerful catapult.
- Local lawmakers in the US state of Virginia threw out a bill that would have banned young people from wearing low-slung trousers. "Underwear is called underwear for a reason," said the congressman who sought the measure.
- A Thai businessman who said he was giving up his massage parlour to enter parliament sought to demonstrate his new resolve by smashing a bathtub outside the assembly and then lying immobile in a coffin. The tub represented his former business, and the coffin showed that he was no longer his old self, he said.
- A man and woman held in adjacent cells of a Turkish prison made a hole in the wall through which they managed to have sex and produce a child, papers said. They got a further four-month sentence for damaging public property.
- The northern English city of Carlisle had second thoughts about an art project in which the text of an ancient local curse was set on a stone in the city centre. Not long after it was installed the city suffered disastrous floods, a bout of cattle disease and local factory closures.
- There were red faces in the office of Croatian President Stipe Mesic after a painting given to him as a gift turned out to have been stolen from a local art exhibition.
- Workers in a German post office thought they had a bomb on their hands when a parcel began vibrating and making strange noises. It turned out to contain an inflatable sex toy.
- Before setting off to rob a bank, a man in the west African state of Mali put on charms that he believed would make him invisible. He was jailed with gunshot wounds after police guarding the place saw through him, or rather failed to do so.
- Tourism authorities in Switzerland decided to wrap an entire glacier in PVC foam to try and stop it melting during the summer months.
- Christian believers in Chicago flocked to a highway retaining wall after a stain that was said to resemble the Virgin Mary appeared on it. A graffiti artist then scrawled "Big Lie" over it, before the city authorities had the whole thing painted over.
- A pastor in Denmark's established church who had been suspended because he did not believe in God was allowed back into the fold. "We're giving him another chance," said the religious affairs minister, who oversees the Lutheran Protestant Church.
- A mute young man who was found wandering on a southern English beach, and who was reported to be a virtuoso piano player, had media around the world fascinated for months. He was later found to be a German fame-seeker -- and it turned out he didn't play the piano all that well either.
- The Virgin Atlantic airline said it was setting up a frequent fliers' club called "Flying Paws." Initial membership was four dogs and a cat; humans need not apply.
- After a row with his wife about money, a well-off Israeli man opened the family safe, took out the equivalent of 680,000 dollars in banknotes and burned it to ashes on the front lawn.
- A top official with the tennis tournament at
Wimbledon, England took the opportunity of his retirement speech to complain about vocal grunting by female players, which he said was getting ever louder.
- Educational authorities in New South Wales, Australia, protested when the state board of studies proposed making surfing into a high-school diploma subject.
- A Japanese woman who paid a contract killer the equivalent of 136,000 dollars to murder her lover's pregnant wife went to the police to complain when he failed to do the job.
- The German interior ministry said that people being snapped for ID photographs should no longer smile because it messed up their biometric recognition technology.
- An Iraqi man who enjoyed a night of love with a British woman in Cyprus got into hot water because of his bad English. He had apparently decided to say "Yes" to whatever she requested -- which worked fine until she thought to ask him, after the fact, whether he had AIDS. "Yes," he answered -- erroneously as it later turned out.
- The Munch museum in Oslo refused to sell copies of a board game based on the real-life theft of its most famous painting, Edvard Munch's "The Scream."
- A Chinese company calling itself "Lunar Embassy" tried to sell real estate on the moon. Its founder claimed there was no law against such a project, but the authorities thought otherwise.
- A Los Angeles taxi-driver found a pouch containing 350,000-dollars' worth of diamonds left in his cab. The driver, an immigrant from Afghanistan, simply handed them in to the police.
- Emily, a one-year-old tabby cat from the US state of Wisconsin, strayed into an air cargo container and before she knew it she was being unloaded in the eastern French city of Nancy. Unharmed, she was flown back in style.
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SOTT
December 26, 2005
Signs Roving Reporter Ignacious O'Reilly in Moscow |
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