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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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©Reuters Store
Is it a Bear or an imposter? The Alien Bear is cleverly designed to look like our original Bear until you remove his fur mask and see the friendly alien face underneath.
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1/13/2006
Al-Jazeerah
A lot of conflicting reports have been circulating about the legal case involving Dr. Kamal Sayid Qadir, who was arrested according to law and an established court system for writing an article criticising the puppet U.S.-led government in Iraqi Kurdistan.
In accordance with law no. 21, article 1, enacted by the Kurdistan National Assembly (KNA) in 2003 pertaining to defamation of public institutions, Dr. Qadir, a leading Kurdish academic and one of the region's most prominent writers, has been sent to jail for 30 years for harshly criticising leaders of the U.S.-backed, KDP.
Representatives of many International Human Rights organizations stressed that KRG, now facing pressure from NGO's and UN instruments, angered by KDP's inhuman act(s), must release Dr. Sayid Qadir if it seeks carrying on with its bid to become an applicant for democracy.
And some analysts believe that the arrest of Dr. Sayid Qadir comes as a crucial test of KRG's relations with the international community on one hand, and the KRG protection of freedom of expression on the other hand.
Dr. Sayid Qadir is accused of 'insulting' Massoud Barzani, head of the U.S. backed Kurdish Democratic Party, KDP, one of two parties that rule Iraqi Kurdistan, and publishing critical views of the system in the region.
Kamal Sayid Qadir wrote that “if a writer was jailed for 30 years for exposing government corruption in Iran or Syria, there would be outrage in the U.S. and Britain and demands for military strikes. But when that happens in Iraq there is silence.”Despite the apparent deterioration in the overall situation in IRAQ, the U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH and the British Prime Minister TONY BLAIR maintains that steps taken by both government are achieving their intended goals, bringing “freedom and democracy” to Iraq.
And self rule areas have been held up as a model of post-SADDAM IRAQ.
On a visit to Kurdistan in October 2005, Dr. Qadir, 48, was kidnaped by members of Parastin, the security forces belonging to the KDP.
Qadir, who used to live in Vienna, has become a leading critic of the corruption and nepotism that has become a feature of daily life in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Last year he wrote, "Kurdish parties have transformed Iraqi Kurdistan into a fortress for oppression, theft of public funds and serious abuses of human rights like murder, torture, amputation of ears and noses, and rape."
Kurdish authorities were angered by his article, calling Qadir for a a meeting with officials then arresting him.
On 16 December 2005, he wrote from his prison cell in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Arbil, saying "I was arrested by a group of armed people on 23 October 2005 in Arbil. I was kidnapped without being asked for my name, or told what I had been accused of or where they were taking me. And to date, I still have no idea who issued a warrant for my arrest."
Qadir was denied proper legal representation and ill-treated during his arrest and interrogation.
In an impassioned plea from his cell, Dr. Sayid Qadir, who is now on hunger strike, wrote, "Oppression is one of the main features of human history… I have now become a small sample of this oppression, deprivation and violation of my very basic rights as a human being since I have been detained."
Following the U.S.-led March 2003 occupation, Dr. Qadir wrote a damning indictment of the U.S. and British policies in the country, "It is maybe pure coincidence that the history of modern IRAQ has ended as it began, namely with the British occupation beginning from the south of Iraq after the WORLD WAR I, ending with the invasion of British troops, this time under the leadership of their American allies," warning, "If they start to play the role of an arrogant occupant and show no respect for local customs and the will of the people, they will very soon face resistance from the Iraqi people — and it will not be an easy task to rule 25 million people."
KRG leaders in Arbil hate “democracy and freedom of speech”, but what they shouldn’t ignore is the fact that people are the power behind their regime. |
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by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse
Wed Jan 11, 2006
Bush wants to create the new criminal of "disruptor" who can be jailed for the crime of "disruptive behavior." A "little-noticed provision" in the latest version of the Patriot Act will empower Secret Service to charge protesters with a new crime of "disrupting major events including political conventions and the Olympics." Secret Service would also be empowered to charge persons with "breaching security" and to charge for "entering a restricted area" which is "where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting." In short, be sure to stay in those wired, fenced containments or free speech zones. Who is the "disruptor"? Bush Team history tells us the disruptor is an American citizen with the audacity to attend Bush events wearing a T-shirt that criticizes Bush; or a member of civil rights, environmental, anti-war or counter-recruiting groups who protest Bush policies; or a person who invades Bush's bubble by criticizing his policies. A disruptor is also a person who interferes in someone else's activity, such as interrupting Bush when he is speaking at a press conference or during an interview.
What are the parameters of the crime of "disruptive behavior"? The dictionary defines "disruptive" as "characterized by unrest or disorder or insubordination." The American Medical Association defines disruptive behavior as a "style of interaction" with people that interferes with patient care, and can include behavior such as "foul language; rude, loud or offensive comments; and intimidation of patients and family members."
What are the rules of engagement for "disruptors"? Some Bush Team history of their treatment of disruptors provide some clues on how this administration will treat disruptors in the future.
(1) People perceived as disruptors may be preemptively ejected from events before engaging in any disruptive conduct.
In the beginning of this war against disruptors, Americans were ejected from taxpayer funded events where Bush was speaking. At first the events were campaign rallies during the election, and then the disruptor ejectment policy was expanded to include Bush's post election campaign-style events on public policy issues on his agenda, such as informing the public on medicare reform and the like. If people drove to the event in a car with a bumper sticker that criticized Bush's policies or wore T-shirts with similar criticism, they were disruptors who could be ejected from the taxpayer event even before they engaged in any disruptive behavior. White House press secretary McClellan defended such ejectments as a proper preemptive strike against persons who may disrupt an event: "If we think people are coming to the event to disrupt it, obviously, they're going to be asked to leave."
(2) Bush Team may check its vast array of databanks to cull out those persons who it deems having "disruptor" potential and then blacklist those persons from events.
The White House even has a list of persons it deems could be "disruptive" to an eventand then blacklists those persons from attending taxpayer funded events where Bush speaks. Sounds like Bush not only has the power to unilaterally designate people as "enemy combatants" in the global "war on terror," but to unilaterally designate Americans as "disruptive" in the domestic war against free speech.
(3) The use of surveillance, monitoring and legal actions against disruptors.
Bush's war against disruptors was then elevated to surveillance, monitoring, and legal actions against disruptor organizations. The FBI conducts political surveillance and obtains intelligence filed in its database on Bush administration critics , such as civil rights groups (e.g., ACLU), antiwar protest groups (e.g., United for Peace and Justice) and environmental groups (e.g., Greenpeace).
This surveillance of American citizens exercising their constitutional rights has been done under the pretext of counterterrorism activities surrounding protests of the Iraq war and the Republican National Convention. The FBI maintains it does not have the intent to monitor political activities and that its surveillance and intelligence gathering is "intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not to quell free speech."
Surveillance of potential disruptors then graduated to legal actions as a preemptive strike against potential disruptive behavior at public events. In addition to monitoring and surveillance of legal groups and legal activities, the FBI issued subpoenas for members to appear before grand juries based on the FBI's "intent" to prevent "disruptive convention protests." The Justice Dept. opened a criminal investigation and subpoenaed records of Internet messages posted by Bush`s critics. And, the Justice Dept. even indicted Greenpeace for a protest that was so lame the federal judge threw out the case.
So now the Patriot Act, which was argued before enactment as a measure to fight foreign terrorists, is being amended to make clear that it also applies to American citizens who have the audacity to disrupt President Bush wherever his bubble may travel. If this provision is enacted into law, then Bush will have a law upon which to expand the type of people who constitute disruptors and the type of activities that constitute disruptive activities. And, then throw them all in jail.
Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse |
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13/01/2006 - 18:13:40
A SWAT team member shot and wounded a pupil who appeared to be carrying a handgun at his middle school in an Orlando, Florida, suburb.
The report of an armed student led to an evacuation of students, teachers and school staff.
The student was taken to the hospital. His condition was not immediately known.
Details of the shooting were sketchy, but Seminole County Sheriff’s officials said no other students, teachers or school staff members at Milwee Middle School were injured.
Sheriff’s officials had originally said the wounded boy had barricaded himself in a restroom.
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by Doug Thompson
13 Jan 2006
President George W. Bush has signed executive orders giving him sole authority to impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus and ignore the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deployment of U.S. troops on American streets. This would give him absolute dictatorial power over the government with no checks and balances. Bush discussed imposing martial law on American streets in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by activating “national security initiatives” put in place by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.
These “national security initiatives," hatched in 1982 by controversial Marine Colonel Oliver North, later one of the key players in the Iran-Contra Scandal, charged the Federal Emergency Management Agency with administering executive orders that allowed suspension of the Constitution, implementation of martial law, establishment of internment camps, and the turning the government over to the President.
John Brinkerhoff, deputy director of FEMA, developed the martial law implementation plan, following a template originally developed by former FEMA director Louis Guiffrida to battle a “national uprising of black militants.” Gifuffrida’s implementation of martial law called for jailing at least 21 million African Americans in “relocation camps.” Brinkerhoff later admitted in an interview with the Miami Herald that President Reagan signed off on the initiatives and they remained in place, dormant, until George W. Bush took office.
Brinkerhoff moved on the Anser Institute for Homeland Security and, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, provided the Bush White House and the Pentagon with talking points supporting revised “national security initiatives” that would could allow imposition of martial law and suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1978, the law that is supposed to forbid use of troops for domestic law enforcement.
Brinkerhoff wrote that intentions of Posse Comitatus are “misunderstood and misapplied” and that the U.S. has in times of national emergency the “full and absolute authority” to send troops into American streets to “enforce order and maintain the peace.”
Bush used parts of the plan to send troops into the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. In addition, FEMA hired former special forces personnel from the mercenary firm Blackwater USA to “enforce security.”
Blackwater USA, in its promotional materials, describes itself as “the most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world,” adding that “we have established a global presence and provide training and operational solutions for the 21st century in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.”
Blackwater is also a major U.S. contractor in Iraq and has a contract with the Bush White House to provide additional security work “on an as-needed basis.”
The Department of Homeland Security established the “Northern Command for National Defense,” a wide-ranging program that includes FEMA, the Pentagon, the FBI and the National Security Agency. Executive orders already signed by Bush allow the Northern Command to send troops into American streets, seize control of radio and television stations and networks and impose martial law “in times of national emergency.”
The authority to declare what is or is not a national emergency rests entirely with Bush who does not have to either consult or seek the approval of Congress for permission to assume absolute control over the government of the United States.
The White House press office would neither confirm nor deny existence of Bush’s executive orders or the existence of the Northern Command for National Defense. Neither would the Department of Homeland Security.
But my sources within the White House and DHS tell me the plans are in place, ready for implementation when the command comes from the man who keeps telling the American public that he is a “war time president” who will “do anything in my power” to impose his will on the people of the United States.
And he has made sure that power will be absolute when he chooses to use it.
First Published at and © Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue |
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by Carol Wolman
13 Jan 2006
George W. Bush is claiming to be a king. He is doing it by declaring himself the war president who is leading the war on terror. He says that as commander-in-chief in war time, he is above the law. He can declare any citizen an enemy, a terrorist, and arrest and hold that person indefinitely, without charges or a trial. Habeas corpus can be suspended, so that the victim's relatives may not know what happened. Many people have pointed out that the American Revolution was about throwing off the rule of mad King George III, and replacing the absolute power of a monarch with power derived from the people. Under the US Constitution, the peoples' elected representatives make the laws and control the purse strings, and the executive branch is supposed to carry out the laws within the legal and budgetary constraints assigned by Congress.
Through bribery and blackmail, Bush has turned Congress into a rubber stamp body that gives him what he wants. He is packing the courts, so that they will uphold his will. Is this what the American people want?
It is instructive to read a Bible passage from 1 Samuel:
1 Sm 8: 6 -7, 10-22a
Samuel was displeased when they asked for a king to judge them.
He prayed to the LORD, however, who said in answer:
“Grant the people’s every request.
It is not you they reject, they are rejecting me as their king.”
Samuel delivered the message of the LORD in full
to those who were asking him for a king.
He told them:
“The rights of the king who will rule you will be as follows:
He will take your sons and assign them to his chariots and horses,
and they will run before his chariot.
He will also appoint from among them his commanders of groups
of a thousand and of a hundred soldiers.
He will set them to do his plowing and his harvesting,
and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.
He will use your daughters as ointment makers, as cooks, and as bakers.
He will take the best of your fields, vineyards, and olive groves,
and give them to his officials.
He will tithe your crops and your vineyards,
and give the revenue to his eunuchs and his slaves.
He will take your male and female servants,
as well as your best oxen and your asses,
and use them to do his work.
He will tithe your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves.
When this takes place,
you will complain against the king whom you have chosen,
but on that day the LORD will not answer you.”
http://www.usccb.org/nab/011306.shtml
Kings always exploit the people, and use their young to fight their wars. Notice, however, that at the beginning of the passage, God says that the people are rejecting His kingship in favor of an earthly king. In other words, when the people listen to God, ie conscience and sense of justice, they do well. When they allow a human being to rule them, they will suffer.
Nevertheless, the ancient Israelites chose to have a king "to lead us in warfare and fight our battles". Is this what the American people are doing? If so, will God help us?
These are not our battles. Let us choose peace.
In the name of the Prince of Peace, Carol Wolman
Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Call for investigation into impeachable offenses
Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/activistsforimpeachment/
Carol S. Wolman, MD is a psychiatrist in Northern California. A lifelong peace activist, she has written extensively on the psychology of our times. She is actively working to impeach Bush and Cheney, and invites you to print out a letter to Bush from Rep. John Conyers, informing Bush that censure and impeachment are underway. You can collect signatures and fax them to your representative and to Conyers. http://deependnews.com/conyerscensure.htm She also suggests you join or form a local group at http://impeachbush.meetup.com/ |
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By Leonard David
Senior space writer
Jan. 11, 2006
Directed energy could revolutionize warfare, expert says
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - There is a new breed of weaponry fast approaching — and at the speed of light, no less. They are labeled "directed-energy weapons," and they may well signal a revolution in military hardware — perhaps more so than the atomic bomb.
Directed-energy weapons take the form of lasers, high-powered microwaves and particle beams. Their adoption for ground, air, sea, and space warfare depends not only on using the electromagnetic spectrum, but also upon favorable political and budgetary wavelengths too.
That’s the outlook of J. Douglas Beason, author of the recently published book "The E-Bomb: How America’s New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Wars Will Be Fought in the Future." Beason previously served on the White House staff working for the president’s science adviser under both the Bush and Clinton administrations.
After more than two decades of research, the United States is on the verge of deploying a new generation of weapons that discharge beams of energy, such as the Airborne Laser and the Active Denial System, as well as the Tactical High Energy Laser, or THEL.
"History has shown that, without investment in high technology, fighting the next war will be done using the 'last war' type of technique," Beason told Space.com. Putting money into basic and long-range research is critical, Beason said, adding: "You can’t always schedule breakthroughs."
A leading expert in directed-energy research for 26 years, Beason is also director of threat reduction here at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. However, he noted that he was expressing his own views rather than the policy of the laboratory, the Defense Department or the Energy Department.
Ripe for transformation?
Though considerable work has been done in lasers, high-power microwaves and other directed-energy technologies, weaponization is still an ongoing process.
For example, work is continuing in the military’s Airborne Laser program. It utilizes a megawatt-class, high-energy chemical oxygen iodine laser toted skyward aboard a modified Boeing 747-400 aircraft. Purpose of the program is to enable the detection, tracking and destruction of ballistic missiles in the boost phase, or powered part of their flight.
Similarly, testing of the U.S. Army’s Tactical High Energy Laser in White Sands, N.M., has shown the ability of heating high-flying rocket warheads, blasting them with enough energy to make them self-detonate. THEL uses a high-energy, deuterium fluoride chemical laser. A mobile THEL also demonstrated the ability to kill multiple mortar rounds.
Then there’s Active Denial Technology — a non-lethal way to use millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to stop, deter and turn back an advancing adversary. This technology, supported by the U.S. Marines, uses a beam of millimeter waves to heat a foe’s skin, causing severe pain without damage, and making the adversary flee the scene.
Beason also pointed to new exciting research areas underway at the Los Alamos National Laboratory: Free-electron laser work with the Navy and a new type of directed energy that operates in the terahertz region.
While progress in directed-energy is appreciable, Beason sees two upfront problems in moving the technology forward. One issue has to do with "convincing the warfighter that there’s a niche for this new type of weapon," and the other relates to making sure these new systems are not viewed as a panacea to solve all problems. "They are only another tool," he said.
Looming even larger is the role of those who acquire new weapons. "The U.S. could put ourselves in a very disastrous position if we allow our acquisition officials to be non-technically competent," Beason explained.
Over the decades, Beason said that the field of directed-energy has had its share of "snake-oil salesmen", as well as those advocates who overpromised. "It wasn’t ready for prime time."
At present, directed-energy systems "are barely limping along with enough money just to prove that they can work," Beason pointed out. Meanwhile, huge slugs of money are being put into legacy-type systems to keep them going.
"It’s a matter of priority," Beason said. The time is now to identify high-payoff, directed-energy projects for the smallest amounts of money, he said. |
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By William M. Arkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, Feb. 1, 1999
[...] What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad?
But the "strategic" PSYOPS scheming didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam, a senior Air Force officer asked in 1990?
According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram idea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air.
But doing so over the skies of Iraq? To project such a hologram over Baghdad on the order of several hundred feet, they calculated, would take a mirror more than a mile square in space, as well as huge projectors and power sources.
And besides, investigators came back, what does Allah look like?
The Gulf War hologram story might be dismissed were it not the case that washingtonpost.com has learned that a super secret program was established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "project information power from space ... for special operations deception missions."
War is Like a Box of Chocolates
Voice-morphing? Fake video? Holographic projection? They sound more like Mission Impossible and Star Trek gimmicks than weapons. Yet for each, there are corresponding and growing research efforts as the technologies improve and offensive information warfare expands.
Whereas early voice morphing required cutting and pasting speech to put letters or words together to make a composite, Papcun's software developed at Los Alamos can far more accurately replicate the way one actually speaks. Eliminated are the robotic intonations.
The irony is that after Papcun finished his speech cloning research, there were no takers in the military. Luckily for him, Hollywood is interested: The promise of creating a virtual Clark Gable is mightier than the sword.
Video and photo manipulation has already raised profound questions of authenticity for the journalistic world. With audio joining the mix, it is not only journalists but also privacy advocates and the conspiracy-minded who will no doubt ponder the worrisome mischief that lurks in the not too distant future.
"We already know that seeing isn't necessarily believing," says Dan Kuehl, "now I guess hearing isn't either."
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by Steven Barnes
12 Jan 2006
I was recently asked: why do I think it inevitable that innocent people will be tortured if currently debated policies are continued? Completely divorced from any moral considerations about the issue, here is my answer: It is inevitable for the exact same reason that innocent people are arrested and convicted, and DNA evidence has released people on death row--human fallibility.
And this is assuming the very best training on the part of FBI and police academies--not military personnel in the field who are not specifically trained to sort wheat from chaff.
Shall we add the problem whenever "Group A" is in a position of power over "Group B." Even if they are of the same race/nationality (say, Protestants over Catholics in Ireland) a disproportionate number of the subjugated group will make their way into the prison systems.
Add a color or language difference, and the problem increases. You can replicate this result anywhere in the world you look, with any colonial group: Maoris in New Zealand, Abos in Australia, blacks in Apartheid South Africa, Native Americans in New Mexico, Oklahoma, etc. African-Americans in America.
Human perception is fallible, human beings have prejudices, our senses fail us. And note: everything I've said assumes absolutely positive intentions, high ethics, and no hidden agendas.
Do you want to believe that ANY group is composed solely of such saintly folks?
And if not, what happens when you add in negative intentions, low ethics, situational stress and hidden agendas?
How about the tendency to think that any group you're fighting is subhuman?
You have the potential for a nightmare. With Miranda laws, Constitutional prohibitions against unlawful search and Seizure, and the ACLU and other advocacy groups, you STILL get corrupt cops, bad judges, coerced confessions, prejudiced juries, incompetent lawyers and so on...and this in what I honestly believe to be among the best legal systems in the world.
ALMOST EVERY BLACK MAN I KNOW has stories of being harassed, arrested or otherwise mistreated by white police officers. Every single one. Think about that.
Those who’ve read my novel "Lion’s Blood" can guess I believe that the situation would be precisely reversed if the social power was in black hands rather than white. It’s just the way human beings are. And I believe that cops are, on the average, good guys committed to protecting their community.
Now...what possible reason do I have to think that the people arresting "terrorists" are of a higher caliber than this?
With all of America's laws and protections of our rights, people STILL get arrested, confined, convicted unjustly. The statistical chance that no innocent person has been executed in America is about as close to zero as you can get.
Add it up. There is simply no way, regardless of good intentions, training, safeguards, or anything else, assuming the highest moral character and most scrupulous oversights, that no innocent person will be accused and dragged screaming into the dark.
In all of human history, no legal system has ever been perfect. They cannot be, because the humans who create them are imperfect.
If you are in favor of torture, make very very certain you have made peace with the inevitability of mistakes. Otherwise, you are simply lying to yourself. And in this context, that, by any standard, is pure human evil.
www.lifewrite.com
Steven Barnes is a NY Times bestselling author, personal performance coach, and martial artist who has written for The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Stargate SG-1. He has lectured on story and human consciousness at UCLA, Mensa, the Smithsonian Institute, and USC. Steve created the Lifewriting system of high-performance living for writers and readers. www.lifewrite.com |
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by Missy Comley Beattie
12 Jan 2006
He's at it again. Speaking before yet another "staged" group of supporters, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Bush is chastising Americans for speaking the truth. What a bully!
Who does he think he's fooling? Let me answer my own question. He's snookering all the people like those who sat nodding behind him, the sleeping public, who are allowing George W. to remain with his hands grasping the wheel. But he is driving his passengers over the edge of the cliff. Bush "welcomes critics" and "loyal opposition." He actually said, "Loyal opposition is one thing; defeatism is another." What? We all know that this man can't take criticism. We've seen him close to a tantrum when vexed. And to the president, there's really no such thing as loyal opposition. We are either with him or against him. Let me continue to weigh in, heavily, among the thorns in his side rather than with those on his side. And the part about defeatism--plenty of generals have used the "D" word. Congressman John Murtha, who actually experienced war, has used it and is demanding that the troops return NOW.
Another blow to Bush's distorted plan: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has shifted his position from his original pledge for an "inclusive constitutional order" to backing autonomy for the Shiite southeast. This stance is a prescription for civil war.
Meanwhile, Bush recently stated, "In a free society, there's only one check on political speech and that's the judgment of the American people."
If we had a president with good judgment, so many of us wouldn't have to be speaking out today.
Furthermore, for him to utter "free society" during this strange time in our history is perplexing. We no longer have a free society if we're being told by Bush that we should be loyal to his decisions.
I keep thinking about the many times I've read or heard people who support the war in Iraq say, "Freedom isn't free." But the leader of what used to be the Free World is now telling all of us that by opposing his agenda, we are providing comfort to the enemy.
It's time for us to identify the enemy.
We have a president who is spying on Americans illegally. He has not given approval to listen only to those with possible links to terrorists, but he's also allowing the wiretapping of ordinary citizens who are exercising their right to express opinions--even peace activists. We are being strong-armed and castigated if we speak against a war that never should have been waged. And we are not, under any circumstances, to mention the colossal deficiencies of a president who really lost both elections.
In another speech in Louisville, Kentucky to justify the war and his illegal spying, Bush said, "I put my hand on the Bible." Maybe, he should read the New Testament and let its words guide him. If he did this, he would be the peace president, my nephew would be alive as would all our troops who have died for nothing, and Iraq would not be in chaos with as many as 200,000 dead at the hands of the failed policies of George W. Bush. But the pain of the families of the dead means little to Bush Inc. as it promotes genocide for oil and profit. The president also said, "The war came to us." Not true. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but Bush continues to make the link.
We're in trouble and George Bush realizes it. Sustenance for the war in Iraq has tanked. Support for George W. is down. So what does he do? He rallies his adherents. He stands in front of the smiling, applauding groupies who believe him when he says he is the only one who can protect us in this global war on terror. Those who aren't hypnotized by his words are frightened and that's what he demands. If we're afraid, he is able to control. And what a control freak he is!
"Freedom isn't free." But we were free and we're not anymore. We've surrendered to fear and propaganda. "Be afraid."
Samuel Alito believes in an all-powerful presidency. George Bush believes in an all-powerful George Bush.
And we, the electorate, have lost our power. We've handed it to the enemy.
Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She's written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she has participated in many peace marches, including the Cindy Sheehan rally in DC. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,'05, she has been writing political articles. |
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by Andy Ostroy
13 Jan 2006
What is it about these tough-talking Republicans, who, every time the soup gets too thick, somehow find a way for their wives and/or mommies to enter the public debate and rescue them? Our big, strong AWOL of a president, George W. Bush, does it all the time. Uses Laura and Babs to deflect criticism and defend him with inane, self-serving statements, or, highly orchestrated acts of fake compassion. And this week we saw it yet again, with Martha-Ann Alito's Academy Award-winning performance at her husband's grueling Senate confirmation hearings. Samuel J. Alito wants to be the next Supreme Court justice, and just about every Democrat in America fears this appointment like the Black Plague. So there they were, the usual liberal posse of Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, Dick Durbin et. al., managing somehow to get a few hard-hitting questions out along with mega-hours of self-important, pontificating blather (not the Dem's best performance, unfortunately).
As if the Mrs. didn't expect this to be a blistering session for Sammy, she grew increasingly emotional and upset during Wednesday's hearings. So unfair was her hubby's interrogation, his "mistreatment," as Utah Sen. Orin Hatch called it, that the gentleman Senator from South Carolina, Lindsay Graham, felt compelled to come to the future justice's aid, lobbing loaded, softball questions designed to paint the picture of an honest, decent, compassionate, non-bigoted man worthy of a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court. And with that, wah, wah, wah. Mrs. Alito's eyes welled up with tears, and, too distraught to remain in the chamber, she left. A big scene. Lots of drama. Well done, Ms. Alito! A performance that would make Spielberg proud! The mainstream press loved it! Republicans throughout the land loved it. And for sure, Sammy loved it too.
And so goes another case of...when the going gets tough, the tough get their wives and mommies to make everything better.
Andy Ostroy, theostroyreport@aol.com, a NYC-based 45-year-old entrepreneur and political commentator, is an aggressive counter to the Bush administration, the Republican Party and the powerful right wing media machine. Our mission is to do whatever possible to help Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2006 and win back the White House in '08. http://www.ostroyreport.blogspot.com/ |
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Bob Fertik
10 Jan 2006
On Monday morning, Bush spoke a total of 250 words to the media on behalf of Sam Alito.
Even though it was a trivially short speech, filled with talking points he's recited many times before - and even though Bush was wide awake in the best hour of his day - Bush couldn't even deliver those 250 words without waiting for most of it to be fed to him through his earpiece!!!
Here's the word-by-word analysis, breaking down the video from BradBlog, which begins with the fourth sentence from Bush's remarks. To show the operation of the earpiece, I start a new line with each pause. I invite you to play the video while reading my notes to double-check my conclusions.
By my count, Bush was fed 29 soundbites through his earpiece to deliver the 216 words below - that's less than 8 words per soundbite.
That low ratio may be because the earpiece was malfunctioning, as evidenced by several extremely noticeable breakdowns in Bush's delivery that led to phrases of just one, two, or three words.
If you study Bush's face, you'll see the clues I've mentioned many times that give away his "audio monitoring" - his eyes turn inwards, he blinks conspicuously, he extends his "uh," and at his most difficult moments he shakes his head from side to side to stall for time.
Now let's roll the video tape...
Sam Alito is [uh]
eminently qualified to be a-a member of the bench.
I-I'm not the only person who feels that way --
the American Bar Association looked at his record, looked at his opinions, looked at his [uh] temperament, [uh]
and came to the same conclusion, that he is [shp]
well qualified
to be a Supreme Court judge.
Sam's [uh]
got [uh]
the intellect necessary to [uh]
to bring [uh]
a lot of class [uh]
to that Court.
He's got a judicial temperament necessary to make sure that
that the Court [uh]
is a- is a- is a- is a body that interprets the law and doesn't try to write the law. [uh]
And so I'm looking forward to your hearings.
I know the American people will be impressed,
just like I have been impressed and a lot of other members of the Senate have been impressed.
And my hope, of course, is that the [uh]
the American people will be impressed by the process.
It's very important that members of the Senate [uh]
conduct a dignified hearing.
The Supreme Court is a dignified body; Sam is a dignified person. And [uh]
my hope, of course, is that the Senate [uh]
bring dignity to the process
and give this man a fair hearing
and an up or down vote on the Senate floor.
Sam, good luck to you. Thanks for your agreement to serve. I appreciate you. Thank you.
So there it is, word by trivial word. Unless he's completely reckless, Bush must have practiced it a couple of times. Yet even with practice he couldn't deliver it without Karl Rove feeding it into his ear.
When will the Washington Press Corps report that the most powerful man in the world is too stupid to deliver 250 simple well-rehearsed words without an earpiece??????
Update: Since Alito is testifying before the Senate under oath, maybe a Senator could ask him whether he saw anything in Bush's ear as he stood a foot away from him, or whether he heard any voices leaking out! |
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January 12, 2006
Editors
The New York Times
Some commentators are complaining that Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings have not been exciting, but they must not have been paying attention. We learned that Judge Alito had once declared that Judge Robert Bork - whose Supreme Court nomination was defeated because of his legal extremism - "was one of the most outstanding nominees" of the 20th century. We heard Judge Alito refuse to call Roe v. Wade "settled law," as Chief Justice John Roberts did at his confirmation hearings. And we learned that Judge Alito subscribes to troubling views about presidential power.
Those are just a few of the quiet bombshells that have dropped. In his deadpan bureaucrat's voice, Judge Alito has said some truly disturbing things about his view of the law. In three days of testimony, he has given the American people reasons to be worried - and senators reasons to oppose his nomination....
The debate over Judge Alito is generally presented as one between Republicans and Democrats. But his testimony should trouble moderate Republicans, especially those who favor abortion rights or are concerned about presidential excesses. The hearings may be short on fireworks, but they have produced, through Judge Alito's words, an array of reasons to be concerned about this nomination. Some commentators are complaining that Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings have not been exciting, but they must not have been paying attention. We learned that Judge Alito had once declared that Judge Robert Bork - whose Supreme Court nomination was defeated because of his legal extremism - "was one of the most outstanding nominees" of the 20th century. We heard Judge Alito refuse to call Roe v. Wade "settled law," as Chief Justice John Roberts did at his confirmation hearings. And we learned that Judge Alito subscribes to troubling views about presidential power.
Those are just a few of the quiet bombshells that have dropped. In his deadpan bureaucrat's voice, Judge Alito has said some truly disturbing things about his view of the law. In three days of testimony, he has given the American people reasons to be worried - and senators reasons to oppose his nomination. Among those reasons are the following:
EVIDENCE OF EXTREMISM Judge Alito's extraordinary praise of Judge Bork is unsettling, given that Judge Bork's radical legal views included rejecting the Supreme Court's entire line of privacy cases, even its 1965 ruling striking down a state law banning sales of contraceptives. Judge Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton - a group whose offensive views about women, minorities and AIDS victims were discussed in greater detail at yesterday's hearing - is also deeply troubling, as is his unconvincing claim not to remember joining it.
OPPOSITION TO ROE V. WADE In 1985, Judge Alito made it clear that he believed the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He had many chances this week to say he had changed his mind, but he refused. When offered the chance to say that Roe is a "super-precedent," entitled to special deference because it has been upheld so often, he refused that, too. As Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, noted in particularly pointed questioning, since Judge Alito was willing to say that other doctrines, like one person one vote, are settled law, his unwillingness to say the same about Roe strongly suggests that he still believes what he believed in 1985.
SUPPORT FOR AN IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY Judge Alito has backed a controversial theory known as the "unitary executive," and argued that the attorney general should be immune from lawsuits when he installs illegal wiretaps. Judge Alito backed away from one of his most extreme statements in this area - his assertion, in a 1985 job application, that he believed "very strongly" in "the supremacy of the elected branches of government." But he left a disturbing impression that as a justice, he would undermine the Supreme Court's critical role in putting a check on presidential excesses.
INSENSITIVITY TO ORDINARY AMERICANS' RIGHTS Time and again, as a lawyer and a judge, the nominee has taken the side of big corporations against the "little guy," supported employers against employees, and routinely rejected the claims of women, racial minorities and the disabled. The hearing shed new light on his especially troubling dissent from a ruling by two Reagan-appointed judges, who said that workers at a coal-processing site were covered by Mine Safety and Health Act protections.
DOUBTS ABOUT THE NOMINEE'S HONESTY Judge Alito's explanation of his involvement with Concerned Alumni of Princeton is hard to believe. In a 1985 job application, he proudly pointed to his membership in the organization. Now he says he remembers nothing of it - except why he joined, which he insists had nothing to do with the group's core concerns. His explanation for why he broke his promise to Congress to recuse himself in any case involving Vanguard companies is also unpersuasive. As for his repeated claims that his past statements on subjects like abortion and Judge Bork never represented his personal views or were intended to impress prospective employers - all that did was make us wonder why we should give any credence to what he says now.
The debate over Judge Alito is generally presented as one between Republicans and Democrats. But his testimony should trouble moderate Republicans, especially those who favor abortion rights or are concerned about presidential excesses. The hearings may be short on fireworks, but they have produced, through Judge Alito's words, an array of reasons to be concerned about this nomination. |
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By Jeffrey Steinberg
EIR
13 Jan 2006
On Jan. 5, 2006, in a front-page story, the Wall Street Journal identified Judge Samuel Alito, President George W. Bush's nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court, as a leading proponent of the savagely unconstitutional doctrine of the "unitary executive."
The idea of the "unitary executive," which forms the core dogma of the ultra-right-wing Federalist Society, to which Judge Alito belongs, is more properly identified by its modern historical name—the Führerprinzip, authored by the Nazi regime's anointed "Crown Jurist" Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt's doctrine, that the charismatic head of state is the law, and can assert absolute dictatorial authority during periods of emergency, has been used to legitimize every totalitarian regime in the West, from Hitler, through Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain, through Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile, to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the United States.The Wall Street Journal quoted Judge Alito from a November 2000 speech, delivered, appropriately, before a Federalist Society convention in Washington, D.C. The Constitution, Alito declared, "makes the President the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that. The President has not just some executive powers, but the executive power—the whole thing."
Judge Alito elaborated, "I thought then"—referring to his 1980s tenure at the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—"and I still think, that this theory best captures the meaning of the Constitution's text and structure," adding that, in his view, the Framers "saw the unitary executive as necessary to balance the huge power of the legislature and the factions that may gain control of it."
After reviewing the Wall Street Journal account, Lyndon LaRouche declared, "If Judge Alito does in fact adhere to the views reported in the Wall Street Journal, he should not be allowed near any court—certainly not the United States Supreme Court—except as a defendant." LaRouche insisted that Alito's nomination must be decisively defeated in the Senate, or the Supreme Court will fall fatally into the hands of a cabal of outright "Schmittlerian" Nazis, led by Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Alito—all members of the self-avowed "conservative revolutionary" Federalist Society.
LaRouche counterposed the outright Nazi doctrine of the Federalist Society proponents of the "unitary executive" (Führerprinzip) to the American System principles invoked by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he was confronted with the awesome responsibility of preparing the United States for world war. On Sept. 8, 1939, at a press conference following his Proclamation of Limited Emergency, as war was erupting in Europe, FDR assured the American people, "There is no intention and no need of doing all those things that could be done.... There is no thought in any shape, manner or form, of putting the Nation, in its defenses or in its internal economy, on a war basis. That is one thing we want to avoid. We are going to keep the nation on a peace basis, in accordance with peacetime authorizations."
Cheney and 9/11 FDR's respect for the U.S. constitutional system of checks and balances, and separation of power, stands in stark contrast to the assault on the Constitution, launched by Vice President Cheney even before Sept. 11, 2001.
As LaRouche prophetically warned, in testimony delivered on Jan. 16, 2001 to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, opposing the nomination of John Ashcroft as Attorney General, the Cheney-led Bush Administration came into office committed to government-by-crisis-management, modeled on the Hitler Nazi dictatorship in Germany. LaRouche warned that the Bush Administration would seek, at the first opportunity, a "Reichstag fire" justification for dictatorship, all based on the legal theories of Hitler's Carl Schmitt. It was Schmitt, who wrote the legal opinion, based on the "unitary executive" Führerprinzip, that justified Hitler's declaration of emergency dictatorial rule on Feb. 28, 1933—24 hours after the German parliament was set ablaze by agents of Hitler's own Herman Göring.
The aftermath of 9/11 proved that LaRouche was 100% right. On Dec. 19, 2005, in a press conference aboard Air Force Two, Vice President Cheney flaunted the fact that he came into office in January 2001, committed to rolling back the legislative safeguards, passed by Congress and signed into law by Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the revelations about illegal FBI and CIA spying on American citizens. In calling for a rollback of those post-Watergate "infringements" on Presidential power, Cheney was, in effect, declaring war on the most sacred principles written into the U.S. Constitution.
Cheney's stooge, President Bush, certified his own adherence to the same Führerprinzip when he recently signed the defense budget, and invoked the "unitary executive" right to ignore the bill's explicit ban on torture. The McCain Amendment, banning torture of American-held prisoners in the "Global War on Terrorism," was passed by an overwhelming, veto-proof bipartisan majority in both the House and the Senate, yet the President asserted his "constitutional" authority as commander-in-chief, to ignore Congress.
Pinochet and Hitler Despite the events of 9/11, the Synarchist bankers behind Cheney did not fully succeed in their scheme for dictatorship and the overthrow of the Constitution. Both the Congress and the American people put up sufficient resistance to partly stymie the efforts to impose crisis-management Executive branch rule-by-decree. The May 2005 bipartisan "Gang of 14" Senate revolt against Cheney's so-called "nuclear option" to strip the Senate of its Constitutional role of "advice and consent" represented a particularly significant setback for the Synarchist cabal.
But the Cheney gang's vision for America shows clearly in Chile, a South American nation targeted for "the Hitler treatment" by a cabal of American-based Synarchists, led by Felix Rohatyn, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz (see accompanying article). Chile under the 1970s and '80s dictatorship of General Pinochet offers the clearest picture of what Cheney et al. still intend to impose on the United States—if given the opportunity. The defeat of the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Alito offers the immediate opportunity to deliver a killer blow to Rohatyn, Shultz, and Cheney's scheme.
The Other Sept. 11
On Sept. 11, 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a military coup that ousted the legitimately elected government of President Salvador Allende. The Pinochet coup would unleash several decades of terror, which would spread to other parts of South and Central America, through a Henry Kissinger-approved regional death squad program called "Operation Condor."
Among the American bankers and government officials who ran the Pinochet coup, from the outset, were:
Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Brothers banker and ITT director. Rohatyn, a protégé of leading World War II-era Synarchist banker André Meyer, orchestrated the 1971 ITT takeover of Hartford Insurance, and, along with ITT Chairman Harold Geneen, helped oversee the overthrow of Allende from his post on the ITT board. Two years after the Pinochet coup, Rohatyn would impose the same Hitlerian/Schachtian austerity policies on New York City, through his chairmanship of the Metropolitan Assistance Corporation ("Big MAC").
George Shultz, Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury, who orchestrated the breakup of FDR's Bretton Woods System on behalf of the Synarchist bankers, traveled to Chile, following the Pinochet coup, and gave his personal imprimatur to the regime's radical free trade economic policies, including the looting-by-privatization of the country's pension system. The same privatization of Social Security was attempted by the Bush Administration last year—with Shultz's enthusiastic backing. Himself a product of the University of Chicago Economics Department of Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" who ran the economic policy of the Pinochet dictatorship, Shultz has been the behind-the-scenes Svengali of the Bush-Cheney Administration, steering it in an explicitly "Pinochet" direction, promoting a bankers' dictatorship of radical free trade/globalization looting, utilizing unbridled police state power to achieve it.
Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to President Nixon, who enthusiastically promoted the Pinochet coup, at the very moment that he was formulating National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200), which asserted Anglo-American Cold War ownership of the planet's strategic raw material wealth and an aggressive corollary doctrine of drastic population reduction, through wars, disease and famine—all targetted at the Third World. Kissinger was the principal American government official behind Operation Condor, a right-wing death squad apparatus that ran a "strategy of tension" terror war against the sovereign republics of South American, which spilled over into continental Europe, particularly Italy. One of Kissinger's primary assets in Operation Condor was the Propaganda Two Freemasonic Lodge of World War II-era fascist Licio Gelli. The Chile of the Pinochet dictatorship, steered from Wall Street and the Nixon Administration by Rohatyn, Shultz, and Kissinger is the model for what these same individuals and the Synarchist bankers cabal they represent, have in mind for the U.S.A.—if they are not stopped.
Carl Schmitt These are the issues before the U.S. Senate in the case of Judge Alito. The doctrine of the "unitary executive" promoted by Alito is a carbon copy of the doctrine of law devised by Carl Schmitt to justify the Hitler dictatorship of February 1933 and the Pinochet dictatorship of Sept. 11, 1973. In both the Hitler and Pinochet cases, Schmitt was "on the scene." As the leading German jurist of the 1920s and '30s, Schmitt wrote the legal opinion justifying Hitler's Reichstag fire coup. Schmitt argued that the "charismatic leader" derives unbridled power from "the people" in time of crisis, and that any form of government, based on a system of checks and balances, consensus, and separation of power, is illegitimate, because it stands in the way of the absolute ruler's responsibility to "protect the people."
In the case of the Pinochet coup in Chile, Schmitt's student-protégé Jaime Guzman, argued that the government had to use violence to impose order. Guzman was the sole source of legal justificaion for the Pinochet coup and dictatorship, and he insisted that violence was a precondition for success. In effect, Schmitt acolyte Guzman ran fascist Chile—in the name of the same doctrine of "unitary executive" power that Schmitt had earlier codified in the Führerprinzip. It is the same doctrine that Cheney et al. seek to impose today on the U.S.A. |
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By GLEN JOHNSON
Associated Press
12 Jan 2006
BOSTON (AP) -- Days after calling on his party to exhibit higher ethical standards, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association said his group will donate to charity $500,000 in campaign contributions linked to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Gov. Mitt Romney, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, said Wednesday the association will give the money to American Red Cross chapters in five hurricane-ravaged states.
"When influence peddling is alleged, a political institution like the Republican Governors Association wants to be above any possible shadow of complicity," the governor said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.
The move allows Romney and the association to avoid questions about the contributions while they are trying to help Republican governors win elections in 36 states this fall.
The Republican Governors Association received the $500,000 in October 2002 from a public affairs company owned by Michael Scanlon, Abramoff's business partner.
Scanlon, like Abramoff, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges as part of a federal probe of influence peddling on Capitol Hill. President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert - all Republicans - have already given charities sums equal to donations they received from Abramoff or his associates.
Nationally known groups including the Salvation Army and American Heart Association as well as organizations such as shelter for battered women in Colorado, will share more than $430,000 in now-unwanted campaign contributions from Abramoff and his associates.
Romney said an internal review, triggered by questions about the donations from the AP, deemed the donations legal. But he and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, the association's vice chairman, decided not to keep the money.
Romney on Monday urged his party to emerge from what he termed its "ethical scandal" by seeking resignations of top leaders associated with Abramoff, and by pushing for a line-item budget veto. He said that would allow the president to eliminate special-interest spending supported by lobbyists.
Romney, who gained national prominence for his work to repair the scandal-ridden 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, announced last month that he would not seek re-election this fall and has already visited early-voting Iowa and New Hampshire.
Romney also said he would continue to travel on corporate aircraft, as he did in December when he flew to a governors association meeting on a Gulfstream jet owned by Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical firm. Massachusetts is currently debating a health care overhaul, although Romney said Pfizer is not a party to the deliberations and the use of the plane was legal.
"I'm not going to propose to you a new series of laws," he said. "But I can say the best efforts in campaign finance reform to date seem to have driven money into secret corners, and it's had unintended consequences." |
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By Donald Kaul
Minuteman Media
12 Jan 2006
A terror stalks the streets of Washington today the like of which has not been seen here since the War of 1812 when the British invaded the city and burned the White House.
Jack Abramoff---lobbyist, con man, swindler, keeper of Washington’s buried skeletons---is singing. His opening number, performed in federal court last week, was a guilty plea to charges of influence peddling that could, and almost certainly will, ensnare some of the leading politicians of our fair capital. We’ll know more as he continues his recital in private to federal prosecutors, in hopes of getting 10 years or so knocked off his sentences.
The fear that grips the city right now is a function of Abramoff’s expertise, which is the transformation of money into power and vice versa. He was a leading soldier in that army of Washington lobbyists that takes money from corporations and doles it out to powerful politicians in return for governmental largesse---tax breaks, deregulation, contracts---worth many times the cost.
If he begins to give prosecutors names and addresses, money drops and amounts, there are going to be a whole lot of people seeking new employment in the next few years with some of them finding careers in license-plate manufacture.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
The scurrying of the rats from the decks of the Good Ship Abramoff has already begun. Dennis Hastert, that tub of integrity who is the Speaker of the House (our House, alas), immediately announced he was donating all the money he has received from Abramoff’s clients to charity.
Our noble president also says he’s giving his Abramoff loot to charity, even though he has nothing to feel guilty about. What a guy.
Tom (Greasy Thumb) DeLay, former House Majority Leader and a close associate of Abramoff, eyes heavenward, urged “everyone involved to cooperate in the investigation and to tell the truth.” Then he gave his Abramoff money to charity.
Even Abramoff’s colleagues are treating him like a case of bird flu. The head of the American League of Lobbyists objected to Abramoff being referred to as a “superlobbyist,” as he sometimes is.
“Jack Abramoff is nothing more than a supercrook,” he said.
My, my, the lobbyists are insulted. I’m amazed. They have no shame; I didn’t think they had any pride either. Apparently, I was wrong. Now they say they’re worried about politicians shying away from “legitimate” contact with lobbyists. Fat chance.
But what’s wrong with a Congressperson avoiding lobbyists? Where is it written that our lawmakers, who make in excess of $160,000 a year, with more for the leadership, can’t pick up their own luncheon checks, pay for their own golfing vacations?
We have the spectacle of politicians coming to Washington owning hardly more than the clothes they wear, and leaving with whopping bank accounts, bulging stock portfolios and expensive country club memberships.
They call it “public service” for a reason. There is supposed to be a certain amount of personal sacrifice involved in serving one’s country, a gift a citizen makes to his society.
These guys treat Congress like Willy Loman’s brother treated Africa: “William, when I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich!”
Then, when one of their bagmen gets caught with his hand in the till, they turn into Claude Raines, the police inspector in “Casablanca,” who, having been on the take for years, is “shocked---shocked!” to hear there is gambling in Casablanca.
Lobbying at its highest levels is little more than legalized bribery. It’s rotting the very core of our democracy. Admittedly, it has some informational function, but a lot of it is bad information. If we did away with it altogether, we’d gain more than we’d lose.
But first things first. As an FBI man said last week: “With most cases, the plea is the end, but with Abramoff, the plea is just the beginning.”
I can hardly wait.
Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong. Email to: donald.kaul2@verizon.net
© 2006 Minuteman Media |
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By Philip B. Heymann
Boston Globe
January 12, 2006
BASED ON his constitutional powers and the authorization for the use of military force granted by congressional resolution after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has declared himself free to ignore any law that he thinks limits his ability to fight terrorism. This is an extraordinary claim for any president in a country that prides itself on a rule of law binding government officials as well as ordinary citizens. In signing the McCain amendment outlawing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees this month, Bush announced that he might ignore the amendment in order to fight terrorism, the very field that the amendment, adopted by overwhelming majorities in both Houses, had specifically addressed. The statute forbids the president only to do anything that, in the circumstances, ''shocks the conscience," thus violating the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. This leaves him broad discretion and little reason to claim powers Congress has specifically denied him. But that is what he has done.
This is at least the fourth occasion Bush has announced that he is not bound by statutes or treaties. He has said he is also free to ignore statutes prohibiting torture, detention of Americans without legislative authority, and electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes without compliance with laws set up to regulate that activity. These claims could be consistent with obedience to statutory law only if either the Constitution had given him exclusive powers (a contention that few accept), or the situations in which he claims authority were so unusual as not to have ever been contemplated by Congress. Certainly the general words of the congressional authorization to use force to deal with Al Qaeda were not meant to overrule every statute the president felt was a hindrance in fighting terrorism.
In each of these cases, Congress plainly addressed the very situations in which Bush now claims an exemption from law. The statute regulating electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes includes emergency and wartime exceptions. Congress had in mind the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans when it forbade detention of an American seized far from a war zone without a specific statute. The McCain amendment was intended to leave the president with discretion to apply the vague constitutional standard of ''shocking the conscience," but only that much discretion. Only the prohibition of torture is absolute and without exception, and Congress wanted it that way.
Indeed, the president's defiance of statutory law is even bolder than this suggests. Each of these executive actions, taken in violation of specific statutory prohibitions, has been treated as a matter of national security secrecy, and therefore anyone who reveals the fact that the president is violating statutes passed by Congress is subject to the immediate threat of prosecution under the espionage statutes. The result in the recent case of wiretaps of Americans without judicial warrants is particularly bizarre. There was nothing secret about our technical capacity to monitor phone calls coming to or from the United States. Nor was there anything secret about our desire to do so to prevent terrorism. No one has, finally, revealed whose calls or e-mail messages were the subject of surveillance. All that could have been secret about the activities described in the New York Times was that the president was defying a law that most thought he had to obey.
It is a fundamental mistake to think that the central domestic conflict about fighting terrorism is only between supporters of national security and supporters of civil liberties of Americans. The prior question is about the effect of law in the form of duly enacted statutes, negotiated between Congress and the president, reconciling these competing claims. The president is claiming that his powers to deal with terrorism as commander-in-chief override a negotiated compromise with the Congress, embodied in a statute signed by the president. He is saying, simply and flatly, that no law can stand in his way. We should not accept that claim.
If the threat of terrorism is to be with us for decades, will our children and grandchildren remember a time when our president's actions were ruled by law?
Philip B. Heymann, former US deputy attorney general, is a professor at Harvard Law School.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company. |
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By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN
Counterpunch
12 Jan 2006
When President Bush signed the new law, sponsored by Senator McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed.
This news came fast on the heels of Bush's shocking admission that, since 2002, he has repeatedly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant, in flagrant violation of applicable federal law.
And before that, Bush declared he had the unilateral authority to ignore the Geneva Conventions and to indefinitely detain without due process both immigrants and citizens as enemy combatants.
All these declarations echo the refrain Bush has been asserting from the outset of his presidency. That refrain is simple: Presidential power must be unilateral, and unchecked. But the most recent and blatant presidential intrusions on the law and Constitution supply the verse to that refrain. They not only claim unilateral executive power, but also supply the train of the President's thinking, the texture of his motivations, and the root of his intentions.
They make clear, for instance, that the phrase "unitary executive" is a code word for a doctrine that favors nearly unlimited executive power. Bush has used the doctrine in his signing statements to quietly expand presidential authority.
In this column, I will consider the meaning of the unitary executive doctrine within a democratic government that respects the separation of powers. I will ask: Can our government remain true to its nature, yet also embrace this doctrine?
I will also consider what the President and his legal advisers mean by applying the unitary executive doctrine. And I will argue that the doctrine violates basic tenets of our system of checks and balances, quietly crossing longstanding legal and moral boundaries that are essential to a democratic society.
President Bush's Aggressive Use of Presidential Signing Statements
Bush has used presidential "signing statements" - statements issued by the President upon signing a bill into law -- to expand his power. Each of his signing statements says that he will interpret the law in question "in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."
Presidential signing statements have gotten very little media attention. They are, however, highly important documents that define how the President interprets the laws he signs. Presidents use such statements to protects the prerogative of their office and ensure control over the executive branch functions.
Presidents also -- since Reagan -- have used such statements to create a kind of alternative legislative history. Attorney General Ed Meese explained in 1986 that:
To make sure that the President's own understanding of what's in a bill is the same . . . is given consideration at the time of statutory construction later on by a court, we have now arranged with West Publishing Company that the presidential statement on the signing of a bill will accompany the legislative history from Congress so that all can be available to the court for future construction of what that statute really means.
The alternative legislative history would, according to Dr. Christopher S. Kelley, professor of political science at the Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, "contain certain policy or principles that the administration had lost in its negotiations" with Congress.
The Supreme Court has paid close attention to presidential signing statements. Indeed, in two important decisions -- the Chadha and Bowsher decisions - the Court relied in part on president signing statements in interpreting laws. Other federal courts, sources show, have taken note of them too.
President Bush has used presidential signing statements more than any previous president. From President Monroe's administration (1817-25) to the Carter administration (1977-81), the executive branch issued a total of 75 signing statements to protect presidential prerogatives. From Reagan's administration through Clinton's, the total number of signing statements ever issued, by all presidents, rose to a total 322.
In striking contrast to his predecessors, President Bush issued at least 435 signing statements in his first term alone. And, in these statements and in his executive orders, Bush used the term "unitary executive" 95 times. It is important, therefore, to understand what this doctrine means.
What Does the Administration Mean When It Refers to the "Unitary Executive"?
Dr. Kelley notes that the unitary executive doctrine arose as the result of the twin circumstances of Vietnam and Watergate. Kelley asserts that "the faith and trust placed into the presidency was broken as a result of the lies of Vietnam and Watergate," which resulted in a congressional assault on presidential prerogatives.
For example, consider the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which Bush evaded when authorizing the NSA to tap without warrants -- even those issued by the FISA court. FISA was enacted after the fall of Nixon with the precise intention of curbing unchecked executive branch surveillance. (Indeed, Nixon's improper use of domestic surveillance was included in Article 2 paragraph (2) of the impeachment articles against him.)
According to Kelley, these congressional limits on the presidency, in turn, led "some very creative people" in the White House and the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to fight back, in an attempt to foil or blunt these limits. In their view, these laws were legislative attempts to strip the president of his rightful powers. Prominent among those in the movement to preserve presidential power and champion the unitary executive doctrine were the founding members of the Federalist Society, nearly all of whom worked in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White Houses.
The unitary executive doctrine arises out of a theory called "departmentalism," or "coordinate construction." According to legal scholars Christopher Yoo, Steven Calabresi, and Anthony Colangelo, the coordinate construction approach "holds that all three branches of the federal government have the power and duty to interpret the Constitution." According to this theory, the president may (and indeed, must) interpret laws, equally as much as the courts.
The Unitary Executive Versus Judicial Supremacy
The coordinate construction theory counters the long-standing notion of "judicial supremacy," articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison, which held that the Court is the final arbiter of what is and is not the law. Marshall famously wrote there: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
Of course, the President has a duty not to undermine his own office, as University of Miami law professor A. Michael Froomkin notes. And, as Kelley points out, the President is bound by his oath of office and the "Take Care clause" to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and to "take care" that the laws are faithfully executed. And those duties require, in turn, that the President interpret what is, and is not constitutional, at least when overseeing the actions of executive agencies.
However, Bush's recent actions make it clear that he interprets the coordinate construction approach extremely aggressively. In his view, and the view of his Administration, that doctrine gives him license to overrule and bypass Congress or the courts, based on his own interpretations of the Constitution -- even where that violates long-established laws and treaties, counters recent legislation that he has himself signed, or (as shown by recent developments in the Padilla case) involves offering a federal court contradictory justifications for a detention.
This is a form of presidential rebellion against Congress and the courts, and possibly a violation of President Bush's oath of office, as well.
After all, can it be possible that that oath means that the President must uphold the Constitution only as he construes it - and not as the federal courts do?
And can it be possible that the oath means that the President need not uphold laws he simply doesn't like - even though they were validly passed by Congress and signed into law by him?
Analyzing Bush's Disturbing Signing Statement for the McCain Anti-Torture Bill
Let's take a close look at Bush's most recent signing statement, on the torture bill. It says:
The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.
In this signing statement, Bush asserts not only his authority to internally supervise the "unitary executive branch," but also his power as Commander-in-Chief, as the basis for his interpretation of the law -- which observers have noted allows Bush to create a loophole to permit the use of torture when he wants.
Clearly, Bush believes he can ignore the intentions of Congress. Not only that but by this statement, he has evinced his intent to do so, if he so chooses.
On top of this, Bush asserts that the law must be consistent with "constitutional limitations on judicial power." But what about presidential power? Does Bush see any constitutional or statutory limitations on that? And does this mean that Bush will ignore the courts, too, if he chooses - as he attempted, recently, to do in the Padilla case?
The Unitary Executive Doctrine Violates the Separation of Powers
As Findlaw columnist Edward Lazarus recently showed, the President does not have unlimited executive authority, not even as Commander-in-Chief of the military. Our government was purposely created with power split between three branches, not concentrated in one.
Separation of powers, then, is not simply a talisman: It is the foundation of our system. James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, No. 47, that:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
Another early American, George Nicholas, eloquently articulated the concept of "power divided" in one of his letters:
The most effectual guard which has yet been discovered against the abuse of power, is the division of it. It is our happiness to have a constitution which contains within it a sufficient limitation to the power granted by it, and also a proper division of that power. But no constitution affords any real security to liberty unless it is considered as sacred and preserved inviolate; because that security can only arise from an actual and not from a nominal limitation and division of power.
Yet it seems a nominal limitation and division of power - with real power concentrated solely in the "unitary executive" - is exactly what President Bush seeks. His signing statements make the point quite clearly, and his overt refusal to follow the laws illustrates that point: In Bush's view, there is no actual limitation or division of power; it all resides in the executive.
Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense:
In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
The unitary executive doctrine conflicts with Paine's principle - one that is fundamental to our constitutional system. If Bush can ignore or evade laws, then the law is no longer king. Americans need to decide whether we are still a country of laws - and if we are, we need to decide whether a President who has determined to ignore or evade the law has not acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government.
Jennifer Van Bergen, a journalist with a law degree, is the author of THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE BUSH PLAN FOR AMERICA (Common Courage Press, 2004). She writes frequently on civil liberties, human rights, and international law. Her book, ARCHETYPES FOR WRITERS, about the characterization method she developed and taught at the New School University, will be out in 2006. She can be reached at jvbxyz@earthlink.net.
This article originally appeared on Findlaw's Writ. |
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by Stephen Crockett
13 Jan 2006
It is amazing that the Republican controlled Corporate Media and the Republican controlled federal and state governments have been able to control the flow of information vital to American Democracy by abusing positions of power. Examples can be found at all levels of government and in the media.
The Bush Administration engaged in blatantly criminal behavior by wiretapping millions of American citizens without a court order. Bush has called the program limited but a NSA Whistleblower and admitted source for the New York Times story that exposed the illegal program stated in an ABC news story that millions of citizens were likely involved. The wiretapping orders and the disinformation on the scale of the program came directly from Bush and Cheney. Bush and Cheney ignored the law by claiming governmental powers that simply do not exist. The type of “powers” claims made by Bush have been made before and reviewed by federal courts. They were found to be not supported by law.
Most recently, the Reagan Administration made similar claims during the Iran-Contra scandal when White House operatives ignored specific federal laws limiting the scope of Presidential powers in the fields of foreign policy, use of military actions and national security. Like the NSA wiretapping scandal, the actions of the Reagan White House were known to be illegal when undertaken and were hidden from the American public for years.
In both scandals, the White House claimed a higher duty while taking a very low road by breaking federal law. In both cases, the illegal actions proved to be questionably effective. The White House in both cases undermined the rule of law and directly attacked the Constitutional checks and balances system dividing power between the courts, Congress and the Executive branches of the federal government.
As a result of Iran-Contra, senior White House personnel went to jail. The current situation has one significant difference with Iran-Contra. President Reagan denied direct knowledge of the illegal activities concerning Iran-Contra. Bush and Cheney have not denied their active involvement in the illegal wiretapping. Bush has admitted ordering the violations of the law. Basically, Bush claims he is not bound by laws passed by Congress and signed into law.
Readers should read the book Landslide by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus for a detailed inside look into Iran-Contra. The issues of today are very similar to the darkest days of Iran-Contra and the better known Watergate scandals of the Nixon White House.
The Bush Administration has been known to politicize the Justice Department when doing so advances their political power. The example that most quickly comes to mind is the actions of senior Bush appointees in the Justice Department in approving Tom Delay’s Texas Congressional Re-Districting Scheme that gave Republicans an nearly airtight lock on control of Congress. Career lawyers at the Justice Department had found the Scheme illegal but were overruled by the Bush appointees. Voting rights advocates have found the Bush Justice Department little interested in investigating potential electronic voting machine fraud in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere.
The Bush Justice Department issued an opinion of Bush’s illegal wiretapping that found no violation of law based on Bush’s claim of inherent Executive power. They ignored all federal case law and Supreme Court rulings that stated no inherent Executive powers as claimed by Bush exist. The opinion found that the federal laws controlling government wiretapping did not apply despite the fact that they were written to prevent exactly the type of government actions undertaken by the Bush Administration.
Outrageously, the Bush Administration has announced that they are looking to prosecute the whistleblowers who revealed the illegal spying by the Bush White House to the New York Times. It is clear that the Bush Justice Department is trying to silence insiders from revealing the extent of criminal activities by the Bush White House.
The nation cannot rely on the Bush Justice Department to investigate the abuses of the Bush White House. The nation needs emergency legislation bringing back the institution of Independent Special Prosecutor completely independent of White House control.
American citizens need toi demand that the partisan administration of the Justice Department cease immediately. The Justice Department should be investigated. They appear to be obstructing justice instead of advancing it.
During both the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, the White House attempted to use the Justice Department to hide illegal activities. History appears to be repeating itself.
Already, the Republican partisan media has started supporting the Bush White House spin operation aimed at changing the subject from illegal White House spying to “leaking national security secrets.” Illegal activities should never be protected by national security claims. Following that path eventually takes the nation very close to dictatorship. This tactic was attempted during Nixon and Reagan. Those exposing criminal government abuses are heroes and definitely not criminals!
These governmental abuses of power to control information available to citizens find many forms. In Maryland, Governor Ehlrich has ordered all state employees not to talk to certain Baltimore Sun journalist because he disliked what they were reporting. Although both are Maryland residents, they cannot talk to their own state government by order of the crazed Republican Governor.
In Ohio, an election law is progressing to enactment that will make it highly unlikely that elections will ever be subject to recounts even when massive fraud is alleged. Basic information about voting machine counts will not be available to Ohio citizens. The Computer source code used to count votes from electronic voting machines are not available to citizens or journalists in almost every state.
David Brock wrote in his book The Republican Noise Machine, “… right wing verbal brownshirts of late have used their mighty media platforms to chill free speech of their political adversaries and to neuter aggressive journalistic fact-finding that threatens Republican power.” The current Constitutional crisis sparked by Bush and Cheney are a test for our embattled institutions. Our free press, the rule of law and American Democracy are all under attack by Republican officeholders and their media allies.
Written by Stephen Crockett (co-host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.democratictalkradio.com ). Mail: P.O. Box 283, Earleville, Maryland 21919. Email: midsouthcm@aol.com
Feel free to publish at no charge without prior approval. |
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Robert Scheer
San Francisco Chronicle
January 11, 2006
OH WHAT a tangled web these no-longer-young Republicans weave when first they practice to deceive! The plumb line that runs down through the cesspool of the festering Abramoff-DeLay scandal is the conceit that the scions of the Reagan Revolution, a generation of young Republican activists summoned by God and party, were morally superior creatures, who had only pure ideological motives for cutting the country's social-safety nets in the name of "small government." More than two decades before he pleaded guilty to felonies in two jurisdictions, Jack Abramoff was the hard-nosed chairman of the College Republicans, and his lieutenants were Harvard graduate Grover Norquist, who rose to political power as president of the American Taxpayers Association, and a young Georgia student named Ralph Reed, who would later become the face of the Christian Coalition. "Today, our party readies itself to mount the wave of the future," Abramoff sermonized as a 25-year-old at the Republican National Convention in 1984, as cited in Mother Jones magazine. "Will we ride that wave to glory, or will it send us crashing ashore? If we're the party of tax cuts, and not the party of 'ifs' and 'buts,' then we're riding our wave. ... If we try to outspend big fat Tip O'Neill, or rush to Geneva to cut a deal, we'll crash ashore."
Now, however, Abramoff has crashed and he threatens to take down DeLay, who announced last week he will not attempt to regain his GOP leadership post in the House, even as he continues to fight his own indictment in Texas, which an all-Republican appeals court has just refused to dismiss. Meanwhile, two others who came up through the ranks of Republican youthful activism, Edwin A. Buckham and Brent Wilkes, can now be added to the web -- growing with each new indictment and investigative news article -- of DeLay-affiliated lobbyists, politicians and public officials who employed or benefited from a series of what appear to be front groups, slush funds and political money-laundering operations.
Wilkes is up to his eyeballs in the case of disgraced Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-San Diego), who pleaded guilty in December to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors trying to sell stuff to the Pentagon. Wilkes, in turn, was a client of Buckham, a key figure at the center of an influence-peddling investigation into his work at the phony front organization, the U.S. Family Network, which serviced Abramoff's clients.
On Monday, Buckham announced that due to recent bad publicity, his prominent Alexander Strategy Group (ASG) lobbying firm was shutting down. It was ASG that paid Delay's wife at least $115,000 in consulting fees while selling the company's widely proclaimed access to her super-powerful husband. The lobby firm also provided office space to "Americans for a Republican Majority," Delay's fund-raising organization. No surprise, then, that when Wilkes wanted to gain influence in Congress in support of his quest to get the Pentagon to invest in products he was selling -- but for which the Pentagon's inspector general found no real demand -- he turned to ASG, paying at least $630,000 for the firm's services. President Bush, as he did with Enron and its politically well-connected execs, is reportedly looking to distance himself from these big-time GOP players going down like a house of cards in a Category 5 hurricane.
And, as with Enron, where company chief Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay was tight with Bush and a key financial supporter of his campaigns, such protests will ring hollow to those paying attention because of the perpetrators' prominent work on the president's campaigns, transition teams, fundraising and even in his administration. Abramoff was a "patron" fundraiser for the Bush 2004 campaign, and served on the Department of the Interior transition team, while Wilkes served as Bush's California campaign finance co-chair.
The scope of the scandal swirling around DeLay was perhaps best described by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, now a lobbyist: "Tom DeLay sent Buckham downtown to set up shop and start a branch office on K Street," Armey told the New York Times, referring to the row of lobby firms famously headquartered there. "The whole idea was: 'What's in it for us?' "
Sounds accurate enough. But Armey's candid comment begs the question of why he and others in the Republican establishment didn't blow the whistle on this operation before the indictments came down. After all, bilking the Pentagon for millions, bribing officials and breaking campaign-finance laws is hardly small potatoes.
What irony that those once young Republicans, who hectored their elders about being more vigilant in defending the nation's taxpayers and security forces, should now end up accused with deeply betraying both.
E-mail Robert Scheer at rscheer@truthdig.com |
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by Ernest Partridge
13 Jan 2006
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
William O. Douglas
Trust is the moral cement that binds a just political order.
Like a person in good physical health, a society of trusting citizens takes its good fortune for granted as each citizen goes about his personal business. When we dwell in such a fortunate society, awareness and appreciation of the bond of civic trust fades below the collective consciousness, even as we continue to enjoy the benefits thereof.
We pay our bills and send personal messages through the mail, trusting the Postal Service to deliver the mail on time and not to open and read it en route. We purchase our food and drugs confident that the food will not be contaminated and that our drugs will be both safe and effective. When we go shopping, we often do not bother to check the change returned to us at the register, and we routinely write checks against bank deposits without scrupulously checking our balance. In short, we generally trust each other.
Despite two decades of relentless assault upon "big government" by the (so -called) "conservatives," we have continued to trust our government.
Until very recently, we have expressed our personal and political opinions in our homes and over the telephone and e-mail, without fear that the government has planted a device to eavesdrop on our conversations. The supreme law of our political order contains a Bill of Rights which, we have confidently believed, guarantees our freedom of speech, of worship, of assembly and the privacy of our persons and our homes. And when our personal lives have been disrupted by an "insolence of office," we have generally been assured that the courts would provide a remedy. For as long as this benign regime of law and order has been secure, it has seemed so ordinary, so "natural." that we have taken little notice of it.
But today, many citizens are expressing fear that this benevolent political order is in grave jeopardy. These individuals are called “alarmists” by “conservative” pundits, and even “traitors” by a few right-wing commentators.
I have experienced an alternative political order, albeit briefly. Of my eight visits to Russia, the first three were during the final days of the Soviet Union. During the summers of 1990 and 1991, I stayed with a friend in his Moscow apartment. On one occasion, as we were having a free-wheeling political conversation, he abruptly stopped me, put a finger to his mouth and then pointed toward the ceiling, in the general direction of an undetected yet plausible microphone. Thereafter, we carried on our conversations outdoors. The brief stroll between the Metro station and his apartment ran alongside the local post office, the upper floors of which were lit "24/7." Why? I was told that the postal workers, under the direction of the KGB, were reading personal mail en route to delivery. (To this day, my Russian friends advise me not to expect my postal and e-mail to be delivered to them unread). And on my trip to the Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport to board my flight back to the States, my driver was pulled over by The Militziya (traffic cop). He did not write out a citation. Instead, at the driver's instruction, I handed the officer a $20 bill, whereupon he waved us on. My feeling of liberation upon returning home to California was palpable.
I returned with a renewed pride in my country, its Constitution and Bill of Rights, its traditions of tolerance, fair-play and mutual trust, and with a renewed gratitude for my good fortune in being a citizen of these free and prosperous United States.
But in the past five years, that pride and gratitude have been clouded by fear and foreboding.
Yes, we Americans have thrived in an atmosphere of mutual trust. But some of the foundation of that civic trust has been seriously eroded, and unless we repair and restore it, that trust may be lost forever.
Within the memory of all of us, we trusted the ballot box and were thus assured that our political leaders enjoyed the legitimacy of "the consent of the governed."
We enjoyed some expectation that those whom we elected to our Congress and our legislatures represented those who voted for them, and not those who financed their elections.
Our trust in our elected representatives had, in the past, been honorably reinforced by our independent "fourth estate" – the press. When government or the elected and appointed denizens thereof got out of line, the press stepped in and exposed the waste, fraud and abuse. The New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the Washington Post investigation of Watergate were among the finest hours of American journalism.
And when representative government failed, aggrieved citizens could turn to the rule of law, and ultimately the Supreme Court, as it desegregated public education, enforced voting rights, protected the citizen's right to privacy, and maintained the wall of separation between church and state.
Within the past five years, all these foundations of our civic and political trust – the franchise, representative government, the press, the Supreme Court -- have been severely compromised.
The Franchise: In the 2000 presidential election, throughout the country, but most significantly in the deciding state of Florida, eligible voters in heavily Democratic districts were refused access to the ballot box, or if they managed to vote their ballots were invalidated, all this through an array of tactics too numerous to mention but familiar to those who watched or read the transcripts of the hearings of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission. It is virtually certain now that in 2000 a sizeable majority of Florida voters intended to vote for Al Gore which, of course, would have won him the White House.
Despite all this, soon after the 9/11 attacks, George Bush had the unmitigated gall to proclaim to the Congress, to the American public, and to the world that the terrorists "hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government." Alas, at that moment his administration was not "democratically elected." We the People knew this, and thus our implicit trust in the "sanctity of the ballot" has been taken from us.
That betrayal of trust was compounded in 2004 in an election that was “won” by vote totals largely collected and compiled on machines built by, and secret software written by, admitted contributors to the Bush campaign and the Republican party. These devices produce no printed or otherwise independent record by which the vote totals can be verified.
Accordingly, if the vote totals in 2004 were accurate and Bush’s victory fairly won, there is simply no way to prove this. And there is compelling statistical, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that it was not fairly won. Moreover, the Republican Congress is suspiciously uninterested in passing legislation that would validate computer generated votes.
So it comes to this: whether fair or fraudulent, computer voting provides no independent data with which to validate the vote totals. Hence, the public is given no reason to trust the official results of elections, and thus to acknowledge the legitimacy the legitimacy of the government.
The Courts: In the election of 2000, the "consent of the governed" was overturned by that very institution that we had come to regard as the final protector of our liberty and of the rule of law: the Supreme Court of the United States. The text of that treasonous decision, Bush v. Gore – a compendium of incoherence, inconsistency and special pleading in defense of a foregone partisan conclusion – stands in permanent condemnation of the "felonious five" who crafted it. The immediate cost of Bush v. Gore is the realization, throughout the realm, that the Supreme Court can no longer be trusted to act in behalf of the citizens at large or to serve as a protector of the rule of law. Instead, it has become just another instrument in the service of "The Establishment" of wealth and privilege.
The restoration of the stature and integrity of the Supreme Court after the massive betrayal of public trust in Bush v. Gore will have to be hard-won over a long time. And that restoration is by no means assured.
The Media: the American press, once the wonder and envy of the civilized world, has been transformed from a watchdog to a lapdog of the "conservative" political establishment. The mighty "pen," which facilitated the end of a dreadful foreign war in Viet Nam and which forced a felonious President from office, became, in the past two Presidential elections, little more than a public relations arm of one of the contestants. When Bush entered office in 2000, a myriad of questions about his personal qualifications and political positions were left unexamined. In the meantime, Al Gore, generally regarded at the outset of the campaign as a skillful, well-informed, highly intelligent, and honorable public servant, was transformed in the public mind into a self-absorbed, pathological liar. This was accomplished by the unrebutted media promulgation of what can only be called a baseless slander. The particulars – that Gore claimed to have "invented the internet," to have "discovered the Love Canal site," and so on – all were invented whole-cloth and broadcast promiscuously by the media.
Even so, Gore gathered more votes than Bush. But it was close enough that a combination of conniving Florida pols, GOP thugs at the county election offices, selective disenfranchisement of legal voters by a private and partisan "research organization," and so on, topped off by Bush v. Gore, sufficed to steal the election and violate the "consent of the governed."
The delinquency of the media in the 2004 election was, if anything, even worse. A majority of the public was persuaded to believe, to the advantage of the Bush-Cheney ticket, the demonstrably false claims that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, had developed weapons of mass destruction, and was a supporter of al Qaeda. This could only be accomplished through a failure of the media to report the facts to the American voters. Furthermore, thanks to the cooperation of the media, in the minds of many voters John Kerry, an authentic war hero, was transformed into a coward and a fake, and George Bush, a deserter, was transformed into a war hero. Bush’s truncated “service” in Air National Guard was either ignored or, when attempts were made to the report it, the maverick journalists paid a heavy price. The attempt by Dan Rather ended his career.
As corrosive as outright lies to a democratic order, is media distraction and irrelevance. Thus the public is served an endless diet of journalistic junk food: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Scott Peterson, the missing teenager in Aruba, the love lives of Brad, Angela, Madonna, Jennifer and other show-biz celebs, etc. ad nauseam. While a persistent problem throughout the history of the commercial American media, under the regime of Bush-II this constipation of substantive news and diarrhea of vacuous blather has, for the first time, been deliberately designed to serve a political purpose.
In the meantime, the theft of the Presidency, the transfer of the public treasury to the wealthiest fraction of our citizens, and the lies spewed forth to justify the invasion of Iraq, have all been judged by the media moguls as unworthy of public attention. Nor has there been much media attention to the cost in lives and treasure of the Iraq war, or the failure of the administration, despite repeated reports and warnings, to deal with the genuine threats of terrorism, with global warming, with federal insolvency.
And so, through the accumulation and concentration of media control and ownership, the regressive right has closed down the vigorous and diverse public debate which is the lifeblood of a democratic society, all the while promulgating the manifestly absurd public complaint that "the media has a liberal bias."
Over the past two decades, "conservative" pundits and politicians have told us endlessly that "government can't be trusted" – and that virtually all government functions can best be handled by "private enterprise." As if to prove their point, while in power the "regressives” have violated the sanctity of the franchise and the integrity of the rule of law, and have spewed out "misinformation" from the their ill-gotten public offices, all of which has provided just cause to further distrust government. And when nature delivers a devastating blow, as with the Katrina catastrophe, the regressive regime further “proves” the inadequacy of “big government” by putting an incompetent hack in charge of emergency response, and then handing out emergency funds, through no-bid contracts, to “the usual suspect” mega-corporations.
Meanwhile, the Presidency, and particularly Bush's Press office, have become fountainheads of lies. Virtually from the moment that Dubya took office, we were served the slander that the departing Clinton administration had "trashed" the executive offices. The General Accounting Office set that record straight. We were told that Saddam “kicked out the arms inspectors.” A lie. That “we know where the WMDs are.” A lie. That all wire taps take place with a warrant. A lie. That “we don’t torture.” A lie. But why go on? There are hundreds more, (as documented here, here, here, and here).
Like their most steadfast media apologist, Rush "I'm not making this up folks" Limbaugh, the Bush spinmeisters "make things up" to suit the perceived needs of the moment. But why should we expect otherwise? These folks come from the world of marketing and corporate public relations – the same folks that have told us that "cigarettes are not addictive," that DDT is "perfectly safe," and that concern about global warming is based on "junk science."
The upshot: Trust and credibility are the mother’s milk of effective democratic leadership. FDR and Churchill had it in World War II, and so did George Bush when he stood at “ground zero,” bullhorn in hand. Bush was trusted then because the public needed desperately to trust him. But now Bush’s fund of trust, like that of LBJ and Nixon before him, has been exhausted, and with it, his capacity to lead. For truth and reality are remorseless adversaries, and eventually as the lies are exposed, trust evaporates, whereupon leadership fails. Then follows a time of great political danger. For if the discredited regime is to remain in power, civil order, once accomplished through trust, mutual respect, and obedience to law, must instead be achieved through force and threat, which is to say, oppression.
So now, when our country has been dealt a grievous injury by the terrorists, when the regime in power has proven itself incapable of dealing with natural disasters or extricating itself from an ill-conceived and immoral war, when the dreadful consequences of fiscal insanity are soon to come due, we are called upon to place our trust and loyalty in an administration which has gained office through an unprincipled manipulation and subversion of our foundational political institutions: the vote, the rule of law, and the free press. Today, when we desperately need to trust our government, trust, that essential moral resource has, like the federal surplus, been squandered to serve private greed and ambition.
The essential first step in restoring trust in our political institutions is to separate from the government those who are most responsible for discrediting those institutions.
http://www.crisispapers.org
Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org). His book in progress, "Conscience of a Progressive," can be seen at www.igc.org/gadfly/progressive/^toc.htm . Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com. |
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By Staff and Wire Reports
Jan 13, 2006
Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday asked for answers on an obscure Pentagon agency that included reports on student anti-war protests and other peaceful civilian demonstrations in a database meant to detect terrorist activities.
"Under what circumstances can peaceful protests at universities or by anti-war groups be monitored?" Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
"What authorities, and under what regulations, do military counterintelligence units have to conduct investigations on U.S. persons?" she wrote.
At issue is a classified database of information about suspicious people and activity inside the United States that's maintained by a three-year-old Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, whose size and budget also are classified.
The database, which a Pentagon fact sheet says is meant to capture information "indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity," came to light a month ago when NBC News obtained details on its contents. The Pentagon acknowledged including information on anti-war activities and other meetings that should have been removed.
The Pentagon announced a review of the program, and Feinstein's office has been told that all inappropriate records have now been removed.
Among the reports until recently maintained in the database was one on an April protest at the University of California, Santa Cruz, by UCSC Students Against the War, Feinstein said Pentagon officials have confirmed to her staff.
Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Greg Hicks said Thursday the review was ongoing. He said he had not seen Feinstein's letter but that Rumsfeld would respond to it after reviewing it.
© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue |
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By Chris Floyd
13 Jan 2006
If President George W. Bush shows no qualms about violating the 217-year-old U.S. Constitution or the 791-year-old Magna Carta, why should we be surprised to find that he is now violating the 2,400-year-old Hippocratic Oath?
And yet this week's revelation of how U.S. doctors are force-feeding captives on hunger strike in Bush's concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay still has the power to shock and sicken -- not just from the savage act itself, but also for the wider moral defeat it represents: another open embrace of raw brutality, another step in America's accelerating plunge into vicious despotism. News of the hunger strike has been trickling out from the ever-incurious U.S. media for months. Indeed, Pentagon warlord Donald Rumsfeld even joked about prisoners "going on a diet." But the full scope of the strike -- and the unethical methods being used to quash it -- only emerged this week in The Observer, which obtained legal affidavits from the Army doctors involved in this "torture lite." The strike, which began last August with a handful of captives, has now spread to 81 prisoners trying to starve themselves to death.
Men driven to such desperation make bad PR for their captors -- especially a blustering pipsqueak who likes to pass himself off as a God-blessed beacon of goodness and freedom. So the strikers are being strapped down and force-fed by tubes shoved through their noses and crammed down into their stomachs. This daily process leaves them bleeding and retching, according to sworn testimony from the concentration camp's hospital chief, Captain John Edmondson.
The good doctor defended the practice as humane, noting that his medicos grease the captives' nostrils with lubricant, and use only "soft and flexible" 3-millimeter hoses -- an amelioration of their previous technique: stuffing 4.8-millimeter hard-rubber tubes down nose and gullet in order to pump gruel into a prisoner's belly more quickly. Yet despite the Christ-like tenderness of this treatment, Edmondson is now being sued in California, his native state, for unprofessional conduct. It seems that U.S. doctors are legally bound by the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which explicitly forbids force-feeding under any circumstances.
Ah, but what are laws, treaties and oaths in our brave new world? There are of course no inherent legal protections or human rights in the Bushist philosophy of power. Like his brother in blood, Osama bin Laden, Bush recognizes no law beyond his own will. Anyone he designates an "enemy" -- without any charges or evidence whatsoever -- becomes sub-human, a piece of trash. And so it is with the Guantanamo captives. None of them has been charged with any crime, as The Observer notes; none has been shown any evidence justifying their imprisonment, or knows how long they will be held. Many of the hunger strikers have been chained in this agonizing limbo for more than four years, a living death guaranteed to induce torment, madness and fatal despair.
Yet it has been thoroughly documented -- sometimes by the Pentagon itself -- that numerous "Terror War" prisoners are innocent men (and children) who have been falsely accused through incompetent intelligence work, or even sold into captivity by bounty hunters paid by eager Bushist agents, as The Washington Post reports. We know too, by the regime's own admission, that all "high-value" terrorist targets are held in secret CIA prisons hidden around the globe, not at Guantanamo.
But last week Bush turned the screws even tighter on his Gitmo trash, signing a law that strips the captives of the ancient right of habeas corpus, which predates the Magna Carta. They are to have no access to the legal system, not even a simple declaration of why they are being held. What's more, last week Bush also asserted his right to ignore an anti-torture law he had just signed, The Boston Globe reports. Even as he reaped kudos for his apparent approval of the mild restraints on torture pushed by Senator John McCain, Bush simultaneously issued a "signing statement" -- an unconstitutional "presidential interpretation" of law -- declaring that he can set aside the law if he feels it conflicts with his "authority as commander-in-chief" at any point. (Cries of "Amen, brother!" were immediately heard in that quadrant of hell where Hitler and Stalin sit gnawing on the anuses of rats.)
No doubt any spot of legal bother about force-feeding captives will be dismissed under the rubric of this unbridled "authority," perhaps with the help of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, a longtime apologist for authoritarian rule by unrestrained presidents. After all, it was Alito himself who concocted the law-gutting device of the presidential "signing statement" when he was a legal factotum in the Ronald Reagan White House, The Washington Post reports.
But just how far does the "Commander's" torture authority reach? To the crushing of an innocent child's testicles. So says John Yoo, the former deputy assistant attorney general who helped craft the official White House "torture memos" that justified any torture short of permanent maiming or death -- and even countenanced the latter if it was "unintentional." Yoo also helped devise the regime's crank philosophy of the "unitary executive" -- that is, dictatorship for a "war president." In response to a question at a public debate last month, Yoo declared that Bush could override any law or treaty and order his goons to crush the testicles of a prisoner's child in the name of "national security," commentator Andrew Sullivan reports.
Crushed testicles. Torture. Tyranny. Aggressive war. Bush better start developing a taste for rat rectums right away. He's going to need it. |
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BBC
The BBC hosted a unique global television debate about America's place in the world with 10 other national broadcasters. |
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by ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN
The Nation
January 30, 2006 issue
Finally, it has started. People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush--not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress. As a former member of Congress who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, I believe they are right to do so.
I can still remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach during those proceedings, when it became clear that the President had so systematically abused the powers of the presidency and so threatened the rule of law that he had to be removed from office. As a Democrat who opposed many of President Nixon's policies, I still found voting for his impeachment to be one of the most sobering and unpleasant tasks I ever had to undertake. None of the members of the committee took pleasure in voting for impeachment; after all, Democrat or Republican, Nixon was still our President.
At the time, I hoped that our committee's work would send a strong signal to future Presidents that they had to obey the rule of law. I was wrong. Like many others, I have been deeply troubled by Bush's breathtaking scorn for our international treaty obligations under the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions. I have also been disturbed by the torture scandals and the violations of US criminal laws at the highest levels of our government they may entail, something I have written about in these pages [see Holtzman, "Torture and Accountability," July 18/25, 2005]. These concerns have been compounded by growing evidence that the President deliberately misled the country into the war in Iraq. But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.
As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government.
The framers of our Constitution feared executive power run amok and provided the remedy of impeachment to protect against it. While impeachment is a last resort, and must never be lightly undertaken (a principle ignored during the proceedings against President Bill Clinton), neither can Congress shirk its responsibility to use that tool to safeguard our democracy. No President can be permitted to commit high crimes and misdemeanors with impunity.
But impeachment and removal from office will not happen unless the American people are convinced of its necessity after a full and fair inquiry into the facts and law is conducted. That inquiry must commence now.
Warrantless Wiretaps
On December 17 President Bush acknowledged that he repeatedly authorized wiretaps, without obtaining a warrant, of American citizens engaged in international calls. On the face of it, these warrantless wiretaps violate FISA, which requires court approval for national security wiretaps and sets up a special procedure for obtaining it. Violation of the law is a felony.
While many facts about these wiretaps are unknown, it now appears that thousands of calls were monitored and that the information obtained may have been widely circulated among federal agencies. It also appears that a number of government officials considered the warrantless wiretaps of dubious legality. Reportedly, several people in the National Security Agency refused to participate in them, and a deputy attorney general even declined to sign off on some aspects of these wiretaps. The special FISA court has raised concerns as well, and a judge on that court has resigned, apparently in protest.
FISA was enacted in 1978, against the backdrop of Watergate, to prevent the widespread abuses in domestic surveillance that were disclosed in Congressional hearings. Among his other abuses of power, President Nixon ordered the FBI to conduct warrantless wiretaps of seventeen journalists and White House staffers. Although Nixon claimed the wiretaps were done for national security purposes, they were undertaken for political purposes and were illegal. Just as Bush's warrantless wiretaps grew out of the 9/11 attacks, Nixon's illegal wiretaps grew out of the Vietnam War and the opposition to it. In fact, the first illegal Nixon wiretap was of a reporter who, in 1969, revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia, a program that President Nixon wanted to hide from the American people and Congress. Nixon's illegal wiretaps formed one of the many grounds for the articles of impeachment voted against him by a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee.
Congress explicitly intended FISA to strike a balance between the legitimate requirements of national security on the one hand and the need both to protect against presidential abuses and to safeguard personal privacy on the other. From Watergate, Congress knew that a President was fully capable of wiretapping under a false claim of national security. That is why the law requires court review of national security wiretaps. Congress understood that because of the huge invasion of privacy involved in wiretaps, there should be checks in place on the executive branch to protect against overzealous and unnecessary wiretapping. At the same time, Congress created special procedures to facilitate obtaining these warrants when justified. Congress also recognized the need for emergency action: The President was given the power to start a wiretap without a warrant as long as court permission was obtained within three days.
FISA can scarcely be claimed to create any obstacle to justified national security wiretaps. Since 1978, when the law was enacted, more than 10,000 national security warrants have been approved by the FISA court; only four have been turned down.
Two legal arguments have been offered for the President's right to violate the law, both of which have been seriously questioned by members of Congress of both parties and by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in a recent analysis. The first--highly dangerous in its sweep and implications--is that the President has the constitutional right as Commander in Chief to break any US law on the grounds of national security. As the CRS analysis points out, the Supreme Court has never upheld the President's right to do this in the area of wiretapping, nor has it ever granted the President a "monopoly over war-powers" or recognized him as "Commander in Chief of the country" as opposed to Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. If the President is permitted to break the law on wiretapping on his own say-so, then a President can break any other law on his own say-so--a formula for dictatorship. This is not a theoretical danger: President Bush has recently claimed the right as Commander in Chief to violate the McCain amendment banning torture and degrading treatment of detainees. Nor is the requirement that national security be at stake any safeguard. We saw in Watergate how President Nixon falsely and cynically used that argument to cover up ordinary crimes and political misdeeds.
Ours is a government of limited power. We learn in elementary school the concept of checks and balances. Those checks do not vanish in wartime; the President's role as Commander in Chief does not swallow up Congress's powers or the Bill of Rights. Given the framers' skepticism about executive power and warmaking--there was no functional standing army at the beginning of the nation, so the President's powers as Commander in Chief depended on Congress's willingness to create and expand an army--it is impossible to find in the Constitution unilateral presidential authority to act against US citizens in a way that violates US laws, even in wartime. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently wrote, "A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."
The second legal argument in defense of Bush's warrantless wiretaps rests on an erroneous statutory interpretation. According to this argument, Congress authorized the Administration to place wiretaps without court approval when it adopted the 2001 resolution authorizing military force against the Taliban and Al Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks. In the first place, the force resolution doesn't mention wiretaps. And given that Congress has traditionally placed so many restrictions on wiretapping because of its extremely intrusive qualities, there would undoubtedly have been vigorous debate if anyone thought the force resolution would roll back FISA. In fact, the legislative history of the force resolution shows that Congress had no intention of broadening the scope of presidential warmaking powers to cover activity in the United States. According to Senator Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader who negotiated the resolution with the White House, the Administration wanted to include language explicitly enlarging the President's warmaking powers to include domestic activity. That language was rejected. Obviously, if the Administration felt it already had the power, it would not have tried to insert the language into the resolution.
What then was the reason for avoiding the FISA court? President Bush suggested that there was no time to get the warrants. But this cannot be true, because FISA permits wiretaps without warrants in emergencies as long as court approval is obtained within three days. Moreover, there is evidence that the President knew the warrantless wiretapping was illegal. In 2004, when the violations had been going on for some time, President Bush told a Buffalo, New York, audience that "a wiretap requires a court order." He went on to say that "when we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
Indeed, the claim that to protect Americans the President needs to be able to avoid court review of his wiretap applications rings hollow. It is unclear why or in what way the existing law, requiring court approval, is not satisfactory. And, if the law is too cumbersome or inapplicable to modern technology, then it is unclear why the President did not seek to revise it instead of disregarding it and thus jeopardizing many otherwise legitimate anti-terrorism prosecutions. His defenders' claim that changing the law would have given away secrets is unacceptable. There are procedures for considering classified information in Congress. Since no good reason has been given for avoiding the FISA court, it is reasonable to suspect that the real reason may have been that the wiretaps, like those President Nixon ordered in Watergate, involved journalists or anti-Bush activists or were improper in other ways and would not have been approved.
It is also curious that President Bush seems so concerned with the imaginary dangers to Americans posed by US courts but remains so apparently unconcerned about fixing some of the real holes in our security. For example, FBI computers--which were unable to search two words at once, like "flight schools," a defect that impaired the Bureau's ability to identify the 9/11 attackers beforehand--still haven't been brought into the twenty-first century. Given Vice President Cheney's longstanding ambition to throw off the constraints on executive power imposed in response to Watergate and the Vietnam War, it may well be that the warrantless wiretap program has had much more to do with restoring the trappings of the Nixon imperial presidency than it ever had to do with protecting national security.
Subverting Our Democracy
A President can commit no more serious crime against our democracy than lying to Congress and the American people to get them to support a military action or war. It is not just that it is cowardly and abhorrent to trick others into giving their lives for a nonexistent threat, or even that making false statements might in some circumstances be a crime. It is that the decision to go to war is the gravest decision a nation can make, and in a democracy the people and their elected representatives, when there is no imminent attack on the United States to repel, have the right to make it. Given that the consequences can be death for hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people--as well as the diversion of vast sums of money to the war effort--the fraud cannot be tolerated. That both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of misleading the nation into military action and neither was impeached for it makes it more, not less, important to hold Bush accountable.
Once it was clear that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, President Bush tried to blame "bad intelligence" for the decision to go to war, apparently to show that the WMD claim was not a deliberate deception. But bad intelligence had little or nothing to do with the main arguments used to win popular support for the invasion of Iraq.
First, there was no serious intelligence--good or bad--to support the Administration's suggestion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots. Nonetheless, the Administration repeatedly tried to claim the connection to show that the invasion was a justified response to 9/11 (like the declaration of war against Japan for Pearl Harbor). The claim was a sheer fabrication.
Second, there was no reliable intelligence to support the Administration's claim that Saddam was about to acquire nuclear weapons capability. The specter of the "mushroom cloud," which frightened many Americans into believing that the invasion of Iraq was necessary for our self-defense, was made up out of whole cloth. As for the biological and chemical weapons, even if, as reported, the CIA director told the President that these existed in Iraq, the Administration still had plenty of information suggesting the contrary.
The deliberateness of the deception has also been confirmed by a British source: the Downing Street memo, the official record of Prime Minister Tony Blair's July 2002 meeting with his top Cabinet officials. At the meeting the chief of British intelligence, who had just returned from the United States, reported that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In other words, the Bush Administration was reported to be in the process of cooking up fake intelligence and facts to justify going to war in Iraq.
During the Nixon impeachment proceedings, I drafted the resolution of impeachment to hold President Nixon accountable for concealing from Congress the bombing of Cambodia he initiated. But the committee did not approve it, probably because it might appear political--in other words, stemming from opposition to the war instead of to the President's abuse of his warmaking powers.
With respect to President Bush and the Iraq War, there is not likely to be any such confusion. Most Americans know that his rationale for the war turned out to be untrue; for them the question is whether the President lied, and if so, what the remedies are for his misconduct.
The Failure to Take Care
Upon assuming the presidency, Bush took an oath of office in which he swore to take care that the laws would be faithfully executed. Impeachment cannot be used to remove a President for maladministration, as the debates on ratifying the Constitution show. But President Bush has been guilty of such gross incompetence or reckless indifference to his obligation to execute the laws faithfully as to call into question whether he takes his oath seriously or is capable of doing so.
The most egregious example is the conduct of the war in Iraq. Unconscionably and unaccountably, the Administration failed to provide US soldiers with bulletproof vests or appropriately armored vehicles. A recent Pentagon study disclosed that proper bulletproof vests would have saved hundreds of lives. Why wasn't the commencement of hostilities postponed until the troops were properly outfitted? There are numerous suggestions that the timing was prompted by political, not military, concerns. The United States was under no imminent threat of attack by Saddam Hussein, and the Administration knew it. They delayed the marketing of the war until Americans finished their summer vacations because "you don't introduce new products in August." As the Downing Street memo revealed, the timeline for the war was set to start thirty days before the 2002 Congressional elections.
And there was no serious plan for the aftermath of the war, a fact also noted in the Downing Street memo. The President's failure as Commander in Chief to protect the troops by arming them properly, and his failure to plan for the occupation, cost dearly in lives and taxpayer dollars. This was not mere negligence or oversight--in other words, maladministration--but reflected a reckless and grotesque disregard for the welfare of the troops and an utter indifference to the need for proper governance of a country after occupation. As such, these failures violated the requirements of the President's oath of office. If they are proven to be the product of political objectives, they could constitute impeachable offenses on those grounds alone.
Torture and Other Abuses of Power
President Bush recently proclaimed, "We do not torture." In view of the revelations of the CIA's secret jails and practice of rendition, not to mention the Abu Ghraib scandal, the statement borders on the absurd, recalling Nixon's famous claim, "I am not a crook." It has been well documented that abuse (including torture) of detainees by US personnel in connection with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been systemic and widespread. Under the War Crimes Act of 1996 it is a crime for any US national to order or engage in the murder, torture or inhuman treatment of a detainee. (When a detainee death results, the act imposes the death penalty.) In addition, anyone in the chain of command who condones the abuse rather than stopping it could also be in violation of the act. The act simply implements the Geneva Conventions, which are the law of the land.
The evidence before us now suggests that the President himself may have authorized detainee abuse. In January 2002, after the Afghanistan war had begun, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush in writing that US mistreatment of detainees might be criminally prosecutable under the War Crimes Act. Rather than order the possibly criminal behavior to stop, which under the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act the President was obligated to do, Bush authorized an "opt-out" of the Geneva Conventions to try to shield the Americans who were abusing detainees from prosecution. In other words, the President's response to reports of detainee abuse was to prevent prosecution of the abusers, thereby implicitly condoning the abuse and authorizing its continuation. If torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners took place as a result of the President's conduct, then he himself may have violated the War Crimes Act, along with those who actually inflicted the abuse.
There are many other indications that the President has knowingly condoned detainee abuse. For example, he never removed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld from office or disciplined him, even though Rumsfeld accepted responsibility for the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, admitted hiding a detainee from the Red Cross--a violation of the Geneva Conventions and possibly the War Crimes Act, if the detainee was being abused--and issued orders (later withdrawn) for Guantánamo interrogations that violated the Geneva Conventions and possibly the War Crimes Act.
More recently, the President opposed the McCain Amendment barring torture when it was first proposed, and he tacitly supported Vice President Cheney's efforts to get language into the bill that would allow the CIA to torture or degrade detainees. Now, in his signing statement, the President announced that he has the right to violate the new law, claiming once again the right as Commander in Chief to break laws when it suits him.
Furthermore, despite the horrors of the Abu Ghraib scandal, no higher-ups have been held accountable. Only one officer of any significant rank has been punished. It is as though the Watergate inquiry stopped with the burglars, as the Nixon coverup tried and failed to accomplish. President Bush has made no serious effort to insure that the full scope of the scandal is uncovered or to hold any higher-ups responsible, perhaps because responsibility goes right to the White House.
It is imperative that a full investigation be undertaken of Bush's role in the systemic torture and abuse of detainees. Violating his oath of office, the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act would constitute impeachable offenses.
Next Steps
Mobilizing the nation and Congress in support of investigations and the impeachment of President Bush is a critical task that has already begun, but it must intensify and grow. The American people stopped the Vietnam War--against the wishes of the President--and forced a reluctant Congress to act on the impeachment of President Nixon. And they can do the same with President Bush. The task has three elements: building public and Congressional support, getting Congress to undertake investigations into various aspects of presidential misconduct and changing the party makeup of Congress in the 2006 elections.
Drumming up public support means organizing rallies, spearheading letter-writing campaigns to newspapers, organizing petition drives, door-knocking in neighborhoods, handing out leaflets and deploying the full range of mobilizing tactics. Organizations like AfterDowningStreet.org and ImpeachPac.org, actively working on a campaign for impeachment, are able to draw on a remarkably solid base of public support. A Zogby poll taken in November--before the wiretap scandal--showed more than 50 percent of those questioned favored impeachment of President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq.
An energized public must in turn bear down on Congress. Constituents should request meetings with their Senators and Representatives to educate them on impeachment. They can also make their case through e-mail, letters and phone calls. Representatives and Senators should be asked specifically to support hearings on and investigations into the deceptions that led to the Iraq War and President Bush's role in the torture scandals. Senators should also be asked to insure that the hearings already planned by the Senate Judiciary Committee into warrantless wiretaps are comprehensive. The hearings should evaluate whether the wiretaps were genuinely used for national security purposes and why the President chose to violate the law when it was so easy to comply with it. Representatives should specifically be asked to co-sponsor Congressman John Conyers's resolution calling for a full inquiry into presidential abuses.
Finally, if this pressure fails to produce results, attention must be focused on changing the political composition of the House and Senate in the upcoming 2006 elections. If a Republican Congress is unwilling to investigate and take appropriate action against a Republican President, then a Democratic Congress should replace it.
As awful as Watergate was, after the vote on impeachment and the resignation of President Nixon, the nation felt a huge sense of relief. Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy. |
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Last Updated Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:08:58 EST
CBC News
The U.S. government is expected to run a deficit of more than $400 billion in the fiscal year ending in September, a White House official said Thursday.
That's up from $318.5 billion in 2005 but below the record $413 billion in 2004.
The cost of dealing with Hurricane Katrina was a big factor in pushing up the figure, said Joel Kaplan, deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Other observers have cited the Iraq war and tax cuts as contributing to the deficit.
The $400 billion estimate represents an increase from a $361 billion forecast in July. Kaplan said the deficit will be halved by 2009 if the U.S. exercises restraint and continues to follow policies advocated by President George W. Bush.
The deficit in the first quarter, which ended Dec. 31, was $119.31 billion, slightly over the $118.05 billion in fiscal 2005.
In February, Bush will present a budget for the 2007 fiscal year, starting in October, that is expected to try and cut spending.
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed concerns in December about the government's failure to deal with its budget deficit.
He had said there could be severe consequences for the U.S. economy unless policy-makers attack a deficit that is projected to soar as baby boomers retire.
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Harkavy
The Village Voice
13 Jan 2006
And now the tax cuts just for millionaires have taken effect. Congratulations, America!
What a way to celebrate Friday the 13th: While the press is fixated on Sam Alito (he's in) and Iran (it's out), new reports bring disastrous financial news to Americans — even if you didn't read all about it.
Adding up the damage: Wall Street bonuses for the securities industry are record-breaking, and so are personal bankruptcies for the rest of you.
Oh, and you just got the bill for tax cuts enacted in 2001 for the benefit of millionaires. The cuts took effect at the beginning of 2006. And by the way, "Gramps" Dick Cheney's Halliburton is still charging you millions of dollars for "maintaining" excess, unused Mercedes trucks that are just sitting idle in the Iraqi desert.
Jesus wept, no matter what Pat Robertson says. Dry your own eyes and keep reading: • New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, nominally a Democrat, is deliriously happy about those bonuses, saying:
"The securities industry had a very good year during 2005. The industry paid record bonuses based on exceptional revenue growth and solid profits."
I wrote about this on December 7, in the context of the Pentagon's recruiting of poor people for its various misadventures around the globe. But now that the bonus news is official, it bears a closer look. As the New York comptroller noted January 11:
Wall Street bonuses will set a new record of $21.5 billion in 2005, surpassing the previous record of $19.5 billion set in 2000 during the peak of the last bull market, according to a forecast released today by State Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi. This translates into average bonuses of $125,500 — also a new record. …
After a disappointing first half, profits for member firms of the New York Stock Exchange improved during the third quarter and industry reports suggest an even stronger fourth quarter. Although 2005 profits could be less than last year's level, many bonuses are tied to industry revenues, which have been exceptionally strong this year. Profits have been held down by rising interest rates, which increased the cost of doing business.
Revenues at Wall Street firms grew by 44.5 percent through the first three quarters of 2005 — reaching the highest level since the stock market peaked in 2000. Merger and acquisition activity account for most of the surge in revenues, which is expected to be up 28 percent over last year's level and to exceed $1 trillion for the first time since 2000. Given the surge in merger and acquisition activity, investment bankers received the largest increases and bonuses just like last year.
• One out of every 53 households in the United States filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005. That's the headline on this CNN story, released the same day as Hevesi's statement on the bonuses.
Bankruptcy filings soared 31.6 percent in 2005. Luckily for the ruling class, new laws will severely curb that number, because it now is harder for ordinary Americans to file Chapter 7 proceedings to get a "fresh start."
Corporate America, of course, continues to take advantage of generous bankruptcy laws. Halliburton, for example, took various thriving and profitable units through bankruptcy court to rid itself of asbestos-litigation burdens. And as I just pointed out last week, vultures like Sago coal mine owner Wilbur Ross love to take companies into bankruptcy to escape having to pay for workers' pensions and health-care benefits.
• Tax cuts specifically benefitting millionaires — and costing the Treasury $27 billion over the next five years — just went into effect. As the indefatigable Billionaires for Bush point out:
"It's a class war, and we're really winning!"
The more sober people at OMBWatch summed it up well, also on January 11, which surely was a Black Wednesday for news, even if the rest of the media didn't report it that way:
As a fitting kick-start to a year in which President Bush is expected to push hard to make his expensive and unbalanced tax cuts permanent, two new tax cuts went into effect that almost exclusively benefit high-income households. …
[B]y 2010, taxpayers earning over $1 million will see an average additional tax kickback of $19,234. Those making between $75,000 and $100,000 will see an average of $1, and those making less than $75,000 will see nothing.
To put this into perspective, OMBWatch added:
Together these tax cuts will cost $27 billion over the next five years (roughly two-thirds of the amount Republican leaders claim will be "saved" with the budget cuts bill). These tax giveaways will primarily wind up in the pockets of the rich, who have already benefited enormously under Bush — such as those with annual incomes of over $1 million who have received an average windfall of $103,000 in 2005 from the president's first-term tax cuts.
Just wait until Bush and Congress resume their "tax-cutting." OMBWatch adds a separate piece that is required reading. But the starkest analysis of the dread economic news that is sure to emerge this spring from Congress comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — the best antidote to the continual lying about budget matters that oozes out of Capitol Hill and the White House. CBPP's January 9 analysis points out the heavy blows that poor people are about to receive, including "the most substantial — and controversial — changes in welfare policy since 1996."
If the monumental Wampumgate scandal isn't enough reason to vote in a new Congress later this year, this mishandling of your children's and grandchildren's futures ought to at least make you think. You might want to start acting now, before your civil liberties are further curtailed. |
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By SAM ROBERTS
New York Times
January 13, 2006
If the experts are right, some time this month, perhaps somewhere in the suburban South or West, a couple, most likely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Hispanic, will conceive a baby who, when born in October, will become the 300 millionth American.
As of yesterday, the Census Bureau officially pegged the resident population of the United States at closing in on 297,900,000. The bureau estimates that with a baby being born every 8 seconds, someone dying every 12 seconds and the nation gaining an immigrant every 31 seconds on average, the population is growing by one person every 14 seconds.
At that rate, the total is expected to top 300 million late this year. But with those projections adjusted monthly and the number of births typically peaking during the summer, the benchmark is likely to be reached about nine months from now.
"You end up with a number in October," said Katrina Wengert, a demographer and a keeper of the Census Bureau's official Population Clock, getting about as specific as possible this far in advance in a field subject to chronic fudging and revising. The clock is, itself, a contrivance, of course, but no more so than other pretexts for a wintertime sexual encounter. Rest assured that hospital publicists, canny obstetricians, entrepreneurial chambers of commerce, baby food manufacturers, public officials and countless others pursuing some political social or personal agenda, abetted by the media, are already guesstimating the growth rate to anoint any number of unsuspecting newborns as the mythical American who pushed the nation's population to 300 million.
In 1967, when the population reached 200 million, Life magazine dispatched 23 photographers to locate the baby and devoted a five-page spread to its search. Instead of deciding on a statistically valid symbol of the average American newborn, the magazine chose the one born at precisely the appointed time.
Life immortalized Robert Ken Woo Jr. of Atlanta, whose parents, a computer programmer and a chemical engineer, had immigrated seven years earlier from China. Mr. Woo graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and is a litigator. Now 38, he still lives in Atlanta with his wife, Angie, who is also a lawyer, and their three daughters.
"He did feel an obligation to do well," Ms. Woo said. "But I think he would have done well, regardless."
This time, like last, the selection is subject to all manner of qualifications, not the least of which is the conceit that the census can measure individuals so precisely as to determine the exact time that the population tops 300 million or, playing the odds, can define the average American newborn.
Still, demographers do know that the United States, which ranks third in population behind China and India, is still gaining people while many other industrialized nations are not. (Japan, officials there announced last month, has begun shrinking.) Driven by immigration and higher fertility rates, particularly among newcomers from abroad, the United States' population is growing by just under 1 percent annually, the equivalent of the entire population of Chicago (2.8 million).
Given the demographic changes recorded in the 20th century, the 300 millionth American, born in the same year the first baby boomers turn 60, will be a very different person from the paradigm in 1915, when the nation's estimated population passed 100 million, or even in 1967, when it topped 200 million.
The symbolic 300 millionth could be an immigrant, arriving by plane or crossing the border illegally, but most bets by those who study such things are on a native-born baby. About 11,000 are born each day.
"The 300 millionth will be a Mexican Latino in Los Angeles County, with parents who speak Spanish at home and with siblings who are bilingual," said William Frey, a demographer with the University of Michigan Population Studies Center.
"This is a far cry from the 200 millionth person who was born in the late 60's - probably a white son to middle-class suburbanites in Los Angeles or New York City," said Dr. Frey, rejecting Life magazine's determination, "and different from the 100 millionth person born in the late 1910's, perhaps to a white ethnic city family in New York City or rural family in upstate New York or Pennsylvania.
"The new baby is symbolic of America's new multi-ethnic demography of the 21st century, both urban and suburban, that will filter out from gateway cities like L.A., Dallas and New York, as white suburban boomers fade into the past," he said.
Carl Haub, a senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau, a research group, concurred that the 300 millionth American is likely to be male - more boys are born than girls - and generally agreed with Dr. Frey about the baby's other characteristics, but left more wiggle room.
While most Americans are still Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Mr. Haub said, Hispanic mothers have higher birth rates, and no state has more births than California, where most newborns are of Hispanic origin. There, Jose ranked fourth in 2004 among the most popular baby names for boys after Daniel, Anthony and Andrew.
What is more certain is that the 300 millionth American will live longer - to 85 or 90 on average - and in a nation that will be more crowded.
Today, there are still plenty of wide-open spaces, with about 80 people per square mile in the nation. But density varies widely: some Texas counties are home to fewer than one person per square mile; Manhattan houses 67,000 per square mile.
"By the time the 300 millionth individual gets to adulthood, many of the cities today we consider small and nice to live in won't be so nice," Mr. Haub said.
The nation is also becoming more diverse and has been doing so much faster since the 1970 census than in the 50 years after the 1920 one registered the 100 millionth American.
"The baby who's born this year, as they grow up, they may not know what we mean by diversity," Mr. Haub said. "And somewhere along mid-century the word majority will disappear."
In 1915, experts differed about whether the 100 millionth was born in January or in April, but the 1920 census confirmed that the benchmark had been reached. In 1967, the Census Bureau acknowledged that, because of undercounting, the 200 millionth American had probably arrived two years earlier. Also, the official population clock was slowed slightly on the morning of Nov. 20, 1967, to accommodate President Lyndon B. Johnson's arrival at the Commerce Department for the ceremony.
That same year, David E. Lilienthal, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, warned in The New York Times that unbridled population growth might doom the nation to shortages of water and energy, bury it in pollution and saddle it with unmanageable poverty. "A population of at least 300 million by 2000 will, I now believe, threaten the very quality of life of individual Americans," he wrote.
Projections are subject to unimaginable imponderables - from the impact of wars and epidemics to dramatic gains in life expectancy. It has taken 230 years for the United States to reach 300 million people (the total number of people who have ever lived in America is obviously much higher). The Census Bureau projects that even with the nation growing more slowly than ever beginning in 2030, the population will top 400 million less than 40 years from now. |
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Reuters
Thu Jan 12, 2006 12:13 PM ET
WASHINGTON - About half of all U.S. women and 40 percent of U.S. men are currently using or have recently used a prescription drug, according to government statistics published on Thursday.
This "snapshot" of information was based on a survey that found that 54 percent of white non-Hispanic women and 43 percent of white non-Hispanic men had used a prescription drug in the past month, the National Center for Health Statistics said in a statement.
Fewer blacks and Hispanics used prescription drugs, according to the survey, done between 1999 and 2002.
Nearly 44 percent of black women and 35 percent of black men reported using prescription drugs and nearly 38 percent of Mexican-American women and nearly 26 percent of Mexican-American men, the survey found. |
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12/01/2006
Several hundred people joined a handful of exotic dancers in front of the New Jersey Statehouse tonight to protest the US state’s new indoor smoking ban.
Some of the 20 strippers – who were clothed for the protest – said the ban will result in lost clients and less money in their pockets.
“It’s going to murder our business,” said Dominique Hernandez, 24. “A lot of people want to get off of work, have a drink and a smoke and watch some pretty girls. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
A loudspeaker blared popular strip bar tunes such as You Can Leave Your Hat On and Girls, Girls, Girls, but – to the disappointment of some in th crowd – the strippers displayed nothing more risque than their midriffs. Some people carried signs that read “Defy Anti-Smoking Nazis” and “Tobacco Control is Out of Control.” [...]
Alan Blumenfeld, owner of a club in Mount Holly described as a “gentlemen’s day care centre,” said the smoking ban would drive away customers across the Delaware River to the state of Pennsylvania. He cloaked his protest in patriotism.
“It’s about camaraderie. It’s the way it’s been for hundreds of years,” Mr Blumenfeld said. “The guys who signed the Declaration of Independence were smokers.”
At one point, the crowd fell silent for the singing of the national anthem, which ended with the strippers saluting and many in the crowd waving baseball caps and cowboy hats while chanting “USA! USA!” |
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The Huffington Post
January 12, 2006
The Huffington Post has learned the Bush administration recently asked high ranking military leaders to denounce Congressman John Murtha. Congressman Murtha has called for the Bush Administration to withdraw US troops from Iraq. The Bush Administration first attacked Rep. Murtha for his Iraq views by associating him with the filmmaker Michael Moore and Representative Jean Schmidt likened him to a coward on the floor of the House of Representatives. When those tactics backfired, Dick Cheney called Murtha "A good man, a marine, a patriot and he's taking a clear stand in an entirely legitimate discussion."
Though the White House has backed off publicly, administration officials have nevertheless recently made calls to military leaders to condemn the congressman. So far they have refused.
Rep. Murtha spent 37 years in the Marine Corps earning a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts and a Navy Distinguished Service Medal. His service has earned him the respect of the military, and made him a trusted adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents and leaders of the armed forces.
Unfolding... |
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By Mohamed Elmasry
Information Clearing House
11 Jan 2006
President George W. Bush continues to staunchly defend his war against Iraq, in which more than 2,000 Americans and more than 30,000 Iraqis have been killed -- with fatality numbers on both sides still going nowhere but up.
Iraq has become nothing less than a very expensive made-in-America killing field, in which every death -- whether Iraqi, American, or Coalition -- has cost U.S. taxpayers more than 2 million dollars. That's 2 million, per person, totaling 200 billion dollars so far.
Moreover, during 34 months of occupation, the U.S. has not built even one more university, school, hospital, bridge, factory, or road. Nor have any massive scholarship programs been established at American universities to help educate deserving Iraqi students in engineering, medicine, business, and other vital infrastructural professions. In the meantime, there is no public accounting to explain where billions of Iraqi oil dollars have been spent, and on whom.
Wars, death, destruction, human misery and loss of personal security are all misfortunes that people of good faith try to avoid or lesson among their fellow humans -- but when these misfortunes become pure evil, it is more often than not in the context of planned aggression, such as the American campaign against Iraq. For an excellent account of how this aggression came into being, the people who made it possible, and why, I strongly recommend you read Francis A. Boyle's book "Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11." [1] This expertly-written book even includes a guide to impeaching George W. Bush! In fact, Boyle's book and his testimony against GWB are extraordinary; this is because Boyle comes with credentials unmatched by any of his critics.
He is not only a leading American expert in international law and a human rights activist (a former board member of Amnesty International, 1988-1992); he is also a distinguished professor with volumes of publications to his credit, who teaches international law at the University of Illinois. Boyle holds a Doctor of Laws, as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard. He is definitely not to be dismissed lightly.
"It is now a matter of public record that immediately after being inaugurated as president in January 2001, George Bush, Jr., Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, and his pro-Israeli 'Neoconservative' Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme, and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq," Boyle writes. "Later, they manipulated the tragic events of September 11 in order to provide a pretext for doing so. The fact that Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11 or supporting Al-Qaeda - as the CIA itself advised - made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Undersecretary of War Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-Cons inhabiting the Bush, Jr. administration."
Not surprisingly, the mainstream American media did not give Boyle's book anything near the coverage it deserves. But one day, his expert witness testimony, along with others, could be used in a court of law, or by historians, to identify who is/was behind this pure evil. It may take years, but that day will surely come.
Boyle recalls his student days at the University of Chicago (he earned his A.B. there in 1971) and how Professor Leo Strauss, who taught political philosophy, trained an entire generation of students "to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians."
"Years later, the University of Chicago became the 'brains' behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft police state," Boyle writes. "Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the U of C in 1967. Many of his lawyers at the Bush Jr. Department of Justice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka 'Feddies'), which originated in part at the U of C. Feddies wrote the USA Patriot Act (USAPA) and the draft for USAPA II, which constitute the blueprint for establishing an American police state."
Boyle continues that, according to Bush, he hired 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration and they "intentionally took offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Palestinians. Most of the Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere are Israel-firsters: what is 'good' for Israel is by definition 'good' for the United States - making it questionable sometimes whether even the notion of 'dual loyalties' accurately expresses the extent of diluted loyalty to true American interests and values."
Boyle's book was published in 2004, and although still timely, it merits a new updated edition in which this most credible author can give more of his expert witness testimony on recent findings that Bush ordered spying on American citizens -- but "only 500 of them," according to the President of the supposed "Free World."
Note:
[1]. "Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11" by Francis A. Boyle
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/093286340X/mmn-20/ |
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By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
Mother Jones
15 Jan 2004
It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone. Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
Six months after the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting‚ -- and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore. You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
In an Administration devoted to the notion of "Feith-based intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity."
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this?'" Rumsfeld noted. "'Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy.
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA's analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances‚ -- once in late 2001 and, again, last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue [intelligence] operation" outside official CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric "Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts‚ -- including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt‚ -- who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.
Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soul mates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He'd come to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's. "He makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years, Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle's arms-control adviser. In the '90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with Schmitt on Moynihan's staff and they had remained friends. Asked about the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence "cell," Schmitt‚ -- who is currently the executive director of the Project for the New American Century‚ -- says that he can't say much about it "because one of my best friends is running it."
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP‚ -- the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."
Besides Cheney, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board.
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. "We gave the names of people who were doing the links," he told an interviewer from PBS's Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with."
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency‚ -- which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon‚ -- leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's informants provided worthwhile intelligence.
So far, despite all of the investigations under way, there is little sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it operates in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told the Los Angeles Times, "the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents‚ -- documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, "or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken."
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats‚ -- but no Republicans‚ -- in support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully," Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans. "I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions."
Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.
Robert Dreyfuss is a longtime Washington journalist and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. His last cover story for the magazine focused on the neoconservative plan ot topple Saddam Hussein and reshape the Middle East ("The Thirty-Year Itch," March/April 2003).
Jason Vest is a Washington reporter whose work has appeared in the Washington Post,U.S. News & World Report, the American Prospect, and the Village Voice. |
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By Farhad Manjoo
Salon.com
10 Jan 2006
In his disturbing new book, Times reporter James Risen reveals how George Tenet's gutless surrender to war-obsessed Donald Rumsfeld led to the total breakdown of U.S. intelligence.
"Rumsfeld is a renegade who steps over just about everyone in the administration, including Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and even Bush himself, to get his way. Aided by Vice President Dick Cheney and influenced by Defense Department neoconservatives, Rumsfeld manages to wrest control of every aspect of American international affairs. "To others in the administration, mystified by the process -- or lack of a process -- it eventually became clear that Cheney and Rumsfeld had a backchannel where the real decision making was taking place," Risen writes." [...]
"Risen writes that after 9/11, "the president made clear to agency officials in many ways that it was time for the gloves to come off." Once, inquiring about Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida lieutenant who was wounded during his capture in Pakistan, Bush asked Tenet, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?" Marketing copy is always suspect, so when journalist James Risen's new book "State of War" arrived accompanied by a press release containing the phrase "tip of the iceberg," I began to worry.
"Tip of the iceberg" is a lemonade-from-lemons construction, an attempt by the publisher to allay concerns that the book's biggest scoops have already been widely aired. After all, several weeks ago the New York Times, where Risen covers national security issues, published much of what you'll read in the book's second chapter, which reveals that President Bush authorized a program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.
Since then, Bush has acknowledged the existence of the wiretapping plan, and Risen and Times colleague Eric Lichtblau have uncovered a great deal more about the program that goes beyond what's in "State of War," including the fact that federal judges and senior members of Bush's own Justice Department have balked at it. After all this new news, it's natural to wonder whether "State of War," which made it to stores just last week, might already be stale on the shelf, a blockbuster-to-be that's now just bust.
Yet it turns out that far from an empty bit of P.R. puffery, "tip of the iceberg" may be the perfect phrase to describe Risen's compelling, disturbing, if ultimately somewhat unfulfilling, volume.
In sketching the recent history of the American intelligence apparatus, Risen serves up scooplet after astonishing scooplet of our spy agencies' mistakes and misdeeds. There's much more here than illegal wiretapping; indeed, the wiretapping story is even a bit out of place in "State of War," a one-off chapter on the National Security Agency in a volume mostly about the CIA. (The book's subtitle is "The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.")
Most of Risen's bombshell disclosures have to do with that agency, including new details on the CIA's interrogation practices and its stable of secret prisons. In addition, we learn that in the months before the United States invaded Iraq, the CIA obtained and then ignored specific intelligence pointing to the absence of weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein, and that, as the famous Downing Street memo noted, the CIA was essentially fixing data around what it knew to be an inevitable war.
In what may be the book's most sensational claim, Risen writes that as part of a bizarre, almost unbelievably ill-conceived attempt to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, the agency recently provided the Iranian government with highly sensitive technical designs for making part of a nuclear bomb -- and then lost track of what the Iranians did with the blueprints.
The trouble is, for all the news in "State of War," you can't help feeling there's an even bigger story in what's not here. Risen's astounding findings are, for the most part, just skeletons of disaster and doom; in many cases, limitations inherent to national security journalism -- spymasters like to keep mum -- kept him from learning many of the details surrounding the programs he uncovers, and his account is often incomplete.
He reports that in early 2005, members of a Defense Department intelligence unit "working in Latin America killed a man outside a bar," but he can tell us nothing more about that incident.
He suggests that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the central planner of the 9/11 attacks who's now in U.S. custody, was treated so harshly by his CIA interrogators that he initially gave them false information just to stop the torture; more recently, he has disavowed his earlier testimony. But Risen, a careful journalist who always comes clean about his ignorance, makes clear he doesn't know what Mohammed is now recanting, how important his reversals may be in the war on terrorism, and whether the incident actually proves that torture yields bad information from detainees.
Thus, the book reads more like a collection of disparate anecdotes about national security difficulties -- almost all from anonymous sources, and sometimes reported with little context -- than a coherent story of what's wrong with the American spy business. At times, it feels like all tip and no iceberg.
To the extent that Risen does put forward a theory for why U.S. intelligence has failed so frequently and so spectacularly under George W. Bush, the story focuses on two key players. The first is George Tenet, the former CIA director, whom Risen paints as a feckless yes man, a pusillanimous glad-hander who ruined the agency's credibility and integrity because he could never stand up to others in the administration. "George Tenet liked to talk about how he was a tough Greek from Queens, but in reality, he was a pussy," one former CIA insider tells Risen. "He just wanted people to like him."
Then there's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the yin to Tenet's yang. Rumsfeld is a renegade who steps over just about everyone in the administration, including Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and even Bush himself, to get his way. Aided by Vice President Dick Cheney and influenced by Defense Department neoconservatives, Rumsfeld manages to wrest control of every aspect of American international affairs.
"To others in the administration, mystified by the process -- or lack of a process -- it eventually became clear that Cheney and Rumsfeld had a backchannel where the real decision making was taking place," Risen writes. "The result was that the Bush administration was the first presidency in modern history in which the Pentagon served as the overwhelming center of gravity for U.S. foreign policy."
These two forces -- Tenet's weakness and Rumsfeld's strength -- combined to squeeze out the CIA, to politicize and muddy its intelligence-gathering efforts, and to push the agency into operations that some there were very nervous about, including the management of prisons and the interrogation of detainees captured in the war on terrorism. Risen writes that after 9/11, "the president made clear to agency officials in many ways that it was time for the gloves to come off." Once, inquiring about Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida lieutenant who was wounded during his capture in Pakistan, Bush asked Tenet, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?"
It is possible, Risen notes, "that this was just one more piece of jocular banter between two plain-speaking men," and he says that White House officials went out of their way to make sure that Bush was never included in debates over how to handle prisoners so that he could maintain plausible deniability on the matter of torture. Still, Tenet got Bush's message and went about restructuring his agency to meet senior administration officials' wishes to get tough -- very tough -- with the enemy. An FBI official tells Risen that he once overheard a CIA official who was transferring an al-Qaida suspect to Egypt (where the suspect would likely be tortured) say to the prisoner, "You know where you are going. Before you get there, I am going to find your mother and fuck her."
Risen writes: "Several CIA officials who are familiar with the way the interrogations of high-value Al Qaeda detainees are actually conducted say that there are no doubts in their minds that the CIA is torturing its prisoners. Water boarding is used, not just once to simulate torture, but over and over again, according to one CIA source." Risen tells of a secret CIA report that "describes how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to the application of several types of harsh interrogation techniques approximately a hundred times over a period of two weeks." (Among a parade of ugly CIA interrogation techniques, one is to force prisoners to listen to Eminem extremely loud for long periods of time.)
Tenet's eagerness to please Bush and the Pentagon establishment was especially evident in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when he faced a stark choice: going with the advice of his agency's analysts, who had no reliable evidence showing that Iraq was a threat, or going with hard-liners like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, who believed Iraq was allied with al-Qaida and was intent on striking the United States.
The CIA's position on Iraq was clear -- it knew almost nothing. "It is hard for people outside the agency to understand how little we were thinking on Iraq," one official tells Risen. But just before the war began, some at the agency tried to fix this problem. Charlie Allen, a CIA veteran who was highly regarded in the agency, launched a provocative program to persuade the expatriate family members of Iraqi weapons scientists to travel to Iraq and investigate the country's plans regarding weapons of mass destruction. Risen tells the story of one such ad hoc spy, Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi-born doctor who had defected from her native country in 1979 and is now an American citizen living in Cleveland. The CIA contacted Alhaddad in May 2002 and asked her to do something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel: The agency wanted her to go to Baghdad and secretly interrogate her brother, Saad Tawfiq, a key Iraqi nuclear scientist, about Iraq's nuclear program.
Alhaddad agreed, and her story makes for the most thrilling reading in Risen's book. She prepares zealously for her assignment, learning ways to avoid detection by Saddam's men, and writing mnemonic aids into a crossword puzzle to help her memorize the questions to ask her brother. Once she's in Iraq, a cloak-and-dagger scene unfolds as she tries to speak candidly with her brother about his work without raising any suspicions. But for all the theatrics -- to talk secretly, the siblings take long walks late at night, they unplug the phones and they turn up the television in Tawfiq's house -- Tawfiq repeatedly tells Alhaddad the same thing: There is no nuclear program in Iraq. Risen paraphrases what Tawfiq said to his sister: "We don't have the resources to make anything anymore, he told her. We don't even have enough spare parts for our conventional military. We can't even shoot down an airplane. We don't have anything left. If the sanctions are ever lifted, then Saddam is certain to restart the programs. But there is nothing now."
Tawfiq, who was understandably wary of war, thought that by taking a risk to tell his sister the truth about Iraq's weapons, he was clearing up an American misunderstanding about Saddam's regime and possibly helping to stave off the invasion. He was not alone; in all, Allen's program recruited family members to get to about 30 Iraqi weapons scientists in the months before the war, and they all said the same thing, "that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned," Risen writes.
This data would, of course, later prove highly accurate -- but Risen says that officials in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the agency's clandestine program, became jealous of Allen's findings, and under Tenet's weak management, they successfully suppressed the new information on Iraq. "The reports from the family members of Iraqi scientists were buried in the bowels of the CIA and were never released for distribution to the State Department, Pentagon, or White House," Risen writes. "President Bush never heard about the visits or the interviews."
When it came to Iraq, Tenet, CIA insiders tell Risen, appeared to make his position clear -- he would go along with what hard-liners wanted. When any analyst, no matter how junior or inexperienced, seemed to say anything that comported with the neocon view of Iraq, Tenet perked up. One former official tells Risen of a meeting in which Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin mentioned that analysts at the Department of Energy doubted that aluminum tubes that Saddam had been buying could be used to build a nuclear bomb. At that point, the official tells Risen, one analyst "who didn't look older than twenty-five says, no, that's bullshit, there is only one use for them," referring to a nuclear program. "And Tenet says, 'Yeah? Great.'"
Another time, Tenet ignored the warnings of Tyler Drumheller, who headed the CIA's European spy operations and had learned from German intelligence that a key CIA source on Iraqi WMD, an Iraqi exile who went by the code name Curveball, was mentally unstable, unreliable and not to be trusted. In the days before former Secretary of State Colin Powell made his famous presentation on Iraqi weapons to the United Nations, Drumheller tried frantically to excise all of Curveball's information from Powell's speech. As late as the night before Powell's presentation, he spoke to Tenet on the phone and warned of problems with Curveball. But Tenet ignored Drumheller, and the Curveball data made it into Powell's speech. The commission investigating the failed WMD intelligence later discredited Curveball's source, and lambasted the CIA for relying on such shaky information.
For all the shoddiness of the CIA's work on Iraq, Risen raises the specter that its work on Iran is even flimsier, and might lead, eventually, to even scarier ends than we've met in Iraq. In a final chapter that is as darkly portentous as it is frustratingly vague, Risen writes of a recent intelligence snafu that compromised all American intelligence operations in Iran. The spy business doesn't get any more comic than this: The snafu was the result of a careless e-mail mistake. In June 2004, a CIA officer accidentally sent information that could be used to identify every American spy in Iran to an agent who, unbeknown to the CIA, was working for the Iranian government. The mistake "left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the United States -- whether Tehran was about to go nuclear."
But wait, it gets better. It turns out, Risen says, that the U.S. has pretty good reason to be worried about Iran's nuclear goals, as we may have been a key source for the development of its weapons program. In an operation code-named Merlin that was launched under the Clinton administration and continued by Bush, the CIA cooked up a high-risk plan "to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear program by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path." To do this, the CIA obtained extremely sensitive Russian blueprints for a component known as a TBA-480 high-voltage block, which Risen writes is needed in a nuclear bomb to "create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core." The design, Risen adds, "was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers ... from the rogue countries like Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short."
The CIA's plan was to slightly tweak the blueprints in order to introduce a technical flaw that would be imperceptible to Iranian scientists, and then to have a Russian scientist drop off the documents at an Iranian diplomatic office in Vienna, Austria. Even in theory, the plan sounds pie in the sky; in reality, the whole thing fell apart. The Russian scientist whom the CIA chose, a defector who lived in the United States, immediately spotted the engineering flaw that the Americans had introduced into the designs, and before he dropped off the plans in Vienna, he added a little note that tipped off the Iranians to the problem.
Were it not in a book by a Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter, the notion that the United States may have so recklessly transferred nuclear secrets to the Iranians sounds almost insane, like the rantings of a conspiracy theorist. As it is, actually, Risen's story is hard to believe -- not because I don't want to believe him or because he's not careful, but because it raises so many questions that he doesn't, and possibly can't, answer. We need to know the scope of the plan, which CIA and White House officials were crazy enough to think it might work, and whether anyone was ever punished for its failure. We need to know whether the CIA has discontinued such techniques and, if it has not, whether it has increased its security checks on such programs.
"State of War" doesn't address these questions. But now that Risen's reporting on the topic is out (and finally: according to Newsweek, the White House asked the New York Times two years ago not to publish his work on the program), perhaps other reporters will get on the case, as happened with the wiretapping program. If Risen's work is just the tip of the iceberg, it's high time we learned what lurks beneath, before we're all sunk. |
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media@aclu.org
13 Jan 2006
NEW YORK -- The American Civil Liberties Union today released new documents obtained from the Defense Department detailing abuse at U.S. facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Included in the release is the first publicly available government document confirming the existence of a secret “Special Access Program” involving a special ops unit, Task Force 6-26, which has been implicated in numerous detainee abuse incidents in Iraq, and whose operatives used fake names to thwart an Army investigation.
“These documents confirm that the torture of detainees and its subsequent cover-up was part of a larger clandestine operation, in all likelihood, authorized by senior government officials,” said ACLU attorney Amrit Singh. “Despite mounting evidence of systemic abuse authorized or endorsed from above, however, not a single high level official has thus far been brought to justice.” In one Army file, an investigator states that he is unable to continue an investigation into claims that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 in Tikrit, Iraq, was stripped, humiliated and physically abused until he passed out, because the unit accused of the abuse is part of the Special Access Program (SAP). A memorandum included in the report states that “fake names were used by the 6-26 members” and that the unit claimed to have a computer malfunction which resulted in the loss of 70 percent of their files. The memorandum concludes, “Hell, even if we reopened [the investigation] we wouldn’t get any more information than we already have.”
Also included in the documents released today is a heavily redacted memo referring to a December 10, 2002 “SERE INTERROGATION SOP” (Standard Operating Procedure) for Guantánamo. SERE, which stands for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape,” is a secret military program under which detainees held in U.S. custody abroad are subjected to harsh interrogation techniques. According to the ACLU, this document shows that such techniques may have been formally authorized in a memo to military personnel at Guantánamo. The ACLU said it is unclear how this document relates to abusive interrogation techniques authorized for use in Guantánamo by Secretary Rumsfeld in a separate memo on December 2, 2002.
Several sworn statements of military intelligence personnel and a written “Chronology of Guard/Detainee Issues” also released today confirm that the Army began receiving reports of detainees being brutally beaten and abused in Afghanistan as early as January 2002. The documents show that abuse continued into 2004. A February 16, 2004 memorandum recording an interview of an American interrogator stationed in “Orgun-E Military Intelligence Detention Facility” in Afghanistan reveals that its “Standard Operating Procedure” included keeping detainees awake, standing and blindfolded without food for the first 24 hours. The interrogator also refers to standard practices of “OGA” (a common military reference to the CIA) that include the use of drugs and prolonged sensory deprivation. A February 12, 2004 memorandum records the use of a “Fear Up approach” involving “disrespect for the Koran,” insulting the detainee, having a room upstairs with spotlights and turning the music on very loud.
In a March 28, 2004 report released today, the Inspector General of the Combined/Joint Task Force 180 in Bagram found several problems with detainee operations in Afghanistan, including a lack of training and oversight on acceptable interrogation techniques. The report states that “Army doctrine simply does not exist” and that detainees are not afforded “with the privileges associated with Enemy or Prisoner of War status” or the Geneva Conventions.
The documents further reveal gruesome accounts of torture and abuse by U.S. military personnel in Iraq. In one 2004 document, a civil contractor recounts in a sworn statement that he witnessed Marines pouring peroxide and water over the open wounds of an Iraqi prisoner. The contractor also reports that soldiers with the 372nd Military Police Company used slingshots against Iraqi children attempting to steal food from the base.
In another document, following the release of images of abuse at Abu Ghraib, one officer wrote on May 6, 2004, that abusive interrogation techniques, such as the application of cold or ice, loud music, sleep deprivation and confining detainees to a metal box, will “continue to cause us problems, as some interrogation techniques aren’t real defensible given the Abu Ghraib fallout.”
The documents released today are a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.
The FOIA lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Singh, Jameel Jaffer and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur N. Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
To date, almost 90,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia.
The documents released today are available at: http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/011206 |
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By James Hider and Stephen Farrell
London Times
12 Jan 2006
“WHY can’t we live together in peace?”, read the graffiti written on a wall in Fallujah by a weary American soldier. Next to it a colleague had scrawled: “Die ragheads die!” The US military has struggled to improve the cultural sensitivity of its troops — often raw youths on their first trip abroad — since the start of the occupation when the first soldiers to hit Baghdad slipped a Stars and Stripes over the head of Saddam Hussein’s statue. Jittery superiors swiftly ordered them to replace it with an Iraqi flag.
Long before the Abu Ghraib scandal, there were numerous examples of brutality and insensitivity by US troops to match tales of their courage. Sometimes it was purely a lack of local knowledge: a minor riot ensued when dogs — considered unclean in the Muslim world — were used to sniff staff entering the Oil Ministry.
At other times it was the crudeness of combat troops thrown abruptly into a peacekeeping role. “I don’t know how many women I’ve seen in labour. These people s*** out kids like turds,” a National Guardsman muttered to The Times on a patrol in Baghdad.
That contempt was quickly detected by the population, which was dismayed to see US forces obsessed with their own protection and doing little to halt the breakdown of law and order.
Much of the damage was done early on. Battle-hardened troops launched house raids that horrified Iraqis, who jealously guard their privacy and the modesty of their women. Doors were kicked in. Money and valuables were reported stolen.
But little has changed. “I’m a door kicker-inner,” one young Marine blurted out in Fallujah last month, to the dismay of his superiors.
The Marines have tried to teach their men some of the language. But most US soldiers know only how to say “move on” or “slow down”. They expect Iraqis to understand their hand signals — a bunched fist meaning “stop”, a hand waved palm-down meaning “slow” — and will frequently shoot to kill if confused drivers fail to respond.
The intensifying violence has only increased the distance between US troops and ordinary Iraqis, with ever-higher walls being built around bases, and US military vehicles warning drivers they will be shot if they come close. Even the Iraqi shops on US bases have closed for fear of rebel infiltration. |
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13/01/2006 - 16:41:27
A US army reconnaissance helicopter went down in northern Mosul, Iraq, today and its two pilots were killed, the US military said, while a senior officer said it may have been shot down.
Lt Gen John Vines, chief of the Multi-National Corps Iraq, told Pentagon reporters that there were indications the OH-58 Kiowa crash was due to hostile fire.
Both of its crew were killed in the crash said Lt Col. Barry Johnson, a US military spokesman in Baghdad.
The helicopter was on a combat air patrol with another Kiowa when it went down.
The two crew were not identified pending identification of next of kin. |
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Magus
The Swamps of Eugnosia
13 Jan 2006
An article by UPI reporter Claude Salhani asserts "Iranian firepower, either in the form of direct rocket and artillery attack, or by Iraqi militia proxy, of which there is no shortage in Iraq, it would be suicidal for the United States to attempt a direct attack on Iran."
Oh, the disingenuous naiveté of it all. Dear Claude, could even you surely not know? How could any Thinking Being, any who have used their eyes to See, their Mind to Think and their ears to Hear, not Know by now about DU?
Depleted Uranium, Claude, mon ami, the maker and releaser into the flesh, lungs, genes, environment, clothing, vehicles, tents, bedding, bedbugs, food, boots on the ground, fighter planes, tanks, Bradley vehicles, Humvees, guns, cannons, cannon fodder, buildings, trees, houses, wells, rivers, sloughs and soldiers, and their wives, husbands, lovers, children, fathers, mothers, friends and even co-workers back home in the U.S. of A., a fatal, irradicable dose of ceramic uranium oxide gas. Depleted Uranium.
All depleted uranium munitions release a constant stream, drip, drip, drip, by poisonous, toxic, invisible, killing drip, of uranium oxide gas. Lethally radioactive for thousands of years upon years, it is impossible to remove from any contaminated thing, human, animal, vegetable, mineral or items manufactured from these various components: Ceramic uranium oxide gas, depleted uranium, uranium oxide, depleted uranium. And everything the U.S. has sent into Iraq is contaminated beyond all repair or reclamation, including all of those 150,000 U.S. troops.
They dare not even bring home all of the thousands of uncounted, unreported dead US troops, now lying abandoned in shallow trench graves, in the deserts just west of Baghdad; a story once told, for one lost day last August, by Al Jazeera, with photos and all, and buried forevermore, carefully, since.
In testing to See if 'tis all truly True, the old DU blues, the anti-war purchasers of cheap, surplus geiger counters found radiation contamination, readings off the scale, above the newest graves in Arlington last year. Even from 6 feet under, within the sealed caskets, the soldiers leaked from their decaying dead bodies enough radioactivity to be an environmental threat to all the landscape around Arlington, VA. But that news too, is no news to be heard or told. 'Tis but a wonder the poor graves do not glow in the dark.
Mayhaps they do, but we see naught,
not in shades of X and gamma rays.
There in Iraq, an army stands upon a foreign soil, and never can it homeward go, for poisons permeate its every atom. What then to do but to arrange for its glorious annihilation, in the hell fires of Iran's response to an attack of the Neocon fantasists "Armageddon Stage 2"? Thus the former U.S. military's problematically radioactive troops and materiel in Iraq are transformed at once into a corpse divine, martyrd to the causes of Israel and George W. Bush and Friends, the Grand Plot's Lies and Greeds and Lusts and Pleasures and Conquests without end, amen.
And how the U.S. soldiers lived so proudly, to only die too young and too betrayed by their Pathocratic rulers in whose games they got used up; all gone; 'bye, with no more concern to their sacrificers and contaminators than the tiny, plastic toy soldiers that they threw around and killed in the yard as boys.
They high priests of Armageddon will get more bang for each buck private blasted to bits, as Iranian rockets splatter into the skies the once human bodies. And as they die, their blood will spout ceramic uranium oxide gas. Ceramic uranium oxide gas. Depleted Uranium won't kiss or tell, for no such story does, or will, the media allow to be told from the lips of the walking uniformed corpses before the Grand Iraq Finale's Show.
In Iraq they silently, dyingly suffer from the perplexing syndrome of "heat related" weight loss, chronic and ever worsening fatigue and painful, oozing "Baghdad Boils", the sores of their exposure to uranium oxide displayed on their flesh like badges of dishonor. Did you really think they could, or would ever be brought home again? |
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Rep. John Murtha
12 Jan 2006
According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, the definition of a civil war is a "war between political factions or regions within the same country." That is exactly what is going on in Iraq, not a global war on terrorism, as the President continues to portray it. 93 percent of those fighting in Iraq are Iraqis. A very small percentage of the fighting is being done by foreign fighters. Our troops are caught in between the fighting. 80 percent of Iraqis want us out of there and 45 percent think it is justified to kill American troops.
Iraqis went to the polls in droves on December 15th and rejected the secular, pro-democracy candidates and those who the Administration in Washington propped up. Preliminary vote results indicate that Iyad Allawi, the pro-American Prime Minister, received about 8 percent of the vote and Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's current Oil Minister and close associate of the U.S. Iraq war planners, received less than 1 percent. According to General Vines, the top operational commander in Iraq, "the vote is reported to be primarily along sectarian lines, which is not particularly heartening." The new government he said "must be a government by and for Iraqis, not sects."
The ethnic and religious strife in Iraq has been going on, not for decades or centuries, but for millennia. These particular explosive hatreds and tensions will be there if our troops leave in six months, six years or six decades. It is time to re-deploy our troops and to re-focus our attention on the real threats posed by global terrorism.
murtha-military.jpg |
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William Blum
Jan 10 2006
The sign has been put out front: "Iraq is open for business."We read about things done and said by the Iraqi president, or the Ministry of this or the Ministry of that, and it's easy to get the impression that Iraq is in the process of becoming a sovereign state, albeit not particularly secular and employing torture, but still, a functioning, independent state. Then we read about the IMF and the rest of the international financial mafia -- with the US playing its usual sine qua non role -- making large loans to the country and forgiving debts, with the customary strings attached, in the current instance ending government subsidies for fuel and other petroleum products. And so the government starts to reduce the subsidies for these products which affect almost every important aspect of life, and the prices quickly quintuple, sparking wide discontent and protests.[1]
Who in this sovereign nation wanted to add more suffering to the already beaten-down Iraqi people? But the international financial mafia are concerned only with making countries meet certain criteria sworn to be holy in Economics 101, like a balanced budget, privatization, and deregulation and thus making themselves more appealing to international investors.
In case the presence of 130,000 American soldiers, a growing number of sprawling US military bases, and all the designed-in-Washington restrictive Coalition Provisional Authority laws still in force aren't enough to keep the Iraqi government in line, this will do it. Iraq will have to agree to allow their economy to be run by the IMF for the next decade. The same IMF that Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former chief economist at the World Bank, describes as having "brought disaster to Russia and Argentina and leaves a trail of devastated developing economies in its wake".[2]
On top of this comes the disclosure of the American occupation's massive giveaway of the sovereign nation's most valuable commodity, oil. One should read the new report, "Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq's Oil Wealth" by the British NO, Platform. Among its findings:
This report reveals how an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost. The policy allocates the majority of Iraq’s oilfields -- accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil reserves -- for development by multinational oil companies.
The estimated cost to Iraq over the life of the new oil contracts is $74 to $194 billion, compared with leaving oil development in public hands. The contracts would guarantee massive profits to foreign companies, with rates of return of 42 to 162 percent. The kinds of contracts that will provide these returns are known as production sharing agreements. PSAs have been heavily promoted by the US government and oil majors and have the backing of senior figures in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. However, PSAs last for 25-40 years, are usually secret and prevent governments from later altering the terms of the contract.[3]
"Crude Designs" author and lead researcher, Greg Muttitt, says: "The form of contracts being promoted is the most expensive and undemocratic option available. Iraq's oil should be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not foreign oil companies."[4]
Noam Chomsky recently remarked: "We're supposed to believe that the US would've invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were pickles and lettuce. This is what we're supposed to believe."[5]
Reconstruction, thy name is not the United States
The Bush administration has announced that it does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February. When the last of the reconstruction budget is spent, US officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.[6]
It should be noted that these services, including sanitation systems, were largely destroyed by US bombing -- most of it rather deliberately -- beginning in the first Gulf War: 40 days and nights the bombing went on, demolishing everything that goes into the making of a modern society; followed by 12 years of merciless economic sanctions, accompanied by 12 years of often daily bombing supposedly to protect the so-called no-fly zones; finally the bombing, invasion and widespread devastation beginning in March 2003 and continuing even as you read this.
"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."[7]
It's a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And afterward doing shockingly little or literally nothing to repair the damage.
On January 27, 1973, in Paris, the United States signed the "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam". Among the principles to which the United States agreed was that stated in Article 21: "In pursuance of its traditional [sic] policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout Indochina."
Five days later, President Nixon sent a message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam in which he stipulated the following:(1)The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions. (2)Preliminary United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years. Nothing of the promised reconstruction aid was ever paid. Or ever will be.
During the same period, Laos and Cambodia were wasted by US bombing as relentlessly as was Vietnam. After the Indochina wars were over, these nations, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of America's "traditional policy" of zero reconstruction. Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.
There goes our neighborhood.
Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, for "just compensation" for the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got just nothing, the same amount the people of Grenada received. In 1998, Washington, in its grand wisdom, fired more than a dozen cruise missiles into a building in Sudan which it claimed was producing chemical and biological weapons. The completely pulverized building was actually a major pharmaceutical plant, vital to the Sudanese people. The United States effectively admitted its mistake by releasing the assets of the plant's owner it had frozen. Surely now it was compensation time. It appears that nothing has ever been paid to the owner, who filed suit, or to those injured in the bombing.[8]
The following year we had the case of Yugoslavia; 78 days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced state into virtually a pre-industrial one; the reconstruction needs were breathtaking. It's been 6 1/2 years since Yugoslavian bridges fell into the Danube, the country's factories and homes leveled, its roads made unusable, transportation torn apart. Yet the country has not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States.
The day after the above announcement about the US ending its reconstruction efforts in Iraq, it was reported that the United States is phasing out its commitment to reconstruction in Afghanistan as well.[9] This after several years of the usual launching of bombs and missiles on towns and villages, resulting in the usual wreckage and ruin.
Oh those quaint tribal customs
On December 7, the "All things considered" feature of National Public Radio had a report about the "honor" killing of a young woman in Iraq who had been kidnaped. She had to be killed by her family because of the mere possibility of her having been raped by her captors; the family had to protect its honor; a much loved and admired daughter she was, but still, her cousin shot her dead. It had nothing to do with Islam, the story said, it was a "tribal custom".
This report was followed immediately by Col. Gary Anderson, US Marines retired, arguing that the United States has to stay the course in Iraq. He's concerned that bin Laden et al. will think the United States is "a quitter". He says that leaving now would "dishonor" the Iraqis and he's apparently prepared to continue killing any number of the very same Iraqi people to preserve their honor. Anthropologists report that this seems to be some kind of "tribal custom" in Anderson's country. Presumably it doesn't bother the good colonel that a large majority of the informed people of the world think the United States is a murderous imperialist power -- he's probably proud of that -- but a "quitter"? Over his dead body. Or someone's dead body.
Yankee karma
The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: How to/should we block the flow into the country? granting amnesty, a guest-worker program, whether the immigrants help the economy, immigrants collecting welfare, policing employers who hire immigrants ... on and on, round and round it goes, for decades. Once in a while someone opposed to immigration will question whether the United States has any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants. Here's one answer to that question: Yes, the United States has a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by American interventions. In Guatemala and Nicaragua Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent played such a role in Honduras.
The end result of these policies has been an army of desperate people heading north in search of a better life, in the process of which they have added to Mexico's poverty burden, inducing many Mexicans to join the trek to Yanquiland.
Although Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico's police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people's aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington's North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US corn into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land and into the immigration stream north.
Hmmm, perhaps we really are in danger of a biological attack ... but not from al Qaeda
A week after the massive anti-war demonstration in Washington on September 24, it was revealed that deadly bacteria had been detected at several sites in the city, including by the Lincoln Memorial, situated very close to the demonstration. Biohazard monitors installed at various sites gave positive readings on the 24th and 25th for the bacterium francisella tularensis, which causes the infectious disease tularemia, a pneumonia-like ailment that can be acquired by inhaling airborne bacteria and can be fatal. This biological agent is on the "A list" of the Department of Homeland Security's biohazards, along with anthrax, plague and smallpox.[10]
My first thought upon reading about this was: Those bastards, they'd love to punish people who protest against the war. There's nothing I would put past them.
My second thought was: Oh stop being so paranoid. The news report cited federal health officials saying that the tularemia bacterium can occur naturally in soil and small animals.
My third thought came more than a month later, when I happened to be reading about a US Army program of the 1960s which carried out numerous exercises involving aircraft spraying of American warships with thousands of servicemen aboard. A wide variety of chemical and biological warfare agents were used to learn the vulnerabilities of these ships and personnel to such attacks and to develop procedures to respond to them. Amongst the CBW agents used were pasteurella tularensis (another name for francisella tularensis), which, said the Department of Defense later, causes tularemia, can produce very serious symptoms, and has a mortality rate of about six percent.[11]
These tests in effect used members of the armed forces as guinea pigs, without their informed consent and without proper medical follow-up. This was a scenario enacted on numerous occasions during the Cold War, and subsequently as well, involving literally millions of service members, with frequent harmful effects, including at least several deaths, military and civilian. It's a good bet that on some future date we'll learn that similar tests are still going on as part of the war on terrorism. I conclude from all this that if our glorious leaders are not particularly concerned about the health and welfare of their own soldiers, the wretched warriors they enlist to fight the empire’s wars, how can we be surprised if they don't care about the health and welfare of those of us standing in opposition to the empire?
Civil liberties holds an important place in the heart of the Bush administration's rhetoric."This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America and, I repeat, limited," said President Bush about the National Security Agency's domestic spying on Americans without a court order.[12]
Let's give the devil his due. It's easy to put down the domestic spying program, but the fact is that the president is right, it is indeed limited. It's limited to those who are being spied upon. No one -- I repeat, no one -- who is not being spied upon is being spied upon. On the other hand, there have been legal scholars, such as former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis, who have felt strongly that all wiretapping by the government should be considered an unconstitutional search under the Fourth Amendment, which, we should remember, states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Thomas Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. But, as someone has pointed out, he was talking about citizens watching the government, not the reverse. |
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Editorial
New York Times
12 Jan 2006
Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician has just dealt a huge blow to American-backed efforts to avoid civil war through the creation of a new, nationally inclusive constitutional order.
That leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has turned his back on the crucial pledge, made before last October's constitutional referendum, that the new charter would be open to substantial amendment by the newly elected Parliament. I
nstead, Mr. Hakim, who runs the dominant, Iranian-supported fundamentalist party, now says no broad changes should be made. In particular, he defends the current provisions allowing substantial autonomy for the oil-rich Shiite southeast. The vote count from last month's parliamentary election is not yet complete. But it is already certain that the Shiite religious alliance, in which Mr. Hakim is the most important leader, will hold enough seats to block any constitutional changes it doesn't like. The only recourse is to persuade Mr. Hakim to respect that earlier pledge.
Mr. Hakim's latest position is a prescription for a national breakup and an endless civil war. It is also a provocative challenge to Washington, which helped broker the original promise of significant constitutional changes. On the basis of that promise, Sunni voters turned out in large numbers, both for the constitutional referendum and for last month's parliamentary vote. Drawing Sunni voters into democratic politics is vital to creating the stable, peaceful Iraq that President Bush has declared to be the precondition for an American military withdrawal. The most unacceptable defect of the new constitution for Sunnis is its provision for radically decentralizing national political and economic power, dispersing it to separate regions.
In a quirk of geology, most of Iraq's known oil deposits lie under provinces dominated by Shiites or Kurds, while the Sunni provinces of the west and north are resource-poor and landlocked. Iraq as a whole is rich enough to support all of its people relatively comfortably. But a radically decentralized Iraq would leave the Sunnis impoverished, aggrieved and desperate, driving them into the arms of radical Sunni groups in neighboring lands.
Although Sunnis are a minority in Iraq, they are an overwhelming majority in the Arab world. An irreconcilable split between Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis would leave the Shiites even more dependent than they are now on Iran and American troops.
Constitutional changes are needed in other areas as well, especially in regard to women's rights and the overly broad prohibitions against former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. But decentralization is the most dangerously explosive issue right now. Mr. Hakim seems perversely determined to inflame it.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company |
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By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
UK Independent
13 January 2006
The confrontation between Iran and the West deepened yesterday as both sides hardened their positions over the Islamic republic's nuclear programme. The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany announced that more than two years of negotiations with Iran over its suspected nuclear weapons programme were at a "dead end" and they urged the UN nuclear watchdog to call an emergency board meeting to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions, accusing Tehran of a "documented record of concealment and deception". Diplomats said the talks at the Vienna headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would probably be held in the first week of next month.
The Iranian leadership stood firm in response. "We are not worried about our nuclear case being sent to the Security Council," Gholamreza Rahmani-Fazli, the deputy secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said on Iranian television. Earlier, the former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani said on radio that the stand off had "become very serious and has reached its climax". He said Iran intended to press on with its nuclear programme and had no intention of complying with " colonial taboos".
Western fears that Iran is bent on developing a nuclear weapon have been fuelled by statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since his election in June last year. He has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" , and Iran has taken steps since August to reverse commitments to the international community on freezing its uranium-related activities. The most serious step came on Tuesday, when the Iranians broke UN seals at its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, which can be used to produce weapons-grade material.
As a result, Iran is faced with the real possibility of being referred to the UN Security Council for sanctions for the first time after more than two years of talking to the Europeans about curbing its nuclear activities.
Iran insists that its intentions in pursuing nuclear technology are peaceful. But the West has continued to harbour suspicions because of the Iranians' refusal to come clean on the extent of its nuclear programme, which was concealed from inspectors for 18 years. There also questions as to why oil-rich Iran, with its vast energy reserves, is so keen to develop nuclear energy.
Last week, a leaked EU intelligence assessment provided more details about companies and middlemen used by the Iranians in their search for nuclear suppliers in Europe and the former Soviet Union. The report provided no proof, however, that the materials were destined for a nuclear weapon.
Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector who headed the UN nuclear watchdog, said: "I think some of the Iranians want to go to nuclear weapons." He pointed to a 40-megawatt heavy-water plant at Arak, which could produce enough plutonium for a nuclear bomb, as a sign that Iran may not have purely peaceful intentions.
A former Israeli general said he recently met Iranian figures in Europe who told him Tehran was "very determined" to acquire nuclear weapons. Uzi Dayan said his informants had an Iranian academic and civil servant background and represented "the official Iranian position". Israel has refused to rule out a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iran.
The European statement issued after the ministers' talks in Berlin stressed that the current dispute is "about Iran's failure to build the necessary confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. Iran continues to challenge the authority of the IAEA Board by ignoring its repeated requests and providing only partial co-operation to the IAEA." The statement noted that this is not just a dispute between Iran and Europe "but between Iran and the whole international community" . It said it was important for the credibility of the non-proliferation regime, as well as the stability of the Middle East region, "that the international community responds firmly to this challenge".
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, urged the UN Security Council to maintain the pressure on the Iranians.
However, Iran argues that it has a right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium, and has informed the IAEA that it only intends to conduct small-scale enrichment at Natanz . The Europeans and US could face difficulties in referring Iran to the UN Security Council for breaking a moratorium which was voluntary in the first place, and without the IAEA declaring Iran to be in breach of its obligations.
The Europeans and the US stressed that they still hope for a diplomatic solution to the stand off. But some analysts said it was a mistake by the Europeans and the Bush administration in recent days to use threatening language that could force Iran into even more extreme positions.
Sounds familiar?
IRAQ
WMD
Signatory of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty accused of holding weapons of mass destruction including a nuclear arms programme. UN weapons inspectors were expelled from the country on the eve of the 2003 war.
CONCEALMENT
Confirmed to UN in 1995 that it had a clandestine nuclear weapons scheme following revelations by Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law who had defected. Before 2003 invasion, regime was accused of concealing WMD from UN inspectors.
MISCALCULATION
Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, 5 March 2003: "It serves the interest of no one for Saddam to miscalculate. It doesn't serve the interest of the United States or the world or Iraq for Saddam to miscalculate our intention or our willingness to act."
SECURITY COUNCIL
November 2002: Iraq threatened with military action unless it co-operates with UN inspectors. US leads invasion without Security Council backing.
IRAN
WMD
Signatory of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty accused of working on nuclear weapons programme. UN weapons inspectors are at work in the country.
CONCEALMENT
Confirmed to UN in 2002 that it had a clandestine nuclear programme after revelations by Iranian dissidents. Iran was accused by Britain, France and Germany yesterday of "concealment and deception".
MISCALCULATION
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 11 January, 2006: "The Iranian regime has made a serious miscalculation.If negotiations have run their course and Iran is not going to negotiate in good faith, then there's no other option but to refer the matter to the Security Council."
SECURITY COUNCIL
12 January 2006: Britain, France and Germany call for Iran to be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. Failure to reach agreement could give US hawks - and Israel - an excuse for unilateral military action. |
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UK Independent
Anne Penketh
13 January 2006
Q. Why should Iran want to produce a nuclear weapon?
Iran is an ancient and proud nation and reacts badly to being treated as a pariah state. It can see how Pakistan's prestige was enhanced in the Islamic world when a Pakistani scientist developed the first Islamic bomb. Iran could do the same for Shia Islam. From a geopolitical perspective, Iran looks around the Middle East and Asia and sees regions bristling with nuclear weapons. To the east lie Pakistan and India, both nuclear armed. To the west is Iraq, which gassed Iranian citizens and where Saddam Hussein tried to develop nuclear weapons. Further west lies Israel - Iran's implacable foe - which is estimated to have 200 nuclear bombs. None of these nations has come under serious pressure to dismantle its nuclear arsenals, and indeed they have gained in international prominence thanks to the bomb.
In the Far East, North Korea is believed to have nuclear weapons, but rather than being threatened with military action it has received security assurances from the Americans.
Although Iran has been blamed by the US and Europe for escalating the current crisis, Iranians could feel that the sabre-rattling and warnings that "all options are on the table" are forcing them to defend themselves from possible attack.
However, when asked about Iran's nuclear plans, Iranian officials always insist their intentions are peaceful and they know that their country would face devastating military action if that were not the case. Experts believe the Iranians probably want to keep their options open by continuing nuclear research that may eventually be switched to weapons production.
Q. When did the dispute between Iran and the West worsen?
After the election of its hardline President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last June. His early statements after coming to power - in which he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" - were put down to the political inexperience of the former mayor of Tehran. But his strongly nationalistic rhetoric has clearly struck a chord with much of the Iranian population as well as part of the Iranian leadership. It is unlikely that he could continue to repeat his pro-nuclear and anti-Israeli statements without the tacit approval of Iran's spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It will be more difficult now for the Iranian leadership to back down on its nuclear programme because of the high profile that the issue has been given domestically in recent months, fuelled by street demonstrations.
Q. Can there be a military solution to the dispute?
As the US and Israel both know, it would be extremely tricky because of the possible Iranian retaliation which could stir up a great deal of trouble for the US and its allies in the Middle East through Iran's links to extremist Islamic groups such as Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad.
Already influential inside Iraq, where the US has more than 130,000 troops tied-up, Iran could wreak havoc there. Iran has also taken care to build much of its nuclear infrastructure underground making facilities less vulnerable to attack. Iranian officials like to boast that taking on Iran militarily would not be as simple as crushing Iraq which was already weakened and isolated in the region when it was invaded in 2003.
Iran, a major oil producer, could also retaliate effectively on the economic front. That is the problem for the West as it prepares to discuss possible sanctions against Iran. As one Western diplomat put it: "We have to find a way to hurt Iran, without it hurting us." |
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Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday January 12, 2006
The Guardian
The west's next step on Tehran's nuclear plans should be to understand the regime and society, not to start bombing Now we face the next big test of the west: after Iraq, Iran. As the Islamic revolutionary regime breaks the international seals on its nuclear facilities, and prepares to hone its skills in the uranium enrichment that could, in a matter of years, enable it to produce nuclear weapons, we in Europe and the United States have to respond. But how? If we mishandle this, it could lead not only to the edge of another military confrontation but also to another crisis of the west.
The European policy of negotiated containment, mistrustfully backed by America and ambiguously accompanied by Russia, has failed. It was worth trying, but it was not enough. The Europeans did not carry sufficiently credible sticks and the Americans did not wave large enough carrots to sway the theocrats in Tehran. Neither half of the old transatlantic west could induce oil-hungry China and energy-rich Russia to play the diplomatic game sufficiently clearly our way.
The seemingly half-crazed new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would probably regard a cost-benefit analysis as an invention of the Great Satan and a prime example of western secular decadence. Allah, he would say, is not an accountant. Yet if cooler heads in the regime behind him are making a cost-benefit analysis, they could still conclude that this is a risk worth taking. The mullahs are floating high on an ocean of oil revenue: an estimated $36bn last year. This money can be used to buy off material discontent at home.
They know that the US is deeply mired in neighbouring Iraq, where the Iranians wield growing influence in the Shia south. As President George Bush might privately put it, Tehran has Washington by the cojones. The mullahs also know that China (which has a large energy-supply deal with Iran) and Russia have very different interests from Europe and the US; and they know that countries like Germany and Italy will be deeply reluctant to let sanctions restrict their lucrative trade with Iran. That's a strong hand.
Everyone seems to agree that the next major step is for the matter to be referred to the UN security council. Even the Bush administration, so contemptuous of the UN during the Iraq crisis, now regards that as Plan B. What then? The security council raps Tehran over the knuckles. President Ahmadinejad says go to hell. The security council comes back with sanctions, which would be limited by the geopolitical and energy interests of China and Russia, and the economic interests of Germany, Italy and France.
Iran continues (overtly or covertly) with uranium enrichment, while those sanctions produce a growing siege mentality in the country. The regime will tell its people that they are being unjustly and hypocritically punished by the west, merely for developing nuclear energy for peaceful use, as Iran is entitled to do under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Compare and contrast Washington's treatment of nuclear India! Many will believe that propaganda - which, like all the best propaganda, contains a grain of truth. External pressure, in this form, could thus consolidate rather than weaken the regime.
What then? What's our Plan C? For the hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv, Plan C would be to bomb selected Iranian nuclear facilities, in order to slow down Iran's progress towards the bomb. Despite all the famous pinpoint precision of state-of-the-art US bombing, one can be quietly confident that this would take the lives of innocent civilians - or, at least, of people whom Iranian television could credibly claim were innocent civilians. A recent trip to Iran convinced me of two things: first, that there is a large reservoir of anti-regime and mildly pro-western feeling in Iran; and, second, that this reservoir could be drained overnight if we bombed. Instead, you would almost certainly have a wave of national solidarity with the regime. At the moment, the extremist Ahmadinejad is playing into the hands of the neoconservative extremists in the west; but at that point, the extremists in the west would have played into the hands of Ahmadinejad.
So what should Europeans and Americans do on the edge of this Persian precipice? Here are a few things for starters. First, Europeans should take the threat of an unpredictable, fragmented Islamic revolutionary regime obtaining nuclear weapons very seriously indeed. Europeans led the movement against nuclear arms escalation by the superpowers in the 1980s; today's threat of nuclear proliferation is probably more dangerous. Americans, for their part, should not confuse European warnings about the need to proceed cautiously with cowardice, euroweeniness, and all those other failings of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" attributed to us by red-blooded American anti-Europeans.
Second, we should share all the information, knowledge and intelligence that we have. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has observed that Iran is unique among the countries of the world in that the US has so little direct contact with it. The US has had no diplomats there since the end of the embassy hostage crisis a quarter-century ago. It has very few businesspeople or journalists there. And, if James Risen's State of War, is to be believed, the CIA managed to shop its whole network of agents in Iran to the Tehran authorities by inadvertently sending a list of them to a double-agent. So they don't even have any spooks there. The Europeans, by contrast, have diplomats, businesspeople, journalists and possibly also spooks aplenty in Iran, and so should be better informed.
We need to share all this information and reach a common analysis. And before we take any step in the diplomatic dance, we need to ask ourselves two questions: how will this affect the Iranian regime, and how will it affect Iranian society? The regime is complex. Ahmadinejad is the president, but not the ultimate boss. The boss of this theocratic regime is the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini. Without his say-so, the nuclear seals would not have been broken. But he is constrained by strong interest groups, such as the Revolutionary Guards, and by other ayatollahs, such as the president's fudamentalist guru, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi.
As important is the dynamic within Iranian society. I feel deeply uncomfortable when I hear the American neoconservative Frank Gaffney calling for a revolution in Iran. It's so brave of him to risk other people's lives. Iranians would do well to remember what happened to their fellow Shias in the south of Iraq when the last President Bush encouraged them to rise up at the end of the Gulf war. But it is the case that Iranian society is potentially our greatest ally - indeed, probably the most pro-western society in the Middle East outside Israel. |
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Robert Dreyfuss
January 12, 2006
The deteriorating international crisis over Iran is a direct result of the Bush’s administration’s ham-handed and mendacious Iraq policy.
Under normal circumstances—that is, under any previous U.S. administration—the battle over Iran’s pugnacious effort in pursuit of nuclear technology would be amenable to a diplomatic solution. But, by insisting on a national security strategy of pre-emptive war, by illegally and unilaterally invading Iraq on false pretenses, and by hinting that the White House would tolerate an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear plants, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have made a successful diplomatic resolution of the Iran crisis nearly impossible. Speaking yesterday at the Council for National Policy, Larry Wilkerson—the former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell who caused a stir last fall when he accused Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld of operating a “cabal” —said that it is likely that Pentagon officials are polishing contingency plans for a strike against Iran. Iran, said Wilkerson, is the “principal winner” from the war in Iraq. As a result of the power of the Shiite religious forces in Iraq, he said, the Iranians “own the south” of Iraq. Wilkerson insisted that the United States ought to “talk to the people who really matter in Iran”—i.e., to the ayatollahs. But he said that U.S. policy has failed so utterly that the door to negotiations with Iran is virtually closed. “When you close the door to diplomacy, you have no other option but to rely on military power,” he said. “I hope to hell we don’t have to use it.”
Without diplomatic tools, the looming showdown with Iran is potentially even more dangerous than the Iraq war. Iran is a far larger and more complex country, with the capability of retaliating against a U.S./Israeli attack by fomenting civil war in Iraq, by creating regional chaos in the Gulf, and by mobilizing its significant international terrorist capability against Western targets.
As it did in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration—along with Israel—is content to exaggerate the threat from Iran. The ayatollahs appear to be at least five years or more away from a serious nuclear capacity, according to U.S. intelligence reports. Iran’s recent decision to restart one part of its nuclear research is indeed a serious threat to diplomatic talks aimed at resolving the matter peacefully. But the issue is nowhere near an end-game stage. There is plenty of time, years in fact, for a back-and-forth effort to secure Iran's compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
By crying wolf over Iraq, through claiming that Saddam Hussein’s regime had an active nuclear arms program, the United States lacks credibility when it now asserts that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. And by its illegal, unilateral invasion of Iraq, without allowing the U.N. and the IAEA to proceed with inspections there, the United States has made other countries extremely wary of taking Iran to the U.N. Security Council, out of fear that it might give the United States or Israel a pretext to attack Iran unilaterally.
But the international community’s justified fear that the United States is controlled by a war party seeking to attack Iran makes other states’ diplomacy even harder. Normally, the five U.N. Security Council powers would take up the matter with some urgency, adopt a resolution demanding Iran compliance, and threaten political and economic sanctions against Iran for non-compliance. But Moscow, Beijing and Paris remember what happened in Iraq. That matter was taken to the UNSC, a resolution passed—and then Washington declared unilaterally that Iraq had violated it, and went to war. So the world’s capitals may be forgiven for being reluctant to drag Iran into the UNSC in 2006.
The fact that John Bolton, the belligerent, war-mongering neoconservative who serves as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., takes over as president of the Security Council in February doesn’t help.
Bolton, Cheney and their allies are pushing for a showdown in the UNSC, even though it is highly unlikely that either Russia or China would support anti-Iran sanctions. India, the Arab League and other countries would strongly oppose such measures. And even Western Europe, furious over Iran for its latest effrontery, doesn’t view sanctions on Iran as a happy outcome. Their resistance to anti-Iran measures comes despite a string of outrageous provocations from Iranian President Ahmadinejad, from demanding that Israel be “wiped off the map” to pooh-poohing the Holocaust to haughtily restarting Iran's nuclear research.
It is impossible to deny that Iran is a dangerous, out-of-control regime—yes, a “rogue” regime. But, had the Bush administration maintained a consistent policy of seeking a dialogue with Iran, had the neocons refrained from demanding regime change and military action, had President Bush not referred to Iran as part of a mythical “axis of evil,” and had the United States not immensely strengthened Iran’s position by handing it Iraq on a silver platter, diplomacy would stand a better chance. A package deal, giving Iran political acceptance and economic incentives, combined with a regulated nuclear technology regime, in exchange for Iran’s backing down from its hardline stance, could likely have been reached over time. It may still, but it seems highly unlikely now.
So we are left with persistent reports that both the United States and Israel are planning to strike Iran, and soon. Not only would such an attack result in a vastly wider conflict in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf, but it would also probably push oil prices well over $100 a barrel, making $5-a-gallon gas a reality. Perhaps, because the international community wants to avoid such a catastrophe, and because the United States is exerting enormous pressure on Russia, China and other world powers, first the IAEA and then the UNSC might vote to sanction Iran. If so, Iran will certainly not back down. And as a result, the United States will have the pretext it seeks to go to war once again.
Some Democrats—and even a fair number of moderate and libertarian Republicans—expect the November 2006 elections to take place against the backdrop of a failed occupation of Iraq. Instead, those same elections might take place in the midst of yet another crisis manufactured by the Bush administration.
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com. |
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www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-13 23:09:46
PARIS, Jan. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- France and Germany considered it is "premature" to talk about sanctions against Iran before proceeding with discussion with other countries, the two countries' Foreign Ministry said on Friday.
"The question of sanctions is premature," said Jean-Baptiste Mattei, spokesman for the France's Foreign Ministry, while his Germany counterpart Martin Jaeger told reporters in Paris, "We believe that is premature at the moment." They believed that it was necessary to act "step by step" after the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Britain met in Berlin in response to Iran's recent resumption of nuclear research. The EU trio called for an extraordinary meeting of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer Iran to the UN Security Council.
Iran on Tuesday removed IAEA seals on uranium enrichment equipment at its nuclear plant in Natanz and two related storage and testing sites, and resumed the fuel research activities.
The United States has long accused Iran of running a covert nuclear arms program. Iran, however, says its nuclear work is designed merely to meet its energy needs and insists on the right to develop a full nuclear fuel cycle. |
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By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times
January 13, 2006
The Chinese government has tapped its homegrown company to build its new embassy at the International Center on Van Ness Street Northwest, off Connecticut Avenue. It is importing scores of Chinese workers who will stay at the refurbished Days Inn. The worker said the motel signed a 2½-year lease. "Then we will come back and go back to normal," the worker said.
Chu Maoming, Chinese Embassy spokesman, tells us construction began in April and will be completed in 2008.
It was all part of a deal with the U.S. State Department, which won access to land in Beijing to build a new embassy, which also will be finished in 2008.
China apparently is employing its own to reduce chances that the U.S. intelligence community would be able to bug the embassy. Press reports said a Boeing jet sold to China for use by senior leaders contained several listening devices. bout the time the 2008 Summer Olympics begin in China, the Days Inn at New York Avenue and Bladensburg Road will be able to post the "vacancy" sign again.
Fighters deploy
Coinciding with increased tensions with Iran over the resumption of illicit uranium enrichment, the U.S. Air Force has dispatched additional warplanes to the region in a not-so-subtle sign, military sources say.
An entire wing of F-16s, the Air National Guard's 122nd Fighter Wing based in Fort Wayne, Ind., left for a base in southwest Asia on Tuesday. A wing is usually about 72 aircraft and several hundred support personnel.
F-16s and support personnel from the 4th Fighter Squadron of the 388th Fighter Wing based at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, also deployed recently to Iraq. The squadron has 12 F-16s.
Both units' F-16s could be used in any military operation to take out Iranian nuclear facilities.
A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command Air Forces, which runs air operations in the region, said the F-16 deployment of about 80 jets is part of a rotation and is not related to Iran's uranium reprocessing. [...] |
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By Megan Goldin
Reuters
13 Jan 2006
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Doctors gave Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a battery of neurological tests on Friday to judge whether he was coming out of a coma but Israeli media reports said concern was rising at his failure to regain consciousness. Neurologists at Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital were testing Sharon's responses to pain, sound and other stimuli to see if he was emerging from a coma after suffering a massive stroke on January 4 that left him fighting for his life.
A week into a health crisis that has cast a shadow over Middle East peacemaking, doctors on Thursday reduced sedatives that have kept Sharon, 77, unconscious and removed a brain catheter after a scan showed no need to drain fluids.
But Israeli media reported that doctors were starting to worry about Sharon's failure to open his eyes. He responded to pain stimuli on both sides of his body earlier in the week but apparently has not made any notable progress since then.
"The doctors have said that the pace of the prime minister's responses are very slow and have expressed concern that he has not yet opened his eyes," the NRG news Web site reported.
A Hadassah spokeswoman declined comment on the reports. Friday's hospital bulletin later said: "There is no change in the prime minister's condition." He had been listed as critical but stable.
Even if Sharon regains consciousness, it could be days before doctors can assess the impairment to his faculties. With his hospital stay expected to last months, Sharon is given little chance of returning to public life. |
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20:54:42 EST Jan 12, 2006
RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI
JERUSALEM (AP) - Ariel Sharon's doctors faced new criticism Thursday for failing to divulge a brain disease discovered after the prime minister's initial stroke and for prescribing blood thinners that may have contributed to a massive second stroke.
The criticism added to a growing chorus of questions about Sharon's treatment. Some experts, however, said there was no clear-cut answer. As Sharon lay comatose for an eighth day Thursday, a brain scan showed the remnants of the blood in his brain from a Jan. 4 stroke have been absorbed, hospital officials said in a statement.
In response, doctors removed a tube they had inserted into Sharon's skull to relieve pressure on his brain, the statement said.
In coming days, doctors may have to cut a hole in Sharon's throat to assist breathing, while still waiting for the clearest sign of improvement: the moment he opens his eyes.
After Sharon, 77, suffered an initial, minor stroke Dec. 18, doctors put him on Clexane, an anticoagulant. At a news conference a few days later, doctors acknowledged blood thinners increased the risk of brain hemorrhage, but said the fear of a clot leading to another stroke was greater in this case.
The debate gained momentum after the Haaretz daily revealed that Sharon also suffered from cerebral amyloid angiopathy, known as CAA, a disease common in the elderly that weakens the blood vessels in the brain and increases the risk of hemorrhage.
Doctors confirmed they knew about the disease after the first stroke, but prescribed the blood thinners anyway, a move outside experts criticized Thursday.
"If someone has a disease that caused bleeding, that causes bleeding, that could cause bleeding in the future, giving anticoagulants . . . is certainly an undesirable situation," said Amos Korczyn, head of the Tel Aviv University Medical School's neurology department.
Doctors were prescribing the Clexane until they could seal a small hole in Sharon's heart they said caused Sharon's first stroke.
But some experts questioned that theory and said the initial stroke was more likely caused by Sharon's brain condition. Sharon suffered his massive stroke a day before he was to undergo the procedure to seal the hole in his heart.
"The likelihood is that the hole in the heart was of no relevance," said Dr. Anthony Rudd, a stroke specialist at London's St. Thomas' Hospital. He said CAA could have caused the first stroke.
Doctors did not disclose the condition in December, and several Israeli media outlets chided Sharon's medical team for keeping it under wraps.
Israel's Channel 10 TV quoted an anonymous medical official as saying that Sharon's advisers asked them not to divulge the CAA ahead of the March 28 election. Asaf Shariv, a top Sharon adviser, denied the report, saying he learned about the condition from the media. "I don't even know if the prime minister knew," Shariv said.
Rudd said he would not have prescribed Clexane if he suspected CAA, and might have gone for a weaker drug, such as aspirin, or a lower dose of blood thinners.
Other doctors disagreed, saying each physician must weigh the risks based on their knowledge of medications and the patient's condition.
"This is a very difficult situation because you are between the devil and the deep blue sea," said Dr. John Martin, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at University College in London. "The decision is always different and it's never black and white, and it's very easy in hindsight to say that was the wrong decision."
Sharon's medical team said the criticism was inappropriate.
"Let's say they would have given him less or wouldn't have given him anything and then suddenly he would have developed a clot in the brain instead of bleeding in the brain. Then everybody would have asked why didn't you give him a higher dosage of blood thinners?" Dr. Jose Cohen, one of Sharon's neurosurgeons, told Israel TV.
For the moment, Cohen said, doctors are trying to draw Sharon out of his induced coma.
Over the past three days, doctors worked to wean Sharon off sedatives. They completely removed the anesthetics for a few hours at a time, but Sharon's blood pressure spiked and at one point his heart beat irregularly, forcing doctors to resume the sedation.
The daily Maariv reported that if Sharon does not wake up in the next few days, doctors may perform a tracheotomy to insert a tube directly into his windpipe.
Ron Krumer, a Hadassah spokesman, said the hospital will inform the public if doctors decide to do the procedure.
If Sharon remains on a respirator, doctors will have to perform a tracheotomy, Martin said, because the plastic tube now in the prime minister's windpipe begins to cause damage after a week.
Rudd said any kind of invasive procedure, including intravenous lines, carries a great risk of infection. An immobile patient on a respirator, as Sharon is, is also at risk for chest infection, he said.
"Combined with the fact that the immune system is bound to be less effective than normal, infection is a constant worry," he said. "I'm sure they are trying to minimize this, but when you have all these lines of various sorts, every single one of them is a way infection can get in."
The fact that doctors are considering a tracheotomy means they are preparing for the long haul, Martin said. It is also becoming more probable that Sharon will remain in a vegetative state, he said.
"If there was no brain damage, I would have expected him to wake up at this point," Martin said. |
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Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
UK Independent
13 January 2006
Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud party, has won a trial of strength with the party's four ministers when they agreed to resign from the government.
A split had emerged within the party when Mr Netanyahu ordered the ministers to resign from the government led by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The ministers - Silvan Shalom (Foreign), Limor Livnat (Education), Dan Naveh (Health) and Yisrael Katz (Agriculture) - had argued that the party would benefit in the forthcoming elections if they stayed in their government positions.
However, Mr Netanyahu took the view that the ministers should walk out to underline the differences between Likud and Kadima, the centre party Mr Olmert should inherit as leader from Ariel Sharon, as electoral campaigning resumes for the 28 March election. Ms Livnat, Mr Naveh and Mr Katz all submitted their resignations on Wednesday, while Mr Shalom agreed to resign yesterday.
Mr Netanyahu's impatience to see his colleagues leave the government appears to have increased as a result of the expected Cabinet decision to allow voting in East Jerusalem for the Palestinian elections.
Although such voting was backed by Likud in last year's Palestinian presidential election, the party now sees any move to allow voting as a precursor to a division of Jerusalem as part of a final status deal with the Palestinians.
The Israeli government had threatened not to allow East Jerusalem Palestinians to vote on the grounds that Hamas was standing in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections. However, it is now expected to agree a compromise.
In a separate development, the Labour Knesset member Isaac Herzog has accused US President George Bush of promoting Mr Olmert by making a telephone call to him.
A statement from Mr Olmert's office said that, beside sending his good wishes for Mr Sharon, who is still critical but stable in the Hadassah hospital, Mr Bush had told Mr Olmert: "We know this is a difficult time for you, and whatever I can do to help I will." |
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By Juan Cole
Salon.com
12 Jan 2006
Ariel Sharon is lauded for breaking with his hard-line past. But the truth is that he simply embraced a smarter way of locking up the Palestinians.
Even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stirs fitfully from his coma, in the aftermath of a massive stroke and several operations, Gazan militants with a bad aim have fired several Qassam rockets into Israel. Israel is now, and is likely to remain for some time, a dark postmodern terrain of wealthy fortress communities besieged by hopeless unemployed militants from isolated ghettos. This archipelago of anxiety, reminiscent of the noir science fiction film "Blade Runner," is in some significant respects the creation and legacy of Sharon.
The conflict between Sharon and the Likud Party, with which he recently broke, was over two distinct far-right-wing visions of Israel. The somewhat messianic Likud is committed to completing the creeping dispossession of the Palestinians by relentlessly colonizing the West Bank and Gaza (at least), and refusing to accept any clear demarcation between Israeli territory and that of its neighbors. This 19th-century-style settler colonialism, reminiscent of the French in Algeria or the Italians in Eritrea, is so blatantly aggressive that it continually threatens to disrupt vital economic and diplomatic relations between Israel and Europe. Sharon saw that, but his rival Benjamin Netanyahu never could.
Likud is hoping that somehow along the way the indigenous population will gradually be convinced to leave for Egypt or Jordan, as the Israelis move in. (Some hard nudging is not ruled out by some elements of the party.) In the meantime, in the words of Likud leader Netanyahu, the Palestinians might have self-rule, but would not be allowed to have self-government.
In reality, it is the Palestinians, with their high population growth rates, who have the demographic advantage. Israel's ability to retain new immigrants fell during the second intifada or Palestinian uprising. As the Russian economy benefits from high petroleum prices, further major immigration by Jews from that country seems unlikely. Indeed, some of the 1 million Russians in Israel, many of them not actually Jewish, may start returning to the old country. By 2020, most projections predict that Jews will be a minority in the area comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Even among Israeli citizens, Israeli government demographers predict that by 2030 the population could be a third Arab.
Sharon, unlike the Likud, understood the threat these demographic trends posed to Israel, and so saw the future as one in which Israel stopped expanding in some directions, instead accepting a fixed territory. It would become a huge gated community, surrounded by seven or eight small enclaves. Each enclave might remain a bad neighborhood, but gates, punitive raids and assassinations would keep the ghetto dwellers from storming the citadel. The "gates" include checkpoints, highways and a wall that would have made the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi -- who built his own Great Wall -- proud. It would break up the Palestinian regions into isolated cantons and guarantee that they could never mobilize politically and would remain de facto stateless. It would also preserve the Jewish polity by keeping the Palestinians in their current limbo, prevented from claiming Israeli citizenship even as they are denied a viable state of their own.
That the scheme probably creates a permanent state of low-intensity warfare between the Israelis and Palestinians is a price Sharon was willing to pay for the permanent territorial gains and diplomatic superiority it guaranteed Israel. Indeed, this condition of staccato conflict between the wealthy Israelis behind their various gates and the dispossessed Palestinians outside is what Sharon seems to have thought of as "security" for Israel.
Both the Likud and Sharon were dedicated to forestalling the emergence of even a weak Palestinian state, of a sort implied by the Oslo peace process accepted by the late Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. Although they said they feared that such a state would pose a military threat to Israel, that seems rather unlikely. It is more probable that they feared that it would gain diplomatic and political legitimacy in the world, gaining a voice among nations that the Palestinians currently lack. Likud and Sharon roared that Rabin had made an error of biblical proportions in agreeing to such a state. Elements of the Israeli far right agreed, and one Yigal Amir took matters into his own hands, assassinating Rabin in 1995.
Amir's bullets ended the Oslo process and sounded the death knell for a genuine Palestinian state. Even in the 1990s, the number of Israeli colonists in the West Bank had doubled, which enraged Palestinians took as a sign of bad faith, and which ultimately led to the outbreak of the second Intifada. Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in the Muslim world, was merely the spark that ignited the uprising. During his three years as prime minister, 1996-99, Rabin's successor and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly derailed what was left of the Oslo process, which had called for a phased Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and movement toward a Palestinian government.
Despite the myth that at Camp David in summer 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat 98 percent of what he was demanding, in fact the Israelis were not nearly so forthcoming. Barak declined to meet with Arafat privately (so that it was the Palestinians who had difficulty finding an Israeli interlocutor). And Barak insisted on keeping 10 percent of Palestinian land, rather as though the British had offered to end the Revolutionary War in 1780 if only George Washington would agree to cede Maine to them. Clayton Swisher, in his fine study "The Truth About Camp David," shows that the Israelis bear significant blame for the breakdown of the negotiations.
The conflict between Sharon and his own Likud Party over his withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 reflected the two differing visions of the Israeli right. For Sharon, Gaza itself could be configured as an enormous slum. The withdrawal of the Israeli colonists from Gaza was simply a way of moving them into the gated community, so as to keep them safe more cheaply than military patrols and reprisals could hope to. (Gaza had not been notably rundown in the 1940s, but the rise of Israel and the isolation of the Strip from its natural markets, especially after 1967, gradually turned it into a huge penitentiary.)
Moreover, the Gaza maneuver took pressure off Israel to move in a deliberate way toward withdrawal from the West Bank. Sharon's advisor Dov Weisglass notoriously explained the Gaza withdrawal to Haaretz in October 2004:
"I found a device, in cooperation with the management of the world, to ensure that there will be no stopwatch here. That there will be no timetable to implement the settlers' nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?"
Weisglass, who later repudiated his interview, actually called the Gaza withdrawal a sort of "formaldehyde" for the negotiations into which Israel had been pressured by the United States and the European Union, for all the world as though he were a diplomatic kidnapper. The unilateral Gaza withdrawal would involve no negotiations with the Palestinians, since Sharon had decided that there was no one to talk to. This allegation, of there being no Palestinian interlocutors, is an updated version of the old (monstrous) Zionist myth, most famously articulated by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinians at all.
Supporters of the Likud demonstrated in the tens of thousands against the Gaza withdrawal in summer of 2005. They did not accept Sharon's theory of enclaves and a fixed gated community. They saw Israel as an ever-expanding, territorially dynamic political reality. Sharon could see that an expanding Israel might well eventually be saddled with new Palestinian citizens of Israel, since the world community would not forever accept their demotion to statelessness even in their own homes. Spinning off the enclaves, and building an apartheid wall, would forestall this scenario.
The fiction that the Palestinians would ultimately get their state could be maintained to the sour Europeans and naive Americans until the point at which it was obvious it would never happen, a decade or more hence ("until the Palestinians become Finns"). The Palestinian Authority, or whatever entity survived, could then claim authority over the congeries of Palestinian ghettos, and could call them a state if it liked, but it would never actually have the sort of territory or authority or sovereignty associated with states. Observers have long drawn a parallel between Sharon's policy of ghettoizing the Palestinians, and the way the South African whites spun off small Bantustans to relieve themselves of unwanted potential black citizens.
The Israeli prime minister appears to have believed that he could destroy the militant fundamentalist movement Hamas, which launched large numbers of deadly terrorist operations against Israel, by murdering enough of its leaders. (I use the word "murder" to describe extra-judicial killings. That the victims were leaders of a terrorist movement was something for which they could have been arrested and convicted instead, and is irrelevant to whether they were murdered.) Israeli security officials adopted a political science theory that you can cause an organization to collapse if you neutralize even a fourth of its leadership.
Sharon's systematic execution of the civilian Hamas leadership even extended to firing a rocket at a nearly blind old man in a wheelchair, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who could surely have been arrested if Israeli authorities had evidence he had committed a crime. Yassin, ironically, had after years of militancy begun urging a "hundred years truce" with the Israelis, and his voice may have restrained some impatient Palestinian youth activists. That voice went silent as Yassin was wheeled out of a mosque on March 22, 2004. Six others were killed by the rocket, and a dozen wounded. Soon thereafter militants in Fallujah, Iraq, killed four Western security agents, claiming to have done so in the memory of Yassin, setting the stage for the destabilization of western Iraq.
Far from wiping out Hamas, Sharon watered its saplings with the blood of martyrs. It has done unprecedentedly well in recent Palestinian elections, even on the West Bank, where it had earlier been weak. The moderate, secular president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was reported in the Jordanian press on Monday to be privately considering resigning if Hamas wins the forthcoming legislative elections.
Sharon's formaldehyde was powerful, and it did indeed put the world to sleep on the pressing issue of continued Israeli dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians. Still, he dealt a permanent, if partial, setback to the expansionist and aggressive Likud Party. It is hard to imagine that even if it returned to power, the party could realistically hope to put colonists back into Gaza. Instead, the Hamas Party, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, will almost certainly rule the strip.
The old general with so much blood on his hands was given the equivalent of formaldehyde by his physicians over the weekend, to induce a coma. Induced sleep is never more than a stopgap measure, however, since the patient must eventually awake to face the real world. The dark vision of Ariel Sharon, of Israel as walled fortress, with hordes of leaderless, hopeless, violent Palestinian plebeians trapped in serial enclaves outside the marble walls, virtually guarantees a Hundred Years War in the Mideast. It enrages the Arab and Muslim world and is a leading cause of its hatred of Israel's patron, America. It hardly creates a situation that would attract Jewish immigration, or help retain Jews already in Israel. It erases the Palestinians as persons, reducing them only to the occasional violence in which some of them engage. Sharon himself never understood, and now perhaps never will understand, that only war can be waged unilaterally. Peace requires negotiations and partners.
Copyright ©2006 Salon Media Group, Inc |
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By Meron Benvenisti
Haaretz
12 Jan 2006
The intense emotions of shock, orphanhood and fear elicited by Ariel Sharon's exit from the political arena evoked expressions bordering on kitsch, even from observers otherwise known for their sober approach.
"Parting from him is like parting from a father: expected, but always frightening and sad," Yaron London wrote, while Amnon Dankner described Sharon as "the portrait of a generation: "a figure embodying the split heart of everyone of us... from yearning to live peacefully to the necessity to resort to arms."
The similarity between Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin - and between those two and Moses on Mount Nevo - was inevitable: "From Moses to Sharon they all saw the land from afar, but none succeeded in bringing the train to a safe haven," one journalist concluded. In other words, had his sickness not defeated him, Sharon would have brought us to the promised land - "peace with the Arabs and clear and recognized borders." The thwarted hope, or illusion, intensified the sense of loss. Again, cruel fate has robbed us of the chance for peace. Not our own acts and foibles, but "the angel of death, sharpening his scythe." But we will not stop pursuing peace and we will increase our support for Sharon's heirs, who are bound to continue his "heritage."
The sudden departure of a worshiped leader is always an opportunity to express his political will as one wishes to express it, not necessarily on the basis of the departed leader's real goals. The image of the "cruel general who became a peace hero" - although somewhat tarnished due to overexposure in describing Rabin - blinded the eyes of many. They failed to notice that Sharon was very close to the goal he had been aiming to achieve ever since he became an adult: a goal that has nothing to do with peace - to remove the Arab demographic threat unilaterally.
He was a junior partner to the removal of the demographic threat in 1948, by expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And later, when he climbed the rungs of power, his wish to initiate major historic moves grew.
His "big plan," which led to the war in Lebanon, attempted to solve the demographic problem by turning Jordan into Palestine, deporting the refugees from Lebanon, transferring them from the West Bank, and destroying the Hashemite kingdom. After this plan failed disastrously, Sharon drafted his canton plan, and strove to implement it in every post he filled. For many years he had to resort to underhanded, even illegal means, but he did not tire, and filled the territories with settlements and outposts.
Becoming prime minister enabled him to pursue his plan to "remove the demographic threat" - thus pulling out of Gaza seemed to subtract a million Palestinians from the demographic balance sheet. The "separation fence" next created isolated cantons, paving the way to fictitiously "losing" hundreds of thousands more. Setting up a separate transportation system, "border passes," and "closures" shattered the Palestinian community into four or five sub-communities, subjected to different conditions and gradually losing touch with each other.
On the eve of his hospitalization, Sharon could have surveyed his achievements with satisfaction. The moves to deal with the "demographic threat" gained unprecedented popularity that led him to believe he would be able to set up a Peronist-presidential regime in Israel. This regime would silence any criticism over his solving the "problem," by establishing an apartheid regime. The United States, entangled in Iraq, has signaled that the canton plan may be seen as the implementation of the Palestinian state, and the Israeli peace camp, crowning Sharon as its leader, also agreed enthusiastically.
The donor states agreed to funnel financial aid unequaled since World War II, thus financing Sharon's canton plan.
Indeed, cruel fate has robbed Sharon of attaining his deepest aspiration, to eliminate, after 60 years of struggle, the Palestinian demographic threat. However, there are signs that his illness has spared him the disappointment he would have suffered had he remained in power. For the present "big plan" - as it was in the war in Lebanon - is based on hasty, erroneous assumptions.
The Palestinian Authority's crumbling is only a matter of time, and donor states' patience is running out, which will lead to the drying up of the PA's financial sources, and therefore, a catastrophic economic crisis. The anarchy in the territories will spin out of control, and the violence directed internally and at Israelis will raise pressure to "react appropriately."
Extremist groups in Israel will undermine the "treacherous government," a new attempt will be made to revive the "Jordan is Palestine" idea and export the problem to Jordan, since it has no solution in the territories, or whatever remains of them once the "settlement blocs" have been stolen from them. The U.S. will be called upon to restore order, maybe in the style of Bosnia or Kosovo.
Like in the "big plan" of 1981, the biggest mistake at present is the attempt to solve the problem unilaterally with dictates and excessive power. Ariel Sharon is no longer capable of changing his approach, and perhaps he never was. But those who claim to be continuing Sharon's heritage should never forget that "heritage" also means learning from his mistakes and avoiding them. |
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RAVI NESSMAN
14:42:32 EST Jan 12, 2006
JERUSALEM (AP) - A Palestinian militant blew himself up Thursday and Israeli troops shot two other militants to death in a shootout during an arrest raid in the West Bank town of Jenin, the bloodiest violence between the two sides in nearly a month.
The fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants came as Palestinian candidates campaigned for Jan. 25 parliamentary elections and raised fears it could spark further violence that could hamper further campaigning.
"If this continues, it could seriously undermine the election," said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. "We urge the United States and others in the international community to ensure that Israel stops such actions and gives us a chance to have free and fair elections." Recent polls show the militant Hamas group, running on a platform of clean government, posing a strong challenge to the ruling Fatah party. Fatah has been weakened by accusations of corruption and its inability to halt growing lawlessness in Palestinian areas, much of it caused by rogue gunmen affiliated with Fatah.
Late Thursday, Fatah gunmen demanding government jobs opened fire on Palestinian Interior Minister Nasser Yousef's house and the Palestinian cabinet building in the West Bank city of Ramallah, wounding one of Yousef's bodyguards seriously and two others moderately, Palestinian officials said. One of the attackers was also wounded.
Fatah militants have routinely kidnapped foreigners and attacked government buildings and officials in their increasingly brazen efforts to get government jobs or secure the release of jailed comrades. The Palestinian Authority often gives into the demands and few of those responsible have been arrested.
Some Palestinian officials, including Yousef who is in charge of the security forces, say they fear gunmen might disrupt the polls, and the weak Palestinian security forces will be powerless to stop them.
Earlier Thursday, Israeli troops targeting Islamic Jihad militants entered the northern West Bank town of Jenin on an arrest raid and surrounded the house of a local militant, Palestinian security officials said. A lengthy gunbattle broke out and two Palestinian militants were killed by Israeli gunfire.
As troops searched the house, another militant blew himself up next to a squad of soldiers, the Israeli military said. The militant was killed, but none of the soldiers was injured.
Another militant surrendered to the troops, who found arms and ammunition in the house.
Islamic Jihad is responsible for all six suicide bomb attacks on Israelis since a ceasefire was declared last February. Israel has killed several of its militants and arrested others as part of a crackdown on the group.
The fighting was the worst Israel-Palestinian violence since an Israeli air strike killed four militants from the small Popular Resistance Committees group in the Gaza Strip.
On Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas must crack down on militant groups after the Palestinian election if he wants to revive the "road map" peace plan.
Abbas has resisted cracking down on the militants, concerned that it would spark a civil war. Instead, he has tried to co-opt them into the political system, persuading Hamas, the largest group, to run in the parliamentary election.
Israel opposes the participation of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel and is responsible for suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israelis in recent years. |
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By Justin Huggler
UK Independent
13 January 2006
At least 349 people were crushed to death and hundreds more were injured yesterday during the final day of the Haj pilgrimage at Mecca in the worst tragedy to hit the annual Muslim rite in Saudi Arabia for 16 years.
The pilgrims were crushed at the eastern end of the Jamarat Bridge as they tried to perform the ritual stoning of Satan. "It was like the road of death there," one said. After the crowds had dispersed, witnesses spoke of scores of bodies lying covered with white shrouds. Most of the dead were said to be Muslim pilgrims of south and south-east Asian origin.
"I saw people moving and suddenly I heard crying, shouting, wailing," said Abdullah Pulig, an Indian street cleaner who had travelled to Saudi Arabia for the pilgrimage. "I looked around and people were piling on each other. They started pulling dead people from the crowd."
During the ritual stoning of the devil, pilgrims crowd to the narrow end of the Jamarat Bridge at Mena, just outside Mecca, to hurl stones at three pillars representing Satan. "The people who died were trying to get on to the bridge to do their stoning. But a wave of people came from the other direction trying to get off the bridge. That's when people died," said Amr Gad, an Egyptian pilgrim.
The Saudi Interior Ministry said: "It was the result of a large number of personal belongings being dropped and because large numbers of pilgrims insisted on doing the stoning in the afternoon."
The Haj attracts some of the largest crowds in the history of mankind - overcrowding has long been a severe problem. It is compounded by the fact that many pilgrims try to carry their belongings with them all the time - and get crushed when they bend to pick up those they have dropped.
In modern times the pilgrimage has been beset with tragedy. A fire in a tent camp killed 343 people in 1997. And in 1990, at least 1,426 people died in a stampede in a tunnel, most of them from Indonesia and Turkey. The Haj is a duty which every able-bodied Muslim must complete at least once in his lifetime. It is a source of great pride to the Saudi royal family that they are the guardians of Mecca, Islam's holiest city and the site of the pilgrimage.
But the Saudi authorities have struggled to cope with the vast crowds each year. In the Eighties, it was political violence that cast its shadow over the Haj, with militants taking over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, bombings, anti-Western protests and strife between Sunni and Shia pilgrims.
In recent years, the sheer number of people attending has been the problem, and year after year the bottleneck at the Jamarat Bridge has been a scene of disaster. Only two years ago, at least 251 people died in a stampede at the bridge. In 1998, at least 119 people died there. In 1994, at least 270 died.
This year, the Saudis enlarged the pillars that represent Satan to make them easier for pilgrims to hit. In previous years, stampedes have been caused by pilgrims jostling each other to get a good aim. |
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www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-13 23:04:45
SOFIA, Jan. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin on Friday maintained his denial that the CIA had operated secret prisons in the Eastern European country.
Kalfin said in the National Assembly, the Bulgarian Parliament,that there was no information about the secret use of Bulgarian prisons by the U.S. agency or the transfer of prisoners in the war on terror within its territory. According to information from the Civil Aviation Administration,there have been no records of planes ferrying prisoners landing on Bulgarian territory, or passing across its airspace, he added.
The minister said the Bulgarian embassy in Switzerland is now trying to obtain material which proves the existence of CIA secret prisons in some Eastern European countries, Bulgaria included.
Reporting of the matter by some western media has been "rancorous" but the Balkan country's bid to join the European Union (EU) in time would not be affected, Kalfin said.
It was reported that Swiss intelligence had intercepted a fax from the Egyptian embassy in the UK which said there had been U.S.detention centers in Romania, Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria.
Bulgaria has denied the accusation since the beginning of the scandal which was broken by the Washington Post on Nov. 2, 2005.
The European Parliament approved a proposal on Thursday to establish a special committee to investigate the CIA scandal.
If the claims are proved true, the entry of Bulgaria and Romania into the EU is highly likely to be delayed. |
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By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Jan 12, 2006
Washington - Ballistic missile threats and high-tech, U.S-backed programs to defend against them have polarized the nations of the Pacific Rim to a degree unseen since the height of the Cold War. Just this past week, the prestigious British publication Jane's Defense Weekly announced that Taiwan had already tested three prototype cruise missiles with a range of 600 miles -- capable of reaching Shanghai to the north and Hong Kong to the south -- and that it had ambitious plans to eventually manufacture and deploy 500 of them against the southern Chinese mainland.
Anticipating this threat China, which has already deployed no less than 700 ballistic missiles against Taiwan and to command the Taiwan Strait, years ago bought Tor-M1 missile batteries that still represent its best chance of shooting down ground-hugging, contour-following cruise missiles. And it can always buy a lot more.
This ever more expensive, ever more complex high-tech missile stand-off, however, is only one example of the ways the ever-escalating race between ballistic missile offense and defense has already drawn deep and potentially dangerous new divisions between the nations of Asia and the Pacific Rim.
On one side are Australia, Japan, India and Taiwan -- all backed by the United States: Over the past year, every one of these nations has made bold, extremely costly commitments into developing or extending their ballistic missile defense capabilities.
Japan, Australia and Taiwan are all led by nationalist, free market, conservative governments fearful of North Korea and/or China. All of them are extremely wealthy, high-technology nations.
India is a huge nation that, despite its healthy and even dramatic economic growth and huge middle class, still has enormous problems with both rural and urban poverty. Its government is secular-centrist tending to the mild populist left and it has been working energetically to defuse old problems with China and dramatically advance relations with it.
India's great worry, ironically, is a traditional old U.S. ally, its historic rival and neighbor Pakistan, who future stability and direction appears to the Indians increasingly questionable. But the end result is the same: With huge population densities in its northern states and main cities, India's need for effective ballistic missile defense is also acute.
The needs of these major Asian and Pacific-Rim nations to develop effective BMD systems has been an enormous boon for the Bush administration and the main high-tech American military technology corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. The driving determination of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to develop a BMD shield for his densely populated nationof 120 million is particularly significant.
Agreements made over the past year between Japan and the United States and monitored in BMD Focus and BMD Watch will be worth many billions of dollars to the U.S. military high-tech sector. And they also offer Japan the prospect of giving an enormous high-tech boost to its own advanced industrial capabilities.
Geopolitically, these developments have had profound and lasting consequences. They appear to have buried for the foreseeable future, perhaps for generations, any prospect that Japan will abandon the United States to go neutral or try to carve out for itself some special relationship with China instead.
Similarly, the ever-growing ties between Taiwan and the United States in BMD cooperation and the readiness of little Taiwan with a population of only 25 million to embark upon a ballistic and cruise missile arms race with gigantic nearby China with its population of 1.3 billion looks set to keep China and the United States, the two towering giants of the Pacific Rim at loggerheads for many years to come, despite their enormous web of mutual economic inter-dependence.
The State Bank of China currently holds 30 percent of all U.S. Treasury Bonds and the stability of the dollar and the U.S. economy are therefore dependent upon continued Chinese cooperation and goodwill. Similarly, China's economic stability and health remains to a very great degree dependent on continued free market access to the ever ravenous demands of the domestic U.S. economy -- much of it sold across the shelves of Wal-Mart. Any disruption of that relationship would cause enormous harm to both huge nations, but their BMD arms race via Taiwan makes such a clash ever more likely.
China is far from isolated either. North Korea remains ever more dependent upon it. And even though China takes pains not to be identified too dramatically as Pyongyang's protector on the global scene, having the Hermit Kingdom as a social as well as strategic buffer between it and the dynamic democratic and free market societies of pro-American South Korea and Japan has benefits for it too.
China's relations with Pakistan remain quietly good too, despite its warming relations with India. And as last year's full-scale military exercises between Russia and China showed, their strategic cooperation continues to grow.
Asia is not totally polarized between the United States and its BMD partners on one side and China and its dependent client nations on the other. The nations of the economically vibrant and vast Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with a combined population of half a billion people, are forging ever closer strategic as well as economic ties to China, but they remain on warm terms generally with the United States too, especially such traditional U.S. allies as Thailand and Indonesia. In all, the ASEAN nations have so far stayed out of the BMD arms race, and they all want to keep it that way.
But most of the major nations of Asia are moving fast down a very different road: They are glaring at each other over ever-thickening picket fences of giant ballistic missiles and ABM interceptors. And those fences are not making good neighbors. |
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AFP
Jan 12, 2006
Tokyo -- Japan plans to deploy imported unmanned spy planes in the fiscal year from April 2007, its defense chief was quoted as saying Thursday, amid growing concern over China and North Korea.
The planes could gather intelligence on missiles as soon as they are launched and monitor hostile vessels and planes, Kyodo News quoted Defense Agency Director-General Fukushiro Nukaga as saying on a visit to London. Japan, which has been officially pacifist since World War II, is developing its own spy plane amid criticism that its policymakers are too dependent on US intelligence on foreign military activity.
Japan needs at least a decade to produce its own spy planes but wants to put an unspecified number of them into use in the 2007 fiscal year, news reports quoted Nukaga as saying.
"It will be imported so it can be introduced as soon as possible," Nukaga said, as quoted by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper's website.
Japan will almost certainly buy the planes from the United States, although Nukaga said Tokyo will also send a research mission to Germany and Italy. He heads to Washington next week.
North Korea shocked the world in 1998 by firing a missile over Japan into the Pacific Ocean. Japan and the United States have since worked on developing a missile shield.
Tension has also been growing with China over historical memories and a disputed gasfield, where Beijing dispatched warships in September. Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso said last month that China was becoming a military threat.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government hopes to amend the US-imposed 1947 constitution formally to allow Japan to maintain a military rather than "Self-Defense Forces", while keeping the nation's official pacifism. |
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AFP
Friday January 13, 9:54 PM
Mongolia's political crisis entered a crucial stage as lawmakers prepared to vote on a resolution that would ensure the collapse of the coalition government.
Parliament debated well into the night whether to ratify Wednesday's mass resignation from the cabinet of Prime Minister Tsakhia Elbegdorj, a move that would lead to his ouster after less than two years in power. The crisis drew hundreds of angry protesters onto the streets of the capital, Ulan Bator, on Thursday, although the situation had eased on Friday after the deployment of police and security forces.
All 10 cabinet members belonging to the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP), which has dominated politics here for most of the nation's 14 years of post-Soviet democracy, triggered the crisis when they resigned.
With the party holding exactly half of the 76 seats in parliament, and looking likely to pick up several votes from a minority party, approval of the resignation -- and the fall of Elbegdorj's government -- appeared imminent.
"It's highly likely the government will be ousted," Sanjaasuren Oyun, the leader of the minority Civil Will Party and a member of parliament, told AFP. "The MPRP has enough votes."
But with most MPs wanting to express their opinions during Friday's debate, a vote may not occur until late Friday night or next week, Oyun said.
The move by the MPRP is a bid to regain total control of the government, Oyun and political observers said.
Elbegdorj, speaking to AFP inside parliament during a brief recess from the debate, criticised the MPRP for its actions and defended his government's record against his opponents' allegations of economic mismanagement.
"I am disappointed with the MPRP, they are not acting for the good of the country," Elbegdorj said.
"We have stabilised the economy and expect growth of around seven percent this year. We have created 20,000 jobs."
Mongolia, most famous for its past under fearless warlord Genghis Khan, has been praised as one of the few Central Asian states to have enjoyed a relatively stable democracy following the fall of the Soviet Union.
It has also been an ally of the United States, and sent a small but symbolically significant military deployment to help the US-led forces in Iraq.
Elbegdorj's coalition government was formed following extremely close parliamentary elections in 2004. A political deal gave him the prime minister's office in exchange for giving the MPRP 10 of the 18 cabinet seats.
But with support for Elbegdorj's Democratic Party falling to just 26 seats following the break up of its own 'Democratic Coalition' last year, the MPRP decided to take full control.
The MPRP enjoyed nearly 70 years of single party rule when Mongolia was a Soviet satellite, and has maintained a large degree of dominance since democracy was introduced in the early 1990s.
It won 72 of the 76 parliamentary seats in 2000 but was forced into the latest coalition after an electoral backlash to its dominance at the 2004 polls.
But the party's tactics this week generated a groundswell of public anger and hundreds of protesters took to the streets on Thursday, demanding Elbegdorj be allowed to continue as prime minister.
Although the protests did not turn violent, the MPRP's head office in Ulan Bator's central square was stormed and badly damaged.
A handful of protesters remained on the streets on Friday but Elbegdorg urged them to remain calm.
"We toppled Communism without shattering windows," he said.
The Civil Will Party's Oyun said another reason for the MPRP's decision to act may have been because one of its senior party officials, who had been installed as customs chief, was detained late last year on corruption charges.
"There's some concern among the public that the MPRP may try to protect this man once they are the government," she said.
US President George W. Bush visited Mongolia in November to praise the nation as an outpost of democracy and deliver public thanks for its troop contribution to Iraq.
"You are an example of success for this region and the world," Bush said during his visit, the first-ever by a US leader to Mongolia. |
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Jonathan Franklin in Santiago
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian
Bachelet set to become South America's first elected woman president
"I am a woman, a socialist, separated and agnostic - all the sins together," said Chilean presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet with a laugh.
Then, asked about her favourite food, she beamed with her trademark smile: "Ahhh! That is my problem, I like everything, seafood, pastas, beans ..."
Whether joking about being a political outsider or being overweight, this 54-year-old mother of three has become the darling of Chilean politics. Her perceived humour and honesty have catapulted her to the top of the ratings and she is a clear favourite to win Sunday's presidential elections.
A poll released yesterday shows Ms Bachelet with a 53% share of the vote - a five-point lead over her opponent, billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera.
If elected Ms Bachelet, a paediatrician who was tortured and lost her father under the Pinochet regime, will become the first woman elected president of a South American nation. "She is going to take the reins of this country as if it were a big house. She is going to manage us well," said Juan Ángel Gaete, a real estate broker in Santiago who said only a woman was capable of solving Chile's problems. "Look at us men, we do one thing at a time, while the mom is cooking, talking on the phone, feeding the children and listening to the radio!"
For a single mother, with little money and no famous last name, Ms Bachelet's rise to power has been remarkable. Chilean politics are as traditional as the rest of this conservative Catholic nation. Never before has a woman politician been considered a serious candidate.
At first sight Ms Bachelet, a fluent English speaker who has both lived and worked in the US, looks like a friendly schoolteacher. She often drives her own car, uses no bodyguards and refuses to attack her political opponents. This non-confrontational style has been criticised as superficial, yet Chileans consistently rank her as the most honest and capable politician in the nation.
This week Segolene Royal, the French socialist politician, flew to Chile to support her campaign. For yesterday's campaign finale Spanish singers including Miguel Bosé were sponsoring a free concert for an estimated 100,000 Bachelet supporters in downtown Santiago.
A sense of spontaneity and distance from traditional politics has provided Ms Bachelet with an extremely loyal base of supporters.
"I lived the dictatorship and have very bad memories of Pinochet, I am afraid of the rightwing parties," said Ricardo Yanez, 46, a school teacher. "With Bachelet, I share her values."
While leftwing governments across the continent - notably Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and incoming Bolivian President Evo Morales - are questioning the free market model, Ms Bachelet is expected to maintain Chile's wide open economy.
Ricardo Lagos, the current charismatic leader, has presided over an economic boom that has seen the economy growing at 5% and exports doubling in less than three years. It has made Chile a model of stability in the otherwise tumultuous region.
In addition to the economic success, Mr Lagos has showcased Chilean leadership, particularly in his refusal to bow to pressure from George Bush to support the war in Iraq.
A member of the socialist party, Ms Bachelet has focused her campaign promises on pre-school education, the rights of working mothers and enforcing Chile's lax labour laws.
"Everywhere I go, a construction site, the supermarket - it is the same, workers approaching me and asking about their rights! About not being paid overtime or being fired without warning," said Ms Bachelet in an interview. "In my government, we are going to crack down on these abuses."
The rise of Bachelet comes as former dictator Augusto Pinochet disappears from the political stage. Pinochet, 90, is increasingly seen by Chileans as a criminal and fraud. With numerous arrest orders and tax investigations, he is politically and socially isolated. Ms Bachelet has refused to answer reporters asking if, as president, she would allow a state funeral for the ailing former dictator.
As a life-long opponent of Pinochet, Bachelet knows first hand the torture techniques practised by DINA, the military intelligence agency that organised the murder of some 3,000 Chileans during the 1973-1990 military rule.
In January 1975, kidnapped by a squad of soldiers, she was beaten and tortured for weeks. Her mother was locked underground without food or water for five days. The military government suspected that Ms Bachelet worked as a courier in clandestine communications networks in Santiago, ferrying messages among resistance groups. Her father and boyfriend were both tortured to death.
Mother and daughter were exiled together first to Australia, then East Germany, where Ms Bachelet received her medical degree and organised international resistance to the Pinochet regime.
Bachelet returned to Chile in the late 1970s and worked in a health clinic, where she specialised in children traumatised by the torture and terror of military rule. When Mr Lagos took power in 2000 he named Ms Bachelet as his health minister.
In 2002 Mr Lagos made Ms Bachelet minister of defence, the first time in the history of South America that a woman held the post. It was a signal to the conservative Chilean military that the Pinochet era was over.
But her critics say she lacks leadership qualities. "Michelle is a valiant woman, who has had a hard life," said Mr Piñera during a debate. "She is capable, but to be president you need much more than being a professional or a business leader. You need tenacity and leadership."
Ms Bachelet brushes such criticism aside. In a recent debate she said: "Together we recovered democracy in Chile. Now I invite you to be part of another historic moment by electing Chile's first woman president. Let's make history."
Booming nation
Population: 16 million
President: Socialist Ricardo Lagos
Ruling government: Centre left coalition
Opposition: The Alliance, made of conservative Catholic party UDI and centre right party National Renovation
GDP growth 2005: 5.5%
Main trade partners: US 14%, Japan 11.4%, China 9.9%, South Korea 5.5%,
Life expectancy: 76 years
Hot political issues: Pension reform, education improvements, crime
Chile is the world's largest producer of copper, and with prices at a record high the government is able to finance social projects |
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PARIS, Jan 12, 2006 (AFP)
Nicolas Sarkozy, France's ambitious ruling party chief and hot contender to be the country's next leader, proposed radical changes to the French system of government Thursday to make the president more accountable to the nation.
In an implicit criticism of the incumbent Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy said future presidents should no longer limit themselves to setting the broad outlines of policy, but should take part in the day-to-day governing of the country.
The role of the president-appointed prime minister should be reduced to that of governmental coordinator, the number of ministers kept by law to 15, and the president should be obliged to appear before the National Assembly to explain his programme, Sarkozy recommended. The Assembly should also play a greater role in determining policy on foreign and defence affairs and the European Union, which have been until now regarded as the presidential preserve, he said.
The 50-year-old head of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) — who is also France's interior minister — was speaking before about 600 journalists at a traditional New Year's greeting ceremony for the press.
He drew laughter when — in a clear reference to Chirac's refusal to rule out running for a third term at elections in May 2007 — he said that the number of presidential mandates should be kept to two, as in the United States.
"The energy spent on staying (in power) is not spent on doing," he said.
Sarkozy has spoken critically in the past about the country's 1958 Fifth Republic constitution — devised by wartime hero Charles de Gaulle — which he believes gives the president unhealthy protection from democratic criticism.
"Rather than a president who presides we need a president who leads. The future president will inevitably be different from the ones who came before," he said.
Sarkozy heads the list of likely right-wing candidates to replace Chirac next year, advocating a programme of "rupture" from long-standing policies in order to free France from a cycle of high unemployment, low growth and dejected national morale.
His call for institutional change seemed intended to set him apart from the UMP's other presidential contender — Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin — who represents continuity with the Chirac era.
Among other policy initiatives, Sarkozy called on the European Union to resume work on its planned constitution which was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands last year.
A shorter version of the document focussing exclusively on procedural mechanics such as voting weights and the role of the EU presidency should be formulated and then submitted to the 25 parliaments for approval, he said.
On domestic issues he called for a long-term plan to reduce the number of civil servants, a mimimum service law to prevent disruption in transport strikes, and freedom for universities to raise money from private sources.
Speaking as interior minister, he said a forthcoming law on immigration would fix quotas for new arrivals in France, limit rights to family unification and facilitate visas for professionally qualified immigrants — without encouraging a brain-drain from countries of origin.
The minister refused to comment on news that his wife Cecilia — who left him amid much publicity last year — had returned to his side.
"Last year I read many articles about what was supposed to have happened to me, and that was fair enough because I had spoken rather too much about it. Back then you said I should be more discreet, so that is what I am going to be," he told the assembled journalists. |
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Friday, 13 January 2006
BBC News
George Galloway has been branded a "laughing stock" by a Labour opponent after the Respect MP imitated a cat on Celebrity Big Brother.
Mr Galloway, 51, went on all fours and pretended to sip cream from actress Rula Lenska's hands, as part of a task set on the Channel 4 show.
Labour London Assembly member John Biggs accused the Bethnal Green and Bow MP of neglecting his constituents.
But Mr Galloway says taking part in the programme is good for politics.
'Dr Doolittle?'
He missed a Commons vote on London's Crossrail project, which would run through his constituency, on Thursday.
Mr Biggs, City and East member on the assembly, said: "His antics on TV, just hours after missing a crucial parliamentary vote affecting his constituency, demonstrates that he is becoming one of the biggest laughing stocks on London politics since the Second World War."
During a Big Brother task to see whether "humans can communicate with animals", Mr Galloway asked Ms Lenska: "Now, would you like me to be the cat?"
He crawled on all fours and then pretended to lap from her hands as if drinking cream, after which she rubbed the "cream" from his "whiskers" and stroked his head and behind his ears.
Psychic goldfish
Earlier, Mr Galloway acted the role of "lab assistant" while Ms Lenska "read the mind" of a goldfish called Barry.
Labour Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong has launched a petition against Mr Galloway.
It urges him to "represent and respect his constituents, not further his own ego, as he is by remaining totally out of touch in the Big Brother house". Ms Armstrong said: "Does he honestly think that his constituents would prefer to see him lounging about in the Big Brother house rather than debating issues as serious as equality?"
Human being?
But Mr Galloway's spokesman said earlier this week that the constituency office was open as normal.
"It is his hope that Big Brother would provide the kind of platform that the media does not normally provide for him," the spokesman said.
"He is coming across as a human being, while the press have tried to demonise him in the past."
But the party is sending a letter of complaint to Channel 4 claiming his conversations with other housemates about the Iraq war and other political issues have not been shown.
Peter Bazalgette, UK chairman of programme makers Endemol, told BBC Two's This Week that Channel 4 had to abide by strict rules on broadcasting political opinions without opposing views to balance them.
He said producers were considering staging a political debate in the house to allow Mr Galloway to speak more freely.
Mr Galloway has been nominated for eviction from the show along with glamour model Jodie Marsh and transvestite Pete Burns. |
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Oleg Gazmanov
New Dawn, a song by Oleg Gazmanov, is being hummed and whistled across Russia. The video is available at the link above (in the title). Thing is, the song has been banned. Guess it strikes to close to the bone.
Wonder when we'll have a song like that for the US? 
Our motherland is wide,
Our father - the president- above us sits,
it would be possible to steal for thousands of years,
but at some point it comes to [shit]
Refrain: Hey, here comes a new dawn,
We don't want to live in vain
Yet how can we win,
if we are so easy to buy
How can we win,
If we are so easy to sell
Oh, our Motherland is rich
with land, gold and oil we could benefit
After all it could be possible to live without grief
So from where comes all this shit ...
Refrain
Oh, our Motherland is strong,
Tanks, cruisers, and fine lead defend it,
Only who will go to war these days,
Once again it comes to [shit]
Refrain
How to satisfy everyone
So that they will cease to be divided at last
So that we can wake up alive in the morning
Otherwise for all it will come to [shit] |
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Thursday, January 12, 2006
Mike Vogel/KTVB
BOISEE -- It happened early Thursday morning around 7:15 a.m.
Jacqueline Correnti describes what she the bright meteor she saw in the morning sky.
A very bright meteor lit up the skies and streaked across the horizon.
NewsChannel 7 spoke with several of the people who witnessed it.
We had numerous calls here at the station from people who saw it.
Police dispatch also took several calls, and even one person in the Boise Airport tower saw it.
And though the eyewitness accounts vary slightly, they are all consistent with it being a meteor. “I was driving north on Bogus Basin, and I looked up in the sky and there was fireworks coming down,” said Jacqueline Correnti.
When Jacqueline Correnti looked up in the sky this morning she couldn’t' believe her eyes.
“I only saw it for a second or two,” said Correnti.
A meteor in the skies above the Treasure Valley going west to east.
“Between where those two clouds are, it was right in the middle of it, and heading that way it was, if I were going out to reach and grab it, it was a good volleyball size,” said Correnti. “This was definitely not a falling star; the tail on it was bright blue and pretty thick. I’ve seen Hailey’s Comet in the sky, but that is so far away. this was like, this was closer than what an airplane would be. I was so excited, I got goose bumps.”
Across town in southeast Boise, Libby Hood saw the same thing.
“I saw it for a good ten seconds it was phenomenal. Was coming home and the bright light from this object in the sky caught my attention and it was low enough here above the roof line, I was just about to pull into the driveway and a flash kind of caught my eye, and I looked over to the left and I seen this ball of fire with a tail behind it, kind of at a gradual descent,” said Hood.
Video Clip
Mike Vogel, Rick Lantz report
At first she thought it might be a plane going down.
“I verbally remember myself saying, ‘oh my gosh,’ because it was that I looked, and I looked again, and just watched this thing go across the sky, and it was so low. Pretty amazing, pretty phenomenal to witness that,” said Hood.
Experts from the Boise Astronomical Society say that if the it did hit the ground, the meteorite would likely be smaller than a walnut.
And although it's unclear if anyone saw it land, considering its size, it is highly unlikely anyone would ever find it.
But if anyone did find it, meteorites are worth a lot of money. Some put their value at about the same as gold. |
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Friday January 13, 2006
By DAN JOLING
Associated Press Writer
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Augustine Volcano erupted Friday for the third time in a week, sending an ash plume toward communities on the southwest Kenai Peninsula.
Tom Murray, scientist in charge at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, said the mountain on an isolated and uninhabited island about 180 miles south of Anchorage erupted for 45 minutes, starting shortly before 4 a.m. The eruption was stronger than a pair of eruptions Wednesday and lasted longer. Murray said additional eruptions are likely.
National Weather Service meteorologist Bob Hopkins said the service issued an ash cloud advisory for residents from Ninilchik, 38 miles south of Kenai, to Kodiak Island. Residents were advised to remain at home or indoors and keep their doors and windows closed.
Satellite data indicated the ash plume thinned as it made its way across Cook Inlet toward the Kenai Peninsula. No heavy accumulation of ash was expected.
The 4,134-foot volcano erupted in 1976 and 1986. After the 1986 eruption, a 7-mile-high column of ash drifted over Anchorage and kept flights out of the skies over Cook Inlet. |
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www.chinaview.cn
2006-01-12 16:47:02
BEIJING, Jan. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- An earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale jolted the Mojiang Hani Autonomous County in southwest China's Yunnan Province at 9:05 a.m. Thursday (Beijing Time), according to the seismological network of China.
The epicenter was located at 23.4 north latitude and 101.6 east longitude, which is about 210 kilometers away from the provincial capital of Kunming.
No casualty has been reported as of Thursday afternoon. |
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1010 WINS
Jan 12, 2006 11:41 am US/Eastern
(ALBANY, NY) -- Break out the shorts.
The unseasonably warm weather will continue through tomorrow, with temperatures to again hit the 50s today and Friday across much of upstate New York.
Yesterday, the thermometer nearly hit 60 in Buffalo and Rochester, with 40- and 50-degree temperatures over the rest of the region. While the January heat wave is welcomed by many in upstate New York, some places would rather see more ice and snow. In Lake George, the warm spell could put a damper on the Adirondack village's annul winter carnival.
The event is held on weekends in February and includes ice fishing and snowmobiling on the lake. There's only one problem -- the lake hasn't frozen over yet. Organizers say the show will still go on -- with events on land, that is.
The thaw hasn't hurt ski areas too much, since December's cold weather allowed many to cover their slopes with man-made snow while Mother Nature pitched in with plenty of the real stuff. |
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By Paul Willis in Northern Kenya
UK Independent13 January 2006
Nomadic farmers in the arid wastelands of northern Kenya are dying with their cattle, as charities warn a famine on the scale of Niger is threatening the region.
So far, scores of people, mainly children, have died and the UN has warned that 2.5 million people are at risk of starvation because seasonal rains failed for the second time in a year. The Kenyan government has declared a national disaster and called for 11 billion Kenyan shillings, about £90m, to be jointly raised by Kenya and the international community. In the worst-hit north-eastern region close to the Somali border, many pastoral farmers have lost their entire livestock because rains expected in April and then October failed to arrive.
Local media has reported nearly 50 fatalities but it is feared the toll may be many times higher since most deaths are likely to have gone unrecorded because of the Muslim practice of burying the dead on the same day of death.
Relief efforts have intensified, with the Government sending the army to distribute supplies and the Kenyan Red Cross initiating a programme to buy cattle from destitute farmers.
The scale of the crisis has shocked aid agencies in one of Africa's more stable and affluent countries.
Oxfam's humanitarian programmes co-coordinator for Kenya, Josie Buxton, said the current level of aid had to at least double.
She said: "At the moment, it looks extremely serious and there is a very real risk that we could have a Niger-type scenario on our hands."
In the north-eastern district of Wajir, the village of Qu'laley lies in dusty bushland, about 200 miles from the Somali border.
Scores of hungry families have been arriving every day from the bush in search of water and food aid.
The rotting corpses of cattle litter the area, scattered between the nomad's makeshift straw huts.
Outside their huts, veiled women prepare a porridge made from maize to feed their remaining livestock, which lie around listlessly in the sun. Othowa Jimale-Ali stands over the simple grave of his baby daughter dug in the scorched earth and marked poignantly by a leafy branch - one of the few pieces of greenery found in this dusty land.
The six-month old, called Fatima, died three days ago from chronic diarrhoea almost certainly caused by a weakening of her immune system because of malnutrition after her mother was unable to breastfeed.
Othowa, 50, said: "I've never known it like this, all the land is dry and there is nowhere to take our cattle. I have lost 50 cows now. It is the will of God and we must trust he will bring us rain."
Within Kenya, blame for the crisis has been levelled at the long-term policy of mass deforestation, which has turned arable farmland to arid desert.
Kenyan Nobel prizewinner, Wangari Maathai, said major deforestation, started by the British during colonial rule and continued legally and illegally after independence, had reduced indigenous forest cover to just 1.7 per cent.
"The tragedies this country are facing today such as drought, famine and poverty have been exacerbated by the gradual degradation of our environment - including indigenous forests," the Ms Maathai said.
Ms Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her devotion to Africa's forests, said Kenya needed at least 10 per cent of its land mass under forest cover to safeguard agriculture, health and water supplies.
Medical superintendent Dr Eliud Aluvaala said that, despite fact-finding visits from government officials and the UN, the hospital had yet to receive any help.
He said: "It's no good sending fact-finding missions - that won't feed the children who are starving."
Ms Buxton also criticised the response to the crisis. She said: "This is something that is happening time and again in Africa. A humanitarian crisis unfolds that we can see coming a long way off and yet despite warnings, nothing is done until it is too late." |
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Jamie Wilson in Washington
Thursday January 12, 2006
The Guardian
Residents of the most devastated areas of New Orleans reacted angrily yesterday to a blueprint for rebuilding the city that gives them four months to prove they can bring their neighbourhoods back to life or face the prospect of their homes being turned into parks or marshland.
The first comprehensive plan for how the city should be put back together following Hurricane Katrina, unveiled by New Orleans' mayor Ray Nagin yesterday, also includes lofty plans to build a light railway system and recreate a jazz district in what was once the red-light area of the city. The multibillion dollar proposals prioritise improving hurricane defences and the elimination of a 76-mile shipping canal blamed for much of the flooding. The blueprint, which calls for a much smaller city, estimating that just half of the 500,000 people who lived there before Hurricane Katrina will resettle in the next two years, drew loud boos and shouts of anger from residents who crowded a downtown hotel meeting room for its announcement.
"I'm ready to rebuild. I'm not going to let you take everything. I'm ready to fight to get my property together," one man shouted from the back of the room.
According to Reuters, Carolyn Parker, a resident of the ruined Lower Ninth ward, told the panel: "I don't think it's right that you try to take my property. "Over my dead body. I didn't die with Katrina."
The Bring New Orleans Back Commission was told to think big and have little regard for the cost when coming up with ideas. The blueprint is non-binding and contains many proposals that are likely to be opposed at federal and state level, as plans for rebuilding the city must also be agreed by the White House and the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state agency in charge of disbursing billions of dollars in federal aid.
A controversial proposal that would have allowed residents to return to all parts of the city but would close within a year those neighbourhoods that did not achieve a critical mass of residents has been watered down since the New York Times reported it over the weekend.
Instead, according to the Times Picayune, a New Orleans newspaper that obtained an advance copy of the report of the land use committee, no one will be allowed to build in the most damaged areas for four months while residents meet to plan how to rebuild their neighbourhoods. Those areas that fail to attract enough people or are considered unsustainable face the prospect of compulsory purchase by the city, and are likely to be turned into parks or marshland that will double as extra flood defences.
Areas that are likely to have to prove their viability include the Lower Ninth, a predominantly African-American area that is one of the city's poorest and was devastated by the flooding. The plan to compulsorily purchase homes is likely to provoke protest, so, according to the Times Picayune, the commission suggested offering a more generous reimbursement package than has previously been suggested, with more than $12bn (£6.4bn) of the $17bn estimated rebuilding budget devoted to buying out residents in unsustainable areas.
The commission will also propose a reorganisation of the city's education system, which has been beset by low performing schools, broken facilities and corruption. Other proposals will involve making the city greener by creating cycle lanes and a commuter train line linking New Orleans to other cities along the Gulf coast.
Committee members said another part of the plan was to use tax credits to recreate Storyville, the city-backed red-light district that operated for 20 years until it was shut in 1917. But rather than bringing back the sex trade the idea is to reclaim its musical legacy by creating recording studios and a jazz museum.
"These are projects by real New Orleanians that will have real benefit," Michael Arata, the chairman of a subcommittee that looked at rebuilding the city's film and music industries, told AP.
At a glance
· The worst damaged areas that do not attract enough residents to make them viable communities to be turned into parks or marshland
· Build a $3 billion (£1.6bn) light railway system in an effort to spark redevelopment in areas of the city that were flooded
· A commuter line linking the city to Baton Rouge to the west and the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the east
· Recreate a jazz district in the former red light area
· Eliminate a 760-mile shipping canal that was a prime cause of flooding after Hurricane Katrina
· A complete reorganisation of the troubled school system |
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By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
UK Independent
13 January 2006
The first sign that the avian flu virus H5N1 may be mutating into a form more infectious to humans has been reported by scientists. Researchers from the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in Mill Hill, north London, have analysed viruses from two children who died of bird flu in eastern Turkey.
In one case, the analysis revealed mutations in the virus that made it more prone to infect humans. In a joint statement, Sir John Skehel, director of the institute, run by the Medical research Council, and the World Health Organisation, said a mutation had been traced in viruses isolated in Hong Kong in 2003 and in Vietnam last year.
"Research has indicated the Hong Kong 2003 viruses preferred to bind to human cell receptors more than to avian receptors, and it is expected that the Turkish virus will also have this characteristic." The statement said the viruses were "very closely related" to H5N1 viruses in birds in Turkey, and also to viruses isolated last year in birds at Qinghai Lake in western China, a congregation point for migratory birds. The biggest fear is H5N1 will change into a form that can spread easily from person to person, triggering a global pandemic with the loss of millions of lives.
That could happen in a single big genetic "shift" involving a reassortment of the avian virus with human virus to create a strain of flu to which no one would have immunity. It could also happen in a series of smaller changes, known as "genetic drift", as the virus gradually evolves to become progressively more infectious to humans.
A spokesman for the MRC said the mutation observed did not amount to a major change. "The virus would have to change a lot more in other areas before it could cause a pandemic," he said. In the statement, the NIMR and the WHO say gene sequences of the viruses indicated they were sensitive to the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and amantadine. The British Government is stockpiling 14.6 million doses of Tamiflu. Earlier, Dr Bob McCracken, a former president of the British Veterinary Association, said the bird flu danger would be greatest during the migratory season for ducks. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The most likely place wild infected ducks are likely to land is in lakes and waterways." He said domestic birds should be kept away from those areas. Ducks can carry the virus without visible symptoms. The H5N1 virus has infected 150 people and killed at least 78 in six countries. |
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AFP
Jan 13, 2006
PARIS - France is to boost its preparedness for a possible bird flu outbreak by conducting major exercises and extending a ban on outdoor poultry rearing, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said Friday. The government is "mobilised in the face of this threat," Villepin said after a meeting of cabinet ministers to discuss the alarming spread of the disease.
"We want to keep adapting our responses and it's for that reason I have decided we will conduct a major exercise in February on a regional scale and a national exercise in March," he said.
The simulations will follow a smaller test carried out last November around a farm in western France.
Villepin said restrictions against outdoor poultry raising already in place in a quarter of the country would be extended to cover more than half the country, or 58 of France's 96 départements, or administrative regions.
European countries are increasingly worried over the spread of bird flu because of growing fears that the virus may mutate into a form transmissible between humans and create a pandemic that could kill millions.
Bird flu has already killed nearly 80 people in Southeast Asia and China since 2003 and Turkey, outside the European Union's southeastern border, has also reported three human deaths.
Agriculture Minister Dominique Bussereau said the ban on outdoor poultry raising was decided "in light of the events currently happening in Turkey" and would include French regions through which migratory birds pass.
"If the threat comes closer, we may impose a wider ban over the whole country," he said.
France is especially sensitive to the disease's spread: it is the biggest poultry producer in the European Union — and the fourth biggest in the world after the United States, China and Brazil — and any outbreak would harm its large farm sector.
So far, however, no cases of bird flu have been reported in France.
Villepin said he had ordered his health minister, Xavier Bertrand, to consult with doctors as to how tasks would be divided up should an epidemic occur, and called for a detailed plan to be readied by the end of the month. |
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By Rachel Williams, New York
Irish Examiner
13/01/06
AN ancient map set to be unveiled next week may prove that it was a Chinese eunuch who discovered America and not Christopher Columbus.
As all schoolchildren are taught, Columbus found the New World in 1492. But the copy of a map dated 1418 to be made public in Beijing on Monday and London a day later could show that it was in fact Admiral Zheng He who got there first, more than 70 years earlier.
If proved to be genuine, the clear depiction of the Americas, Africa and Europe will bolster his case significantly, according to the Economist. Gunnar Thompson, specialist on old maps and early explorers, said: “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th century world history.” The exploits of Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435, were described in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft, and are well documented in Chinese historical records. The 1763 copy of the map contains notes that “substantially match” descriptions in the book, the magazine said.
Six Chinese characters in the upper right-hand corner of the map say it is a “general chart of the integrated world.” The commentary, written in clear Chinese characters, includes a description of the people of the west coast of America: “The skin of the race in this area is black-red, and feathers are wrapped around their heads and waists.”
There are also several mistakes: the British Isles do not appear and California is an island. But it is the precision, rather than the errors, that is more likely to make critics question the authenticity of the map.
Zheng He has long been considered one of the pioneers of marine exploration in China, but he was virtually unheard of in the West until 2002. That year retired British submarine commander Gavin Menzies published a book claiming he circumnavigated the world in a two-year odyssey which began in 1421, discovering America on the way.
It was when the map’s owner, eminent Chinese lawyer Liu Gang, read the book that he realised what he might have on his hands. He had bought the map for about $500 from a small Shanghai dealer in 2001.
The map will be unveiled at Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum on Tuesday. |
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Associated Press
13 Jan 2006
Genetic study indicates some 3.5 million of today's Ashkenazi Jews - about 40 percent of the total Ashkenazi population - are descended from just four women Some 3.5 million of today's Ashkenazi Jews - about 40 percent of the total Ashkenazi population - are descended from just four women, a genetic study indicates.
Those women apparently lived somewhere in Europe within the last 2,000 years, but not necessarily in the same place or even the same century, said lead author Dr. Doron Behar of the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel.
He did the work with Karl Skorecki of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and others.
Each woman left a genetic signature that shows up in their descendants today, he and colleagues say in a report published online by the American Journal of Human Genetics. Together, their four signatures appear in about 40 percent of Ashkenazi Jews, while being virtually absent in non-Jews and found only rarely in Jews of non-Ashkenazi origin, the researchers said.
They said the total Ashkenazi population is estimated at around 8 million people. The estimated world Jewish population is about 13 million.
Ashkenazi Jews are a group with mainly central and eastern European ancestry. Ultimately, though, they can be traced back to Jews who migrated from Israel to Italy in the first and second centuries, Behar said.
'Their descendants left a legacy'
Eventually this group moved to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries and expanded greatly, reaching about 10 million just before World War II, he said.
The study involved mitochondrial DNA, called mtDNA, which is passed only through the mother. A woman can pass her mtDNA to grandchildren only by having daughters. So mtDNA is "the perfect tool to trace maternal lineages," Behar said Thursday in a telephone interview.
His study involved analyzing mtDNA from more than 11,000 samples representing 67 populations.
Mike Hammer, who does similar research at the University of Arizona, said he found the work tracing back to just four ancestors "quite plausible... I think they've done a really good job of tackling this question."
But he said it's not clear the women lived in Europe.
"They may have existed in the Near East," Hammer said. "We don't know exactly where the four women were, but their descendants left a legacy in the population today, whereas ... other women's descendants did not."
Behar said the four women he referred to did inherit their genetic signatures from female ancestors who lived in the Near East. But he said he preferred to focus on these later European descendants because they were at the root of the Ashkenazi population explosion. |
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By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 12, 2006
In the quest to decipher the evolution of the cosmos, no topic generates greater interest among scientists than "dark energy," the mysterious force that appears to be causing the universe to expand at an ever-accelerating rate.
Yesterday, Louisiana State University astronomer Bradley E. Schaefer tossed a grenade into this debate, presenting new research to suggest that the force dark energy exerts may have varied over time. That casts new doubt on the validity of Albert Einstein's "cosmological constant" only a few years after astronomers rescued the concept from scientific oblivion. "I'm not pushing this as a proof," Schaefer said in an interview at this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in the District, where he presented his research. "It's pointing against the cosmological constant, but it's a first result describing how dark energy changes with time. We need more people to test the results and get more information."
Schaefer based his findings on analysis of ultra-bright cosmic explosions called gamma-ray bursts, detected as far as 12.8 billion light-years away. He found that the most distant explosions appeared brighter than they should have been if the universe were accelerating at a constant rate.
"As you go back in time, the universe is pushing [outward] less and less," he said. "At some point, the pressure of dark energy is zero and is exerting no force on the universe. There is no explanation for it."
Schaefer's findings, the first attempt to use gamma-ray bursts to study dark energy, produced a result that disagreed with accumulating evidence gleaned from observing a different kind of blast -- the exploding stars called supernovae. That work suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating in accordance with Einstein's cosmological constant.
"The idea of using a gamma-ray burst as a distance indicator is a very exciting one," said California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis, a supernova cosmologist. "The trouble is there are no ways to check the techniques. I'm not saying it's no good, but I can't believe it's as precise as supernovae."
The concept of dark energy emerged in 1999 as a way to explain the fact that the expansion of the universe, once thought to be slowing ever since the big bang about 13.7 billion years ago, was accelerating. That resurrected the idea of a cosmological constant, introduced by Einstein more than 80 years ago as a "fudge factor" to explain why the universe then appeared to be in equilibrium, rather than being pulled together by gravity.
A few years later, however, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was not in stasis, after all, but was expanding. There was no "constant." Einstein condemned his own idea as "my greatest blunder."
But in the 1990s, astronomers found ways to use supernovae as cosmic "standard candles" whose luminosity could be analyzed to track the history of the universe's expansion as far back as 9.8 billion light-years.
That led to the 1999 discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating rather than slowing. There had to be some "repulsive force" overcoming the gravity that should have been causing the universe to come together.
Astronomers called the force dark energy, and "it mimics the cosmological constant," said Michigan Technological University astronomer Robert J. Nemiroff. Einstein may have been right after all.
Astronomers estimate that dark energy makes up 70 percent of the universe, but they do not know what it is. Solving the mystery is as all-consuming as any passion in physics. "It's so spooky," said Astronomical Society President Robert B. Kirshner, a cosmology expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Everybody is looking for ways to get at it."
Schaefer said he had been interested for several years in using gamma-ray bursts -- the brightest explosions in a violent universe -- to look far deeper into the past than astronomers could reach with supernovae.
The key were the launches of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's HETE-2 satellite in 2000, and NASA's Swift satellite in 2004. Both were designed to locate and observe gamma-ray bursts, which last milliseconds to several minutes.
Schaefer analyzed 52 of the bursts and found that the most distant of them were brighter than the cosmological constant would have predicted -- indicating that the universe's expansion was accelerating at a slower rate than it is today.
Schaefer "gets full marks for coming up with a new technique," Ellis said in a telephone interview, but "we still really don't have a clue" what dark energy is. "It's mayhem at the moment" in cosmology, he added. "The theorists are having a field day, because there's no data." |
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By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
NY Times
January 10, 2006
On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements.
Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip.
A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded - brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip - even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth. The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth.
Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects.
"It took us several years to believe what we were seeing," Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own.
But if the findings, published in 1996, surprised most scientists, recent research has left them flabbergasted. Humans, it turns out, have mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more highly evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say reflects the evolution of humans' sophisticated social abilities.
The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions.
"We are exquisitely social creatures," Dr. Rizzolatti said. "Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others."
He continued, "Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking."
The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy.
Everyday experiences are also being viewed in a new light. Mirror neurons reveal how children learn, why people respond to certain types of sports, dance, music and art, why watching media violence may be harmful and why many men like pornography.
How can a single mirror neuron or system of mirror neurons be so incredibly smart?
Most nerve cells in the brain are comparatively pedestrian. Many specialize in detecting ordinary features of the outside world. Some fire when they encounter a horizontal line while others are dedicated to vertical lines. Others detect a single frequency of sound or a direction of movement.
Moving to higher levels of the brain, scientists find groups of neurons that detect far more complex features like faces, hands or expressive body language. Still other neurons help the body plan movements and assume complex postures.
Mirror neurons make these complex cells look like numbskulls. Found in several areas of the brain - including the premotor cortex, the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus and the insula - they fire in response to chains of actions linked to intentions.
Studies show that some mirror neurons fire when a person reaches for a glass or watches someone else reach for a glass; others fire when the person puts the glass down and still others fire when the person reaches for a toothbrush and so on. They respond when someone kicks a ball, sees a ball being kicked, hears a ball being kicked and says or hears the word "kick."
"When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain," said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. "Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate," he said. "But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements.
"When you see me pull my arm back, as if to throw the ball, you also have in your brain a copy of what I am doing and it helps you understand my goal. Because of mirror neurons, you can read my intentions. You know what I am going to do next."
He continued: "And if you see me choke up, in emotional distress from striking out at home plate, mirror neurons in your brain simulate my distress. You automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling."
Mirror neurons seem to analyzed scenes and to read minds. If you see someone reach toward a bookshelf and his hand is out of sight, you have little doubt that he is going to pick up a book because your mirror neurons tell you so.
In a study published in March 2005 in Public Library of Science, Dr. Iacoboni and his colleagues reported that mirror neurons could discern if another person who was picking up a cup of tea planned to drink from it or clear it from the table. "Mirror neurons provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture," said Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the U.C.L.A. who studies human development.
Until now, scholars have treated culture as fundamentally separate from biology, she said. "But now we see that mirror neurons absorb culture directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation."
Other animals - monkeys, probably apes and possibly elephants, dolphins and dogs - have rudimentary mirror neurons, several mirror neuron experts said. But humans, with their huge working memory, carry out far more sophisticated imitations.
Language is based on mirror neurons, according to Michael Arbib, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. One such system, found in the front of the brain, contains overlapping circuitry for spoken language and sign language.
In an article published in Trends in Neuroscience in March 1998, Dr. Arbib described how complex hand gestures and the complex tongue and lip movements used in making sentences use the same machinery. Autism, some researchers believe, may involve broken mirror neurons. A study published in the Jan. 6 issue of Nature Neuroscience by Mirella Dapretto, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A., found that while many people with autism can identify an emotional expression, like sadness, on another person's face, or imitate sad looks with their own faces, they do not feel the emotional significance of the imitated emotion. From observing other people, they do not know what it feels like to be sad, angry, disgusted or surprised.
Mirror neurons provide clues to how children learn: they kick in at birth. Dr. Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington has published studies showing that infants a few minutes old will stick out their tongues at adults doing the same thing. More than other primates, human children are hard-wired for imitation, he said, their mirror neurons involved in observing what others do and practicing doing the same things.
Still, there is one caveat, Dr. Iacoboni said. Mirror neurons work best in real life, when people are face to face. Virtual reality and videos are shadowy substitutes.
Nevertheless, a study in the January 2006 issue of Media Psychology found that when children watched violent television programs, mirror neurons, as well as several brain regions involved in aggression were activated, increasing the probability that the children would behave violently.
The ability to share the emotions of others appears to be intimately linked to the functioning of mirror neurons, said Dr. Christian Keysers, who studies the neural basis of empathy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and who has published several recent articles on the topic in Neuron.
When you see someone touched in a painful way, your own pain areas are activated, he said. When you see a spider crawl up someone's leg, you feel a creepy sensation because your mirror neurons are firing.
People who rank high on a scale measuring empathy have particularly active mirror neurons systems, Dr. Keysers said.
Social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment, disgust and lust are based on a uniquely human mirror neuron system found in a part of the brain called the insula, Dr. Keysers said. In a study not yet published, he found that when people watched a hand go forward to caress someone and then saw another hand push it away rudely, the insula registered the social pain of rejection. Humiliation appears to be mapped in the brain by the same mechanisms that encode real physical pain, he said.
Psychotherapists are understandably enthralled by the discovery of mirror neurons, said Dr. Daniel Siegel, the director of the Center for Human Development in Los Angeles and the author of "Parenting From the Inside Out," because they provide a possible neurobiological basis for the psychological mechanisms known as transference and countertransference.
In transference, clients "transfer" feelings about important figures in their lives onto a therapist. Similarly, in countertransference, a therapist's reactions to a client are shaped by the therapist's own earlier relationships.
Therapists can use their own mirror system to understand a client's problems and to generate empathy, he said. And they can help clients understand that many of their experiences stem from what other people have said or done to them in the past.
Art exploits mirror neurons, said Dr. Vittorio Gallese, a neuroscientist at Parma University. When you see the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini's hand of divinity grasping marble, you see the hand as if it were grasping flesh, he said. Experiments show that when you read a novel, you memorize positions of objects from the narrator's point of view.
Professional athletes and coaches, who often use mental practice and imagery, have long exploited the brain's mirror properties perhaps without knowing their biological basis, Dr. Iacoboni said. Observation directly improves muscle performance via mirror neurons.
Similarly, millions of fans who watch their favorite sports on television are hooked by mirror neuron activation. In someone who has never played a sport - say tennis - the mirror neurons involved in running, swaying and swinging the arms will be activated, Dr. Iacoboni said.
But in someone who plays tennis, the mirror systems will be highly activated when an overhead smash is observed. Watching a game, that person will be better able to predict what will happen next, he said.
In yet another realm, mirror neurons are powerfully activated by pornography, several scientists said. For example, when a man watches another man have sexual intercourse with a woman, the observer's mirror neurons spring into action. The vicarious thrill of watching sex, it turns out, is not so vicarious after all. |
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Article in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) on 9 January, 2006
Markus Wilhelmson
Translation by a Signs Reader
The British film director Jon Jacobs bought a holiday resort in space for 100,000 US dollars. But the resort exists only in a computer game. The border between the different worlds is being erased as the games become increasingly more human.
On Monday, December 19th, the opening ceremony was held at Jon Jacobs new resort. If you happen to pass by, you'll find it on an asteroid in Paradise V.
THE INVESTMENT INCLUDED a residential block with 1,000 apartments, a shopping mall, a large sports center, an amphitheatre and ten biotopes.
Jacobs views the transaction as an investment and expects to get his money back. He is now going to sell apartments, tickets to sporting events, hunting rights on his domains, and he has the right to impose taxes on activities taking place on his grounds.
All of this is part of the world, the life, that's going on around the clock in the computer game "Project Entropia".
This role play on the Internet has broken new ground with its virtual world with a real economy. 350,000 players from 179 countries take part in it and everything is controlled from the old premises of the closed down newspaper Arbetet (the Work) in Gothenburg, Sweden.
- Our initial idea was not to make this into a game. We still want to create a virtual reality where you can move around in a 3D environment instead of looking at the Internet as a flat page with text and pictures, says Jan Welter Timkrans, president and founder of Mindark, the company which has developed "Project Entropia".
AFTER STUDYING at Chalmers Institute of Technology, Welter Timkrans invented a security system which he sold to several major companies. He then manufactured a computer system for purchasing, used today by both UN and the World Bank.
"Project Entropia" is his latest production and the result of almost ten years of development work. This year his company will make a turnover of SEK 30 million (USD 3.9 million), and he is certain that the turnover will double in 2006.
So, what do you do in this other world?
You create your own character, an avatar, and give it a name and characteristics that you might want to have yourself in real life.
Then the pursuit of success begins. You build a house or a network; a creative mind might team up with an engineer and form a winning team. Hard work and specific skills are premiered.
IT TAKES SEVERAL years to work your way up, to climb the hierarchies and earn money by selling services or goods. The success is measured in the currency of the game, called PED (Project Entropia Dollars). You can exchange your money in PED for USD according to a set rate. 10 PED are worth 1 US dollar.
- Above all, I think there are two things that are attractive in these games, says Hans Sollerman, president of E-man, a company working with e-commerce solutions among other things:
- You enter into a social context with very clear rules explaining how to behave. The real world is much more complex and ugly with real people and unpredictable behavior. In here you get a chance to become somebody. You may buy a virtual island and be the king there. In a period of time where the pressure from society says that you're not good enough the way you are, this is a way of succeeding, of being seen, of getting a value you can't get in the other world, Sollerman says.
THE EXAMPLES are many of fuzzy boundaries between the real world and the virtual world. In South Korea, where role plays on the Internet are so big that three TV channels have live broadcasts 24 hours a day of different computer games, problems with Mafia-type activities are spreading.
Older, established players attack newcomers and demand money, real money, for providing protection.
In the game "Sims online" a 17-year old boy was caught opening a brothel where he sold cybersex to other players. For this brothel owner, who played under the name Evangeline, it was game over.
In China a computer game company was ordered to pay legal costs and pay the player Li Hongchen 140 dollars damage, after he lost his virtual arms. The sentence forms a precedent and means that virtual assets should not be valued differently from assets in real life.
A CHINESE PLAYER stole a virtual sword from an opponent. The robbed player looked the thief up and killed him - for real. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in June.
A result of the ever-increasing amounts of money in circulation is that many players choose to quit their jobs in order to work full-time in the virtual world. For those who don't have the opportunity to spend the time necessary on their avatar, but still want it to ascend the hierarchies, it's become common to pay someone to take over your virtual life.
The most common scenario is that Western players hire Asian assistants to take care of their avatars. In China, complete sweatshops have sprung up, where the employees take care of a Westerners' virtual alter ego.
- It's like in real life. Some people have money to hire people to do what they themselves view as boring chores. Jan Welter Timkrans declares that those who do the tasks are happy because they are able to earn money.
THERE ARE REPORTS about computer game addiction every once in a while. A world where it is also economically profitable to play a lot sounds like a hothouse for potential addicts.
In South Korea, a 28-year old died in August last year after taking part in the role play "Starcraft" for 50 hours straight with short breaks just to use the toilet.
- It's easy to become totally absorbed by the game, thinking the game is more important than real life, especially among young people. But, it's essentially as any other hobby. I have friends riding MTB's in the woods. They are totally crazy and ride with their life at stake. There are better and worse varieties of everything, says Hans Sollerman.
Jan Welter Timkrans defends the game and compares it to watching TV.
- You are a participant in the game instead of an observer.
LARS ILSHAMMAR is a historian aimed at technology and politics, and he has followed the development of role plays on the Internet.
He is of the opinion that many people get their strongest sensory impressions and experience their real passions in this created world and that the grey and dull real world becomes just a scene you return to now and then to sleep or earn money in.
- This says quite a lot about our time, that people feel that the existence created by the welfare state is not enough to satisfy our needs. People don't find the meaning of life in their everyday life. That's why they seek this meaning somewhere else, and get their kicks in the world of computer games instead, Ilshammar declares and adds:
- If the real world becomes less important or almost subsides, and all the strong emotions are experienced in the created world, you could ask yourself a philosophical question: What is really real? The physical world or the created world? It's up to us to decide. |
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By Sara Nelson
Newsshopper.co.uk
A DOG walker was given paws for thought when he came across a wild cat.
John Costin has a tail to tell following the encounter near Churchfield Woods, Bexley Village.
The 64-year-old had just let his dog Mickey off the lead when he saw the curious creature crouching in tall grass.
The father-of-three said: "When it saw me, it stood up and kept very still.
"The first thing I thought was this is not an ordinary cat' then it crossed my mind cats like this had been spotted in the area before I thought it must be a wild cat.
"It was standing in the grass so it was hard to tell, but I would say it was about a foot high and around a foot and a half from nose to back legs, like the length of a small whippet. I didn't notice its tail."
The retired civil service technician added: "I was struck by how sleek its fur was.
"It looked like a sort of tortoiseshell pattern. To me it looked like a small lynx or a bobcat and it had pointy ears.
"There was just something different about it at first it crossed my mind it might just be a huge domestic cat, but looking at it I felt it had to be wild. The shape of it and the size of it were very striking."
Over recent years, a panther-type cat the so-called Beast of Bexley has been spotted across the borough. [...] |
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Whitehaven News
09/01/2006
CUMBRIA could be home to big cats including pumas, panthers and lynx according to police records.
Police have been called out to a string of claimed wild cat sightings in recent years – including reports of mystery monster moggies close to Carlisle and Keswick, and even one claimed sighting of a lion.
Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show there have been nine reported sightings of big cats in Cumbria in the last six years.
These include claims of a large straw-coloured beast, twice the size of a normal cat, lurking at Wetheral Cemetery and a huge lynx-like animal on the prowl at Applethwaite, near Keswick.
Nobody has ever been harmed by a big cat in the county and police, who have been unable to track down any wildcats, say there is no need for public concern.
But force wildlife workers admit there could be a Cumbrian beast on the loose – and say there is no reason to doubt eyewitnesses.
“The people who report them genuinely believe that they have seen something – usually a large black cat,” said Dennis Crisp, wildlife crime coordinator for Cumbria Police.
“I wouldn’t dispute the fact that there could be something in it. It is possible that something could’ve escaped from captivity, but we’ve had no reports that something has.
“If there is a sighting, it is most likely that one has escaped from captivity and is travelling.”
Some of the reports suggest the caller may have mistaken a more common animal for something more exotic.
Among the beasts spotted was one “sighting” of a lion in a field opposite the South Lakes Wild Animal Park in south Cumbria in October 2003.
Records show a patrol attended and found nothing. No lions were missing from the park.
At Wetheral Cemetery, police searched the area after the report of the large cat in February 2003.
The police report states the result: “Wildlife officer attended scene. Checked and found markings belonging to a fox.”
Other reports include claims of a puma in a field at Bolton, near Appleby, in 2004. “It was jet black and larger than a dog,” said the caller.
Another concerned caller said they had seen a panther-sized fawn-coloured cat on a hill at Troutbeck Bridge, near Windermere, in March 2002.
While in Barrow, a resident said they saw “a black panther going into the rear yard” of a house at Duke Street. Nothing was found.
Mr Crisp added: “There has been nothing to substantiate them or disprove them but we do look at all the cases on their merits and we do keep an open mind on the subject.”
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