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| MORE LUNACY: NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRIBES FOR SUPREME COURT FASCISTS & GIVING LECTURES????? |
| 03.31.04 (9:15 am) [edit] |
[b]NEO-CON, NEO-FASCIST REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM BIZARRO WORLD--
INABILITY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN BRIBERY/CRONYISM TO DO FAVORS FOR CRIMINALS --AND -- SOMEONE GIVING A LECTURE, WHICH ALL SUPREME COURT JUSTICES DO... ALL OF THEM INCLUDING THE NEO-NAZI SUPREME FASCIST SCALIA WHO SHOULD RECUSE HIMSELF FOR HIS SORDID BRIBE-TAKING FROM RIECH MARSHALL CHENEY, THE PIG WHO IS COVERING-UP THE ENERGY RAPE OF AMERICA BY HIS CORPORATE CRONIES.
THE NEO-CON, NEO-FASCISTS HAVE A CONGENITAL DISEASE: THE INABILITY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN CORRUPTIONS AND CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE RICH -- AND-- HONEST ACTIONS OF THOSE THEY DON'T LIKE.[/b]
[u][b]Scalia Should Recuse Himself[/b][/u] - http://www.commondreams.org/v...
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has never displayed much regard for judicial ethics. For instance, he cast a decisive vote in the 2000 Florida recount case of Bush v. Gore, arguably the most important decision in the court's recent history, despite the fact that his sons were working for law firms associated with the campaign of George W. Bush.
After Scalia's support from the bench allowed him to assume the presidency, Bush appointed one of the justice's sons to a high-level position in the U.S. Department of Labor.
This year, Scalia again wants to bend judicial standards past the breaking point.
The Supreme Court agreed last month to take up an appeal by Vice President Dick Cheney in a case that involves the refusal of the No. 2 man in the Bush administration to disclose the identities of members of the secretive energy task force he headed shortly after taking office in 2001.
Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent to support the task force's work, yet Cheney refuses to reveal the names of energy industry insiders - such as Enron's Ken Lay - who appear to have influenced efforts by the task force to shape an energy policy for the United States.
Cheney has come under increasingly intense political and legal pressure to disclose the identities of energy industry insiders he met and consulted with. Now he wants the Supreme Court to rule that he does not have to abide by rules that seek to ensure government decision making can be scrutinized by the American people.
No honest jurist would hesitate to rebuke Cheney.
However, there are some questions about whether all the jurists who are to hear this case will be honest players.
Three weeks after the court agreed to take the Cheney case, Scalia spent a weekend duck hunting in southern Louisiana with Cheney. The bird-slaying trek brought to light a fact that Cheney and Scalia both acknowledge: The men are old friends. Yet Scalia continues to claim he can and will remain impartial with regard to a case that is of tremendous consequence for his old friend.
Even if Scalia could remain impartial, the appearance of impropriety is so obvious - and so extreme - that he must recuse himself from this case.
If Scalia fails to take the ethical course, his fellow justices should move to sanction a jurist who seems to have a problem distinguishing between right and wrong.
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| NEO-CONS' REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM BIZARRO WORLD: NO LEGAL COUNSEL FOR DEFENDANTS?!?!?! |
| 03.31.04 (9:03 am) [edit] |
[b]ACCORDING TO THE NEO-CON, NEO-FASCIST REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM BIZARRO WORLD--
NO LEGAL COUNSEL SHOULD BE PROVIDED FOR DEFENDANTS!?!?!?!?
PERHAPS THESE NEO-CON NEO-NAZIS SHOULD REVISIT THE U.S. CONSTITUTION & THE BILL OF RIGHTS: The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution states: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."
OF COURSE, THE NEO-CONS HAVE TO [u]LASH OUT LIKE MAD DOGS FOAMING AT THE MOUTH IN THEIR SYPHLITIC RAGE AT THE FRENCH WHO HAVE RESPECT FOR THE RULE OF LAW[/u], WHICH THEY DO NOT!!! OF COURSE, THE NAZIS ELIMINATED THIS RIGHT FOR GERMAN JEWS AND DISSIDENTS WHO DISAGREED WITH THEM, TOO!!!
IN THE NEO-CON, NEO-FASCIST REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM BIZARRO WORLD: THE LIKES OF THE CORRUPT HERR FUHRER BUSH, RIECH MARSHAL CHENEY & S.S. OFFICERS ASHCROFT, RICE & ROVE WOULD DECIDE WHETHER YOU SHOULD HAVE LEGAL COUNSEL!!! TO HELL WITH THE U.S. CONSTITUTION & THE BILL OF RIGHTS!!!
NO WONDER THE IRAQIS AREN'T QUITE THRILLED WITH DUBYA'S 'COWBOY' DEMOCRACY WITH RIGGED ELECTIONS!!!!!!!! [/b] http://www.tblog.com/template...
[u][b]History to Right of Counsel[/b][/u], http://www.nlada.org/About/Ab...
Roots of the modern right to counsel for the defendant who cannot afford to pay a private lawyer can be found more than a century ago. In Webb v. Baird, (6 Ind. 13), the Indiana Supreme Court in 1853 recognized a right to an attorney at public expense for an indigent person accused of crime, grounded in "the principles of a civilized society," not in constitutional or statutory law.
"It is not to be thought of in a civilized community for a moment that any citizen put in jeopardy of life or liberty should be debarred of counsel because he is too poor to employ such aid," the Indiana court wrote. "No court could be expected to respect itself to sit and hear such a trial. The defense of the poor in such cases is a duty which will at once be conceded as essential to the accused, to the court and to the public."
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution states: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence." The right to counsel in federal proceedings was well-established by statute early in the country's history, and was reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1938 in Johnson v. Zerbst. The Webb v. Baird decision, however, was the exception rather than the rule in the states. Well into the 20th century, most states relied only on the volunteer pro bono efforts of lawyers to provide defense for poor people accused of even the most serious crimes. While some private programs, such as the New York Legal Aid Society, were active as early as 1896 in providing counsel to needy immigrants, and the first public defender office began operations in Los Angeles in 1914, such services were non-existent outside of the largest cities.
The United States Supreme Court developed the Sixth Amendment right to counsel in state proceedings gradually and somewhat haltingly in the 20th century. In Powell v. Alabama, the famous "Scottsboro Case" from the Depression era, the Court held that counsel was required in all state capital proceedings. (Read the Court's key reasoning.)
Only a decade later, however, in Betts v. Brady, the Court declined to extend the Sixth Amendment right to counsel to state felony proceedings. It was not until 1963, twenty-one years after Betts, that the Court again addressed the issue of the right to counsel in state proceedings involving serious non-capital crimes. In a dramatic series of decisions, the Supreme Court firmly established the right to counsel in virtually all aspects of state criminal proceedings.
The most significant decision on the right to counsel in Supreme Court history was Gideon v. Wainwright, which overruled Betts v. Brady. The Court unanimously held that an indigent person accused of a serious crime was entitled to the appointment of defense counsel at state expense. (Read the Court's key reasoning.)
Twenty-two state attorneys general joined petitioner Clarence Earl Gideon in arguing that Sixth Amendment protection be extended to all defendants charged with felonies in state courts.
Four years later, with its decision in In re Gault, the Supreme Court built on the Gideon decision to extend to children the same rights as adults by providing counsel to the indigent child charged in juvenile delinquency proceedings. The right to counsel in trial courts was significantly expanded again when the Court, in Argersinger v. Hamlin, extended the right to counsel to all misdemeanor state proceedings where there is a potential loss of liberty.
The decisions in Gideon, Gault and Argersinger are the best known of the right-to-counsel cases in the Supreme Court, but they were part of a broader array of decisions rendered by the Court in the past three decades, all of which protect the right to counsel for people who cannot afford to hire a private lawyer. The Court recognized the low-income defendant's right to counsel at such critical stages of criminal proceedings as:
1. post-arrest interrogation, in Miranda v. Arizona in 1966, and Brewer v. Williams in 1977;
2. line-ups, in United States v. Wade in 1967;
3. other identification procedures, in Moore v. Illinois in 1977 (one-person showups);
4. preliminary hearings, in Coleman v. Alabama in 1970;
5. arraignments, in Hamilton v. Alabama in 1961; and
6. plea negotiations, in Brady v. United States and McMann v. Richardson, both in 1970.
After conviction, the indigent defendant is constitutionally guaranteed the right to counsel in:
1. sentencing proceedings, per Townsend v. Burke in 1948, and United States v. Tucker in 1972;
2. appeals of right, per Douglas v. California in 1963; and
3. in some cases, probation and parole proceedings, per Mempa v. Rhay in 1967.
In addition, the right to counsel for indigent defendants often extends, under state or federal law or practice, to collateral attacks on a conviction as well as a range of what might be called " quasi-criminal" proceedings involving loss of liberty, such as mental competency and commitment proceedings, extradition, prison disciplinary proceedings, status hearings for juveniles, some family matters such as non-payment of court-ordered support or contempt proceedings, as well as child dependency, abuse and neglect situations.
Finally, in any criminal proceeding in which counsel appears, the defendant is entitled to counsel's effective assistance, under Strickland v. Washington, decided in 1984.
These diverse requirements under the federal Constitution, often supplemented by more stringent state standards, created enormous pressures on the lawyers who provided indigent defense. The mandate of the Gideon, Gault and Argersinger decisions, as well as the Supreme Court's requirement to provide counsel at all critical stages of a prosecution, meant that government would have to assume vastly increased costs for providing counsel to the poor. Policymakers began to think about more systematic ways to deliver constitutionally required defense services.
The first significant efforts to systematize and standardize the provision of indigent defense services occurred in the early 1970's. In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals (NAC) wrote a basic set of standards governing indigent defense systems. The next year, the U.S. Justice Department convened the National Study Commission on Defense Services, which issued its comprehensive Guidelines for Legal Defense Systems in the United States (msword, 96 Kb) in 1976. Today, a comprehensive web of standards at the national, state and local levels governs the provision of indigent defense across the country. In 2000, the U.S. Justice Department compiled all these standards in a single compendium.
But serious problems remain. As the Justice Department found, in its 2000 report (in pdf format), Improving Criminal Justice Systems Through Expanded Strategies and Innovative Collaborations: Standards are frequently not implemented, contracts are often awarded to the lowest bidder without regard to the scope or quality of services, organizational structures are weak, workloads are high, and funding has not kept pace with other components of the criminal justice system. The effects can be severe, including legal representation of such low quality to amount to no representation at all, delays, overturned convictions, and convictions of the innocent. Ultimately, as Attorney General Janet Reno states, the lack of competent, vigorous legal representation for indigent defendants calls into question the legitimacy of criminal convictions and the integrity of the criminal justice system as a whole.
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| ... IS BUSH UNHINGED? ... THE SHORT ANSWER: YES ... |
| 03.31.04 (8:45 am) [edit] |
[b]Is Bush Unhinged?[/b]
Before you conclude that I myself must be unhinged even to raise such a question, ask yourself this: If a man talks as if he has lost contact with reality, then might he actually have done so? Granted that this possibility deserves evaluation, then consider President George W. Bush’s rhetoric in his March 19 speech to diplomats and others at the White House.
The president begins by stating his interpretation of the recent bombings in Madrid, reiterating one of his recurrent themes of the past two and a half years: “[T]he civilized world is at war” in a “new kind of war.” The concept of war, of course, ranks high among evocative metaphors. Not by accident have politicians declared wars on poverty, drugs, cancer, illiteracy, and an assortment of other alleged enemies. A society at war, as William James observed in 1906 in his call for the “moral equivalent of war,” finds a reason for unaccustomed solidarity and—here’s where the politicians come in—for unaccustomed submission to central government authority. James himself, after all, was arguing that “the martial type of character can be bred without war.” Political leaders are always seeking to establish such character, with themselves in command of the battalions of “disciplined” subjects. Insofar as the so-called war on terrorism merely represents the latest attempt to bend the war metaphor to an obvious political purpose, we might well dismiss the president’s rhetorical flourish as nothing but the same old same old.
Bush, however, will allow no such dismissal. “The war on terror,” he insists, “is not a figure of speech.” Well, I beg your pardon, Mr. President, but that is precisely what it is. How can one go to war against “terror,” which is a state of mind? Even if the president were to take more care with his language and to speak instead of a “war on terrorism,” the phrase still could not be anything more than a metaphor, because terrorism is a form of action available to virtually any determined adult anywhere anytime. War on terrorism, too, can be only a figure of speech.
War, if it is anything, is the marshalling of armed forces against somebody, not against a state of mind or a form of action. Wars are fought between groups of persons. We might argue about whether the United States can wage war only against another nation state, as opposed to an indefinitely large number of individuals committed to fanatical Islamism who in various workaday guises are living in scores of different countries. The expression “war on certain criminals and conspirators of criminal acts” would fit the present case better and would entail far more sensible thinking about the proper way to deal with such persons. The idea of war, obviously, calls to mind too readily the serviceability of the armed forces. Hence the application of such forces to the conquest of Iraq in the name of “bringing the terrorists to justice,” although that conquest was actually nothing but a hugely destructive, immensely expensive diversion from genuine efforts to allay the threat posed by the Islamist maniacs who compose al Qaeda and similar groups. “These killers will be tracked down and found, they will face their day of justice,” the president declares, speaking as always as if only a fixed number of such killers exist, rather than a vast reservoir of actual and potential recruits that is only augmented and revitalized by actions such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It would be a boon to humanity if the president could be brought to understand the distinction between waging war and establishing justice.
Whatever our understanding of the president’s “war on terror” might be, however, he definitely parts company with reality when he states, “There is no neutral ground—no neutral ground—in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death.” Of course, this Manichean pronouncement echoes the administration’s previous declaration that everybody on earth is either with us or against us—and if they know what’s good for them, they’ll fall into line with our wishes. Aside from the undeniable fact that some nations simply prefer, as did the Spanish people (as opposed to the Aznar government), to avoid the blowback of U.S. interventions around the world, the president’s insistence on equating U.S. policy with good, freedom, and life and all alternative policies with evil, slavery, and death represents the sort of childish bifurcation one expects to find expressed by a member of a youth gang, not by the leader of the world’s most powerful government. To raise but a single example, though a highly relevant one in this context, can any dispassionate person argue that the U.S. position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is entirely good, whereas every alternative position is entirely evil?
Observers endowed with humane moral sensibilities recognize that there is plenty of evil to go around in Israel and elsewhere. In Iraq, for example, the U.S. government bears clear responsibility for killing and injuring thousands of noncombatants in the past year—not to mention the horrendous mortality and suffering it brought about previously by enforcement of the economic sanctions used to cripple that country for more than a decade. Some people maintain that the price was worth paying, that ultimately the good obtained will more than compensate for the harm caused in the process, but even if one accepts that assessment for the sake of argument, it remains true nevertheless that much harm was caused, that the burden of responsibility for evils perpetrated must be borne by the U.S. side as well as by the demonized enemy (Saddam Hussein having been made out after 1990 as “another Hitler”). International conflicts in the real world do not often divide neatly into nothing-but-good versus nothing-but-evil. For the president of the United States to employ such a juvenile characterization raises the possibility that his mind is so immature that he ought to be removed from office before he propels the world into even worse disasters.
Seemingly aware of previous criticism, the president declares that “the terrorists are offended not merely by our policies—they are offended by our existence as free nations.” I myself have seen no evidence to confirm such a statement; certainly the president has adduced none. I have seen, however, the translated testimony of one Osama bin Laden, who in a famous October 2001 videotape objects to U.S. support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, and to U.S. economic sanctions and other hostile actions against Iraq—that is, to various U.S. policies. “Millions of innocent children are being killed in Iraq and in Palestine and we don’t hear a word from the infidels. We don’t hear a raised voice,” says bin Laden. In my ears, this statement sounds like an objection to U.S. policies. I have seen no evidence that bin Laden or any other known Islamic terrorist takes offence at our very existence, provided that we mind our own business in our own homeland.
In the president’s mind, however, every deviation from adherence to his promulgated national-security policy of U.S. world domination and preventive warfare represents a dangerous form of appeasement: “Any sign of weakness or retreat simply validates terrorist violence, and invites more violence for all nations. The only certain way to protect our people is by early, united, and decisive action”—that is, by global military intervention by the United States, with all other nations serving as its lackeys. In the neoconservative vision to which the president has been converted, time stands still: It is always 1938, and if we fail to bring all our military might to bear preventively against the Hitler du jour, we shall certainly be plunged into global catastrophe.
Waxing positive, the president credits recent U.S. and allied military actions with bringing about “a free Afghanistan” and the “long-awaited liberation” of the Iraqi people. He maintains that the fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence, aggression, and instability in the Middle East. . . . [Y]ears of illicit weapons development by the dictator have come to the end. . . . [T]he Iraqi people are now receiving aid, instead of suffering under the sanctions. . . . [M]en and women across the Middle East, looking to Iraq, are getting a glimpse of what life in a free country can be like. . . . Who would begrudge the Iraqi people their long-awaited liberation?
This effusion evinces a tenuous grip on reality. Nobody begrudges the Iraqi people their freedom, but many of us have serious doubts about just how much freedom those long-suffering people really have. Their country is occupied by a lethal foreign army whose soldiers roam freely, breaking into homes and mosques at will, maintaining checkpoints that often become the venues of unjustified killings, carrying out police activities by employing such means as aerial bombardment and bursts of heavy machine-gun fire. If this unfortunate scene is the “glimpse of what life in a free country can be like” that others throughout the Middle East are getting, then woe unto anyone who yearns to stimulate those Middle Easterners to seek freedom. “With Afghanistan and Iraq showing the way, we are confident that freedom will lift the sights and hopes of millions in the greater Middle East,” the president states. If he really harbors such confidence, one can only note how ill-founded it is.
The president seems to have no idea of what a free society consists of. Violent military occupation and the complete absence of the rule of law totally invalidate any claim that either Iraq or Afghanistan is now a free society. At present Iraq is awash with violence perpetrated by resistance fighters and occupation forces and with criminality of all sorts unleashed by the disruptions associated with the war and by the U.S. dissolution of the old police apparatus. “We will not fail the Iraqi people, who have placed their trust in us,” Bush declares. But they never placed their trust in us in the first place; they simply suffered our invasion and occupation of their country. In any event, we have already gravely disappointed the hopes that many Iraqis held for life after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The country is rife with resentment and hostility, and the people are eager for U.S. forces to get out. Although the president maintains that “[w]e’ve set out to break the cycle of bitterness and radicalism that has brought stagnation to a vital region,” one cannot help concluding from the facts on the ground that the upshot of the U.S. invasion and occupation has been just the opposite, that U.S. actions in Iraq have only poured fuel on the fires of terrorism there as well as in the wider world.
It is disconcerting for me to listen to the president’s speeches. I get the unsettling feeling that the man inhabits another world in which things are the exact opposite of how they seem to me. Of course, I may be the one whose perspective is askew. Unlike Bush, I cannot claim that the Almighty has licensed my position. Yet I fear that time will tell in favor of my view of the matter—a view shared, of course, by most people on the planet, indeed, by nearly everybody who has not been bribed, intimidated, or blinded by partisan loyalty to the Bush administration. For now, this difference of views might seem to be nothing more than that—just one man’s opinion jousting with another’s—but reality has a way of passing definite judgment, and I will not be surprised if Bush’s pronouncements ultimately come to be seen as having no more substance than a bad dream.
[i][b]Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and editor of its scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He is also the author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government and the editor of Arms, Politics and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. For further articles and studies, see the War on Terrorism and OnPower.org[/b] - [/i]. http://www.independent.org/ti...
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| THAT AUDACIOUS RICHARD CLARKE ... |
| 03.31.04 (8:22 am) [edit] |
[b]That Audacious Richard Clarke[/b]
Evoking those steamy fear-filled days of August 1814, Washington is again hot, bothered, and praying for rain. This time, it is not a British army running the White House administration out of town. Instead, it is the compelling, courageous, and stubborn revelations of longtime administration terrorism guru Richard Clarke.
His book,[i] Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror[/i], was submitted to the administration for review over six months ago. It sets out how the Bush administration came to office obsessed with Saddam Hussein, put al Qaeda on the back burner, and, after 9/11, used that event to implement a long held plan to go into Baghdad. That the administration approved Clarke's book for release may have been a White House oversight, or even a tactical miscalculation.
But it is not only the book itself, but Clarke's [i]temperate, calm, and knowledgeable public presentation of the facts that has frightened the White House to its very core[/i]. http://www.cbsnews.com/storie...
The Bush-Cheney campaign is riding a single horse to November: their approach to war on terror. More and more, it seems the White House takes its war on terror about as seriously as it takes its war on steroids.
We might have known this earlier. In early 2000, Condoleeza Rice explained the Bush approach to security in[i] Foreign Affairs [/i]magazine. In an article containing almost 7,000 words on national security, she [i]mentions terrorism only five times[/i]: http://www.foreignpolicy2000.... four in terms of rogue states like Iraq, and one referring to Chechnya. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, having repeatedly attacked U.S. military and diplomatic facilities and killed Americans in the 1990s, and against whom President Clinton had retaliated militarily, warranted not a single mention by the future national security advisor.
Bush himself has repeatedly confirmed Clarke's facts. The Bush-Cheney ticket has proven to be willfully blind to how terrorism works, and, consequently, how it can be reduced or eliminated. It is a strange cold fact that human and physical resources were prematurely and carelessly shifted from the effort to root out al Qaeda in Afghanistan to fuel the long-favored neoconservative goal of rooting out Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The President and Vice President do not deny that Saddam Hussein's rule was always a bigger thorn in their side than the decentralized and difficult-to-target Al Qaeda. This is public knowledge, contained in late 1990s publications of future Bush political appointees, and in Bush-friendly books like Bob Woodward's "[i]Bush at War[/i]" and David Frum's "[i]The Right Man[/i]."
At one time, Saddam Hussein, like current dictators in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, served a useful purpose. The future of Iraq might have evolved, under its own power through domestic reformers, in the pattern of post-Suharto Indonesia. Suharto, a former ally, was dictator for thirty years, was accused of genocide and murder of his own citizens, and was recently awarded the title of "most corrupt leader in modern history," beating out Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko. A lot like Saddam Hussein, without the WMDs. Which is to say, a lot like Saddam Hussein.
Our current Deputy Secretary of Defense and lead soprano in the "topple Saddam" choir, Paul Wolfowitz, knows the Suharto story better than anyone. As U.S. ambassador to Indonesia under Reagan, he was a strong advocate for the US-Indonesia alliance. Over a decade later, in May 1997, Wolfowitz still sung Suharto's praises to Congress, noting that "progress [on human rights] has to be credited to the strong and remarkable leadership of President Suharto." In two years, the reformers had taken back Indonesia in a conflicted, but democratic, process.
It's too bad that Wolfowitz couldn't recognize and grant the same possibilities for Iraq under Hussein. But then again, perhaps he saw that possibility of change from within all too clearly, hence the urgency of a new U.S. friendly puppet government in Baghdad.
Clarke accurately describes the Cold Warriors in the Bush administration with "It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier." I and many others observed the same thing, at a lower level within the Pentagon.
The White House faces a grave and growing danger. Its attack machine is activated against Clarke, but, preferring character assassination over basic truth, it will be hard to sustain. Clarke's public stance of honor and credibility has real staying power, and it has already inspired and heartened both new witnesses and the mainstream media to seek and reveal the truth.
This truth is damaging to that single horse the administration is riding in this election race. The economy, the budget, the debt, veteran's benefits, military readiness, Medicare and social security crises, education, immigration – all are issues where the administration has sorely disappointed conservatives like me, as well as liberals and independents, in every state. If the war on terror horse stumbles, the administration falls.
In 1814, grace prevailed in the form of a rare and unpredicted tornado that arrived while the city burned on the afternoon of August 25th.
"[i]The tornado tore through the center of Washington and directly into the British occupation ... The collapsing buildings and flying debris killed several British soldiers. Many of the soldiers did not have time to take cover from the winds and they laid face down in the streets. One account describes how a British officer on horseback did not dismount and the winds slammed both horse and rider violently to the ground[/i]."
The rains that followed put out the fires, and much was saved.
The audacious Mr. Clarke is for all Americans a modern sign of grace, of the power of truth over deception, and of courage over cowardice. May the strong winds blow and the rain come down in Washington, and again save our Republic.
- [i][b]Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski can be reached at karen@militaryweek.com[/b][/i]. - http://militaryweek.com/witho...
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| EVER NOTICE HOW NEO-CONS WANT ENDLESS WARS? IN IRAQ, SYRIA, IRAN, CHINA, ETC.? BUT THEY STAY HOME! |
| 03.31.04 (8:09 am) [edit] |
[b]EVER NOTICE THAT IT IS THE MAD-DOG NEO-CONS WHO SEE EVERYONE ELSE AS AN ENEMY?
EVER NOTICE THAT IT IS THE NEO-CON ARM-CHAIR CHICKEN-HAWKS WHO LUST FOR WAR FROM THE COMFORT OF THEIR EASY CHAIRS?
EVER NOTICE THAT IT IS THE NEO-CONS WHO LUST FOR ENDLESS WARS WITH AFGHANISTAN (A FIASCO), IRAQ (A GUERRILLA QUAGMIRE), SYRIA, IRAN, CHINA? YOU NAME IT, THEY WANT TO FIGHT IT!
BUT, EVER NOTICE THAT THESE NEO-CON CRAZIES NEVER GO FIGHT THEMSELVES? THEY AVOID WAR FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR LOVED-ONES! IT IS YOU AND I WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THEIR CANNON-FODDER SO THEY CAN GET RICH QUICK![/b]
[u][b]New World Disorder[/b][/u]
"It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things." This warning is from Niccolo Machiavelli, yet it has never had sharper resonance.
More than a decade ago, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush explicitly sought to initiate, as he put it to Congress, a "new world order." He made that momentous declaration on Sept. 11, 1990. Eleven years later, the suddenly mystical date of 9/11 motivated his son to finish what the father began. A year ago last week, Bush the younger launched a war against the man who tried to kill his dad, initiating the opposite of order.
The situation hardly needs rehearsing. In Iraq, many thousands are dead, including 564 Americans. Civil war threatens. Afghanistan, meanwhile, is choked by drug-running warlords. Islamic jihadists have been empowered. The nuclear profiteering of Pakistan has been exposed but not necessarily stopped. Al Qaeda's elusiveness has reinforced its mythic malevolence. The Atlantic Alliance is in ruins. The United States has never been more isolated. A pattern of deception has destroyed its credibility abroad and at home. Disorder spreads from Washington to Israel to Haiti to Spain. Whether the concern is subduing resistance fighters far away or making Americans feel safer, the Pentagon's unprecedented military dominance—the costs of which stifle the U.S. economy—is shown to be essentially impotent.
In America, the new order of things is defined mainly by the sour taste of moral hangover, how the emotional intensity of the 9/11 trauma—anguished but pure—dissolved into a feeling of being trapped in a cage of our own making. As the carnage in Madrid makes clear, the threats in the world are real and dangerous to handle, but one U.S. initiative after another has escalated rather than diffused such threats. Instead of replacing chaos with new order, our nation's responses inflict new wounds that increase the chaos. We strike at those whom we perceive as aiming to do us harm but without actually defending ourselves. And most unsettling of all, in our attempt to get the bad people to stop threatening us, we have begun to imitate them.
The most important revelation of the Iraq war has been of the Bush administration's blatant contempt for fact. Whether defined as "lying" or not, the clear manipulation of intelligence ahead of last year's invasion has been completely exposed. The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" has been transformed. Where once it evoked the grave danger of a repeat of the 9/11 trauma, now it evokes an apparently calculated American fear. The government laid out explicit evidence defining a threat that required the launching of preventive war, and the U.S. media trumpeted that evidence without hesitation. The result, since there were no weapons of mass destruction, as the government and a pliant press had ample reason to know, was an institutionalized deceit maintained to this day. At the United Nations, the United States misled the world. In speech after speech, President Bush misled Congress and the nation. And note that the word "misled" means both to have falsified and to have failed in leadership. To mislead, as the tautological George Bush might put it, is to mislead.
The repetition of falsehoods tied to the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq has eroded the American capacity, if not to tell the difference between what is true and what is a lie, then to think the difference matters much. The administration distorted fact ahead of the invasion, when the American people could not refute what had not happened yet. And the administration distorts fact now, when the American people do not remember clearly what we were told a year ago. That Bush retains the confidence of a sizable proportion of the electorate suggests that Americans don't particularly worry anymore about truth as a guiding principle of their government.
In that lies the irony. The Bush dynasty has in fact initiated a new order of things. The United States of America has become its own opposite, a nation of triumphant freedom that claims the right to restrain the freedom of others; a nation of a structured balance of power that destroys the balance of power abroad; a nation of creative enterprise that exports a smothering banality; and above all, a nation of forcefully direct expression that disrespects the truth. Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq, the main outcome of the war for the United States is clear. We have defeated ourselves.
[b][i]James Carroll is a best-selling author, most recently of An American Requiem, which won a National Book Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and many other publications, and he writes a weekly column for The Boston Globe.[/i][/b] - http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
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| U.S. OCCUPATION BARS U.N. FROM OVERSEEING ELECTIONS! |
| 03.31.04 (6:19 am) [edit] |
[b]Iraqi Council Bars UN from Overseeing Elections [/b]
[i]Al-Hayat [/i]reports that the Interim Governing Council (IGC) is rejecting any role for the United Nations in overseeing Iraqi elections save that of "help and consultation). Iraqi National Congress spokesman Intifadh Qanbar said that the UN delegation was told by the IGC that elections would have to be a purely Iraqi affair, that Iraqis would have to take the leading role in them, and that there would be no UN role in administering elections. He also said that no interference would be brooked from Iraq's neighbors.
Qanbar and the INC sharply criticized UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for having opposed the first Gulf War (which aimed at forcing Saddam back out of Kuwait), and blamed him for meeting with Saddam in 1998. He also criticized Brahimi's statement that Iraq might face a civil war. Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a cleric now in the last days of his temporary presidency of the IGC, had also complained two days ago in Kuwait that Brahimi's report on Iraq had lacked balance.
Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has rejected charges that he had misused American funds, saying that such charges derived from the CIA and that they were false.
Chalabi was supported by the CIA and the State Department around 1992 to 1996 or so, when they dropped him because he could not give an accounting of the millions of dollars they had given him to overthrow Saddam. He was then picked up by the Pentagon instead, and especially once the Bush administration came to power.
The attempt by the INC to marginalize Brahimi and the United Nations reflects Chalabi's fear that he would not be able to win a fair, UN-supervised election. One fears he plans on vote-buying and other corrupt acts to be elected or appointed to a high Iraqi governing post, possibly as Prime Minister. Although the al-Hayat story says that the IGC wants to limit the UN role, if one looks carefully this move seems to be coming mainly from Chalabi and his people.
[i][b]By Juan Cole[/b][/i], http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?...
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| THE DEFECTOR |
| 03.31.04 (5:49 am) [edit] |
[b]The Defector [/b]
Both the ferocity of the White House attacks and his lionization by the liberal press testify: Richard Clarke has drawn blood.
The former counter-terrorism chief seeks to dynamite the central pillar of the Bush presidency: that the president has bravely and brilliantly led us in the War on Terror and that the war on Iraq made us more secure.
According to Clarke, the White House, especially Condi Rice, was diffident if not indolent in coping with the threat of Al Qaeda prior to 9-11. And the obsession with Iraq blinded the White House to the real threat.
As Clarke tells it, at a meeting of sub-Cabinet officers he called in April 2001 to discuss Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Paul Wolfowitz dismissed the "little terrorist" in Afghanistan and sought to refocus the meeting on Iraq.
On 9-11 itself, Clarke was stunned to hear Donald Rumsfeld call for bombing Iraq -- not Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was -- because there were better "targets" in Iraq, though Baghdad had had nothing to do with the atrocities.
On Sept. 12, Clarke was enraged as he watched Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz try to steer the president's wrath away from Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, toward Iraq and Saddam. Clarke contends the eventual invasion of Iraq was a disaster for the war on terror.
First, it diverted vital resources, such as U.S. Special Forces, away from the hunt for Osama when we might have caught and killed him. In the two years since bin Laden escaped, the cancer cells he created have multiplied. Now we face Al Qaeda clones all over the world.
Second, the Iraqi invasion played into bin Laden's hand. He had long predicted the United States would invade an oil-rich Islamic nation to seize its resources, and in the eyes of the Arab and Islamic world, we have done exactly that.
Third, the pandemic hatred of the United States, as seen in the recent Pew polls, is, Clarke believes, a direct consequence of our invasion.
Fourth, we ignited a war of national resistance in Iraq that has given the Islamic young a cause in which to believe and for which to fight -- i.e., to expel imperialist-infidel America from Baghdad, which for 500 years was the seat of the caliphate.
Bush's grand strategy is the Bush Doctrine. By it, the United States asserts a right to launch pre-emptive strikes and preventive wars on rogue nations to deny them weapons of mass destruction. After 9-11, said Bush, we cannot risk a rogue nation giving a biological or nuclear weapon to Al Qaeda. To prevent it, we take down rogue regimes and disarm them, before they strike.
Under the Bush Doctrine we invaded Iraq. Yet, we now know that Saddam had no links to 9-11, no ties to Al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no plans to attack us.
The White House has fallen back on the argument that Saddam and his Baathist regime constituted a terrorist state with a horrific record on human rights that would forever be a threat if ever it did acquire the weapons for which it still had plans, if not programs.
Moreover, our long-term policy for ending the terrorist threat is to use our resources to advance a "world democratic revolution." When all Islamic states are free and democratic, the threat of terror will pass away.
The test case is Iraq, but only the early returns are in.
What do they show? Clearly, the Iraqi people are glad to be rid of the tyrant and his regime. And while no roses were strewn in the path of U.S. troops, the Iraqis are not all hostile. The Libyans have come around, and the Iranians want to talk. Progress is being made.
Yet, the price in U.S. and Iraqi dead and wounded is high, and the cost in resources, $150 billion and counting, is prohibitive of any new war on Iran or North Korea, whose arsenals are far more advanced. Much of our Army is tied down. Our alliances are strained. The cancer of terrorism appears to have metastasized. The Islamic world appears to be against us.
By our old standards -- America does not attack nations that do not attack us -- Iraq was not a war of necessity, but a war of choice. Was it wise? Bush says yes, Clarke no.
The verdict of history is not yet in. But if Iraq collapses in chaos or civil war to become a spawning ground of Islamic terror, Bush will be a failed president and America will need a new foreign policy.
However, by then, the architects of the Iraq war could still be in power. We are headed for interesting times, made more interesting by Richard Clarke.
[i][b]By Patrick J. Buchanan[/b][/i], http://antiwar.com/pat/?artic...
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| US SHOULD NOT STOP SUPPORTING ISRAEL-- BUT ISRAEL CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO DESTROY US |
| 03.30.04 (6:29 pm) [edit] |
[b]THE US SHOULD NOT STOP SUPPORTING ISRAEL.
HOWEVER THE US SHOULD ENDORSE ANY CRIME ISRAEL CHOOSES TO COMMIT.
NOR SHOULD ISRAEL BE ALLOWED TO DESTROY THE US.
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE NOT ISRAEL'S CANNON-FODDER TO BE USED TO SYSTEMATICALLY MASSACRE THE PALESTINIAN AND ARAB PEOPLES: THE INSANE NEO-CON'S FANTASY OF THEIR 21st CENTURY HOLOCAUST.[/b]
[u][b]Israel's isolation ... and ours[/b][/u]
"Israel has a right to defend itself," said President Bush. And against whom was Israel defending itself at dawn on Monday?
A half-blind and deaf paraplegic being wheeled out of a mosque after prayers, Sheik Ahmed Yassin was struck by missiles that blew him to pieces. In carrying out the assassination of the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Ariel Sharon used a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship. Thus, in Islamic eyes, we are passive accomplices in the killing.
Instantly, protests erupted in Mosul and Basra. Ayatollah al-Sistani, the Shiite leader on whom we depend for a peaceful transfer of power in Iraq, was enraged: "[T]his morning, the occupying Zionist entity committed an ugly crime against the Palestinian people by killing one of their heroes, scholar-martyr Ahmed Yassin."
Sharon's defenders say the sheik had sanctioned terror attacks on innocent Israelis. But why did Israel not then seize him, expose his complicity in murder, and put him in prison, as Israel had before? Why convert this crippled old sheik into a martyr-saint? Why enhance the prestige of Hamas?
Has the killing made Israel more secure? If so, why were Israeli buses deserted all week? Has it made us more secure? Why then were the travel advisories issued to Americans in the Middle East? Why are U.S. embassies shutting down? How does inflaming the Islamic world against us advance the president's goal of persuading the world that Islam is not America's enemy?
President Bush must begin to realize that his blind solidarity with Sharon, who has shown himself contemptuous of America's interests in the larger region, is among the greatest crosses we have to bear in the war on terror.
A year after the fall of Baghdad, Bush's men are boasting of his triumphs – the overthrow of the Taliban, the liberation of Iraq, not one act of terror on U.S. soil in two years. But consider the war from bin Laden's vantage point.
The murderous strike of 9-11 electrified America-haters, but produced blowback and near total disaster for bin Laden. In weeks, Bush had united a great coalition, smashed the Taliban and almost finished Osama himself at Tora Bora. Then came Iraq.
Here Bush played straight into bin Laden's hand. By attacking a prostrate Arab nation that played no role in 9-11, we united Arab and Islamic peoples in hatred of America. We shattered alliances and ignited a guerrilla war.
According to a Pew poll, U.S. prestige in the Muslim world has never been lower. Bush is widely detested. In Pakistan, 65 percent of the people hold Osama in high regard, while 8 percent are positive on Bush. We are losing the hearts and minds of the Islamic young, creating a spawning pool out of which future terrorists will emerge.
Now, an attack in Madrid has left 200 dead and blown a hole in our coalition. A socialist has come to power who intends to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. Poland, too, has begun to waver
As Bush wins battles, Osama advances toward his strategic goals: Demonization of America as the enemy of Islam, isolation of America as an imperialist aggressor against Arab nations and the enabler of Sharon, and unification of Islam's young behind bin Laden's ultimate war aim: the expulsion of America from all Muslim lands.
The legendary Col. John Boyd described strategy as appending to oneself as many centers of power as possible, while isolating one's enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
Bush I did this brilliantly in the Gulf War, isolating Saddam. Bush II did it brilliantly in the Afghan war, isolating the Taliban. Now Bush has fallen into the trap his father avoided. He is letting Ariel Sharon create the perception that America's war and Israel's war are one and the same.
In the Middle East, Sharon has no friends. He does not care whom he alienates. But we are a world power with friend, allies and interests in 22 Arab and 57 Muslim countries.
To protect our interests, to win our war on al-Qaida, it is imperative that we not let ourselves become as isolated as Israel is today.
Between America and Israel, there are thus common interests and a collision of interests. Sharon does not want us to confine our war on terror to those who attacked us on 9-11. He wants us to expand our list of enemies to include his list of enemies: Arafat, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia. He wants us to escalate "the firemen's war" into an American war on Israel's enemies, so, together, we can establish joint hegemony in the Middle East.
If Sharon and his acolytes in the Bush administration succeed in conflating Sharon's war with America's war, we could lose our war. Why cannot the president see what is going on?
[i][b]By Patrick J. Buchanan[/b][/i], http://www.wnd.com/news/artic...
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| NEW POLL REVEALS IRAQIS DON'T WANT DUBYA'S IMPOSED "DEMOCRACY" |
| 03.30.04 (6:22 pm) [edit] |
[b]One Year Later: Warning Signs in Iraq[/b]
The U.S. mission in Iraq has now entered its second year, and it remains as controversial as ever. Bush Administration supporters contend that, despite the periodic terrorist bombings and insurgent attacks on American forces, major progress is being made toward creating a stable, united, democratic Iraq. Critics counter that not only does the security environment remain extremely dangerous, but there are increasingly worrisome political and ideological trends in Iraqi society.
A recent nationwide poll of Iraqis conducted by [i]ABC News[/i] and other organizations gives some comfort to the administration and its allies. A majority of Iraqis feel that their lives are somewhat better than they were a year ago, and the coalition gets reasonably high marks for restoring schools and other portions of Iraq's infrastructure. Nevertheless, the poll reveals even more alarming information about Iraqi attitudes toward the occupation and the country's political future.
Consider the level of hostility regarding the presence of coalition forces. The Kurds strongly support the troop presence, 82 percent to 12 percent. But the Arabs (both Sunni and Shiite) take a very different view. Only 30 percent support the occupation; 60 percent oppose it. Since Arabs make up approximately 80 percent of Iraq's population, that scope of opposition is ample cause for concern. Clearly, opposition to the U.S.-led mission is far more widespread than just disgruntled supporters of Saddam Hussein.
More Iraqis believe that the war humiliated Iraq than believe that it liberated the country. Again, the Kurd-Arab split is pronounced and troubling. Only 11 percent of Kurds believe the war was a humiliation; 48 percent of Arabs regard it in that manner. Just 33 percent of Arabs (and a mere 21 percent of Sunni Arabs) see the war as an act of liberation.
Proponents of the Iraq mission can take some comfort that 78 percent of all respondents, and even 74 percent of Arabs, believe that armed attacks on coalition forces constitute unacceptable behavior. Yet it is sobering that 21 percent of Arab respondents think that such attacks are appropriate. That figure can fairly be interpreted as the hard core supporters of the insurgency. Since there are nearly 16 million Arab teenagers and adults in Iraq, that translates to some 3.3 million proponents of violent resistance to the occupation. It is additional evidence that the insurgency is not confined to "Saddam diehards," as the administration argued for so long.
Perhaps the most sobering result of the poll is the tepid support for democracy in Iraq. When asked what kind of government Iraq should have a year from now, only 28 percent advocate a democratic system, while 47 percent favor "a single strong Iraqi leader" and 10 percent want a government of religious leaders. When asked what kind of government the country should have in 5 years, the results are just modestly better: 42 percent favor democracy, 35 percent a single strong leader, and 10 percent a government of religious figures.
That means that the United States and its coalition partners are trying to build democracy in a country where not even a bare majority of the population endorses such a system. For democracy to have a good chance to take root and thrive, the support level probably needs to be in the area of 70 to 75 percent. That is especially true because, historically in most non-Western societies, non-democratic forces tend to be more motivated, better organized, and, above all, more ruthless than their democratic adversaries. It is hardly encouraging for the prospects of a democratic Iraq that the enemies of democracy there actually outnumber the proponents.
The poll results raise serious doubts about whether the security environment will improve anytime soon. Except in the Kurdish north, the war is deemed a humiliating occupation rather than a liberation. Likewise, except in Kurdish territory, there appears to be widespread opposition to the occupation, and an alarmingly large contingent of hard-core opponents willing to countenance violence against coalition forces.
The poll results lead to even stronger doubts about Iraq's future. The notion that Iraq will become a stable, united democracy once the occupation ends looks more like a pipe dream than a reasonable expectation. Unless the United States plans to occupy and control Iraq for a very long time, it is likely that the country will revert to authoritarian rule. Given the stark differences in opinion on an assortment of issues between Kurds and Arabs, there is also more than a small chance that the country will fragment along those ethnic lines. Those are not happy prospects, but they come as little surprise to realist policy experts who warned before the war began that the United States was embarking on a thankless and frustrating mission.
. [i][b]Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy[/b][/i]. - http://www.cato.org/dailys/03...
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| REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM BIZARRO WORLD: OKAY TO ABORT HUMAN BEINGS IF DUBYA WANTS TO!!!!! HO HO HO!!!!! |
| 03.30.04 (2:51 pm) [edit] |
[b][u]REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM BIZARRO WORLD[/u]:
OKAY TO ABORT LIFE IF DUBYA WANTS TO ...
OKAY TO ABORT LIFE IN THE SERVICE OF THE NEO-CON'S EMPIRE ...
ONCE YOU'RE OUT-OF-THE-WOMB, IT'S TIME TO BE A SLAVE TO THE NEO-CON'S WORLD OF WARFARE AND SERFDOM ...
WHAT IS THE POINT OF LIFE IF IT IS JUST TO BE USED AS DUBYA'S CANNON-FODDER?[/b]
[u][b]Mom Says President 'Personally Responsible' For Son's Death[/b][/u]
The mother of an Illinois National Guard pilot killed in Iraq says she holds President George W. Bush "personally responsible" for the death of her son.
Rosemarie Dietz Slavenas blamed Bush and said her son died because the United States lacks what she calls a "civilized foreign policy."
Slavenas held a private civilian ceremony for her son, Lt. Brian Slavenas (pictured, right), NBC5's Charlie Wojciechowski reported on Thursday. After the ceremony, a bugler played taps and Slavenas' mother came out of the church to speak to the media.
"My son was not a soldier," Slavenas said. "He was my son. George [W.] Bush killed my son. I request in Brian's name a stop to the killing. No more preemptive wars."
Hundreds of people attended the funeral Thursday for 1st Lt. Brian Slavenas. He was remembered by several speakers at Faith United Methodist Church in Genoa as a wonderful man and a good friend.
Just a few hours later, and just blocks away, another service was held for Slavenas), Wojciechowski reported. At the Genoa Veteran's Home, the 30-year-old pilot was remembered as a brave soldier by his father and brothers, who served in the military.
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| OVERRATED WOLFOWITZ'S OVERCONFIDENCE! |
| 03.30.04 (1:04 pm) [edit] |
[b]Wolfowitz's Overconfidence
[u]A theory about why he was wrong about Iraq[/u].[/b]
According to the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz habitually "belittled" the threat posed by al-Qaida prior to Sept. 11. In one much-quoted passage from Clarke's new book, [i]Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror,[/i] Wolfowitz complains at a White House meeting, "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because [the] FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."
Why did Wolfowitz trust his own judgment over the findings of the FBI and CIA? Why, similarly, did Wolfowitz blandly assume that post-Saddam Iraq would quickly get back on its feet? [i]Slate [/i]editor Jacob Weiberg last fall offered a plausible explanation for the overconfidence of the Pentagon hawks (including Wolfowitz):
[i]The assumption that events will conform to a preconceived model is a failing to which neoconservatives are notably vulnerable. Part of this may be Marxist residue that never quite washed off. The intellectual descendants of Trotskyists, the neocons find the idea of revolution from above, in which intellectuals and ideas play the crucial role, instinctively appealing. Many neocons also tend to buy into overly deterministic, Hegelian theories of history (see Fukuyama, Frank). In this sense, the assumption that Iraq was destined to become a liberal democracy with just a nudge from the United States is an error akin to Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick's Hannah Arendt-inspired view that Communist totalitarian societies could never reform from within[/i].
But James Mann's absorbing new book, [i]Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet [/i]furnishes an alternative, Wolfowitz-specific explanation. Mann doesn't present it this way, but here's [i]Chatterbox's [/i]construct: Wolfowitz was corrupted by early success. Twenty-odd years ago, Wolfowitz took two very lonely positions that proved to be spectacularly right. As a consequence, he developed an unshakable belief that once he's thought through a problem (which, according to Mann, Wolfowitz does very slowly) he should ignore the cavils of lesser minds. Time will prove that he's right.
The first lonely position was Wolfowitz's early belief that U.S. policymakers should worry about Iraqi expansionism. Wolfowitz formulated this position in 1979, when he was working as deputy assistant secretary of defense for regional programs in the Carter administration. (Wolfowitz's work for a Democratic presidential administration, and before that, the pro-détente Ford administration, would initially cause problems when he sought a job with the hard-line Reagan administration, whose hawkish views were more in tune with Wolfowitz's own.) Defense Secretary Harold Brown was horrified by Wolfowitz's idea, which was included in a study called[i] Capabilities for Limited Contingencies in the Persian Gulf[/i]. A quarter-century later, however, Wolfowitz's analysis looks eerily prescient:
[i]Iraq has become militarily pre-eminent in the Persian Gulf, a worrisome development. ... Iraq may in the future use her military forces against such states as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia (as in the 1961 Kuwait crisis that was resolved by timely British intervention with force). ... [W]e must not only be able to defend the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and ourselves against an Iraqi invasion or show of force, we should also make manifest our capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq's power—and this may require an increased visibility for U.S. power[/i].
In 1990, Dennis Ross, who wrote this passage at Wolfowitz's direction, was traveling with Secretary of State James Baker when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. To Ross' amazement, an Army general briefing Baker on the matter used an updated version of the report that he and Wolfowitz had put out 11 years earlier.
Wolfowitz's second lonely position was taken in 1982, when he was heading the policy planning staff at Ronald Reagan's State Department. It was a challenge to the widespread belief that China's strategic significance as an ally against the Soviet Union rendered it untouchable on human rights and Taiwan. In fact, Wolfowitz argued, China had a weak army and would be of no great use to the United States in a war against the Soviets; perhaps it was time to regard China more as an embryonic great-power rival. Mann writes:
[i]Here, once again, Wolfowitz was taking American foreign policy several steps beyond the usual cold war thinking of the era. When he studied the Persian Gulf in the late 1970s, Wolfowitz had started out with the predicatable cold war anxieties about a Soviet drive toward the oil fields of the Middle East, but he then had gone on to focus on a different possibility, the prospect that Iraq might try to dominate the oil fields by invading its neighbors. So too with Wolfowitz's China policy. ... In both instances, Iraq and China, Wolfowitz was beginning to think about foreign policy issues that were to arise a decade later, after the Soviet collapse[/i].
To Mann, Wolfowitz's early ideas about Iraq and China contributed to Wolfowitz's eventual advocacy of unilateral American power around the world. But [i]Chatterbox[/i] thinks they may also have given Wolfowitz too much confidence in his ability to render risky judgments. Wolfowitz was not yet 40 when he staked out these positions. Within the foreign policy establishment, that made him a baby. Now he's a "wise man" of 60, drawing on the lessons of his youth to address new foreign policy challenges. And the main lesson is: [i]The Wolf Man is Never Wrong[/i]. [Which is why overrated Wolfowitz-the-Liar should be relegated to the dustbin of history along with his criminal activities.]
[i]Chatterbox[/i] [i]is[/i] wrong, on occasion, and promises to discard this theory if he encounters a better one. - http://slate.msn.com/id/20979...
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| JUST ANOTHER DAY OF DUBYA PISSING ALL OVER THE OVAL OFFICE: BUSH LIES ... OTHERS DIE ... |
| 03.30.04 (8:13 am) [edit] |
[b]Striking Where Bush Is Weakest[/b]
If the Bush administration had gone after Osama bin Laden with anything akin to the energy it is expending to discredit Richard Clarke, the story of America's response to terrorism might have been dramatically different. That, of course, is the point that Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, makes when he says that Bush and his aides "ignored" the terrorist threats before September 11, 2001, and, even more significantly, when he suggests that the administration diverted attention from the real war on terrorism with an unnecessary war on Iraq.
Those are powerful charges, and Clarke has made them convincingly in his testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, in various media appearances over the past few days, and in his book, Against All Enemies. Predictably, the White House spin machine has been churning out increasingly-visceral attacks on Clarke, a self-described Republican who still praises Bush's father as a masterful leader. Amid the tit-for-tat that has developed, however, Clarke has already prevailed. No matter what the Bush administration throws at the man who served in four White Houses, Clarke has already trumped his attackers.
Clarke did so by opening his testimony before the commission on Wednesday not with a bold pronouncement about the failings of the administration, but with an apology: "I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurrence. I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11," he began. "To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness."
In that statement, Clarke proved to be a more masterful political strategist -- and, be clear, a duel between a renegade aide and a president in an election year is about politics -- than White House electoral strategist Karl Rove. Why? Because Clarke recognized the ultimate vulnerability of the Bush administration: An absolute inability on the part of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, to admit when they have failed, when they have been proven wrong and when they have been caught in lies.
The administration that began by neglecting George Bush's popular-vote deficit in the 2000 and claiming a mandate for radical change has been consistent in nothing so much as its refusal to accept unpleasant realities. Bush and his aides always refuse to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. As such, they are always pointing fingers of blame at others. September 11? Blame evil or Bill Clinton -- pretty much the same thing in the Bush administration's collective mind. False information about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction program gets into the State of the Union Address? Blame the CIA or someone, anyone, in Europe. Economic downturn? Blame Democrats in Congress for not backing bigger tax cuts for corporations and more-of-the-same trade policies. False figures on the cost of Medicare reform go to Congress? Blame, well, er, gee, gay marriage?
No matter what goes wrong, the ironclad rule of the Bush administration has been to find someone outside the administration -- preferably a Democrat or a foreigner -- to blame. And if there is no way to blame someone else, the policy has been to keep expressing an Orwellian faith in the prospect that the failure will become a success, or that the lie will be made true -- witness Cheney's refusal to back away from his pre-war "they'll greet us with flowers" fantasy about the Iraqi response to a U.S.-led invasion.
Supposedly, this refusal to bend in the face of reality is smart politics. But a constant pattern of avoiding responsibility tends, eventually, to catch up even with the smartest politicians. Richard Nixon never recognized that fact and it destroyed his presidency. Bill Clinton, for all of his failings, did recognize it and, with his televised apology for mishandling of the Monica Lewinsky mess, thwarted Republican attempts to destroy his presidency.
Richard Clarke, who lived inside the belly of the beast that is the Bush administration, recognizes its many vulnerabilities. And, by reminding the American people that apologies are owed for failings before 9/11 and since, he struck Bush and his aides where they are weakest.
[b]By John Nichols, The OnLine Beat[/b], http://www.thenation.com/theb...
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| HOW MANY AMERICANS SHOULD DIE FOR ISRAEL? HOW ABOUT SENDING WAR-LOVING REDUCTIO-ABSURDs TO WAR??? |
| 03.30.04 (8:10 am) [edit] |
[b]Bush Adviser: War Launched to Protect Israel[/b]
IPS uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 -- the 9/11 commission -- in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch U.S. ally in the Middle East.
Zelikow's casting of the attack on Iraq as one launched to protect Israel appears at odds with the public position of President George W. Bush and his administration, which has never overtly drawn the link between its war on the regime of former president Hussein and its concern for Israel's security.
The administration has instead insisted it launched the war to liberate the Iraqi people, destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to protect the United States.
Zelikow made his statements about ”the unstated threat” during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president.
He served on the board between 2001 and 2003.
”Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation.
”And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell,” said Zelikow.
The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state.
The administration, which is surrounded by staunch pro-Israel, neo-conservative hawks, is currently fighting an extensive campaign to ward off accusations that it derailed the ”war on terrorism” it launched after 9/11 by taking a detour to Iraq, which appears to have posed no direct threat to the United States.
Israel is Washington's biggest ally in the Middle East, receiving annual direct aid of three to four billion dollars.
Even though members of the 16-person PFIAB come from outside government, they enjoy the confidence of the president and have access to all information related to foreign intelligence that they need to play their vital advisory role.
Known in intelligence circles as ”Piffy-ab”, the board is supposed to evaluate the nation's intelligence agencies and probe any mistakes they make.
The unpaid appointees on the board require a security clearance known as ”code word” that is higher than top secret.
The national security adviser to former President George H.W. Bush (1989-93) Brent Scowcroft, currently chairs the board in its work overseeing a number of intelligence bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the various military intelligence groups and the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office.
Neither Scowcroft nor Zelikow returned numerous phone calls and email messages from IPS for this story.
Zelikow has long-established ties to the Bush administration.
Before his appointment to PFIAB in October 2001, he was part of the current president's transition team in January 2001.
In that capacity, Zelikow drafted a memo for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on reorganising and restructuring the National Security Council (NSC) and prioritising its work.
Richard A. Clarke, who was counter-terrorism coordinator for Bush's predecessor President Bill Clinton (1993-2001) also worked for Bush senior, and has recently accused the current administration of not heeding his terrorism warnings, said Zelikow was among those he briefed about the urgent threat from al-Qaeda in December 2000.
Rice herself had served in the NSC during the first Bush administration, and subsequently teamed up with Zelikow on a 1995 book about the unification of Germany.
Zelikow had ties with another senior Bush administration official -- Robert Zoellick, the current trade representative. The two wrote three books together, including one in 1998 on the United States and the ”Muslim Middle East”.
Aside from his position at the 9/11 commission, Zelikow is now also director of the Miller Centre of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
His close ties to the administration prompted accusations of a conflict of interest in 2002 from families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, who protested his appointment to the investigative body.
In his university speech, Zelikow, who strongly backed attacking the Iraqi dictator, also explained the threat to Israel by arguing that Baghdad was preparing in 1990-91 to spend huge amounts of ”scarce hard currency” to harness ”communications against electromagnetic pulse”, a side-effect of a nuclear explosion that could sever radio, electronic and electrical communications.
That was ”a perfectly absurd expenditure unless you were going to ride out a nuclear exchange -- they (Iraqi officials) were not preparing to ride out a nuclear exchange with us. Those were preparations to ride out a nuclear exchange with the Israelis”, according to Zelikow.
He also suggested that the danger of biological weapons falling into the hands of the anti-Israeli Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym Hamas, would threaten Israel rather than the United States, and that those weapons could have been developed to the point where they could deter Washington from attacking Hamas.
”Play out those scenarios,” he told his audience, ”and I will tell you, people have thought about that, but they are just not talking very much about it”.
”Don't look at the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but then ask yourself the question, 'gee, is Iraq tied to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the people who are carrying out suicide bombings in Israel'? Easy question to answer; the evidence is abundant.”
To date, the possibility of the United States attacking Iraq to protect Israel has been only timidly raised by some intellectuals and writers, with few public acknowledgements from sources close to the administration.
Analysts who reviewed Zelikow's statements said they are concrete evidence of one factor in the rationale for going to war, which has been hushed up.
”Those of us speaking about it sort of routinely referred to the protection of Israel as a component,” said Phyllis Bennis of the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies. ”But this is a very good piece of evidence of that.”
Others say the administration should be blamed for not making known to the public its true intentions and real motives for invading Iraq.
”They (the administration) made a decision to invade Iraq, and then started to search for a policy to justify it. It was a decision in search of a policy and because of the odd way they went about it, people are trying to read something into it,” said Nathan Brown, professor of political science at George Washington University and an expert on the Middle East.
But he downplayed the Israel link. ”In terms of securing Israel, it doesn't make sense to me because the Israelis are probably more concerned about Iran than they were about Iraq in terms of the long-term strategic threat,” he said.
Still, Brown says Zelikow's words carried weight.
”Certainly his position would allow him to speak with a little bit more expertise about the thinking of the Bush administration, but it doesn't strike me that he is any more authoritative than Wolfowitz, or Rice or Powell or anybody else. All of them were sort of fishing about for justification for a decision that has already been made,” Brown said.
[i][b]By: Emad Mekay[/b][/i], http://www.independent-media....%20Reported
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| AMERICANS ARE NOT SACRIFICIAL LAMBS FOR ISRAEL-- EXCEPT UNDER HERR FUHRER BUSH!!!!! |
| 03.30.04 (8:05 am) [edit] |
[b]Israel's isolation ... and ours[/b]
"Israel has a right to defend itself," said President Bush. And against whom was Israel defending itself at dawn on Monday?
A half-blind and deaf paraplegic being wheeled out of a mosque after prayers, Sheik Ahmed Yassin was struck by missiles that blew him to pieces. In carrying out the assassination of the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Ariel Sharon used a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship. Thus, in Islamic eyes, we are passive accomplices in the killing.
Instantly, protests erupted in Mosul and Basra. Ayatollah al-Sistani, the Shiite leader on whom we depend for a peaceful transfer of power in Iraq, was enraged: "[T]his morning, the occupying Zionist entity committed an ugly crime against the Palestinian people by killing one of their heroes, scholar-martyr Ahmed Yassin."
Sharon's defenders say the sheik had sanctioned terror attacks on innocent Israelis. But why did Israel not then seize him, expose his complicity in murder, and put him in prison, as Israel had before? Why convert this crippled old sheik into a martyr-saint? Why enhance the prestige of Hamas?
Has the killing made Israel more secure? If so, why were Israeli buses deserted all week? Has it made us more secure? Why then were the travel advisories issued to Americans in the Middle East? Why are U.S. embassies shutting down? How does inflaming the Islamic world against us advance the president's goal of persuading the world that Islam is not America's enemy?
President Bush must begin to realize that his blind solidarity with Sharon, who has shown himself contemptuous of America's interests in the larger region, is among the greatest crosses we have to bear in the war on terror.
A year after the fall of Baghdad, Bush's men are boasting of his triumphs – the overthrow of the Taliban, the liberation of Iraq, not one act of terror on U.S. soil in two years. But consider the war from bin Laden's vantage point.
The murderous strike of 9-11 electrified America-haters, but produced blowback and near total disaster for bin Laden. In weeks, Bush had united a great coalition, smashed the Taliban and almost finished Osama himself at Tora Bora. Then came Iraq.
Here Bush played straight into bin Laden's hand. By attacking a prostrate Arab nation that played no role in 9-11, we united Arab and Islamic peoples in hatred of America. We shattered alliances and ignited a guerrilla war.
According to a Pew poll, U.S. prestige in the Muslim world has never been lower. Bush is widely detested. In Pakistan, 65 percent of the people hold Osama in high regard, while 8 percent are positive on Bush. We are losing the hearts and minds of the Islamic young, creating a spawning pool out of which future terrorists will emerge.
Now, an attack in Madrid has left 200 dead and blown a hole in our coalition. A socialist has come to power who intends to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. Poland, too, has begun to waver
As Bush wins battles, Osama advances toward his strategic goals: Demonization of America as the enemy of Islam, isolation of America as an imperialist aggressor against Arab nations and the enabler of Sharon, and unification of Islam's young behind bin Laden's ultimate war aim: the expulsion of America from all Muslim lands.
The legendary Col. John Boyd described strategy as appending to oneself as many centers of power as possible, while isolating one's enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
Bush I did this brilliantly in the Gulf War, isolating Saddam. Bush II did it brilliantly in the Afghan war, isolating the Taliban. Now Bush has fallen into the trap his father avoided. He is letting Ariel Sharon create the perception that America's war and Israel's war are one and the same.
In the Middle East, Sharon has no friends. He does not care whom he alienates. But we are a world power with friend, allies and interests in 22 Arab and 57 Muslim countries.
To protect our interests, to win our war on al-Qaida, it is imperative that we not let ourselves become as isolated as Israel is today.
Between America and Israel, there are thus common interests and a collision of interests. Sharon does not want us to confine our war on terror to those who attacked us on 9-11. He wants us to expand our list of enemies to include his list of enemies: Arafat, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia. He wants us to escalate "the firemen's war" into an American war on Israel's enemies, so, together, we can establish joint hegemony in the Middle East.
If Sharon and his acolytes in the Bush administration succeed in conflating Sharon's war with America's war, we could lose our war. Why cannot the president see what is going on?
[b]By Patrick J. Buchanan[/b], http://www.wnd.com/news/artic...
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| RICHARD CLARKE IS CREDIBLE, BUSH AND RICE ARE NOT!!!!! |
| 03.30.04 (8:02 am) [edit] |
[b]A CREDIBLE CLARKE[/b]
RICHARD CLARKE came across as calm, credible -- and courageous -- in his testimony Wednesday.
The government's former top counterterrorism adviser began with an expression of contrition before the bipartisan commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, directing his comments to relatives of the victims: "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed."
His comparison of the Clinton and Bush administrations' approaches to terrorism was dramatic and damning. The Clinton White House, he said, had "no higher priority" than combating terrorism -- while the Bush White House made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Not surprisingly, several commission members tried to challenge Clarke's motives. John Lehman, a former Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan who now is chair of J.F. Lehman & Co., questioned whether Clarke was "an active partisan trying to shove out a book."
Clarke never flinched. He pointed out that the last time he had to declare party loyalty was 2000 -- when he requested a Republican ballot in the Virgina primary. He noted that he had served in the White House under Reagan and both Bushes. He addressed head-on the notion that he was aligned with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry.
"Let's just lay that one to bed," he testified. "I'm not working for the Kerry campaign." While he co-teaches a class with a longtime friend and professional associate who works for Kerry, Clarke stated unequivocally that he would not work for a Kerry administration.
Clarke forcefully countered suggestions that his criticisms of President Bush contradict his closed-door testimony to the commission as well as his public statements during his White House tenure.
"In the 15 hours of (closed-door) testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq," he said. "And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."
Those words were followed by a long silence, punctuating their power. Clarke has raised unsettling questions about this administration's approach to terrorism, before and after Sept. 11. These questions will not go away.
White House attempts to discredit this public servant have been aggressive to the point of unseemliness. Clarke proved Wednesday that he is fully capable of defending his honor.
[b]San Francisco Chronicle[/b], http://www.independent-media....%20Reported
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| ISRAELI ASSASSINATIONS: DEFENCE OR MURDER? |
| 03.30.04 (5:26 am) [edit] |
[b]Defence or murder?[/b]
[i][b]Does Israel have a legal right to assassinate its enemies - or are such executions war crimes? After two years deliberating, its supreme court is set to decide. Anthony Dworkin reports [/b][/i] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/isr...,2763,1180910,00.html
A half-blind man in a wheelchair is blown apart on a crowded city street. An insecure 16-year-old boy is coaxed into donning an explosive vest. Are the events of last week in Israel a preview of the future of warfare in the age of "asymmetric" conflict? And if so, what rules of law and morality should govern such a conflict, bringing its conduct into some semblance of conformity with recognised humanitarian principles?
When Israel killed the Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin with a missile launched from a helicopter, it provoked a storm of criticism. As one Israeli commentator put it, this was the mother of all targeted assassinations. From Kofi Annan to Jack Straw to the European Union's Javier Solana, international statesmen lined up to denounce the strike as unlawful. Among the western liberal democracies, only the United States stood partly aside from the chorus of condemnation - its muddled response a telling reflection of its own contentious anti-terrorist war.
Israel countered by describing Yassin as the "godfather of the suicide bombers" and giving notice that its campaign of targeted killings would be intensified. Anyone involved in the terrorist war against Israel should know there is no immunity, said the country's public security minister the day after the attack.
The morality and legality of assassinating terrorist suspects is being argued out around the world, and is one of the hottest topics in the field of international law. Such discussions often seem merely theoretical, unlikely to have any impact on the actions of the governments involved. But in the case of Israel, there is one body whose assessment of the question could have real and immediate consequences - the country's own supreme court. Within months, the court is likely to deliver its decision in a case brought by two non-profit groups seeking a declaration that the Israeli government's policy of targeted killing is contrary to international law and should be halted.
"I believe this may be the most important case that the supreme court has yet been asked to consider," says one of the lawyers for the petitioners, Michael Sfard. In line with the significance of the moral, legal and security issues at stake, the court has not rushed to a decision. It has had the case before it for two years. Nevertheless Sfard is confident that the case is now in "the final few metres". The groups he represents and the Israeli government have been asked to submit their final briefs.
The first targeted killing in response to the violence of the current Palestinian intifada took place in November 2000, when the Fatah activist Hussein Abayat was killed in a helicopter attack near Bethlehem. Since then, well over 100 Palestinian militants have been the victims of such attacks (not counting the roughly equal number of bystanders who have also died).
At first the assassinations were directed at people who were said to be "ticking time bombs" - individuals who were actively involved in organising terrorist attacks. But more recently the Israeli military has shifted to a wider range of targets, including figures such as Sheikh Yassin, who are leaders of militant groups rather than actual bomb-makers. The government of Ariel Sharon openly acknowledges these targeted strikes as an essential part of its armed struggle to protect Israel's citizens against terrorism.
According to Sfard, though, the killings are not merely unjustified - they are war crimes, perhaps even crimes against humanity. However much we may castigate terrorists, he argues, we must accept that they are not soldiers but civilians, and must be fought with law enforcement methods. That means they can be killed only when there is no other way to prevent them from carrying out an attack that would endanger human life. Otherwise suspected terrorists should be detained and put on trial before they can lawfully be punished for their actions.
"If a terrorist - or any criminal - is threatening someone's life, then you can do everything necessary to stop him," says Sfard. "But these assassinations target people at home, sleeping in their beds, or when they're simply driving in their cars - they're not endangering anyone at the time when they're killed." To kill under these circumstances is simply execution - but carried out without any trial or proof of guilt.
Not surprisingly, the Israeli government and its supporters present the matter in an entirely different way. They argue that Palestinian militants may not be soldiers, but they are still participants in an armed conflict - determined fighters who aim to kill Israeli civilians and who have engineered a concerted campaign of atrocities.
"These targeted killings are almost always legitimate," argues Yoram Dinstein of Tel Aviv University, one of the country's foremost authorities on the laws of war. Under these, he points out, civilians who join in a conflict by directly participating in hostilities make themselves a lawful target for enemy forces. And that doesn't just mean the people who carry out terrorist missions, but also those who equip and send them. "There is no difference in this respect between the person who blows himself up and the dispatcher," Dinstein argues.
Are the leaders of Hamas criminals or combatants? The terms of the question echo a familiar argument over Guantánamo Bay and America's proclaimed war against al-Qaida. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, though, few would deny that there is an armed conflict going on. The crux of the case is therefore likely to come down to a dispute about what it means for someone to take a direct part in hostilities. In the law, this is a notoriously slippery and contested concept - all the more so in the age of low-intensity terrorist warfare.
Like much of the modern law of war, the guiding principle here can be found in the horrific experience of "total war" in the second world war. The aim was to make sure that it was no longer acceptable to target civilians assisting in the general war effort - which in a modern society could be taken to cover almost any adult. But are those who train and equip suicide bombers taking part in hostilities? What about those such as Sheikh Yassin who approve strategic decisions - for instance by giving the go-ahead for women to be used in suicide missions?
And if these people lose their immunity from attack, is that true only while they are directly engaged in terrorist activity? Or do they forfeit their civilian status indefinitely - so that they can be attacked not just when they're fitting an explosives belt or poring over a list of targets, but when they're sleeping, driving, or leaving a mosque? And what about the inherent problem of targeting suspects who don't admit that they are fighters? These are the issues that Israel's supreme court will have to grapple with.
There is no clear legal precedent, and the court will have to base its decision on a view about how the underlying principles of the law should be applied in this unforeseen kind of war. But there are a couple of factors that it might fall back on. The court might make a distinction between the military and political wings of organisations such as Hamas - so that it might rule that only those involved in the military chain of command could be attacked. And it might specify that targeted killings are never permissible when the suspected terrorists can be apprehended without the risk of serious loss of life.
In such an emotive case, though, the factors shaping its decision may not be entirely legal. Sfard believes the biggest obstacle he and his colleagues face is a political one. "The justices are in a very problematic position," he argues. "I am sure that they don't want to be the first judges from a liberal democratic country to authorise a policy of execution without trial - but if the policy was put to a popular vote, it would certainly win. It may be difficult for the court to take a step that would be seen by much of the public as harming the government's power to defend the nation's security."
In fact, there may be a middle way the court could choose, as Dinstein points out. "I don't believe the court will rule against the government in total," he says. But he adds that the present supreme court is notoriously activist: it won't want simply to give the government free rein. Therefore the judges may set some guidelines on the practice of targeted killing, and at the same time extend a wide degree of deference to the Israeli army as to how it applies these guidelines in practice. For instance, they might say that military commanders are best placed to judge whether a particular killing is militarily necessary to defend the country against the risk of future attacks.
Whenever it comes, the court's decision is likely to be minutely scrutinised and passionately disputed. Judges on the American supreme court have already said that they may look to the Israeli legal system for precedents when they consider the ground rules for the US war on terror. The new international criminal court (though it is unlikely to have jurisdiction over Israeli or American actions for the foreseeable future) may also have to consider the use of force against terrorists at some point. Israel's justices will be the first to enter this legal minefield, but they will certainly not have the final word on the subject.
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| DUBYA, 'THE WAR PRESIDENT' WAGED A WAR OF LIES |
| 03.30.04 (5:24 am) [edit] |
[b]The 'war president' waged a war of lies[/b]
A cascade of embarrassing revelations and accusations are demolishing George W. Bush's slickly packaged, made-for-TV persona as a "war president" and the scourge of Islamic terrorists.
Former president Jimmy Carter accused Bush and British PM Tony Blair of waging a war of "lies" against Iraq.
Poland's president said he was "deceived" by Bush into sending troops to Iraq. Spain's new prime minister denounced Bush's Iraq adventure as a "fiasco" and a "war based on lies."
A group of leading American business executives ran a full-page ad in The New York Times entitled "Have you noticed what's happened to chief executives who lie?" with a picture of an executive being led away in handcuffs. The ad described the Iraq invasion as a "state-sponsored deception (that) already dwarfs the damage done by the worst corporate scandals," citing 566 American dead and a cost of $125 billion US (not to mention 20,000 Iraqi deaths).
The underlying message was stark: the president and his "war cabinet" ought to face criminal charges for lying to the nation and starting an unnecessary war for domestic political reasons.
The fourth bombshell exploded when Richard Clarke, the respected former counter-terrorism chief under presidents Clinton and George Bush Sr., went public with the most damning accusations yet made against the White House. His testimony before a commission investigating the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. asserted the Bush administration damaged U.S. national security, did not do enough to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and obsessed over Iraq while largely ignoring al-Qaida's threat.
Bush, said Clarke, did "a terrible job" in fighting terrorism. Bush's obsession with Iraq left the U.S. "needlessly unprepared" to counter an al-Qaida attack. He also criticized, somewhat less strongly, the Clinton administration's anti-terrorism efforts.
Clarke, a Republican, insisted there were no links between Iraq and either 9/11 or terrorism, and that Iraq had no concealed weapons, a position long maintained by this column. But the feeble, politicized 9/11 commission failed to follow up on this dramatic testimony.
Vice President Dick Cheney was described by Clarke as a "right-wing ideologue." He accused Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq War, of "belittling" the al-Qaida threat.
We learned Defence Secretary Rumsfeld was so preoccupied with anti-missile defence before 9/11 he ignored al-Qaida.
[b]Urgent warnings [/b]
The commission's report stated Rumsfeld "did not recall any particular counter-terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11," though the CIA claimed to have urgently warned both Bush and Rumsfeld of impending attacks.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who refused to testify, was shown to be a dithering, confused amateur and a character assassin who has led the White House attacks on Clarke.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, another self-styled scourge of terrorists, actually proposed cutting spending on counter-terrorism exactly one day before 9/11 - and again, afterward. Unfortunately, the commission failed to ask why the Bush administration had been sending millions in aid to the "terrorist" Taliban until four months before 9/11.
This column has repeatedly asserted the Bush administration was asleep on guard duty on 9/11.
True, there were no warnings hijacked airliners were coming on that specific day. But with the benefit of hindsight, we see the same ineptitude and confusion that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor - a combination of distraction, smugness, self-deception, disbelief and bungling. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan's naval codes were being intercepted and deciphered; her attacking aircraft were spotted by radar. Yet the obvious conclusions somehow were not made. The same applies to Sept. 11, 2001.
In the U.S. Navy, a ship's captain is responsible for all accidents or misfortunes, no matter what the excuse. But no senior member of the Bush administration has accepted responsibility for the death of some 3,000 people on 9/11. No one resigned.
No senior U.S. official acted with the honour and courage of Britain's foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who resigned to protest a war against Iraq he charged was based entirely on falsehoods and disinformation.
Instead, the Bush administration launched a trumped up war against Iraq to mask its own negligence prior to 9/11, and to satisfy America's lust for revenge by attacking a nation innocent of that crime.
Clarke, at least, had the decency to apologize to the families of the 9/11 victims, saying, "the government failed you. And I failed you." We have yet to hear a peep of self-criticism from the blundering but arrogant Bush White House.
Of course not. This administration is running for re-election on its "war record" against Iraq, and its so-called war on terrorism. Bush is playing Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman.
But his claim to be a war president is like the man who murders his family, then begs for mercy because he is an orphan. The Iraq war was not one of self-defence, like World War II, but an unprovoked, illegal aggression engineered by the Bush administration and justified by a torrent of shameful lies. Bush's "war on terrorism" is a police action that was unnecessarily and foolishly militarized.
Richard Clarke, no matter his motives, has done his nation an important, badly needed service.
[i][b]By Eric Margolis -- Contributing Foreign Editor, Toronto Sun[/b][/i], http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand...
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| REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM-- "9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING", LET BUSH & RICE LIE, LIE, LIE, LIE, LIE!!!!! |
| 03.29.04 (5:23 pm) [edit] |
[b]The War on Clarke [/b]
Richard Clarke must be wondering if explaining what the United States did not do in the war on terrorism is more dangerous than actually fighting the terrorists. Clarke, the former terrorism czar for both Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is now being vilified by a host of Bush officials, including Dick Cheney and Condeleeza Rice, as a liar.
The attack on Clarke, which consists of leaks, threats and intimidation tactics, has become the genuine hallmark of the Bush presidency. Previous victims of the Bush smear machine include:
1. Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who challenged the fantasy spun by Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and correctly insisted that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to pacify Iraq.
2. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had provided the Bush administration with a report that Niger had not supplied Iraq with uranium yellowcake essential for building a nuclear device. Not only were his character and competence called into question, but his family's security was jeopardized by a White House leak that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA operative.
3. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, who reported on the Bush administration obsession with Iraq and talk early on of removing Saddam Hussein.
These smear campaigns were mild compared to the vicious assault now underway against Richard Clarke. What is the truth about Richard Clarke?
I was neither a personal friend nor fan of Richard Clarke when I was in government. Richard Clarke, in my experience, was arrogant and intense. He probably still is. (People who know me would suggest that I am the pot calling the kettle black.) However, Richard Clarke also is a competent professional who has served faithfully with Democratic and Republican administrations since the 1970s.
My first contact with Mr. Clarke came during January of 1991 in the operations center at State Department. Clarke, who was the assistant secretary of state for political military affairs, had been denied space in the task force area, and my boss, State Counterterrorism Chief Morris Busby, interceded for Clarke and carved out space for his PM unit. Our two groups shared space in the back rooms of the task force area.
In 1992, Clarke was exiled to the National Security Council over a flap involving Israel. I was told at the time that this move was intended to get rid of him. Those who hoped that banishing Clarke to the National Security Council would lead to his dismissal from government did not understand what a formidable professional he was.
I left government service in 1993 but continued to keep tabs on Clarke's counterterrorism activities through friends and former colleagues in the various policy and intelligence bureaucracies. Some close friends complained (and still do) that Richard was too alarmist and too pushy on some issues.
While some can quibble about his personality, there should be no dispute that Richard Clarke was an aggressive advocate for a tough response to terrorism. Unfortunately, politicians in both parties chose to ignore him on key issues. President Clinton, for example, sat on the Presidential Decision Directive 39, which laid out his administration's plan for fighting terrorism, for 28 months after taking office in January of 1993. Clinton finally signed the document after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Clarke pushed to get it done sooner but ran up against political apathy in the early days of the Clinton administration.
Clarke was just as pushy with the Bush administration. In the first months of the Bush presidency a terrorism issue unrelated to Al Qaeda, which first surfaced during the Clinton administration, came to the front burner. Four U.S. oil workers were being held by individuals tied to Colombian terrorists in the jungles of Ecuador. The U.S. Embassy requested the deployment of U.S. counterterrorism forces (civilian and military) to Ecuador to help find and rescue the workers. Clarke chaired a meeting of the Counter Terrorism Support Group (CSG) at the Old Executive Office Building to consider the matter. He wanted to grant the request and was backed by the Department of State, the CIA and the FBI. The Department of Defense, however, balked. At the end of the day, the Bush administration, against Clarke's recommendation, chose to treat terrorism in Ecuador as criminal matter rather than a military issue. U.S. military forces stayed at home.
Clarke has told the uncomfortable truth in his book, and now finds himself the target of the full fury of angry Bush partisans, who insist that fighting terrorism was Bush's highest priority. The evidence shows otherwise. For starters, Clarke presented a memo to Condi Rice outlining the URGENT (this tag is on the document) threat presented by Al Qaeda in January 2001. While Dr. Rice insists she made terrorism a top priority, one of her first decisions in the early days of 2001 was to downgrade Clarke's position as the National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism. How is that making terrorism an elevated priority? It is not. Richard Clarke also requested in January 2001 that President Bush convene a meeting of principal Bush officials (e.g., the secretary of state, secretary of defense and the attorney general) but this meeting was postponed by Dr. Rice until Sept. 4, 2001. That seven-month gap represents time that, in retrospect, could have been used to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
The Clarke bashers also insist that that no more could have been done before 9/11 than what was done during the first eight months of the Bush presidency. Oh? If that was the case, then why did Bush direct the airlines to lock cockpit doors after 9/11? Why did the Bush administration decide to arm pilots, put more air marshals on planes and federalize the security force doing screening at airports? Why did the Bush administration order attacks on Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan if, in the words of the Bush spinners, "we did all that we could do prior to 9/11"? Why did Bush officials establish emergency financial task forces comprised of intelligence and law enforcement officials to hunt down the trails of terrorist financing if all had been done prior to 9/11? The uncomfortable facts show that Richard Clarke proposed many of these measures in the early days of the Bush presidency. Action was taken only in the aftermath of 9/11.
Here is the bottom line—Richard Clarke was right, and the Bush administration and the people of the United States would have been better off if his warnings in the early days of 2001 had been heeded. Rather than attack Richard Clarke's character, Republican operatives should focus their venom on the terrorists who killed Americans in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon. George W. Bush should set the tone and thank his former terrorism chief, apologize for this week's ugliness, and focus on getting Osama Bin Laden. As one American, I say thank you, Richard Clarke.
[i][b]Larry C. Johnson is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He served with the CIA from 1985 through 1989 and worked in the State Department's office of Counter Terrorism from 1989 through 1993. He also is a registered Republican who contributed financially to the Bush Campaign in 2000[/b][/i]. - http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| 49 RET. MILITARY TOP BRASS TELL DUBYA: STOP WASTING MONEY ON PHONY 'MISSILE DEFENSE'!!!!! |
| 03.29.04 (5:18 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya has been neo-con[i] conning, scamming and swindling [/i]the American taxpayers ([i]yes, with immoral and criminal tax cuts for corporations and the rich, but also[/i] ...) with awarding insane, obscenely costly no-bid, no-audit, no-accountability 'contracts' for outrageous weapons systems boondoggles ([i]that don't even work[/i]) to his corrupt corporate campaign contributors in the rapacious Military Industrial Complex ...[/b]
Already it is [i]well-documented [/i]that vile [i]war-profiteers-cum-tra itors[/i] at Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, and the ghoulish Defense Contractors, are gluttonously helping themselves to the[i] 'spoils-of-looting'[/i] engineered via their vicious[i], illegal and immoral war-mongering in Iraq[/i], in order to steal and embezzle vast riches from the American taxpayers, while our U.S. Soldiers and Innocent Iraqi Civilians are 'cannon-fodder' [i]taking the hit [/i]for these blood-thirsty War Criminals ...
"We the People" should support the surprising, but welcome request by 49 Retired Military Top Brass, asking Dubya to [i]stop scamming Americans [/i]while we are at war ([i]of the neo-con, neo-fascist Bush regime's making[/i]) and in the record-level deficit disaster heading for an economic train-wreck ([i]of the neo-con, neo-fascist Bush regime's making, too[/i]) not seen since the Great Depression ...
P.S. The phony 'Defense Shield' is a "perpetual money-making machine" for greedy and traitorous Corporate Top Dogs & Fat Cats ... [i]The damn thing doesn't even work[/i]! http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
Consider "[b]Retired top brass say [i]no[/i] to 'missile shield'[/b]" by [i]Bryan Bender[/i], The Boston Globe, on http://www.independent-media....%20Reported :
Forty-nine retired generals and admirals yesterday urged President Bush to suspend plans for a national missile shield and instead use the money to secure nuclear materials abroad and ports and borders at home.
The Bush administration plans to field a nationwide defense system in September to shoot down missiles armed with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and has budgeted $3.7 billion this year for the project.
Lexington, Mass.-based Raytheon is one of the main government contractors and is developing the missile interceptor and most of the radar technology.
But the 49 former senior military leaders contend that the system remains unproven. They also said it is more likely that terrorists would smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States than a country would launch a missile at the United States, risking a devastating retaliatory strike.
"As you have said, Mr. President, our highest priority is to prevent terrorists from acquiring and employing weapons of mass destruction," wrote the former officers, including retired Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired General Joseph P. Hoar, former chief of the US Central Command.
The retired officers added that "the militarily responsible course of action" is to use the funding for the missile shield "to secure the multitude of facilities containing nuclear weapons and materials and to protect our ports and borders against terrorists who may attempt to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States."
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, recently concluded that only two of the antimissile system's 10 key technologies have been fully tested. Meanwhile, to make the September deadline, the Pentagon has waived some operational testing requirements. The military's top weapons tester stated earlier this month that such testing is not planned "for the foreseeable future."
The letter calls on the president to "postpone operational deployment of the expensive and untested" system.
It is one element of a larger missile defense effort -- estimated to cost $53 billion over the next five years -- that will use ships at sea and other methods to track and deflect missile launches. Navy Secretary Gordon England announced Monday that a specially equipped Aegis destroyer will be positioned this fall in the Sea of Japan, where it will be an alert for North Korean missile launches.
Raytheon builds the "kill vehicle" designed to destroy an incoming missile. The firm also makes many of the system's radars, including ones positioned on Cape Cod, the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, and the Pacific island of Kwajalein.
[u]Retired Top Military Brass Urges Dubya To Stop Scamming American Taxpayers [/u]..., http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| 9/11 FAMILIES PRAISE TRUTHFUL RICHARD CLARKE & PROTEST THE LIARS RICE & BUSH |
| 03.29.04 (7:22 am) [edit] |
[b]Family Affair
[i]After a charged hearing, 9-11 families praised Richard Clarke, protested Condoleezza Rice, and demanded the resignation of the commission's director[/i][/b]
Inside the sleek wooden walls of a Hart Senate Office Building hearing room, where the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States held two days of hearings, GOP commissioners subjected former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke to sharp questioning during a charged and emotional hearing Wednesday. But while Clarke deftly parried charges about potential partisanship -- asserting, under oath, that he has no interest in ever joining a John Kerry administration, "should there be one" -- the pointed questions highlighted another fault line that may widen as the political season progresses: a divide between the GOP commissioners and the family members of victims of September 11.
Clarke began his testimony by offering the victims' family members a sincere and moving apology. "Those entrusted with protecting you, failed you," he said, his voice husky with emotion. "And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness."
He then proceeded to charge the Bush administration with failing, during its first nine months, to treat the terrorist threat as "urgent," despite repeated | |
