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9/11 WIDOW SAYS GEORGE W. BUSH (THE ASSASSIN) LET 9/11 HAPPEN ...

04.30.04 (5:04 pm) [edit]

[b]9/11 widow speaks in Rockland[/b]

Ellen Mariani was flying to California for her daughter's wedding on Sept. 11, 2001.

Her husband, Neil, was on a flight two hours after her. That flight was United Airlines 175, which crashed into the World Trade Center.

Ellen was at her stopover in Chicago when she found out her husband's plane had been hijacked. She didn't find out until the following morning that he was dead.

Mariani, from Derry, N.H., spoke in Rockland Tuesday at St. Peter's Episcopal Church about her fight to gain truth from her government about what happened before and after 9/11.

She believes President George W. Bush "intentionally allowed 9/11 to happen to gather public support for a war on terrorism," a statement she made in an open letter to the president.

"I never wrote in my life," said Mariani. "My heart is broken but my hand isn't."

Mariani has sued the president and members of his administration under the civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. She filed the action on Nov. 26.

The RICO act was passed in 1968 as a way of combating organized crime, specifically the Mafia.

In her speech, Mariani used red flags to signify all the times that she felt misled, lied to, or treated unfairly or unkindly. She raised a red flag at United Airlines because of its poor treatment of her and the handling of her vulnerable situation.

"I put the lawsuit in because I wanted to face United Airlines in court because of my husband's death," said Mariani. "I want answers; I want to know why he didn't get to his destination safely. I was treated unfairly and rudely."

She raised a red flag at her past lawyers who wanted a cut from her victim compensation fund eligiibility. Mariani signed papers with her first attorney soon after the 9/11 attacks.

"I went back to look at what I signed," said Mariani. "My attorney took my power of attorney over me."

Finally, she raised several red flags at the government for the following list, all stated in her open letter to the president:

. Why were 29 pages of the 9/11 committee report personally censored at your request?

. Where are the "black boxes" from Flight 11 and Flight 175?

. Where are the "voice recorders" from Flight 11 and Flight 175?

. Why can't we gain access to the complete air traffic control records for Flight 11 and Flight 175?

. Where are the airport surveillance tapes that show the passengers boarding the doomed flights?

. When will the complete passenger lists for all flights be released?

Mariani's husband didn't have a will, and was unemployed at the time of his death and lacked health insurance. She is living off social security and had to sell her house, but declined to take any money from the 9/11 victims' compensation fund.

"I have reported to the world that I am going to eat dirt before I take that fund," said Mariani, who is originally from Maine. "I'm from Maine and I mean business." - http://rockland.villagesoup.c...

THE JESUS FACTOR: SUBVERSION OF RELIGION BY AN EVANGELICAL KOOK DUBYA

04.30.04 (8:35 am) [edit]

[b]VISIT [u]'THE JESUS FACTOR'[/u] WEBSITE ON [/b] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages...

[b]THE KOOK DUBYA IS AN EVANGELICAL NUTJOB WHO MISQUOTES FROM THE BIBLE USING RELIGIOUS RHETORIC INCORRECTLY TO SUBVERT THE TEACHINGS OF RELIGION AND TAKE US INTO ILLEGAL AND IMMORAL NEO-CON WARS [i]AND[/i] UNDERMINE THE U.S. CONSTITUTION & BILL OF RIGHTS[/b].

BUNGLING BUSH'S HEAVY-HANDED RAID ON FALLUJAH BACKFIRES!!!

04.30.04 (8:29 am) [edit]

[b]Heavy-Handed Raid on Fallujah Backfires [/b]

The 26 April explosions at a chemical warehouse being raided by the U.S. military constitute yet another example of heavy-handed tactics gone awry. US officials say they had reason to believe the facility was being used to manufacture chemical munitions. Rather than use other means to investigate, such as better human intelligence or a more discreet method of entry, the military used its preferred reconnaissance approach: a cadre of soldiers, armored vehicles and a blowtorch. Troops stormed their way into the facility, with horrendous consequences.

The US military reports two soldiers died and fifteen were wounded in two massive explosions that immediately followed troops' attempt to access the building.

When I arrived at the scene, a witness told me, "People were jumping and dancing on the burning Humvees because of the hatred towards the Americans due to their dealings with Iraqis. People were cheering for Fallujah." Images of the aftermath were broadcast and printed throughout the Western media.

In order for Western observers to understand why the deaths of people presented to Western audiences as liberators would be cheered by those supposedly being liberated, the media would need to present the hundreds of raids that result in Iraqi suffering. Monday's perfume factory calamity was certainly not the first time a military raid in occupied Iraq has backfired on the soldiers carrying it out.

But botched raids typically go unnoticed by the international media because officials are loathe to point them out and reporters rarely follow the numerous leads that circulate around Baghdad and beyond.

Earlier in this month, for instance, the Army conducted an early morning raid searching for weapons in the Abu Hanifa Mosque in a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad. The fruits for crashing through two gates with tanks, for driving a Humvee over and destroying three tons of food-aid stockpiled for Fallujah, for holding 210 people inside the mosque at gunpoint, for smashing through classroom doors and for shooting up walls and ceilings? Not one bullet. The raid wasn't entirely without results for occupation forces, though. The US military gained even more resentment, distrust and rage from the Iraqis in Baghdad.

Troops conduct home raids throughout Iraq on a daily basis. At times these do produce weapons, and sometimes even a person engaged in the increasingly popular resistance to the US-UK occupation. However, a great number of them yield nothing but anguish.

In one case I reported on last winter, a late night raid on a house found soldiers breaking the door to the home of two Baghdad University professors, even though they were offered free access. The home was destroyed, furniture broken and torn apart, bags of rice dumped on the kitchen floor, and the husband and son detained.

The next day soldiers revisited the home, I was told, excusing themselves for having had poor information. The husband and son remain in detention, whereabouts unknown to the family.

The raid on 26 April erupted into more than the two explosions reported by eyewitnesses. The warehouse incident is symbolic of so many raids the occupation forces have conducted. One witness told me he saw the warehouse's owner offer a key to the soldiers before they entered, but they refused it, preferring instead to force their way in.

Stories such as this abound on the Iraqi street. More often than not, they end in dead, beaten or detained Iraqis and personal property stolen by soldiers.

This time, because it ended in American deaths, the raid received at least some mention in the Western press.

When human rights organizations estimate that at least half of the 13,000 detainees in the horrid, overflowing Abu Ghraib prison had no affiliation with the armed resistance prior to being arrested by occupation forces, one can imagine how they, their families and friends now view the Anglo-American occupation of their country.

[b]By Dahr Jamail [/b]- http://www.antiwar.com/orig/j...

BUNGLING BUSH'S HEAVY-HANDED RAID ON FALLUJAH BACKFIRES!!!

04.30.04 (8:28 am) [edit]

FREEDOM-HATING NEO-CON'S NAZI-STYLE TORTURE: DEPRAVITY AS 'LIBERATION' ...

04.30.04 (8:25 am) [edit]

[b]Depravity as 'Liberation'

The torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison is emblematic of our crazed foreign policy [/b]

The Abu Ghraib prison was a symbol of Saddam's horrific tyranny: electrodes hanging out of the walls, floors stained with the blood of god-knows-how-many victims, bodies dangling from meat-hooks, like in some cheap Grade-B horror flick. So when the Americans came and "liberated" the place, the long-suffering Iraqi people were supposed to be grateful. After all, the sadistic torturers of the Ba'athist regime were gone, and it was a new day � or was it?

Well, not all that new, according to a shocking report broadcast by CBS the other night. 60 Minutes II showed photos taken of American soldiers guarding the prison torturing their charges. The images show the American "liberators" liberating their own perverted libidos, posed next to naked prisoners who were being forced into simulating sex with each other. In one macabre shot, a hooded prisoner stands precariously perched on a pedestal, with electrodes attached to his arms: he is reportedly told that if he falls, he'll be electrocuted. There are several photos in which naked prisoners are stacked in a pyramid, and one with a slur written on his skin in English. Photos in the possession of the military authorities show a prisoner whose genitals are attached to wires. In one, a dog is shown attacking an Iraqi prisoner. The authorities are investigating the account of an Iraqi who alleges that a translator, hired by the Americans to work at Abu Ghraib, raped a male juvenile prisoner:

"[i]They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming. ...and the female soldier was taking pictures[/i]."

Included in this photo-montage of Operation Iraqi Freedom is a picture of a badly beaten corpse.

"[i]In most of the pictures," Dan Rather reports, "the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up[/i]."

This is how we're "liberating" Iraq.

Last month, 17 American soldiers, including the brigadier general in charge of all detention facilities in occupied Iraq, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, were relieved of their duties: 6 face charges. The sickening details were kept secret, by journalists as well as the U.S. military, until the photos began to circulate independently of both. When CBS finally stopped sitting on this story, they spun it so that it was framed in terms of an apologia, as articulated by Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of coalition operations in Iraq, who avers:

"[i]So what would I tell the people of Iraq? This is wrong. This is reprehensible. But this is not representative of the 150,000 soldiers that are over here. I'd say the same thing to the American people... Don't judge your army based on the actions of a few[/i]."

We're supposed to believe that these are just a few rotten apples, that the overwhelming majority of U.S. occupation troops are regular Boy Scouts, busy building schools and helping little old ladies cross streets. To which one can only reply: Baloney!

Two competing narratives about the American occupiers are now vying for attention. One the one hand, we have Pat Tillman, the football hero who enlisted shortly after 9/11, with his square clean visage, almost a caricature of idealized American manhood, a selfless martyr who gave his all for a righteous cause. And on the other hand we have the grinning leering perverts of Abu Ghraib. Which is the real face of the American occupiers: John Wayne in "Flying Leathernecks" or John Holmes in "Freaky Leatherboys"?

Just ask the Iraqis, who, according to the latest Gallup poll, see their American occupiers as "uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect for the country's people, religion and traditions." USA Today reports:

"[i]Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger, according to a new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll[/i]."

And that was before the Abu Ghraib outrage�.

The CBS News piece is in many ways almost as outrageous as the events it describes. To begin with, the entire story is framed by General Kimmitt's apologia: it also gives a lot of time to the craven excuses of one of the accused soldiers, who blames his disgusting behavior on a lack of "training." Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick is so typically contemporary American in his whining refusal to take responsibility that it would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic:

"[i]We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things...like rules and regulations. And it just wasn't happening[/i]."

We'll have to take Frederick at his word that he required "training" in order to be restrained from acting like a mad dog. What a surprise that, in "real" life, he's a prison guard in Virginia, described by his boss as "one of the best." One supposes that's why he needs "rules and regulations" to prevent him from literally f*cking over his charges.

As contemptible as he is, Frederick is performing a great service in exposing the responsibility of his superiors, and demonstrating that this wasn't the exception that proves the rule of American beneficence. Frederick's testimony shows that his actions amounted to the implementation of an informal policy:

"[i]Frederick says Americans came into the prison: 'We had military intelligence, we had all kinds of other government agencies, FBI, CIA ... All those that I didn't even know or recognize[/i].' Frederick's letters and email messages home also offer clues to problems at the prison. He wrote that he was helping the interrogators:

"[i]'Military intelligence has encouraged and told us 'Great job.' They usually don't allow others to watch them interrogate. But since they like the way I run the prison, they have made an exception. We help getting them to talk with the way we handle them. ... We've had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They usually end up breaking within hours[/i].'"

The CBS report adds:

"[i]The Army found that interrogators asked reservists working in the prison to prepare the Iraqi detainees, physically and mentally, for questioning[/i]. "

Will any of these interrogators, who are civilians and supposedly not subject to military authority, face charges? Gen. Kimmitt says he hopes so, but that remains to be seen. However, whatever action is taken, or not taken, the conclusion that we are dealing here with the results of a deliberate policy, and not an exceptional case, is inescapable.

The role played by CBS in all this is far from admirable. True, they exposed it, and broadcast a very few of the horrific photos. They also covered it up for at least a month, and might have done so indefinitely if not for the fact that the story was beginning to leak out:

"[i]Two weeks ago, 60 Minutes II received an appeal from the Defense Department, and eventually from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to delay this broadcast � given the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq[/i]."

One wonders if the "danger and tension on the ground in Iraq" was the Defense Department's main concern: after all, the Iraqis surely know what is happening to them. Abused detainees have families, and friends, and word travels fast. More likely it is the "danger and tension" on the ground in this country, the growing outcry on the home front against a futile and increasingly ugly war, that worries not only the Pentagon bureaucrats but their bosses in the White House. If they succeed in riding out the storm, it will be with the invaluable help of the American media:

"[i]60 Minutes II decided to honor that request, while pressing for the Defense Department to add its perspective to the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison. This week, with the photos beginning to circulate elsewhere, and with other journalists about to publish their versions of the story, the Defense Department agreed to cooperate in our report[/i]."

If the truth was going to come out anyway, then better it should be as seen through the prism of the American commander, a whiney spineless automaton who needs "rules and regulations" to tell him how to act like a human being, and Frederick's lawyer, one Gary Myers, who declares:

"[i]The elixir of power, the elixir of believing that you're helping the CIA, for God's sake, when you're from a small town in Virginia, that's intoxicating. And so, good guys sometimes do things believing that they are being of assistance and helping a just cause. ... And helping people they view as important[/i]."

Okay, let's see if I get this straight: the inhabitants of small towns in Virginia are entirely bereft of any moral sensibility. Rural life, we are supposed to believe, leads to a blatant disregard for human dignity and decency. Such rubes as Sgt. Frederick are so easily intoxicated by power, or proximity to it, that they cannot contain their inherent animality, and cannot be held responsible for their actions � any more than a cougar can be accused of murder for hunting its prey.

Them city slicker lawyers, what'll they think of next? It's an interesting theory, not because it's clever but because it is profoundly and offensively stupid. I doubt it will hold up in a court of law � especially not an Iraqi one. You can bet your bottom dollar, however, that the Iraqis will never be allowed to sit in judgement of Sgt. Frederick and his fellow sadists. Not even when they are handed back their "sovereignty" on June 30.

Mr. Myers has a point about "the elixir of power," however, although not in the way he intended. This poisonous brew is what we have quaffed in Iraq, a potent mixture of high-sounding hubris and militant megalomania. Is it any wonder that its effects are to inspire a kind of madness?

Our policy of perpetual war is not so much a foreign policy as a form of collective insanity.

We went in to "liberate" the people of Iraq, and wound up torturing them. If supporters of this disastrous war have some kind of explanation for that, I'd love to hear it. Meanwhile, a note to the "mainstream" media: let's start interviewing the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of these heinous acts, to get some idea of what really happened. It is also necessary to start naming names. Unless we want to encourage more such incidents in the future, public shaming can act as a deterrent.

[b]Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard.[/b] - http://www.antiwar.com/justin...

FREEDOM-HATING NEO-CON'S NAZI-STYLE TORTURE: DEPRAVITY AS 'LIBERATION' ...

04.30.04 (8:23 am) [edit]

IRAQIS SAY: 'U.S. OUT NOW!' - DOES DUBYA/CHENEY (HALLIBURTON) LISTEN? - NO!

04.30.04 (8:12 am) [edit]

[b]Iraqis Say: 'US Out Now!' [/b]

From March 22 to April 2, 60 trained Iraqi pollsters interviewed 3,444 randomly selected Iraqis for USA Today. This is one of the first polls in Iraq that seems to me well weighted statistically, though to be sure we'd have to know more than USA Today told us.

The numbers are negative for the US, and are much more negative than previous such polls. Moreover, the polling ended by April 2, just before the Shiite uprising and the worst of the Fallujah fighting, so that it is highly likely that the present attitudes of the Iraqi public toward the US are much more negative.

Amazingly, 57% of Iraqis say that US troops should leave Iraq immediately. If one subtracted the Kurds, a much higher percentage of Arabic speaking Iraqis say this. And, they say it with their eyes open. About 57% also admit that life would get harder (i.e. there would be a lot of instability) if the US suddenly withdrew. They want the US gone anyway, and will take their chances.

Over half say there are circumstances under which it is all right to attack US troops! A February poll I discussed here had said that only 10% of Iraqi Shiites held that attacks on US troops were ever justified, and 30% of Sunni Arabs felt that way. The number in al-Anbar province (think Fallujah) was 70%, but it was high for Iraq at that time. Again, if the earlier polling was correct, there was a massive shift in opinion on this matter. We went from having about 3 million Iraqis think it was all right to attack US troops to more than 13 million.

[My earlier comment on the Feb. poll: "That is, the poll actually shows that in absolute numbers, there are more Shiites who approve of attacks on Americans than there are Sunni Arabs. The numbers bring into question the official line that there are no problems in the South, only in the Sunni Arab heartland. The other problem is that attitudes change, and sometimes they change rapidly. The US cannot count on the percentage of Shiites who approve of attacks on its troops remaining at 10% if it is strafing Sadr City in Baghdad. Every 1% increase in the number of Shiites who approve of attacks equals 160,000 new enemies.").

For the question, "Has the Coalition invasion of Iraq done more harm than good?", in the USA Today poll 46% say "more harm," whereas only 33% say "more good." But the ethnic breakdown here is startling. Only 2% of Kurds say the invasion did more harm. 56% of Sunni Arabs say it did more harm, and so do 59% of Baghdadis (Baghdad is about 2/5s Shiite but the Shiites there are probably Sadrists in the majority, who agree with most Sunnis about the undesirability of the US presence). Among Shiites, 47% say it did more harm, 28% say it did more good.

More harm: Total 45%, Baghdad 59%, Shiite 47%, Sunni Arab 56%, Kurds 2%

More good: Total 33%

About the Same: Total 16%

To the question of whether coalition military forces are mainly liberators or mainly occupiers, 71% said occupiers. The percentage among Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite, who said this, was about 80%. The Kurds mostly disagreed, which brought the numbers down. (The US never put that many troops in the Kurdish north, depending on the peshmerga fighters, so the Kurds are in fact much less occupied than the Arabs).

An opinion poll done by an Iraqi institute a couple of months ago found that about 47% of Iraqis said that the US invasion was a source of humiliation, and 48% said it was a liberation. If that poll was valid, it means that there was a massive shift in opinion by late March and a big growth in anti-Americanism. Based on my close reading of the Iraqi press and reports of sermons, I believe that the Israeli murder of Hamas clerical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on March 22 was the turning point in the big spike in anti-American feeling. There were lots of demonstrations that the Western press did not cover, and a lot of oratory.

Regarding George Bush, 55% of Iraqis have an unfavorable view of him, and if we exclude the 4 million Kurds and just look at the Arabs, his unfavorable rating is above 60% for both Sunnis and Shiites. Since Iraq is now for all practical purposes the 51st state, I say we let the Iraqis vote in the US elections in November.

Oddly, 61% of Iraqis still say that the US invasion and overthrow of Saddam was worth it (though only 28% of Sunni Arabs say it was worth it). That is, the poll does not show that Iraqis have begun regretting the US overthrow of Sadam. It shows that they have begun regretting the continued US Occupation.

And, the bad news is that despite the ballyhooed transfer of sovereignty on June 30, the actual US occupation is likely to last for a decade unless Iraqis throw the US out. And given their present mood, one should not dismiss the possibility that that is what they will do.

[b]Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan [/b]- http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?...

IRAQIS SAY: 'U.S. OUT NOW!' - DOES DUBYA/CHENEY (HALLIBURTON) LISTEN? - NO!

04.30.04 (8:10 am) [edit]

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS AWOL BUSH: "I FLIP-FLOP BETWEEN DRINKING BINGES!"

04.29.04 (9:43 pm) [edit]

[b]"I request duty in Vietnam" [/b]-- the first line in one of the documents http://www.johnkerry.com/abou... from John Kerry's service records, now posted on the Kerry website on http://www.johnkerry.com/abou... .

[b]VERSUS[/b]

So, while the news networks have sat on this explosive story for months, it's well documented that George W. Bush[b] never showed up [/b]for National Guard duty for a period of approximately one year, possibly more, in 1972-1973. Despite all the talk about "honor and dignity," Bush seems to have a problem meeting his commitments on http://www.kings.edu/twsawyer... . - http://www.awolbush.com

EVEN MORE NEO-CON DESPERATION TACTICS AD INFINITUM: EVEN MORE BUSH FLIP-FLOPS ...

04.29.04 (9:41 pm) [edit]

[b]So Bush has a site somewhere that tracks Kerry's "flip-flops". Reader TK probably spent three seconds coming up with this list of Bush flip flops. It's not like they're hard to find[/b]: - http://www.dailykos.com/story...

. Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he's for it.

. Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.

. Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.

. Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.

. Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.

. Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.

. Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.

. Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.

. Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.

. Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.

. Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits

. Bush-"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. Bush-"I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care.

. Bush claims to be in favor of the environment and then secretly starts drilling on Padre Island.

. Bush talks about helping education and increases mandates while cutting funding.

. Bush first says the U.S. won't negotiate with North Korea. Now he will

. Bush goes to Bob Jones University. Then say's he shouldn't have.

. Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq. Later Bush announced he would not call for a vote

. Bush said the "mission accomplished" banner was put up by the sailors. Bush later admits it was his advance team.

. Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the US. Bush after meeting with Pres. Fox, he's against it.

NEO-CON DESPERATION TACTICS AD INFINITUM: BUSH'S FLIP-FLOPS ...

04.29.04 (9:37 pm) [edit]

[b]President Bush's decision to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly before the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reversed earlier White House insistence that she would only appear privately[/b]. - http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO...

Some previous Bush reversals in the face of criticism:

. He argued a federal Department of Homeland Security wasn't needed, then devised a plan to create one.

. He resisted a commission to investigate Iraq intelligence failures, but then relented.

. He also initially opposed the creation of the independent commission to examine if the 2001 attacks could have been prevented, before getting behind the idea under pressure from victims' families.

. He opposed, and then supported, a two-month extension of the commission's work, after the panel said protracted disputes over access to White House documents left too little time.

. He at first said any access to the president by the commission would be limited to just one hour but relaxed the limit earlier this month.

A RETURN TO MORALITY SURE AS HELL WON'T COME FROM RIGHT-WING HYPOCRITICAL FASCISTS!!!

04.29.04 (6:17 pm) [edit]

[b]Pulp Fictions Triumph over Truth

For those who Backed Bush over War in Iraq, the Idea of Proof has shifted from Fact to Fervor[/b]

Perhaps the most important divide in the presidential campaign is between fact and fiction. There are, of course, other sharp distinctions based on region and religiosity, guns and gays, abstinence and abortion. But were the election to be decided on domestic concerns alone, George Bush would be near certain to join the ranks of one-term presidents - like his father after the aura of the Gulf war evaporated.

But one year after Bush's triumphant May Day landing on the deck of the USS Lincoln and appearance behind a "Mission Accomplished" sign, his splendid little war has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat. April has been the bloodiest month by far - 122 US soldiers killed compared with 73 last April in the supposed last month of the war. The unending war has inspired among Bush's backers a rally-round-the-flag effect, a redoubling of belief.

They believe in the cause as articulated by the vice president, Dick Cheney, this week in his speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where Winston Churchill delivered his "iron curtain" oration. "You and I are living in such a time" of the "gravest of threats", said Cheney. Once again, he explained the motive for the Iraq war, implicitly conflating Saddam Hussein with al-Qaida and oblivious to the failure to discover WMD.

"His regime cultivated ties to terror," he said, "and had built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction." And Saddam "would still be in power", he continued, coming to the point of his allegory, if John Kerry, cast as Neville Chamberlain to Bush's Churchill, had had his way.

These misperceptions are pillars of Bush's support, according to a study by the University of Maryland: 57 % of those surveyed "believe that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaida", and 45% "believe that evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaida has been found". Moreover, 65% believe that "experts" have confirmed that Iraq had WMD.

Among those who perceived experts as saying that Iraq had WMD, 72% said they would vote for Bush and 23% for Kerry. Among those who perceived experts as saying that Iraq had supported al-Qaida, 62% said they would vote for Bush and 36% for Kerry. The reason given by respondents for their views was that they had heard these claims from the Bush administration.

These political pulp fictions are believed out of faith and fear. This is a classic case study in "the will to believe", as the American philosopher William James called it. The greater insecurity would be not to believe Bush. It would mean the president had lied on issues of national security. And how could the Iraq war be seen as a pure, moral choice once good had been shown to be false? The idea of proof has shifted from fact to Fervor

The attack lines against Kerry are that he is an opponent of national security and un-American. When Kerry committed the gaffe of uttering the truth that many world leaders secretly hope for his victory, he provided the Bush campaign with an opening. The secretary of commerce, Donald Evans, has repeatedly said that Kerry "looks French". The Republican house majority leader, Tom DeLay, begins every speech: "As John Kerry would say, bonjour."

The European mission this month of Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat on the foreign relations committee, is a telling if overlooked footnote to the campaign xenophobia. After meetings with Jacques Chirac and at Downing Street, he learned first-hand of the Bush administration's almost complete lack of consultation. Chirac offered first steps toward French assistance in Iraq, and Biden wrote a letter spelling them out to Bush, who referred him to the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who in turn politely listened and never responded.

Meanwhile, the Republican chairman of the committee, Senator Richard Lugar, who has been granted just one meeting in the past year with the president, remarked to negligible press notice: "The diplomacy is deficient. By that I simply mean not many people agree with us, or like us, or are prepared to work with us. That will really have to change." A senate source told me: "The only hope for real internationalization is in regime change in the United States."

The brazen smears about Kerry's wounds and medals, his voting record on military programs as a senator, and his loyalty, have been communicated by the Bush-Cheney campaign through an estimated $50m in TV and radio advertising in less than 60 days in 17 swing states. This storm of unremitting negativity has bolstered the faith of his supporters, tested by recent events, and has managed to maintain the contest at a draw.

The attacks against Kerry are a bodyguard of lies to protect the original ones who are the praetorian guard of Bush's presidency.

� [i][b]Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and Washington bureau chief of Salon.com [/b][/i]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...

CONDI RICE MAKES FREUDIAN SLIP & CALLS DUBYA HER "HUSBAND"! WHAT ARE THEY DOING IN THE OVAL OFFICE?

04.29.04 (5:54 pm) [edit]

[b]SAM ADAMS' COUNTERPOINT POSTED THIS GOODY - http://www.samadams.tblog.com... --

One for the record from the Condolizzard ...[/b]

Washington D.C.: There is a buzz over a comment the US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, made at an apparently off-the-record Washington power dinner with the publisher of the [i]The New York Times[/i], Arthur Ochs Sulzberger jnr, and other Times people at the home of the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman.

According to an account in New York magazine, Dr Rice said at one point: "[b]As I was telling my husb [/b]. . .". then stopped and said: "[b]As I was telling President Bush [/b]. . ." Eyebrows jumped; jaws dropped. There was a slight pause in the chatter. While the first phrase was correctly reported, there is a possibility the second one did not immediately follow. In which case, it is not at all clear whom or what Dr Rice, who is single, may have been talking about. Meanwhile, Mr Taubman is said to be put out by the publicity and told everyone to clam up.

What really is going on in the Oval Office??? ... Methinks it makes the Clinton/Lewinsky affair pale in comparison ... The Bush/Condolizzard affair simply makes the mind boggle ([i]and the stomach turn[/i]) ... Poor Laura ...

[b]Source:[/b]

[b]The Washington Post[/b], http://www.smh.com.au/article...

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS AWOL BUSH: "LET ME DRINK 'TIL I'M SLOSHED!"

04.29.04 (12:40 pm) [edit]

HEY REDUCTO ASSHOLE: DOES DUBYA HAVE THE RIGHT TO MASSACRE TENS OF THOUSANDS IN IRAQ???

04.29.04 (12:29 pm) [edit]

[b]REDUCTO-ASSHOLE HAS HIS HEAD BURIED SO FAR UP RUSH LIMBAUGH'S FAT ASS AND IS EATING HIS SHIT AND DRINKING DUBYA'S PISS BY THE GALLON, THAT HE CAN'T RECOGNIZE THE INSANITY OF HIS NEO-ORWELLIAN IRRATIONALITY!!![/b]

Number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 19, 2003: [b]724[/b]

Number killed since George W. Bush declared an end to "major combat" on May 1, 2003: [b]586[/b]

Number killed this month: [b]128[/b]

[b]Source: [/b]U.S. Department of Defense http://www.defenselink.mil/ne...

[b]Support for War Is Down Sharply, Poll Concludes [/b] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM LOGIC: DRINK DUBYA'S PISS & EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG!!!!

04.29.04 (12:25 pm) [edit]

[b]REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM LOGIC:--

DRINK DUBYA'S PISS BY THE GALLON ...

EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG ...

ABORTION IS KILLING, BUT MASSACRING U.S. SOLDIERS & INNOCENT IRAQI CIVILIANS IS OKAY ...

PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT IS HORRIBLE, BECAUSE EATING CHEETOS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BREATHING CLEAN AIR ...

THE MAD KING GEORGE SHOULDN'T BE ACCOUNTABLE TO 'WE THE PEOPLE' BECAUSE THE ARM-CHAIR CHICKEN-HAWK EATING CHEETOS-LUVING FUCKWIT LIKES SCRATCHING HIS FAT ASS & JERKING-OFF WHILE WATCHING OUR U.S. SOLDIERS BEING MASSACRED ...

THE DANGERS AND TRAGEDY OF GORGING ON CHEETOS & RUSH LIMBAUGH'S CRAP AND DRINKING BUSH'S PISS CREATES BRAIN-DEAD, MIND-NUMBING IRRATIONAL DELUSIONS!!![/b]

KERRY: "I REQUST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VS. AWOL DRUNK BUSH: "TESTS SHOW I'M MENTALLY UNSTABLE!"

04.29.04 (10:03 am) [edit]

FOR ONCE, COWARDLY BUSHY-BOY SHOULD FIGHT HIS OWN BATTLES!!!

04.29.04 (10:01 am) [edit]

[b]For once, Bush should fight his own battles[/b]

It�s really not hard to see why many Democrats just plain old hate President Bush.

Yes, I know �hate� is a strong word and underlying it is a strong emotion. But it�s not an altogether inappropriate feeling in the face of unmitigated, unapologetic and seemingly endless gall.

Last Sunday, the president�s longtime handler and current campaign adviser Karen Hughes went on the talk shows to attack Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) over his military record and his subsequent work as a Vietnam war protester.

In particular, Hughes implied that Kerry had some sort of character problem because of a dispute over whether he threw back ribbons or medals during a war protest in 1971.

�He only pretended to throw his,� Hughes told CNN.

�Now, I can understand if, out of conscience, you take a principled stand, and you would decide that you were so opposed to this that you would actually throw your medals. But to pretend to do so � I think that�s very revealing.�

As E.J. Dionne rightly put it in The Washington Post two days later, this campaign against Kerry is a smear, pure and simple.

As Dionne writes, the same question once put to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) � �Have you no sense of decency, sir?� � needs to be posed to these �shamelessly partisan Republicans who can�t stand the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are facing off against a Democrat who fought and was wounded in Vietnam.�

But let�s not get tripped up by the shameful display on the House floor last week, when Republican after Republican all but accused Kerry of being a traitor, or even by Hughes�s temerity in questioning the service of a man who risked his life for his country in Vietnam, on behalf of a man who did everything in his power to stay out of that fight.

Let�s draw back and see the big picture. And the big picture here is Bush, who is behind all of this.

Let�s start with this. What�s the signature pattern of Bush�s life?

When he faces a challenge or a tough scrape, he lets his family and friends bail him out. He has always let others do his fighting for him.

You see it in his failed businesses, where well-heeled family friends again and again came in to bail him out. It�s there in the legal scrapes. And it�s there in the whole matter of ducking service in Vietnam � first by getting his father�s and his father�s friends� help in jumping the queue to get into the Texas Air National Guard, and then again with help cleaning up the subsequent unfortunateness while he was serving in the Texas Air National Guard.

(As was reported this week in Salon, despite assurances to the contrary from the White House, the president still refuses to release his complete Vietnam-era service record.)

The pattern has even come up repeatedly on the campaign trail. Since the president came onto the national political stage, he has faced three main opponents � Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then-Vice President Al Gore and now Kerry. Each served in Vietnam, though under very different circumstances. And President Bush has had his lieutenants and surrogates attack the service of each one.

So here, with Hughes, we have the same pattern repeating itself. The president knows he�s vulnerable on this issue � after all, he says he supported the war at the time, but he did all he could to avoid the fighting himself.

So he gets Hughes to do his dirty work for him. That means that to shift attention from an earlier time when he couldn�t fight his own fights, Bush is now repeating the pattern.

So what should the Democrats do? First of all, it�s unpardonable that the party and the campaign are forcing Kerry to rebut this medals-and-ribbons ridiculousness on his own.

He shouldn�t even need to stoop to the level of addressing this stuff. Where are his surrogates? What about retired generals and other Vietnam vets?

Kerry himself shouldn�t be lowering himself to addressing the particulars of these attacks or getting mixed up on the details. He should be taking this directly to the president. He should tell him to turn over a new leaf in life and stop being a coward.

If the president wants to attack or question Kerry�s war record or what he did after the war, Kerry should tell him to do it himself. No special deals, no hidden help from family retainers, no hiding behind Hughes. Tell the president, for once, to fight his own fights. - http://thehill.com/marshall/0...

FOR ONCE, COWARDLY IDIOT BUSHY-BOY SHOULD FIGHT HIS OWN BATTLES!!!

04.29.04 (9:58 am) [edit]

LIAR BUSH IS AMERICA'S IRRATIONAL, FANATICAL AYATOLLAH

04.29.04 (9:54 am) [edit]

[b]America's Ayatollah [/b]

The term of the moment in Washington is "the wall." This is the legal barrier that once separated the CIA and its investigators from the FBI and its investigators, and which may have contributed to the confusion that enabled the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A more interesting wall, however, was on view Tuesday evening in President Bush's prime-time news conference. It's the one between him and reality.

Never mind that even for Bush, this was a poor performance -- answers that resembled a frantic scavenger hunt for the right (or any) word or, too often, a thought. Never mind that he really had very little to say -- no exit plan for Iraq, no second thoughts about Sept. 11, no wonderment, even, at the apparent disappearance of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and how that might have happened. Like a kid who has been told otherwise, Bush persists in believing in his own version of Santa Claus. The weapons are there, somewhere -- in a North Pole of his mind.

What matters more is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: "We're changing the world." He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq and he used it in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson, that presidential personification of naive morality, shake his head in bemusement. In Bush's rhetoric, a war to rid Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction, a war to ensure that Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" did not appear over an American city, has mutated into an effort to reorder the world.

"I also know that there's an historic opportunity here to change the world," Bush said of the effort in Iraq. But the next sentence was even more disquieting. "And it's very important for the loved ones of our troops to understand that the mission is an important, vital mission for the security of America and for the ability to change the world for the better." It is one thing to die to defend your country. It is quite another to do that for a single man's impossible dream. What Bush wants is admirable. It is not, however, attainable.

Shortly after Sept. 11, Bush used the word "crusade" to characterize his response to the attacks. The Islamic world, remembering countless crusades on behalf of Christianity, protested, and Bush quickly interred the word in the National Archives or someplace. Nonetheless, that is pretty much what Bush described in his news conference -- not a crusade for Christ and not one to oust the Muslims from Jerusalem but an American one that would eradicate terrorism and, in short, "change the world." The United States, the president said, had been "called" for that task.

Some people might consider this religious drivel and others might find it stirring, but whatever it is, it cannot be the basis for foreign policy, not to mention a war. Yet it explains, as nothing else can, just why Bush is so adamantly steadfast about Iraq and why he simply asserts what is not proved or just plain untrue -- the purported connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, for instance, or why Hussein was such a threat, when we have it on the word of David Kay and countless weapons inspectors that he manifestly was not. Bush talks as if only an atheist would demand proof when faith alone more than suffices. He is America's own ayatollah.

Several investigative commissions are now meeting in Washington, looking into intelligence failures -- everything from the failure to detect and intercept the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to the assertion that Iraq was armed to the teeth with all sorts of awful stuff. But what really has to be examined is how a single man, the president, took the nation and part of the world to war because, as he essentially put it Tuesday night, he was "called" to do it.

If that is the case, and it sure seems so at the moment, then this commission has to ask us all -- and I don't exclude myself -- how much of Congress and the press went to war with an air of juvenile glee. The Commission on Credulous Stupidity may call me as its first witness, but after that it has to examine how, despite our vaunted separation of powers, a barely elected president opted for a war that need not have been fought. This is Bush's cause, a noble but irrational effort much like the one that set off for Jerusalem in the year 1212. It was known as the Children's Crusade.

LIAR BUSH IS AMERICA'S IRRATIONAL, FANATICAL AYATOLLAH

04.29.04 (9:52 am) [edit]

LIAR BUSH IS AMERICA'S IRRATIONAL, FANATICAL AYATOLLAH

04.29.04 (9:51 am) [edit]

NEW POLL: MOST AMERICANS REALIZE BUSH'S ILLEGAL NEO-CON IRAQ WAR WAS A TRAGIC MISTAKE!!!

04.29.04 (9:46 am) [edit]

[b]Support for War Is Down Sharply, Poll Concludes[/b]

Support for the war in Iraq has eroded substantially over the past several months, and Americans are increasingly critical of the way President Bush is handling the conflict, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

After initially expressing robust backing for the war, the public is now evenly divided over whether the United States military should stay for as long as it takes to stabilize Iraq or pull out as soon as possible, the poll showed.

Asked whether the United States had done the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, 47 percent of respondents said it had, down from 58 percent a month earlier and 63 percent in December, just after American forces captured Saddam Hussein. Forty-six percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, up from 37 percent last month and 31 percent in December.

The diminished public support for the war did not translate into any significant advantage for Mr. Bush's Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. The poll showed the two men remaining in a statistical dead heat, both in a head-to-head matchup and in a three-way race that included Ralph Nader.

Support for Mr. Bush is stronger in other areas vital to his re-election, including his handling of the threat from terrorism, which won the approval of 60 percent of respondents.

Even so, just short of a year after Mr. Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln last May 1 and proclaimed the end to major combat operations under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," his approval rating has slid from the high levels it reached during the war.

It now stands at 46 percent, the lowest level of his presidency in The Times/CBS News Poll, down from 71 percent last March and a high of 89 percent just after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

At this point in his winning re-election race in 1996, President Bill Clinton's approval rating in The New York Times/CBS News Poll was 48 percent.

Mr. Bush's approval rating for his handling of Iraq was 41 percent, down from 49 percent last month and 59 percent in December.

The survey held hints of trouble for Mr. Kerry as he seeks to introduce himself to an electorate that knows relatively little about him. While 55 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters said they strongly favored the president, only 32 percent of Mr. Kerry's supporters strongly favored their candidate.

Sixty-one percent of voters said Mr. Kerry says what he thinks people want to hear, versus 29 percent who said he says what he believes. The Bush campaign has attacked Mr. Kerry for months on that score, portraying him as a flip-flopper with no convictions.

On the same question, 43 percent said Mr. Bush says what people want to hear and 53 percent said he says what he believes.

The poll, conducted from Friday to Tuesday, came during a month that has seen more American soldiers killed in Iraq than in any other month since the invasion 13 months ago. In the days before the poll was conducted, a Web site obtained and publicly released for the first time photographs of soldiers' coffins returning to the United States from Iraq.

"The only thing I think was good was when they got Saddam," said Anna Bartlow, 67, of Tulsa, Okla., a poll respondent who identified herself as a Republican. "That's the only thing that I think they did right, but if they were going to go over there just for him, they should have gotten him and then got out."

Of the Iraqis, Ms. Bartlow said, "Let them fight it out among themselves."

The poll questioned 1,042 people. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Terry Holt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, questioned whether the poll accurately reflected public opinion. But, Mr. Holt said, the White House has all along expected the presidential race to be close until the very end.

"There will be tough times in Iraq," Mr. Holt said, "but the key to prevailing and winning the war on terror is steady, determined leadership."

Chad Clanton, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, said the fact that the race remained essentially tied showed that Mr. Bush's attacks, including an aggressive advertising campaign, had failed to take down Mr. Kerry.

The poll suggested that American attitudes about the war were shifting in response to a daily barrage of disturbing images and news reports. Mr. Bush's advisers have asserted that Americans long ago made up their minds that the war was justified, and that violent flare-ups in Iraq would not hurt the president politically as long as the United States remained committed to creating a stable democracy there.

But the Times/CBS poll appeared to bolster the view of many Democrats that the intensified violence in Iraq would inevitably lead to questions about the wisdom of the war and Mr. Bush's leadership.

Asked whether the results of the war with Iraq were worth the loss of American lives and other costs, 33 percent of respondents said it was worth it. That was down from 37 percent at the beginning of April and 44 percent in December. Fifty-eight percent said it was not worth it, up from 54 percent at the start of the month and 49 percent in December.

At a time when American troops are engaged in fierce battles in Najaf and Falluja, two centers of the Iraqi insurgency, the poll found that 46 percent of Americans thought the United States military should remain in Iraq for as long as it takes to create a stable democracy, even if it takes a long time, and 46 percent said the United States should withdraw as soon as possible.

American perceptions of Iraqis haveH also shifted, the poll found. While 53 percent of Americans in a CBS News poll a year ago saw Iraqis as grateful for getting rid of Mr. Hussein, 38 percent see Iraqis feeling that way now. Forty-eight percent now view the Iraqis as resentful, up from 26 percent a year ago.

But the Iraq developments do not appear to have reshaped the presidential race in any discernible way.

If the election were held today, 46 percent of registered voters would vote for Mr. Kerry and 44 percent for Mr. Bush, the poll found. With Mr. Nader in the race, Mr. Bush would get 43 percent, Mr. Kerry 41 percent and Mr. Nader 5 percent, suggesting that nearly all of Mr. Nader's support comes from voters who would otherwise back the Democrat.

Follow-up interviews with people who took part in the poll suggested that the surge in violence in the past few months had led some Americans who supported the general goal of bringing democracy to Iraq to become more skeptical.

"It appears to me that we're not welcome there, and I don't know if I would have been able to support the invasion of Iraq if I had felt that the Iraqi people didn't welcome us there," said Michael Ryan, 54, of Ashland, Ore., who identified himself as a Democrat.

"I'm under the impression now that Dick Cheney came into office with an agenda for war in Iraq, and that George Bush had the same agenda, and that they were twisting the facts to justify the invasion," he said. "And I feel angry about it because I supported the U.S. invasion."

Violet Adams, 66, of Delta, Colo., who identified herself as a Republican, said she thought the United States would have to maintain a presence in the Middle East for a decade as part of the broader effort to confront Islamic terrorism.

"We either take them in their territory, on their turf, and keep them there, or we let them scatter all over the world and start their little cells, and then we'll all be living like Israel," Ms. Adams said.

Nick Dente, 46, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who identified himself as an independent, said he had not been a supporter of Mr. Bush but was open to backing him depending on how he conducted the fight against terrorism. In going to war with Iraq, Mr. Dente said, Mr. Bush took that fight in the wrong direction.

"I believe we've gotten sidetracked from finding Al Qaeda," he said.

[b]N.Y. Times[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

NEW POLL: MOST AMERICANS REALIZE BUSH'S ILLEGAL NEO-CON IRAQ WAR WAS A TRAGIC MISTAKE!!!

04.29.04 (9:45 am) [edit]

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS BUSH: "I'LL SWILL LOTS OF BOOZE INSTEAD!"

04.28.04 (8:26 pm) [edit]

FOR DUBYA, YOUR LIFE IS VERY, VERY CHEAP ...

04.28.04 (8:19 pm) [edit]

[b]WHEN LIFE IS CHEAP[/b]

Here's a blast from the past: Dick Cheney in 2000, accepting his party's nomination as candidate for vice president:

[i]For eight years, Clinton and Gore have extended our military commitments while depleting our military power. Rarely has so much been demanded of our armed forces and so little given to them in return.

George W. Bush and I are going to change that too. I have seen our military -- I have seen our military at its finest, with the best equipment, the best training and the best leadership.

I am proud of them. I have had the responsibility for their well-being. And I can promise them now, help is on the way.

Soon our men and women in uniform will once again have a commander-in-chief they can respect ... a commander-in-chief who understands their mission and restores their morale[/i].

This "Help is on the way!" shtick was a famous Cheney talking point on the campaign trail. You'd have thought the Clinton-era military was on the verge of starvation and collapse. Never mind that it was Clinton's military that rolled up the Taliban in Afghanistan, that blew past the Republican Guard to take down Saddam Hussein.

Now, three years after Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took up their offices, it's possible to speak of a Bush-era military. And what do we see from the "Help is on the way!" boys?

An undying determination to hand billions of our dollars over to the military-industrial complex behemoths -- while actual people, like our soldiers in the field, are stiffed.

The classic expression of these twinned agendas was in October, when the Administration opposed a plan to let Guard and Reserve members buy health coverage like other soldiers through the Pentagon because it would cost about $400 million -- even as it furiously rejected compelling evidence that Halliburton was overcharging for gasoline to the tune of about $400 million.

Now comes news that thanks to the "Help is on the way!" Administration, our soldiers in Iraq are being nickeled-and-dimed -- sometimes to death.

Newsweek reports:

... [i]many soldiers who are there [in Iraq] say the Pentagon is failing to protect them with the best technology America has to offer. Especially tanks, Bradleys and other heavy vehicles, even in some cases body armor ...

A breakdown of the casualty figures suggests that many US deaths and wounds in Iraq simply did not need to occur. According to an unofficial study by a defense consultant that is now circulating through the Army, of a total of 789 Coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices, while 48 others died in rocket-propelled-grenade attacks. Almost all those soldiers were killed while in unprotected vehicles, which means that perhaps one in four of those killed in combat in Iraq might be alive if they had had stronger armor around them, the study suggested. Thousands more who were unprotected have suffered grievous wounds, such as the loss of limbs[/i].

Wow.

Think about that if you watch "Nightline" this Friday, when Ted Koppel will devote the entire show to reading the names and showing photos of every fallen soldier: Every fourth name Koppel reads might have been saved, had this Administration not tried to wage its war on the cheap.

And it's still skimping: The White House has left Iraq entirely out of its 2005 budget proposal, and has been bluntly clear that it won't ask for more money until after the November presidential election. (At which point, one hopes, a Kerry Administration will be making such decisions.)

So for now, as The Washington Post reports, "The Army has publicly identified nearly $6 billion in funding requests that did not make Bush's $402 billion defense budget for 2005 ... including $132 million for bolt-on vehicle armor; $879 million for combat helmets, silk-weight underwear, boots and other clothing; $21.5 million for M249 squad automatic weapons; and $27 million for ammunition magazines, night sights and ammo packs. ...

"The Marine Corps' unfunded budget requests include $40 million for body armor, lightweight helmets and other equipment for 'Marines engaged in the global war on terrorism,' Marine Corps documents state."

The Bush Administration -- ever-desperate to invite association with Ronald Reagan -- is unwaveringly committed to spending about $10 billion every year for the next five years on Reagan's bogus missile defense system.

So the President may have forgotten to ask for money for Iraq in 2005 -- but he sure as shootin' remembered to formally request $10.2 billion for Star Wars.

Yet at the same time, the President declines, at a time of war, to set aside 1/77th of that $10.2 billion to provide bolt-on armor for Humvees -- armor that could have prevented hundreds of American deaths and grievous injuries.

He declines to set aside 1/12th of that $10.2 billion to provide our troops in the field with combat helmets, underwear and boots. He can't even spare 1/255th of the Star Wars budget to buy body armor and helmets for Marines.

Don't get me wrong; I opposed going into Iraq, and think we should declare victory and get out, as soon as possible.

But it's offensive that we deny soldiers health care because it cuts into Halliburton's war profiteering; it's offensive that our soldiers are dying or being maimed for want of protective gear, because boots, helmets and underwear expenditures would slow down the missile defense gravy train for Lockheed Martin.

Rarely has so much been demanded of our armed forces and so little given to them in return. - http://www.thenation.com/outr...

BUSH/CHENEY PUPPET SHOW WON'T BE FORMALLY RECORDED SO VEEP-CHENEY-N-CHIMP-BUSH CAN LIE!!!!!

04.28.04 (4:19 pm) [edit]

[b]Bush-Cheney 9/11 Interview Won't Be Formally Recorded[/b]

The White House said on Tuesday that there would be no recording or formal transcription of the historic joint interview of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The interview, to begin at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday at the White House, will be recorded by two note takers, one from the White House. Under a pact with the White House that allowed all its 10 members in the interview, the commission is permitted to take a note taker, but not a recording device. The panel said it did not press for a formal transcription of the session, letting the White House decide.

The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the session would not be officially transcribed because the White House considered it a "private meeting" that would include highly classified information.

"Let's keep in mind that it is extraordinary for a sitting president of the United States to sit down with a legislatively created commission," Mr. McClellan said.

An adviser to Mr. Bush said a larger consideration was the concern that an official transcript would set a precedent for appearances by presidents before other commissions and create legal problems down the road.

Mr. Bush will not be under oath, and the White House has been adamant that what he says should not be considered official testimony.

"He is not testifying, he is talking to them," the adviser said. "A transcript implies testimony. This would open a Pandora's box of all sorts of precedent-setting and legal issues. We were reluctant for the president to do this, anyway."

Legal scholars said the lack of an official transcript would give the White House some deniability and make it more difficult to use the president's words as evidence in a future suit against the government.

"It gives them more maneuverability in case someone slips up or says something he regrets," Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have cleared much of their schedules to be ready for the session. Mr. Bush has prepared with Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, as well as with the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, who will sit in on the interview. Mr. Cheney's office declined to give details of his preparations. White House officials would not say whether Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had prepared together.

Commission members say they believe that they are under no formal time limit for the interview. Although the White House had offered one hour each for interviews of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, they dropped that as part of an accord in which the president and vice president could be interviewed together.

The panel chairman, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, a Republican, said White House officials had not told him that the questioning would have to be cut off at a specific time.

"The only thing they've told me so far," Mr. Kean said in an interview last week, "is to please respect the fact that this is the president of the United States, and I'm sure members of the commission will do that."

Former Representative Timothy J. Roemer, a Democrat on the panel, said: "I believe that it is very important that we get all 10 commissioners in the process. We should make sure that all 10 commissioners have ample opportunity to ask questions. I certainly have a lot of questions and probably not a lot of time to ask them."

Mr. Roemer noted that "we were able to get about four hours with former President Bill Clinton and three" with former Vice President Al Gore and that Bob Woodward spoke more than three hours with Mr. Bush for his Iraq war book.

"I don't know that the metric should be what Bob Woodward got on the Iraq war," Mr. Roemer said. "But certainly the seriousness of 3,000 people dying on 9/11 would suggest that we need ample time."

Mr. Kean said the panel would focus on Sept. 11, but he would not be more specific. Members have said they want to know about interactions among Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other officials on Sept. 11 and, specifically, when Mr. Bush issued an order letting military pilots down civilian airliners. The commission is investigating whether the order was relayed quickly to fighter pilots who might have had a chance to shoot an American Airlines jet before it struck the Pentagon.

Mr. Roemer said he wanted "to know about the sense of urgency in the administration in the summer" in dealing with a flood of reports about terrorist threats, "the time period when alarm bells were going off and people's hair was supposed to be on fire." He said testimony to the panel suggested that many people in the administration paid too little attention to terrorism that summer.

Mr. Kean said he was humbled to be part of the session. "This is real history," he said. "Presidents just don't do this. Presidents don't meet with commissions like this."

Mr. Kean added that the panel had no ground rules but was asking its staff to prepare essential questions. - http://nytimes.com/2004/04/28...

ILLEGITIMATE DUBYA WILL TRY TO RIG THE ELECTION AGAIN: ONLY WAY ARM-CHAIR CHICKEN-HAWK CAN WIN!

04.28.04 (11:12 am) [edit]

[b]Bush hiring perl programmers to rig election [/b]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 10:13:31AM +0000, Michael Styer wrote:
Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:
And, the mere fact that a politician has friends who work in
corporations, or that a politican once worked for a corporation, doesn't
by any means prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that said politician is
biased in favor of said corporation. One would need a lot more evidence
to prove that, I think.

the best evidence that any politician favours any special interest group
is what they actually do when they're in power. for instance, the wars
fought by the bush administration have given us abundant evidence that
they favour oil and military corporations.

it also helps if you can find statements by the politicians (or at least
by their close allies) that fit the facts of what they've actually done
and explain their strategy. even if they're not keen to draw attention
to their real aims, few policies are formulated entirely in secret. for
instance, the bush administration seems to be carrying out the policies
proposed by the Project for the New American Century (whose statement of
principles was supported by cheney and rumsfeld):
http://www.newamericancentury.org/" title="http://www.newamericancentury.org/" target="_blank"http://www.newamericancentury... .

a politician's personal connections to some corporations is another kind
of secondary evidence; it would indeed be a little questionable if it
were the *only* evidence. however, before a politician has been elected
for the first time, there's less solid evidence to go on, so this kind
of evidence becomes more important. it's also more convincing if all
the evidence points the same way, i.e. if the politician, many of their
family and friends, and most of their administration, and *their*
families and friends, all have the same kinds of interests.

Good example : the brother in law of Osama Ben Laden, who owns a part of
Houston's airport (thanks to the Bush family) (or is it Dallas'
airport?), is a good friend of the president (or used to be). Thus,
before 9/11, Bush repeated to the CIA : don't annoy the good Ben Laden
people and their Saudi friends with your investigations, I'm telling you
that they're with us -- instead of letting the CIA doing its job
propertly and maybe prevent (part of) the 9/11 attack.

A couple of remarkable claims here... 9/11 is Bush's fault because he
knows someone who married into the Bin Laden family? or because Bush told
the CIA not to investigate things it would otherwise have definitely
uncovered?

it's possible that bush interfered with investigations of the bin laden
family in a way that made 9/11 more likely to happen. if so, he would
indeed bear some responsiblity for that.

the fact that there are close business ties between the bush family and
the bin laden family does not prove that such interference took place:
it is no more than very weak evidence for it. nor does the fact that
bush has tried to prevent investigation of 9/11: there are plenty of
different explanations for what facts he might not want to come out, or
he might just want to be left free to make up explanations (e.g. to
blame 9/11 on whomever he wants to attack next). the fact that the bush
administration allowed and helped the members of the bin laden family
who were in the US on 9/11 to leave the country quickly is a little more
specific - it was a decision that frustrating investigation of the bin
ladens was more important than promoting investigation of 9/11 - but
again there are various possible explanations for their motives.

Seriously, the intelligence failures and reluctance to act that enabled
9/11 to happen started long before Dubya got anywhere near the house on
PA avenue. He only took office in Jan 2001 and Al Quaeda was active
around the world and in the US long before that. While we're ascribing
blame for this let's not let Clinton off the hook. Or Dubya's father, who
after all was at one time head of the CIA.

we don't even know that intelligence failures and so forth allowed 9/11
to happen. if some people are determined to commit such a crime, and
prepared to sacrifice their own lives in the process, then it is
possible that they will succeed even if everything sensible is done to
try and stop them.

doubtless, investigations were flawed before the current administration
took office. the current administration are also not the only US
interests who have ties to the bin ladens, or to other powerful saudis.

more culpable than investigating al qaeda ineffectively is funding,
arming and training them. that started during the carter administration
- at least for groups similar to al qaeda; i am not sure if al qaeda
itself started during the carter or the reagan administration.

however, the current administration *are* the only administration who
have failed to investigate 9/11. bringing anybody who planned 9/11
(other than those who are already dead) to justice would be one
(imperfect) way to try to prevent something similar happening again. we
still don't know if there was anyone other than the hijackers who knew
what was being planned.

finally, the surest way to avoid atrocities like 9/11 is not to motivate
people to attack you - *providing* you can do that without compromizing
your principles. in this case, it appears that the motivation was the
continued presence of US troops in saudi arabia. they should not be
there anyway. - http://london.pm.org/pipermai...

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS BUSH: "I'M TOO SCARED, I'LL PISS IN MY PANTS!"

04.28.04 (11:05 am) [edit]

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS BUSH: "POPPY GOT ME OUT: NOW I CAN DRINK-N-SLUT!"

04.28.04 (11:04 am) [edit]

EVEN PATRIOTIC REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS ARE OPPOSED TO DUBYA'S BUDGET FIASCO & RAPE OF AMERICA

04.28.04 (11:00 am) [edit]

[b]A Task of Moderation[/b]

A thin but resistant line of moderate Republicans is reported to be still holding out for some budget responsibility in the Senate. We can only offer them encouragement, and congratulations for sensing voters' rising concern over the red ink being generated across the decade by President Bush's tax-cut mania. At issue is a resolution of differences between rival budget plans. House Republicans are pressing for an open-ended acceptance of the president's deficit-stoking approach, which fails to raise revenue to the level of the nation's rising expenditures. In the Senate, on the other hand, Democrats and four G.O.P. moderates have passed a proposal that demands the return of pay-as-you-go discipline.

We urge the Senate moderates to resist the behind-the-scenes deal-making and arm-twisting, and to keep insisting on basic fiscal responsibility. At a time of military conflict and enormous expenses for homeland security, the Republican-led Congress has generally ignored the need to match spending with revenue in passing the president's $1.7 trillion tax cuts. Now the Senate proposes to apply pay-as-you-go budgeting to tax-cut decisions as well as to spending. This approach � forcing lawmakers to come up with responsible offsets for lost revenue and increased spending � was the core budgetary mechanism of the 1990's that moved the nation to surpluses from alarming deficits.

The House Republicans' strategy is to outflank the Senate negotiators and produce a watered-down compromise with no fiscal muscle. The task of the four moderates � John McCain, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Lincoln Chafee � remains clear: holding fast. - http://nytimes.com/2004/04/28...

EVEN PATRIOTIC REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS ARE TURNING AGAINST DUBYA'S BUDGET FIASCO AND RAPE OF AMERICA

04.28.04 (10:59 am) [edit]

REPUBLICAN SENATOR SLAMS BUSH FOR BEING A DIPLOMATIC BUFFOON-N-FAILURE!!!

04.28.04 (10:38 am) [edit]

[b]Lugar chides Bush for diplomacy flaws[/b]

Deft diplomacy will be needed when the United States seeks a U.N. resolution to endorse its plan to transfer power in Iraq, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said Monday, but within the Bush administration, "diplomacy is deficient."

President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was opposed by many countries, including several who are represented in the U.N. Security Council. Until his recent shift to seek a U.N. resolution for on the transfer of power, Bush has resisted a significant role for the international organization in reconstructing Iraq.

"Even if the decisions are correct, the diplomacy is deficient," Lugar said at a breakfast with Washington reporters. "By that I simply mean not many people agree with us, or like us or are prepared to work with us. That will really have to change."

He laid the responsibility for the poor international relations at Bush's doorstep.

"It starts with the president and proceeds, really, through the Cabinet and those who are advising him. Each administration has to determine which kind of tone it wants to establish in these matters, and that obviously starts with the president," he said.

In addition to improving U.S. relations with the United Nations, Lugar said, the Bush administration will have to explain to voters why it has changed its view about the United Nations' appropriate role and deal with the growing anti-American sentiment in Iraq.

"Americans will say why in the world should the French and Russians . . . after we have done all the fighting, have all the people on the ground, have paid all the money, why should they have a say in this? But then we're back to square one, where is where our administration has been until a short time ago, which is that they shouldn't have any say," Lugar said.

"When you see the polling of the Iraqis now, they don't like us; they resent our being there," he said. Asked whether the United States should leave immediately, Lugar said, "They say no, but they don't want the U.S. there any longer than you have to be - and that's among the more benign people, not the insurgents."

Lugar, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has been nudging the Bush White House since before the war started to also have a plan for postwar Iraq. Although Lugar is well regarded on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington for his foreign policy expertise, recent news analyses have painted him as largely ignored by the Bush administration.

He did not dispute that characterization at the hour-long meeting with journalists.

"They're going to have to determine, really, who they want to have around the table," he said. "I do not purport to have played a significant role in those talks."

Lugar said he has had only one long conversation with Bush - 90 minutes when the two traveled to Indiana last fall on Air Force One.

But even if the White House doesn't solicit his advice, Lugar said, he has evidence that Bush and other top officials take note of his comments, although they don't necessarily take his advice.

For instance, Lugar said, the day after he said the June 30 deadline should be reconsidered, Bush publicly said it was a firm date; and when Lugar said it was important for the White House to name an ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte was nominated within days; and that when Lugar said it was important to conduct a hearing on Negroponte's nomination quickly, the administration initially said it would take more time, then agreed to an earlier date.

Nevertheless, he said, "the administration people have kept their counsel. The suggestion has been that perhaps I might be more intrusive. Sort of go down to the White House and hammer on the door and say, 'I'm here, and we ought to be talking.' " - http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/...

REPUBLICAN SENATOR SLAMS BUSH FOR BEING A DIPLOMATIC BUFFOON-N-FAILURE!!!

04.28.04 (10:37 am) [edit]

GIVE US WHAT WE WANT: AN END TO THE MAD KING GEORGE & NEO-CON NEO-NAZIS!!!!!

04.28.04 (10:34 am) [edit]

[b]THIS IS WHAT THE MAD KING GEORGE HAS GIVEN US: WARFARE, DEATH AND MISERY ...

Remembering the fallen[/b]

May 1st is the one-year anniversary of George Bush's Top Gun performance aboard the aircraft carrier, when he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. To highlight this now infamous day, Military Families Speak Out and Veterans for Peace will be holding a vigil/demonstration in Washington, D.C. to call for an end to the war. To learn more about the protest, contact folks at the MFSO.

Coincidentally or otherwise, on the eve of this anniversary, Apr. 30, ABC's "Nightline" will air an entire program dedicated to reading out the names of the U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, accompanied by the photos of the fallen. Due to the limited time available, anchor Ted Koppel will only read the names of the 523 men and women killed in combat. An ABC spokesman denied any intent to send a political message, and said that the special program was "purely a tribute." - http://www.alternet.org/waron...

CRIMINAL VEEP-N-CREEP DICKY-BOY CHENEY: WHAT DOES HE HAVE TO HIDE??? PLENTY!!!

04.28.04 (10:14 am) [edit]

[b]Vice President Cheney Hiding Energy Task Force Secrets[/b]

Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated attempts to block disclosure of activities from his 2001 energy task force reached the Supreme Court yesterday. Despite two federal court rulings against these efforts, the administration continues to insist the American public has no business knowing about the involvement of corporate executives like Ken Lay of Enron in shaping the nation's energy policy.

[b]1. Cheney demands that Americans � who pay his salary and allow him to be in office � stay out of his business.[/b] Cheney needs to realize he is no longer CEO of Halliburton. He serves the public first and foremost and has a duty to inform Americans about the development of his energy recommendations.

[b]2. If the administration has nothing to hide, it should release all of the task force information and let the public decide on its own. [/b]The vice president's extraordinary efforts to conceal the task force activities do not fit with his claims that there is nothing to hide. Let the public decide what influence former Enron CEO Ken Lay and other energy industry executives had in shaping the nation's energy policy.

[b]3. The administration's energy plan is bad for Americans and a windfall for energy companies. [/b] The energy blueprint is a clear handout to the energy sector and does little to address long term energy needs. It increases domestic oil production, recommends opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and aims to expand oil and natural gas development on other federal lands. The task force also promotes coal production over other alternative, and cleaner, energy sources.

[b]The Center for American Progress[/b], http://www.americanprogress.o...

CRIMINAL VEEP-N-CREEP DICKY-BOY CHENEY: WHAT DOES HE HAVE TO HIDE??? PLENTY!!!

04.28.04 (10:12 am) [edit]

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS BUSH: "I WANT MORE PARTIES, BOOZE & CHICKS!"

04.28.04 (10:06 am) [edit]

NEO-CON WARMONGERING: THE BLOODY COST!!!

04.28.04 (10:03 am) [edit]

[b]The Bloody Cost[/b]

Here's another bit of evidence that when the United States condones the bloody ways of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Americans pay for it with their blood.

I never saw this reported in the mainstream media, but libertarian Justin Raimondo quotes a group that claims credit for the murder and mutilation of four American mercenaries in Fallujah.

"This is a gift from the people of Fallujah to the people of Palestine and the family of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin who was assassinated by the criminal Zionists," said the statement from the Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin. "We advise the U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq and we advise the families of the American soldiers and the contractors not to come to Iraq."

The United States cannot stop Sharon from assassinating people. When President Bush demanded that Sharon withdraw his military forces from the West Bank, Sharon showed Bush the utmost contempt by ignoring him. However, the United States could join the rest of the world in condemning assassinations. But Bush does not have the guts to do it. He swallowed Sharon's calculated insult and, publicly humiliated, smiled like a little boy.

A real man would have called Sharon and said: "Look, Mister, you've got 24 hours to pull those troops out of the occupied areas. If you don't, I'm cutting off all U.S. aid to Israel immediately, and I will instruct the ambassador to the United Nations to inform other members of the Security Council that the United States will no longer veto any resolutions directed against Israel. Furthermore, if you think your Israeli lobby can change my mind, call the lobbyists up and ask them how they will feel if the president of the United States goes on national television and raises the subject of dual loyalty. You seemed to be confused as to who the dog is and who the tail is. Well, I'm here to tell you that I'm the dog and you're the tail, and you're damned close to getting chopped off."

Alas, there is no man in the White House.

Americans ought to hang their heads in shame that every candidate for national office feels obliged to pay public obeisance to and pledge undying support for a foreign country about the size of New Jersey. It's time Americans started asking these bozos: "Just what office are you running for: president of the United States or deputy prime minister of Israel? And whose interests do you put first � those of the United States or those of Israel?"

It ought to be a source of shame that Congress hands Israel a gift of $3 billion every year when there is neither a state nor a municipality in this country that isn't hurting for revenue. Israel has a high standard of living. It has more F-16s than any country in the world except the United States. It has modern tanks and nuclear weapons. In short, it does not need the coerced charity of the American taxpayers.

Everything I've said about Israel would apply to any other foreign country. The point is, the United States should not allow any foreign country to exert undue influence on its internal affairs and on its policies. If the Japanese, the French or the Germans tried to influence American elections the way the Israeli lobby does, Americans would be outraged. Well, the principle applies to everyone.

Those Americans who say to politicians "My vote depends on your support for Israel" ought to stop and examine their conscience. Which country are they a citizen of? Which country commands their loyalty?

As for President Bush, he should realize that every time he condones Sharon's crimes, some young Americans will pay for it with their lives. It is because of Bush's blind support for Sharon, a right-wing extremist with blood on his hands, that hatred for America grows in the Arab world. We don't need that. We should cut the apron strings and let Israel fend for itself.

[b]Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column three times a week for King Features, which is carried on Antiwar.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner.[/b] - http://www.antiwar.com/reese/...

NEO-CON WARMONGERING: THE BLOODY COST!!!

04.28.04 (10:02 am) [edit]

NEOCONSERVATISM VERSUS LIBERTARIANISM: THEY'RE POLAR OPPOSITES!!!

04.28.04 (9:59 am) [edit]

[b]Neoconservatism Versus Libertarianism

They're Polar Opposites!!![/b]

Oh, how the neocons are squirming, and turning somersaults over Iraq, a performance the sight of which would be almost a pleasure to behold if not for the steep price of admission. New York Times columnist David Brooks' soddily defiant mea culpa � which we covered in the last installment of this column � was preceded by the editors of National Review, who claim to have now gotten "a glimpse of he abyss in Iraq," as their editorial of April the 16th put it. In a line that begs the question "look who's talking," they had the nerve to complain that:

"[i]Since the conclusion of the war, the Bush administration has shown a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations[/i],"

And, they complain,

"[i]Every piece of good news has been hailed as turning the corner, even as the insurgency has remained stubbornly strong[/i]."

This from a magazine that has consistently served as a conduit for administration propaganda, that constantly plumbed for war, and that, a year ago, ran an article by the classicist scholar and warmonger of note Victor Davis Hanson, in which he wrote:

"[i]In general, the media has now gone from the hysteria of the Armageddon of Afghanistan to the quagmire of Iraq to the looting in Baghdad � the only constant is slanted coverage, mistaken analysis, and the absence of any contriteness about being in error and in error in such a manner that reflected so poorly upon themselves and damaged the country at large at a time of war. It is as if only further bad news could serve as a sort of catharsis that might at least cleanse them of any unease about being so wrong so predictably and so often[/i]. "

Whose analysis is "mistaken" now? Whose errors have damaged the country at large? Every bit of bad news, over the months, all the indications of impending disaster, have been routinely dismissed by National Review's writers as due to "media bias," the consequence of an antiwar conspiracy to hide the real truth about our supposed success in Iraq.

Ah, but suddenly there appears an abyss�.! I'd like to push Victor Davis Hanson and the editors of National Review into it head first.

The editors of National Review led a smear campaign against conservatives and libertarians who opposed the war, deeming them "Unpatriotic Conservatives," and yet now these same people are repeating the arguments of Patrick J. Buchanan, Lew Rockwell, myself, adopting the paleoconservatives critique of "democratic" imperialism. Like Brooks, the National Review editorial makes some minor criticisms of the Bush policy as imperialism "on the cheap," but the main problem, as far as they are concerned, is:

"[i]An intellectual mistake made prior to the occupation: an underestimation in general of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is fundamentally still a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny. This was largely, if not entirely, a Wilsonian mistake. The Wilsonian tendency has grown stronger in conservative foreign-policy thought in recent years, with both benefits (idealism should occupy an important place in American foreign policy, and almost always has) and drawbacks (as we have seen in Iraq, the world isn't as malleable as some Wilsonians would have it)."[/i]

One can hardly find anything in this with which to disagree � except to note that one of the biggest and most energetic promoters of this mistaken Wilsonian tendency has been none other than National Review. What else is one to make of Michael Ledeen's constant paeans to the glories of what he calls "creative destruction" in the Middle East, and countless articles in that magazine urging the extension of the war into Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and beyond? Wasn't it Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, who infamously suggested the nuking of Mecca as a prelude to the occupation of Saudi Arabia. I suppose one could claim that the mindset of Lowry and his co-thinkers and fellow editors owes more to Dr. Strangelove than to Woodrow Wilson, but this hardly exculpatory. Second only to The Weekly Standard, none have been louder or more consistent in calling for war in the Middle East than National Review.

What is appalling is the utter dishonesty of their arguments: yesterday, Pat Buchanan was an "unpatriotic conservative" for making the very same arguments against the neoconservative's democracy fetish as National Review now borrows and claims as its own. It was Buchanan, after all, who recently wrote:

"[i]Bush's world democratic revolution is Wilsonian imperialism, which contains an inherent and perhaps fatal contradiction. Imperialism means we decide the government a nation will have and how its foreign policy shall be oriented. Democracy means they decide. What do we do if we impose democracy on Iraq, and the Iraqis use their freedom to vote to throw us out and confront Israel and claim Kuwait as their long-lost province?"[/i]

Buchanan wrote that in the beginning of April, but he had been saying it long before the wisdom of the principle ever dawned on the editors of National Review. In 1999, he outlined what he called a "New Americanism":

"[i]We need a new foreign policy rooted neither in the Wilsonian Utopianism of the Democrat Party nor the Pax Americana of the Republican think tanks and little magazines, a policy that reflects the goodness and greatness of this Republic, but also an awareness that we were not put on this earth to lord it over other nations. The true third way is a New Americanism that puts America first, but 'goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,' that defends America's freedom, frontiers, citizens, security, and vital interests, but harbors no desire to impose our vision on any other people[/i]."

Yet, for embracing this anti-Wilsonian skepticism, Buchanan was smeared by David Frum, in National Review, as a "defeatist" and I was attacked by Frum as a spoke on the axis of evil, who wrote that the paleoconservative critics of Bush's war policy are "yearning for defeat." He cites a piece by Eric Margolis, and then goes on to attack me:

"[i]Raimondo was more explicit still on March 12, 2003. Speaking of the negative consequences he foresaw of even a successful American campaign in Iraq, he wrote: 'It is a high price to pay for 'victory' � so high that patriots might almost be forgiven if they pine for defeat[/i].'"

Having pushed America into the Iraqi abyss, Frum and his neoconservative buddies blame me for making the prescient point that the only direction we can go is rapidly downward.

Of course,[i] they [/i]bear no responsibility. It's the Iraqis' fault � they aren't civilized enough to appreciate their own liberation. The White House is to blame: The President isn't sending enough troops, he isn't spending enough money. It's the Pentagon that's at fault: the generals aren't expending enough American � and Iraqi � lives. The solution, as the editors of National Review aver, is to hunker down and fall back on the principle of naked brutality:

"[i]In light of recent events, however, we should downplay expectations. If we leave Iraq in some sort of orderly condition, with some sort of legitimate non-dictatorial government and a roughly working economy, we will be doing very well. The first step toward that goal is dealing harshly with our enemies[/i]."

The National Review solution is blood and iron. They entitled their manifesto "An End to Illusion," but whose illusions are they talking about? Theirs? Ours? Perhaps both. Reconciled to the reality � that our crusade in Iraq is a futile one � the last remnants of what had once been the conservative movement are reduced to the simple pleasures: "dealing harshly" with their perceived "enemies." Especially their enemies on the home front.

And that, I'm afraid, is really the whole point.

What, one has to ask, was the purpose the Iraq war, if not to neutralize Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, or to punish him for his alleged links to Al Qaeda? Why are we in Iraq � and poised to enter into Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and the steppes of Central Asia?

The rising tide of bloodshed, the spiraling costs, the atmosphere of anticipatory terror in which we all live � what is it all for? I would suggest that, of all the items at the top of the neoconservative agenda � the defense of Israel, the elimination of the so-called "Vietnam syndrome," the goal of "benevolent world hegemony," as Bill Kristol describes the goal of American foreign policy, the defeat of an amorphous "terrorist threat" that seems to include any and all who resist the advance of American power � the real goal is much closer to home. What the neocons are after is the final overthrow of our old republic, and the completion of the transition to Empire.

I have spoken, today, of the neocons, short for neoconservatives, as if their identity and politics were not problematic. But who are these guys, anyway � and what do they believe? I have covered this topic not only in my columns, but in my first book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. (A book that is now, alas, out of print.) And so I won't repeat myself here, except to say that this small but very influential sect of public intellectuals traces its origins to the radical left-wing of American politics. They started out as Trotskyites, morphed into Scoop Jackson Democrats, and, in the 1980s, found themselves in the right wing of the Republican party. Their theme, as long as the cold war lasted, had always been a bellicose foreign policy, animated by an obsessive hatred of their old enemies in the Kremlin. But with the implosion of the Red Empire, their raison d'etre was radically abbreviated: adrift in the post-cold war era, the neocon movement seemed to wither on the vine, and was fast losing ground to a new "isolationism" � that is, a new awareness that it was time to the U.S. government to start putting America and Americans first. The Republican leadership opposed the Kosovo war, and was critical of every one of Bill Clinton's foreign adventures. Many conservatives were close to endorsing non-interventionism in principle.

Then came 9/11.

Their foreign policy, an unrestrained push for American dominance, had been a hard sell in the initial years of the post-cold war era, and their domestic agenda � dubbed "national greatness" conservatism, seemed far too grandiose for most. America, they argued, was enjoying what the columnist Charles Krauthammer called "the unipolar moment," that is, unrivaled power on the world scene that caused the French to invent a new and slightly derisive label us: the hyperpower, i.e. a power that was so far above all others that it ascended to a whole new level. The US, argued Krauthammer, and others, had to seize this moment before it passed. Global hegemony was within our reach: we had only to reach out and grasp it. to realize all the dreams of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon combined.

This mindset was ready � nay, eager! � to embrace the post-9/11 principles of preemptive warfare and civilizational conflict, having formulated them long before. They moved with stunning speed to secure public support for policies that would normally be considered outrageous, and, while the nation was still numb with shock, started planning the Iraq war before the smoke had cleared from the skies over lower Manhattan.

Both Bob Woodward and former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, in their respective books, detail the story of how Cheney and Wolfowitz wanted to strike Iraq immediately after the World Trade Towers were hit, and the war planning began soon afterward, in November of 2001. Woodward details the testimony of Colin Powell, who was shocked to find that Cheney and his neocon minions had set up what Powell called "a separate government," bypassing the elaborate system of institutional checks and balances, as well as congressional oversight, and manufactured the case for war out of whole cloth.

In a fascinating article in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described the mysterious origins and functions of a semi-secret Pentagon sub-agency, the "Office of Special Plans," that fed raw intelligence of dubious provenance to a complicit White House and an even more gullible public, in what amounted to a systematic campaign of lies designed to push, cajole, and ultimately trick us into war.

This is all coming out now, and one big benefit to my job as editorial director of Antiwar.com is that I get to read the news of this as it comes off the wire. The neocons are � finally � getting their come-uppance. To which one can only add: Glory, glory, hallelujah!

But it's too early to celebrate quite yet. The neocons may be discredited, that is, exposed as lying manipulators with a positively creepy obsession with bloodlust and a fixation on the Middle East. But they are far from defeated. Their main mission �getting us into Iraq � has succeeded. The United States is in there for at least a decade, if not more � and the terrorist threat is not ameliorated, but increased.

The sense that we are living in an emergency, in the midst of a crisis, is essential to the strategy of the neocons in gaining and keeping power. In the realm of foreign policy, it justifies our rampage through the Middle East, and all the aggressive posturing that they love. The end of history is postponed indefinitely.

It is on the home front, however, that the real battle is being waged, and it is on this battleground that the neocons show their true colors, coming out of the closet, so to speak, as what Claes Ryn and Paul Craig Roberts describe as "neo-Jacobins." The original Jacobins were the most radical � and bloodthirsty � faction of the French Revolution, and when they gained power they set up the guillotine in the public square, created a police state, and launched a furious pogrom that ended only when Robespierre met his end on the very guillotine to which he had condemned thousands.

As the Robespierre of the neocons, George W. Bush is leading the charge to abridge if not abolish the Bill of Rights � and sweep away the last remnants of constitutional government in America. Pushing the lie that our government didn't have the authority or the resources to stop a terrorist conspiracy that was years in the making, Bush not only wants to renew but to extend the odious "Patriot" Act, which translates the principle of preemptive war to the domestic scene. Government snoops can now read your email, as well as your snail mail, secretly search your home, lock you up without pressing any specific charges and hold you indefinitely � all without judicial oversight, which is merely perfunctory mandates acquiescence in the name of the "national emergency."

The state of permanent emergency, created by a foreign policy that makes enemies aplenty, justifies, in turn, a rollback of civil liberties on the home front � and, of course, crushing taxation. War is the health of the State � this libertarian maxim, originally penned by the great turn-of-the-last-century classical liberal , Randolph Bourne, is grimly illustrated by recent events.

This is why libertarians oppose the war plans of our leaders, and why libertarianism is the polar opposite of neoconservatism. The tendency of war is to centralize economic and political power, to intrude the long arm of government into every sector of the private sphere, to militarize and regiment society and enforce uniformity of thought. George W. Bush's program of perpetual war, in effect, means the overthrow of our old republic. In sounding the call to do battle against an amorphous and omnipresent enemy that cannot be defeated for at least a generation, he is sounding the death knell of the America political idea, which is of a government strictly limited by custom and the Constitution.

We are the last defenders of that idea left standing.

I say we, and let me take a moment, here, to explain where I'm coming from. I was a libertarian before there was a libertarian party, recruited to the movement in the days when libertarianism existed as a small but energetic faction of the larger conservative movement. We didn't have any magazines, or any thinktanks � aside from the relatively small Foundation for Economic Education � or any real national group. All we had were a few newsletters, most of them mimeographed, not printed, and a large group of us, mostly students, were in the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (known as YAF), where we were a vocal and visible presence.

We saw how the George W. Bush of our era � Richard M. Nixon � escalated the war in Vietnam even as he instituted wage-and-price controls. The Republicans, we learned back then, were the party of war and Big Government � and the two inevitably went hand-in-hand. Today, history is repeating itself � and, if the first time was as tragedy, then the second time is farce of truly monumental proportions.

Although I am no longer a member of the Libertarian Party, I was active in the party for roughly a decade, from the presidential campaign of Roger MacBride to that of Ed Clark, the mid-Seventies to the mid-Eighties, and so being invited to speak here is, for me, a special treat. It gives me the chance to say what I have always wanted to say to my � well, I won't say comrades, because that word has unfortunate historical connotations � but you get the idea. And what I want to say is this:

This country needs a strong libertarian party, a party of liberty, as never before in its history. Perhaps not since the first American libertarians decided they'd had enough of the English King and decided to venture out on their own. Whether we have to take the course they took, at Lexington and Concord, and take back our country from a conniving cabal through means not limited to the ballot box remains to be seen. That, however, is the worst case scenario, and, I am more of an optimist, by nature, than that.

The American people are not easily pushed around, or at least not so easily as the neocons seem to think The conniving cabal that pulled off a veritable coup d'etat, and dragged us into war, is now being exposed, and one thing they don't like is the spotlight. That is one of Antiwar.com's greatest achievements, I am proud to say: the perfidious role of the neocons, formerly obscure, is now common knowledge.

My very first article posted on Antiwar.com, back in the early 1990s, was a screed exposing their key role as the sparkplug of the War Party, the energizing factor behind the push to involve us in conflicts from Kosovo to Cairo. Back then, hardly anyone knew what I was talking about. Today their history as the troublesome catalyst for much of the conflict in the world is well-known. While the neocons deny their own existence, generally, and deride such political folklore as a "conspiracy theory," and worse, the degree to which our present peril has been traced back to them was brought home to me the other day when I was talking politics with my mailman.

"Oh, this war," he said � it was all the handiwork of "those neocons!"

Yes, the world doesn't want for bad guys, these days. There seems to be an oversupply of evil on the market. But who are the good guys? Or, rather, where are they?

For the most part, I am sad to say, libertarians have not played the key role they ought to be playing during this crucial time. As we face the greatest threat to our liberties since the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the machinations of the Federalist Party, a few have played exemplary roles as individuals. I am thinking here of people like James Bovard, whose book, Terrorism and Tyranny, has done much to expose the statist agenda behind the War Party's fulminations. I am thinking of Karen Kwiatkowski, whose inside account of the shenanigans engaged in by the Office of Special Plans preceded the revelations of Richard Clarke and Colin Powell via Bob Woodward. I am thinking of the dedicated staff and governing board of Antiwar.com, which gave libertarians a platform from which to address an audience of 50,000-plus daily.

But as an organized movement, a party � the party of liberty � libertarians have taken no leadership role in the fightback. At a time when libertarians ought to be providing political as well as ideological leadership to the variegated forces that oppose this war, our voice has sometimes been equivocal. The Libertarian Party has acted as if all issues are equally important, and given the question of war and peace no more attention than they would the privatization of garbage collection or the abolition of local sales taxes. If any war has seemed to concern them above all others, it is the so-called "war on drugs."

In short, libertarians have good ideas, but they lack any strategic sense. They don't know how to prioritize, and often they just refuse to. A good example is the decision to invite noted warmonger and Bush defender Neal Boortz as a major speaker at the LP National Convention � on the grounds that his general opposition to government regulation, and especially gun control laws, overrides (or renders irrelevant) his disagreement with the official position of the party on the war, the "PATRIOT" Act, and the growing prospect of future overseas conflicts.

This is a grave error, one that will ensure that the great opportunities presented by the current crisis will pass us right by. We aren't Republicans, and haven't been since Nixon bombed Cambodia, cut the last links between legal tender and gold, and ushered in the era of Republican Big Government, and we have to stop pretending otherwise. Of course, we aren't Democrats, either, but their constituency � antiwar, pro-civil liberties, anti-neocon � is clearly up for grabs. John Kerry is positioning himself to the right of Bush on foreign policy: he not only refuses to call for an exit strategy in Iraq, but talks about how we're "trying to do it on the cheap." We have to really get in there and "nation-build," he says. But the whole point is that it isn't our nation to build.

Americans don't want an Empire on which the sun never sets: they broke away from such an entity on the occasion of their birth as a nation, and it isn't in their character to want one of their own. Opposition to this war, and the foreign policy that made it inevitable, is running high: more than half the people oppose it. Yet both "major" party candidates support the war, the "nation-building," the pernicious idea that we can or should "pay any price, bear any burden," as John F. Kennedy put it during the cold war era � pernicious because the price is our liberty, our unique identity as Americans.

Ralph Nader shows some promise: he has started out his campaign by attacking Bush as a "messianic militarist," and calling for "a date certain" for a US withdrawal from Iraq, suggesting that we set a deadline of six months from now. This is derided by the "majors" as hopeless radicalism, and both Bush and Kerry denounced it as irresponsible, yet it is a stance taken by as much as half the voters, whose position goes unrepresented by either of the two parties.

Where is the Libertarian Party in all this? If the LP is going to survive well into the 21st century, it must make a focused and energetic appeal to antiwar sentiment, and the growing number of voters for whom this is the most important issue, some 35 percent. But Nader is stealing what ought to be our thunder. While the LP engages in a protracted internal discussion and nominating procedure, Nader is already on the campaign trail, tying up the third party vote.

Okay, so the presidential sweepstakes is largely symbolic, a publicity-generating device which is supposed to benefit local candidates. But what kind of local races is the LP running? In California, where I've lived for the past 30-plus years, the party is fielding a full slate of candidates for � local Water Boards, local Community College Boards, and a host of other obscure elected offices � hardly the sort of races that lend themselves to discussions of foreign policy. But why not run for Congress, in races where both "major' candidates represent the two-party consensus on the war and our interventionist foreign policy? During the Vietnam war era, independent peace candidates running in general elections as well as Democratic primaries gained a real electoral foothold and, with a little sustained effort, might have cultivated a solid political base.

Certainly the Libertarian Party represents nothing if not a sustained effort. What is lacking is political imagination, and a basic strategic sense. For over 30 years, the LP has held high the banner of liberty every election season, hoping against hope that, this year, they'd make the big breakthrough and garner national attention. It has yet to happen, but if it ever does, it is bound to be in a time of tumult very much like the year 2004. The opportunity is there, but is the leadership?

The answer is not yet clear.

Outreach � it's on the agenda at all the national and state LP committee meetings, but it has no living embodiment. The primary party publication, the LP News, a monthly newspaper, is typically devoted to the arcane world of the party itself: so-and-so did this, that party official said this, blah blah blah, of no possible interest to anyone unless they are already a member � and to a precious few of those.

To read the LP News, you'd never know there was a war on, You'd never know that this has been the bloodiest month of the war so far, with the prospect of more looming as an immediate likelihood. In the literature and public pronouncements of the LP there is scant mention of the most important issue we are all facing, and that is the question of war and peace.

Most people don't sit down and decide which ideology to adopt, like buying a new suit and trying on different styles systematically and consciously. People are rarely recruited into an ideological movement on the basis of pure abstractions. What actually occurs is that they gradually come to accept its precepts and authority as they see the power of its ideas in action.

There is only one way forward for the libertarian movement, and that is as the catalyst of a mass-based, non-leftist antiwar movement, fiercely dedicated to the defense of civil liberties and organized outside the two "major" parties � albeit not without making inroads on each. We also have to begin to recruit from the Left as well as the Right. Young people today are not attracted to Marxism, but to anarchism of the left-wing variety. The question of how these young lefties are going to achieve a society that is at once property-less and State-less is a conundrum that ought to baffle them, if only it is brought to their attention. Unfortunately, they never get to hear such arguments, since libertarians are so busy playing footsie with Neal Boortz and the Republicans.

Libertarianism, as it comes of age politically, is bound to reassert itself as an ideology that goes beyond "left" and "right." These archaic categories, based on the seating arrangements in the French Parliament circa 1790, serve only to mask the real ideological divide in this country � but that is another lecture altogether, and, I fear, a much longer one �.

[b]Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author of [i]Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan[/i]), (1993), and [i]Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans [/i](1996). He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of[i] An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard[/i][/b]. - http://www.antiwar.com/justin...

KIPLING'S BRUTAL EPITAPH: WE'VE GOT A NAIVE & MURDEROUS FOOL IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

04.28.04 (9:50 am) [edit]

[b]Kipling's Brutal Epitaph [/b]

At Versailles in 1919, delegates of four of the five victorious powers arrived with cold, clear ideas of what they must bring home.

Japan demanded and got Germany's islands north of the equator and Shantung in China. Italy demanded and got the Austrian South Tyrol, but was denied Fiume on the Adriatic, and left embittered.

France got Alsace-Lorraine, African colonies, Lebanon and Syria. But, above all, Clemenceau wanted Germany driven off the west bank of the Rhine, forced to rebuild war-ravaged France, stripped of lands and people and so weakened she would never threaten Paris again.

Lloyd George got Tanganyika, Transjordan, Palestine, Iraq, the Kaiser's fleet and a treaty guarantee Germany would never again be allowed to build a navy that could imperil the nation or empire.

What did America get? In his war message, Wilson had said, "(W)e shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts � for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free."

He had plunged us into the greatest war in history for abstract ideals. "We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make."

All very noble. We asked for nothing and got nothing, save 116,000 dead, a $25 billion debt and the ingratitude of Allies we rescued who mocked us as "Uncle Shylock" when we asked them to pay their war debts.

What causes one to recall this brief history is the clear echo of Wilsonian utopianism in the president's press conference of April 13. Pressed as to what we are fighting for, the president, again and again, invoked Wilsonian ideals.

"We serve the cause of liberty," the president said, "and that is, always and everywhere, a cause worth serving."

"A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure." "A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have incredible change." "A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East is vital to future peace and security."

"We're changing the world." That phrase or a variation recurred again and again.

"The legacy we are going to leave behind is . . . a legacy that really is based upon our deep belief that people want to be free and that free societies are peaceful societies." "It's important for us to spread freedom throughout the Middle East. Free societies are hopeful societies." "We have an obligation to work toward a more free world. That's our obligation. That's what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned." "And my job as president is to lead this nation into making this world a better place."

Bush believes God has called him to liberate the repressed peoples of Iraq and the Islamic world, because freedom is God's gift to mankind, and when men are made free, they do not war with one another.

Yet, as one looks to Najaf, Fallujah and Sadr City, this seems not only naive but delusional. Where did George W. Bush of Midland-Odessa and Crawford get these ideas?

History shows that the liberated often turn to oppressing their oppressors. Liberated from Saddam, the Kurds seized Kirkut and its oil fields and started kicking Arabs out. The Shi'ites await a Shi'ite-dominated Iraq. The Sunnis do not believe in majority rule. They believe in Sunni rule. When we liberate a people, we liberate not only its democrats but its demons.

When the ancien regime fell, there came the guillotine, the Terror and Bonaparte. When the Romanovs fell, Lenin crawled out of the rubble. When the Western imperialists departed Africa, despots seized power in almost every sub-Saharan nation. Democracy did not survive in one of 22 Arab states.

Why did Bush risk his presidency on a gamble that this time it would be different? He may be an idealist, but is he a realist? Does he comprehend the world he claims to be changing? Or is he inviting the brutal epitaph of Kipling?

[i]Now, it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,

For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down;

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,

And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'[/i]

[b]By Patrick J. Buchanan[/b], http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a...

KIPLING'S BRUTAL EPITAPH: WE'VE GOT A NAIVE & MURDEROUS FOOL IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

04.28.04 (9:48 am) [edit]

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS BUSH: "I REQUEST MORE BOOZE & MORE BABES!"

04.27.04 (3:01 pm) [edit]

TRAGEDY OF REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: EAT CHEETOS, DRINK BUSH'S PISS & LAP-UP LIMBAUGH'S CRAP ...

04.27.04 (2:40 pm) [edit]

[b]TRAGEDY OF REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM:--

IF YOU EAT A NON-STOP DIET OF CHEETOS ...

DRINK BUSH'S PISS BY THE GALLONS ...

LAP-UP LIMBAUGH'S CRAP THAT EVEN STARVING BIRDS WON'T TOUCH ...

AND JERK-OFF TO PICTURES OF OUR DEAD U.S. SOLDIERS KILLED IN IRAQ TO ENRICH THE BUSH CRIME FAMILY AND HALLIBURTON, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU:--[/b]

[b]YOU TURN INTO A COWARDLY ARM-CHAIR CHICKEN-HAWK AND A BRAIN-DEAD MINDLESS NEO-CON FUCKWIT DEVOURING AND REGURGITATING LIES, LIES, LIES AND YOU END-UP FAT, STUPID & LONELY, WORSHIPPING THIS [/b] http://www.bushflash.com/idio...

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S SUICIDAL WORLD WAR IV - HE'LL WIPE US ALL OUT WITH HIS INSANITY!!!

04.27.04 (1:55 pm) [edit]

[b]Bush�s Operation Clean Sweep: World War IV in 2004?[/b]

Even though Bush II will lose the popular vote in the US presidential election of 2004, his electoral college victory seems assured. With Republican party governors firmly in charge of Florida, California, Texas and New York, and supported by a whopping Bush campaign war chest approaching $200 million, dubious electronic voting schemes courtesy of Diebold, Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors ( http://www.blackboxvoting.com... ), it seems certain that Bush will make it back to the Oval Office through the back door that is the Electoral College. And if not the Electoral College then by benefit of a rebel attack on US soil which kills thousands of Americans and leads to the suspension of the US Constitution. That according to General Tommy Franks, USA (Ret.), who opined in the magazine Cigar Aficionado that the US will have to shed its constitution in favor of a military style of government. Even the notorious aristocrat Alexander Hamilton would have been appalled as such a statement, as would Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. But these are mediocre times in history; particularly, and dangerously, in America where its people have eliminated those who might have continued to wage a struggle for an equitable form of government in the US, as well as engage the world through international treaty building.

Mediocre times produce the very worst that the world has to offer: Reagan, Bin Laden, Bush, Hussein, Sharon, and Blair. None but the feeble minded could draw inspiration from such a ghastly lineup of "leaders". This is the world as it has become absent the shortened lives of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X and Yitzhak Rabin, all of whom were murdered for their beliefs, or, rather, for the threat they posed to the established interests. Even Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power in the then USSR in 1964 for trying to push his country towards a more peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world. The threats these titans of history posed to the established order of their day was not so much monetary as it was ideology. Each of them planted in the minds of those who would listen the thought that the established order of war, racism, poverty, and income and wealth disparity could and should be questioned. However, those who pull the strings could not stand an ignorant populace that questioned the order of things. And so their fate was, it seems, preordained by disgruntled individuals agitated by those portions of business and government who were wedded to the status quo. And so, JFK and Khrushchev, King and RFK, and Malcolm X and Rubin were terminated and Americans, and the world, found themselves at the mercy of Bush and Bin Laden, Hussein and Blair, and Reagan and Sharon.

[b]Crippled Opposition[/b]

With the election of Bush II in 2004, the ideological and economic fracturing of America will be complete and, for the foreseeable future, permanent. The three branches of the US government, corporations, and the majority of state's governors and state houses will be controlled by those Republicans and Democrats who have become indistinguishable in their belief that the government's only role in America is to make it safe and ludicrously easy for small and large corporations to make a profit without the drag of government regulations, programs and taxes that, in their view, steal from the bottom line. With those folks at the helm, 2002 and 2003 saw the US federal and state governments give the business community trillions of dollars of hand-outs in the form of tax cuts, regulatory relief and legislation that allowed businesses to rape and pillage the American landscape and its middle and lower classes. The latter group�s struggle is getting worse. Even as its industrial, service and information technology jobs are exported to other countries, these Americans are being forced to work longer hours, endure more expensive privatized health and welfare benefits, and higher prices for feeding, clothing and educating their children. Slowly but surely, Americans from the middle and lower classes find themselves at an increasing distance from their rulers, yet must bear the burden of profit and war for these same dastardly people.

But those that rule have in their malleable plebian audience a strange group of middle and lower class acolytes. Among them, the notorious Christian right and an estimated 5 to 9 million American-Muslims who handed Bush II over 90 percent of their vote in the last presidential election. That group, along with neo-con Latinos and Asians, seem to have forgotten the struggles they waged to reach, what once was, a republic with a semblance of representative democracy. Are they trying to recreate the religious-military dictatorships of their own home countries? Bush II certainly has obliged them in that effort.

The invincible political-corporate-state apparatus (PCS) that George Bush II and his supporters have created will be opposed by a loose affiliation of hundred�s of local and urban communities-- supported by a handful of wealthy donors, actors and retired military personnel--who have refused to accept the destruction of the federal and state governments, the Iraq War and the draconian Patriot Act I and II, or, for that matter, the legitimacy of the Bush II presidency. But the deck is stacked against them.

[b]Catholics and Muslims of the World: Unite![/b]

Thanks to the Patriot Act, elements of the Bush PCS can now enter the homes of protestors that question opposition to the established order on the street, the Internet, in high schools, on television, in the newspapers, and even in common conversation. The Pentagon has its own domestic intelligence service that has begun working with the FBI who, in turn, is ramping up its efforts to build databases of Americans who oppose the Bush PCS machine. Even local police, like the Miami Police Department, have become tools of the hideous juggernaut that has been created by the powerful and paranoid of the land. The Miami Police Department received $8.5 million from the $87.5 billion Pentagon appropriation for the Iraq War. The $8.5 million from that Pentagon appropriation was used for the defense of Miami against anti-globalization protestors in the same way it is used by the US military to quell disturbances in Iraq. The Miami protestors were made up of a broad spectrum of America society representing unions, teachers and the young and old alike. That event should be burned into the minds of Americans and the world as the Bush PCS has made it clear that it makes no distinction between the Iraqis demonstrating for a free press, or a US steelworkers demonstrating against a �Free� Trade Agreement. Antiwar, anti-globalization, pro-labor, pro-women�s rights, pro-environment, pro-national healthcare movements should be cautious post-2004 as they take to the streets to protest. America has become a police state.

And so the Bush-led PCS will continue to dress its god, its profits, its worldview in the colorful and flammable costume that is patriotism. The rallying cries are very persuasive to simple minds: Fight 'Em There Rather than Here! America is Safer Now! The Economy is Recovering! Do Your Duty and Buy! Cheaper Oil and Gas for Americans! Help Freedom Loving Iraqi's Rebuild! God Bless America! Go Team! That same sort of infantile rationale will continue to be used to not only further the economic and ideological divide in America, but to attack nations who, coincidently, have large oil and gas reserves, sit in the path of energy pipelines, or who happen to believe in Islam. But wait! The Catholic and oil rich nations of Venezuela and Colombia find themselves targets of the Bush PCS. Now there�s a coincidence: Roman Catholics and Muslims the target of an Evangelical Christian American government. Catholics and Muslims Unite!

[b]2004-2008: Operation Clean Sweep[/b]

Shortly upon taking office in 2004, Bush�s PCS will move rapidly on a number of fronts. Unbound by the constraints of campaigning, the real work of the Bush PCS will begin. First, the Bush PCS will continue to rupture federal and state programs that assist the middle and lower classes of America and their culture and environment. The US Supreme Court will eliminate a woman�s right to choose. Constitutional amendments banning gay rights, women�s rights and civil rights/affirmative action will be proposed by the Bush PCS and, in all likelihood, will succeed. An additional amendment to the constitution concerning military rule in case of an attack on US soil by any foreign individual or state will be added easing the way towards military rule in America.

While the nation debates these issues, Bush will quietly issue an edict supporting a return to the draft. The massive military campaign that is sure to follow will require millions of US military personnel that can only be had forcibly through conscription. As early as the Christian holiday of Christmas in December 2004, or more likely, the Christian Easter Holiday in April 2005 (celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ), the Bush PCS will attack. Syria will be attacked by American-British-Israeli coalition forces, primarily from its Western, Southern and Eastern flanks. There will be no prolonged bombing campaign in this operation. The air campaign will be concomitant with an amphibious assault on Syria�s Western shores, accompanied by a land invasion from the Southern and Eastern flanks. The forces of the American led coalition will crush the dilapidated Syrian military within 10 business days. The Palestinians will likely be granted a piece of the former Syria and will be relocated there by the US and Israel.

Simultaneously with invasion of Syria, Iran will be subjected to an extraordinary air and cruise missile assault led by American forces. This operation will include additional military elements from the Turkish and Afghani military who will have been promised a piece of Iran once it is defeated. A withering air assault will come from the Northwest through Turkey, from the West from US controlled Iraq, from the East from the air bases in Afghanistan, and from carrier groups and cruise missile launching submarines, to include an Israeli submarine, in the Persian Gulf. Within 60 business days, Iran will be defeated by US-led forces. And should Iran successfully test a nuclear weapon prior to that time, the Bush PCS will accelerate its timetable for attack opting to use tactical nuclear weapons to take out Iranian nuclear weaponry.

Since the Bush PCS believes that North Korea cannot be allowed to exist, it will attack North Korea simultaneously with its invasion of Syria and Iran. China will have been dealt with during back channel negotiations. The price China will demand of not intervening against the US invasion (Chinese troop strength at 100 million) will be Taiwan. The Bush PCS will turn a blind eye to China�s takeover of Taiwan, which had become a bad US hangover from the Cold War. The US will be glad to rid itself of support for Taiwan. Vladimir Putin may sign on to the US-led invasion and commit Russian troops which will incur from the Northeastern portion of North Korea�s border. Participation with Bush in this effort would allow Russia basing rights on the Eastern shores of North Korea. The US and South Korean military will attempt to neutralize the North Korean military with low yield tactical nuclear weapons which will be used primarily along the heavily fortified Southern border. This conflict will see the massive deployment of ordnance with calmative agents meant to literally put to sleep the North Korean military. An electromagnetic pulse weapon or weapons will be used to knock out North Korea�s command and control infrastructure. Ground operations will be simultaneous with air and sea assault but the conflict will rage on for 12 business quarters as weather and terrain complicate the US led attack.

Meanwhile in Colombia, US military forces will openly engage in combat against the FARC and indigenous peoples movements there. Over in Venezuela, the US will finally topple Hugo Chavez (if not prior to 2004). The aged leaders of Cuba and Libya will be no match for the Bush PCS, and they will likely be toppled in US led coups. In each of these cases, Bush PCS friendly dictators will be installed and US corporations will quickly move to capitalize each of those societies, just as they are doing in Iraq.

All of, it seems, is a fait accompli. - http://www.globalresearch.ca/...

NEO-CON NEO-NAZIS WANT TO SMEAR KERRY TO CREATE U.S. DICTATORSHIP! CHENEY SAID SO!

04.27.04 (1:51 pm) [edit]

[b]CHECK OUT WEB-SITE DEVOTED TO DEBUNKING THE BUSH/CHENEY NEO-CON'S NEO-NAZIS LIES ABOUT KERRY [/b] http://blog.johnkerry.com/dbu...

There's a deep mystery surrounding Dick Cheney's energy task force, but it's not about what happened back in 2001. Clearly, energy industry executives dictated the content of a report that served their interests.

The real mystery is why the Bush administration has engaged in a three-year fight � which reaches the Supreme Court today � to hide the details of a story whose broad outline we already know.

One possibility is that there is some kind of incriminating evidence in the task force's records. Another is that the administration fears that full disclosure will highlight its chummy relationship with the energy industry. But there's a third possibility: that the administration is really taking a stand on principle. And that's what scares me.

Could there be a smoking gun in the records? Well, maybe Mr. Cheney was already divvying up Iraq's oil fields in 2001, but I'd be surprised to find anything that clear-cut. It's more likely that the administration fears that releasing the task force's records would alert the public to the obvious.

Those of us who have been following such things know that the Bush administration is so deeply enmeshed in the energy industry that it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Campaign contributions are part of it, but it's also personal: George Bush and Dick Cheney are only two of the many members of the administration who grew rich by relying on the kindness of energy companies. Indeed, the day after the executive director of Mr. Cheney's task force left the government, he went into business as an energy industry lobbyist.

In return, the Bush administration has given energy companies a lot to celebrate. One policy decision alone, effectively scrapping "new source review" in regulating power plant pollution, is worth billions of dollars to industry donors.

But if we know all this, why does the release of the task force's records matter? The answer, I think, is that there's a big difference between compelling circumstantial evidence and a more or less official confirmation.

Consider, as a parallel, the case of the nonexistent W.M.D. It was pretty clear by last summer that Saddam didn't have the weapons that were the ostensible reason for war. But it wasn't until January, when David Kay admitted that there was nothing there, that the absence of W.M.D. got traction with the broad public.

The main public justification for the Cheney task force was the 2000-2001 electricity crisis in California. For at least two years, we've known that this crisis was largely the result of market manipulation by energy companies � and surmised that some of those same companies were advising Mr. Cheney on energy policy. But the public will pay a lot more attention if it turns out there is documentation that any energy executives were telling Mr. Cheney how to solve power shortages even as their traders were busily creating those shortages.

Still, Mr. Cheney's determination to keep his secrets probably reflects more than an effort to avoid bad publicity. It's also a matter of principle, based on the administration's deep belief that it has the right to act as it pleases, and that the public has no right to know what it's doing.

As Linda Greenhouse recently pointed out in The New York Times, the legal arguments the administration is making for the secrecy of the energy task force are "strikingly similar" to those it makes for its right to detain, without trial, anyone it deems an enemy combatant. In both cases, as Ms. Greenhouse puts it, the administration has put forward "a vision of presidential power . . . as far-reaching as any the court has seen."

That same vision is apparent in many other actions. Just to mention one: we learn from Bob Woodward that the administration diverted funds earmarked for Afghanistan to preparations for an invasion of Iraq without asking or even notifying Congress.

What Mr. Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn't obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public.

Not long ago I would have thought it inconceivable that the Supreme Court would endorse that doctrine. But I would also have thought it inconceivable that a president would propound such a vision in the first place. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

IRAQIS DEMAND FULL SOVEREIGNTY & NOT THE BUSH/CHENEY NEO-NAZI BULLSHIT FULL OF LIES!!!

04.27.04 (1:47 pm) [edit]

[b]Iraqis demand full sovereignty[/b]

Members of Iraq's interim Governing Council have called for "nothing less than full sovereignty" after the planned transfer of power on 30 June.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said Iraq would have to "give back" some power to the US in the early days.

That caused concern among Iraqi leaders and on the United Nations Security Council which is expected to be asked to support the new government in Iraq.

UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is to brief the Council in the next few hours.

He has said that he favours the winding up of the 25-member Governing Council appointed by the US from veteran politicians to be replaced by technocrats who could run the country until general elections.

[b]Sensitive time [/b]

The BBC's Middle East analyst Roger Hardy says it is clear that the US will remain the dominant power in Iraq in both military and financial terms for some time to come.

But he adds that the US has have to convince ordinary Iraqis that what is being billed as the handover of power will not be a purely symbolic moment.

Mr Powell's comments - which came a week after US administrator for Iraq Paul Bremer said local Iraqi forces could not maintain security by themselves - were criticised swiftly by Iraqi politicians.

A spokesman for the Iraqi Governing Council, Hameed al-Kafaei, said he believed Mr Powell was talking about co-operation over security.

"But sovereignty will have to be full on 30 June. Iraqis will not accept any less than full sovereignty," he said.

Public Works Minister Nesreen Berwari told the Associated Press news agency that Iraqis would welcome support for security and building democratic institutions from the UN and the US.

But she said Iraqis must take control of local and national government and make decisions on "day-to-day life," including budgets and "how to move the country politically".

As the members of the Security Council prepared to hear Mr Brahimi's latest report in New York, the only Arab member of the Council also called for Iraq to have full control after 30 June.

Algerian UN Ambassador Abdallah Baali said: "We definitely would like to see the Iraqi sovereignty restored in full and as soon as possible."

[b]UN 'leading role' [/b]

Separately, the former US Ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, was being questioned by senators deciding whether to approve him as the White House's new envoy in Iraq.

Mr Negroponte told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he expected the UN to take the lead in post-transition Iraq, in particular as it moves towards rule by an elected government.

If his appointment is confirmed, Mr Negroponte will replace Mr Bremer as the top US civilian in Iraq after 30 June when Mr Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority ceases to exist.

But US officials have said their military forces will still have control of some aspects of security and Mr Powell went further on Monday, saying that while Iraqis would have what he called sovereignty, "some of its sovereignty will have to be given back... or limited by them".

He told Reuters news agency that the coalition did not mean to "seize anything away" from the planned caretaker government but added: "It is with the understanding that they need our help and for us to provide that help we have to be able to operate freely, which in some ways infringes on what some would call full sovereignty."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Tuesday that it was important to separate "sovereignty" from "authority".

He said Iraqis themselves wanted limits on the authority of the interim government which he said had just two roles before it is replaced by an elected body: to assume day-to-day responsibility for administration and to prepare the country for a national poll. - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi...

REPUGLICANS AND NEO-CON NEO-NAZIS: WMDs IN EVERY NATION THAT ISRAEL DOESN'T LIKE & HALLIBURTON DOES!

04.27.04 (1:44 pm) [edit]

[b]The Two-Line Struggle at the Top[/b]

[b]Phase Two: Syria and Iran[/b]

During the 1920s and 30s, there was division within the Japanese elite. On the one hand there were the diplomats in the Foreign Ministry, typically Western-educated, cultured men; and the leaders of the zaibatsu (financial cliques like Mitsui and Sumitomo) who feared boycotts of Japanese products in China. They tended to oppose imperialist war. On the other hand, there were hotheads in the Japanese Army, influenced by fascist ideology, hell-bent on establishing Japanese domination over China and Southeast Asia (creating what they came to call the "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere"). The latter won out decisively with the Manchurian Incident in 1931.

For some time now, here in the USA, it's been apparent that there's a power struggle, perhaps what you can call a "two-line struggle" between Colin Powell's State Department and Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department. (Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has referred to this as the "split personality" of the Bush Administration.) The former seems dominated by professional diplomats who find it in U.S. interest to maintain friendly ties with the world in general. The latter is dominated by the neocons, whose project for a New American Century includes (among other ambitious goals) plans for regime change in Iraq, Syria and Iran, change plans that the world tends to oppose and fear since they mean U.S. hegemony throughout Southwest Asia. The former receives some neocon input (notably in the form of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, whose appointment Powell is said to have opposed), but like the Japanese Foreign Ministry before the Manchurian Incident, it generally takes a cautious approach to war. Powell, whose career includes some unpleasant incidents and so does not attract my own admiration, is nevertheless a professional committed to the fundamental task he has been assigned (pursue diplomacy), and he is probably committed to opposing aspects of the neocons' program which seem to require for popular support exploitation of anti-Arab racism.

(I refer specifically to the cynical expectation of the neocons that the U.S. public's response to 9/11 and widespread, irrational assignment of blame for that event on a vague "raghead" category, would allow them to conflate bin Laden with Saddam Hussein on meager evidence, and insure popular support for the war on Iraq. And also, their supposition that they can take the war into Syria and Iran with popular support, knowing that a certain component of the population will just be happy to see further humiliation of Arabs and other Muslims without really thinking about the reasons or repercussions. The neocons know they can't justify their project to the public on the basis of conventional logic; or rather, should they do so, it would have to be on the basis of Machiavelli's logic---or what some political scientists call "realism"---which would require admission that disinformation [lying] is a useful tool in the project's execution. Instead they rely on the public's fear of Arabs, all Arabs anywhere, as potential terrorists planning further Sept. 11s.)

In recent days the split between the factions has been evidenced by quarreling over the leadership of occupied Iraq, with Powell favoring L. Paul Bremmer III as paramount civilian administrator (in deference to the apparent Iraqi hostility to a military governor) and Rumsfeld and the Pentagon wanting Gen. Jay M. Garner (ret.) to head the new regime. It has also been conspicuous with regard to policy towards Syria and Iran (as well as North Korea). Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker, Rumsfeld intimate, and member of the Defense Policy Board until recently chaired by chief neocon ideologue Richard Perle, in a speech to the neocon-dominated American Enterprise Institute, denounced Powell's diplomacy (among other things, oddly blaming Powell for the fact that 95% of the Turkish population opposed the U.S. attack on Iraq) and calling the Secretary of State's decision to visit Syria and talk with its president, Bashar Assad, "ludicrous." This suggests (to me, anyway) that the neocons really want to attack, rather than talk with, Syria. It's in their script, and Powell at least to some extent disagrees with that script.

But the reporting on the "tough and at times blunt" encounter between Powell and Assad (Washington Post, May 4) suggests the issues the neocons have and will continue to raise as they muster support for the Syria invasion. In no particular order:

1. Syria's possession of chemical and biological weapons. (Note: quite a number of nations, including the second largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, Egypt, possess such weapons. To make this grounds of war with Syria would strike many in the world as ludicrous. However, if an invasion of Syria resulted in the occupying army's discovery of such weapons, they could be represented as transported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (whether they are or not). And some among the neocon's domestic support base would be happy and satisfied with that discovery, and feel safer in consequence.)

2. Syria's "sponsorship" of Lebanon's Hezbollah (viewed by most in Lebanon as a large, mainstream political party), the Palestinian group Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, all officially regarded by the State Department as "terrorist." Assad told Powell that these groups' offices in Damascus are media outlets, whereas the State Department believes they are command headquarters for operations against Israel. (Maybe they're both.) Assad reportedly agreed to a Powell proposal "to curtail the ability of the organizations' leaders to appear on television" (which does not seem to me to enhance freedom of speech or of the press in Syria, not that I want to get picky).

3. Syria allegedly allowed personnel and equipment to flow into Iraq during the invasion.. While there surely was nothing illegal in this, from the standpoint of international law, especially given that the Anglo-American attack itself lacked international support, it "deeply angered" US officials according to the Post. Just as that lack of international support, and the opposition of France, Germany, Belgium, Turkey etc. deeply disappointed and angered them. (Note: Syria and Iraq have not been close friends. They have longbeen ruled by rival factions of the secular Baath Party. Syria supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. If Syria afforded Iraq some support during the invasion, it may reflect pan-Arab sentiments emanating from the Syrian street as much as Assad's own calculations.)

4. Some fleeing Iraqi officials may have made their way into Iraq "to escape capture," which is understandable. (What would you do?) Rumsfeld has said there's "no question" that senior Iraqi officials are now in Syria. Syria is being pressured to turn over such officials, and may be wondering by what right the US is exerting such pressure, having illegally invading neighboring Iraq in the first place.

5. Child custody disputes between Syrians and their American spouses. Probably not a casus belli. But a grounds for depicting these Arabs as violators of Americans' human rights.

I assume that the neocons' real intention is to invade Syria, in large part to eliminate the threat to Israel of the above-listed organizations. But any shred of evidence that they might threaten Americans will also be amplified as they prepare the case. And the weapons of mass destruction issue will be highlighted, although it does raise the question of why Egypt (on the U.S. payroll, $ 2 billion per annum specifically) can have them but not Syria. (Syria's been calling for the elimination of all WMD in the region, which include most notably Israel's undeclared nukes that Washington never wants to talk about.) And I assume the State Department will continue to advocate diplomacy, and that until someone resigns the line struggle will continue. Following Bush's awkwardly interesting statement "First things first. We're here in Iraq now and the thing about Syria is that we expect cooperation," Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State under the president's father, said he felt that should Bush invade Syria, he ought to be impeached. "You can't get away with that sort of thing in a democracy," he said. I'd hope not. Anyway it's clear the power structure is deeply divided on this issue.

Meanwhile, tempers flare about how to deal with Iran. (The neocons steering the Pentagon seem apt to represent all Shiite resistance as Iran-induced; the old "outside agitators" device.) The Pentagon arranged a ceasefire agreement with the (quite secular) Iranian organization Mujahadeen Khalq, based in Iraq, on April 15. But according to the Boston Globe (May 4) unnamed "State Department officials said the truce is another example of the Pentagon making decisions that undermine State policy." The Mujahadeen Khalq is an interesting organization. Its ideology is sometimes called "Islamic Marxism" and it was one of the groups that brought down the Shah of Iran in 1979. Later, it fell afoul of the mullahs and hundreds of its cadre were killed. Saddam Hussein allowed them a presence in Iraq and made use of them in his war against Iran in the eighties. They occupy the curious status of being on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations but also enjoying a good measure of support from the U.S. Congress. Many legislators have petitioned the State Department to remove them from the list.

It looks as though the neocons want to use, however counterintuitive this might seem, this putatively terrorist organization to abet their aim of expanding the Terror War into Iran, and that the State Department (whose functions have been so rudely superceded of late by Defense) finds this irritating. Said the above-quoted State Department official, "We believe in dialogue with Iran. But there are others in the administration who believe that fighting Iran by proxy is better." A very telling statement. There is division at the top, and so far, as in Japan in the 1930s, the most bellicose have won the most battles, which is scary.

[b]Gary Leupp is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.[/b] - http://www.counterpunch.org/l...

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM LOGIC: WHEN YOU DRINK BUSH'S PISS, YOU SEE WMDs EVERYWHERE!!!

04.27.04 (1:40 pm) [edit]

[b]REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM LOGIC:

WHEN YOU DRINK BUSH'S PISS, YOU SEE WMDs EVERYWHERE -- ESPECIALLY WHERE THE NEO-CON FASCIST PIGS AND ARIEL SHARON WANT WARFARE ...[/b]

[u][b]War Without End[/b][/u]

[b]Moqtada al-Sadr: the Latest Neocon Excuse to Kill Iranians [& Syrians] by Kurt Nimmo [/b]

Somebody needs to tell Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Reuel Marc Gerecht to shut the hell up.

In fact, they need to be arrested and tried as traitors for their part in the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq. AEI needs to prosecuted as a criminal organization and shuttered for good. So does JINSA and the Hoover Institute and all of the other neocon criminal organizations. If there was any justice in the world, Bush would be impeached and Dick Cheney would be wearing an orange jumpsuit. Instead, these guys influence and run US foreign policy, they are millionaires, they are allowed to publish books and papers filled with criminal conspiracies against international peace. The American people either don't know, don't care, or are too busy watching television to do anything about it.

As Jim Lobe reports, the above mentioned are now "pushing for retribution against Iran for, they say, sponsoring this week's Shiite uprising in Iraq led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Despite the growing number of reports that depict the fighting as a spontaneous and indigenous revolt against the U.S.-led occupation, the influential neo-cons are calling on Bush to warn Tehran to cease its alleged backing for al-Sadr and other Shia militias or face retaliation, ranging from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to covert action designed to overthrow the government."

Note the first option -- attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. It is a line straight out of the Zionist script. On June 7, 1981, the Israelis attacked Iraq's Osiraq nuclear facility with American-made F-16s, in direct violation of international law. Now the Bush neocons want to do the same thing to Iran.

"Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged US President George Bush to take all steps possible to block Iran from developing nuclear arms [last July]," al-Jazeerah reported. "Sharon also said Israel believed Iran is shipping weapons to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah through Syria, and voiced Israeli concerns about camps for training Palestinian 'terrorists' in Syria."

Note, nearly all of Sharon's enemies are mentioned: Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. These enemies are also on the neocon hit list and Bush's evil axis roster.

Of course, most people in the world, when asked, don't believe Iran, Syria, or Hezbollah are primary threats to world peace -- that distinction is reserved for Israel. For instance, a poll conducted by Eurobarometer late last year indicated nearly 60% of Europeans believe Israel "presents a threat to peace, putting it ahead of Iran, North Korea and the US, each of which polled 53%," the BBC reported.

As for nukes -- they are a pipe dream for Iran, but a reality for Israel. "By the late 1990s the U.S. Intelligence Community estimated that Israel possessed between 75-130 weapons, based on production estimates," writes FAS. "The stockpile would certainly include warheads for mobile Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles, as well as bombs for Israeli aircraft, and may include other tactical nuclear weapons of various types. Some published estimates even claimed that Israel might have as many as 400 nuclear weapons by the late 1990s."

So maybe the US should attack Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility.

Sharon, the rabid Likudites, and the Bush neocons are racists who hate Arabs and Iranians. They can't wait to start World War IV -- World War III, according to the neocons, was the Cold War (these guys love back-to-back wars and mass murder) -- and turn the Middle East into one huge killing field in the name of Greater Israel. Remarkably, the American people have allowed them to get away with lying about Iraq and WMD and killing 10,000 people, excluding the approximately 40,000 Iraqi conscripts they slaughtered last year.

"Some neo-conservatives have seized on Sadr's uprising as a new opportunity both to raise tensions against Iran and to divert attention from Washington's bungling of relations with the Shia community in Iraq," writes Lobe.

This is criminal behavior. It should not be tolerated. Unfortunately, it will not only be tolerated, it will be encouraged by the likes of the War Street Journal and Fox, especially after Bush takes the election in November, either semi-legitimately or by hook, crook, and Diebold voting machine.

It's war all the time from here on out. - http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone...

MORE PROOF THAT HERR FUHRER BUSH & RIECH MARSHAL CHENEY ARE CATASTROPHIC FAILURES!!!

04.27.04 (7:38 am) [edit]

[b]What Do We Do Now?[/b]

It seems very hard for some people--especially those in high places, but also those striving for high places--to grasp a simple truth: The United States does not belong in Iraq. It is not our country. Our presence is causing death, suffering, destruction, and so large sections of the population are rising against us. Our military is then reacting with indiscriminate force, bombing and shooting and rounding up people simply on "suspicion."

Amnesty International, a year after the invasion, reported: "Scores of unarmed people have been killed due to excessive or unnecessary use of lethal force by coalition forces during public demonstrations, at checkpoints, and in house raids. Thousands of people have been detained [estimates range from 8,500 to 15,000], often under harsh conditions, and subjected to prolonged and often unacknowledged detention. Many have been tortured or ill-treated, and some have died in custody."

The recent battles in Fallujah brought this report from Amnesty International: "Half of at least 600 people who died in the recent fighting between Coalition forces and insurgents in Fallujah are said to have been civilians, many of them women and children."

In light of this, any discussion of "What do we do now?" must start with the understanding that the present U.S. military occupation is morally unacceptable.

The suggestion that we simply withdraw from Iraq is met with laments: "We mustn't cut and run. . . . We must stay the course. . . . Our reputation will be ruined. . . ." That is exactly what we heard when, at the start of the Vietnam escalation, some of us called for immediate withdrawal. The result of staying the course was 58,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese dead.

"We can't leave a vacuum there." I think it was John Kerry who said that. What arrogance to think that when the United States leaves a place there's nothing there! The same kind of thinking saw the enormous expanse of the American West as "empty territory" waiting for us to occupy it, when hundreds of thousands of Indians lived there already.

The history of military occupations of Third World countries is that they bring neither democracy nor security. The long U.S. occupation of the Philippines, following a bloody war in which American troops finally subdued the Filipino independence movement, did not lead to democracy, but rather to a succession of dictatorships, ending with Fernando Marcos.

The long U.S. occupations of Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916-1926) led only to military rule and corruption in both countries.

The only rational argument for continuing on the present course is that things will be worse if we leave. There will be chaos, there will be civil war, we are told. In Vietnam, supporters of the war promised a bloodbath if U.S. troops withdrew. That did not happen.

There is a history of dire forecasts for what will happen if we desist from deadly force. If we did not drop the bomb on Hiroshima, it was said, we would have to invade Japan and huge casualties would follow. We know now, and knew then, that was not true, but to acknowledge that did not fit the government's political agenda. The U.S. had broken the Japanese code and had intercepted the cables from Tokyo to the emissary in Moscow, which made clear that the Japanese were ready to surrender so long as the position of the Emperor was secure.

Truth is, no one knows what will happen if the United States withdraws. We face a choice between the certainty of mayhem if we stay and the uncertainty of what will follow.

There is a possibility of reducing that uncertainty by replacing a U.S. military presence with an international nonmilitary presence. It is conceivable that the United Nations should arrange, as U.S. forces leave, for a multinational team of peacekeepers and negotiators, including, importantly, people from the Arab countries. Such a group might bring together Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, and work out a solution for self-governance, which would give all three groups a share in political power.

Simultaneously, the U.N. should arrange for shipments of food and medicine, from the U.S. and other countries, as well as a corps of engineers to begin the reconstruction of the country.

In a situation that is obviously bad and getting worse, some see the solution in enlarging the military presence. The rightwing columnist David Brooks wrote in mid-April: "I never thought it would be this bad," but he then expressed his joy that President Bush is "acknowledging the need for more troops." This fits the definition of fanaticism: "When you find you're going in the wrong direction, you double your speed."

John Kerry, sadly (for those of us who hoped for a decisive break from the Bush agenda), echoes that fanaticism. If he learned any thing from his experience in Vietnam, he has forgotten it. There, too, repeated failure to win the support of the Vietnamese people led to sending more and more troops into Tennyson's "valley of death."

In a recent piece in The Washington Post, Kerry talks about "success" in military terms. "If our military commanders request more troops we should deploy them." He seems to think that if we "internationalize" our disastrous policy, it becomes less of a disaster. "We also need to renew our effort to attract international support in the form of boots on the ground to create a climate of security in Iraq." Is that what brings security--"boots on the ground"?

Kerry suggests: "We should urge NATO to create a new out-of-area operation for Iraq under the lead of a U.S. commander. This would help us obtain more troops from major powers." More troops, more troops. And the U.S. must be in charge--that old notion that the world can trust our leadership--despite our long record of moral failure.

To those who worry about what will happen in Iraq after our troops leave, they should consider the effect of having foreign troops: continued, escalating bloodshed, continued insecurity, increased hatred for the United States in the entire Muslim world of over a billion people, and increased hostility everywhere.

The effect of that will be the exact opposite of what our political leaders--of both parties--claim they intend to achieve, a "victory" over terrorism. When you inflame the anger of an entire population, you have enlarged the breeding ground for terrorism.

What of the other long-term effects of continued occupation? I'm thinking of the poisoning of the moral fiber of our soldiers--being forced to kill, maim, imprison innocent people, becoming the pawns of an imperial power after they were deceived into believing they were fighting for freedom, democracy, against tyranny.

I'm thinking of the irony that those very things we said our soldiers were dying for--giving their eyes, their limbs for--are being lost at home by this brutal war. Our freedom of speech is diminished, our electoral system corrupted, Congressional and judicial checks on executive power nonexistent.

And the costs of the war--the $400 billion military budget (which Kerry, shockingly, refuses to consider lowering)--make it inevitable that people in this country will suffer from lack of health care, a deteriorating school system, dirtier air and water. Corporate power is unregulated and running wild.

Kerry does not seem to understand that he is giving away his strongest card against Bush--the growing disillusion with the war among the American public. He thinks he is being clever, by saying he will wage the war better than Bush. But by declaring his continued support for the military occupation, he is climbing aboard a sinking ship.

We do not need another war President. We need a peace President. And those of us in this country who feel this way should make our desire known in the strongest of ways to the man who may be our next occupant of the White House.

[b]Howard Zinn, the author of "[i]A People's History of the United States[/i]," is a columnist for [i]The Progressive[/i][/b]. - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

REICH MARSHAL CHENEY EXTOLS THE VIRTUES OF A U.S. FASCIST DICTATORSHIP!

04.27.04 (7:30 am) [edit]

[b]A Vision of Power[/b]

There's a deep mystery surrounding Dick Cheney's energy task force, but it's not about what happened back in 2001. Clearly, energy industry executives dictated the content of a report that served their interests.

The real mystery is why the Bush administration has engaged in a three-year fight � which reaches the Supreme Court today � to hide the details of a story whose broad outline we already know.

One possibility is that there is some kind of incriminating evidence in the task force's records. Another is that the administration fears that full disclosure will highlight its chummy relationship with the energy industry. But there's a third possibility: that the administration is really taking a stand on principle. And that's what scares me.

Could there be a smoking gun in the records? Well, maybe Mr. Cheney was already divvying up Iraq's oil fields in 2001, but I'd be surprised to find anything that clear-cut. It's more likely that the administration fears that releasing the task force's records would alert the public to the obvious.

Those of us who have been following such things know that the Bush administration is so deeply enmeshed in the energy industry that it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Campaign contributions are part of it, but it's also personal: George Bush and Dick Cheney are only two of the many members of the administration who grew rich by relying on the kindness of energy companies. Indeed, the day after the executive director of Mr. Cheney's task force left the government, he went into business as an energy industry lobbyist.

In return, the Bush administration has given energy companies a lot to celebrate. One policy decision alone, effectively scrapping "new source review" in regulating power plant pollution, is worth billions of dollars to industry donors.

But if we know all this, why does the release of the task force's records matter? The answer, I think, is that there's a big difference between compelling circumstantial evidence and a more or less official confirmation.

Consider, as a parallel, the case of the nonexistent W.M.D. It was pretty clear by last summer that Saddam didn't have the weapons that were the ostensible reason for war. But it wasn't until January, when David Kay admitted that there was nothing there, that the absence of W.M.D. got traction with the broad public.

The main public justification for the Cheney task force was the 2000-2001 electricity crisis in California. For at least two years, we've known that this crisis was largely the result of market manipulation by energy companies � and surmised that some of those same companies were advising Mr. Cheney on energy policy. But the public will pay a lot more attention if it turns out there is documentation that any energy executives were telling Mr. Cheney how to solve power shortages even as their traders were busily creating those shortages.

Still, Mr. Cheney's determination to keep his secrets probably reflects more than an effort to avoid bad publicity. It's also a matter of principle, based on the administration's deep belief that it has the right to act as it pleases, and that the public has no right to know what it's doing.

As Linda Greenhouse recently pointed out in The New York Times, the legal arguments the administration is making for the secrecy of the energy task force are "strikingly similar" to those it makes for its right to detain, without trial, anyone it deems an enemy combatant. In both cases, as Ms. Greenhouse puts it, the administration has put forward "a vision of presidential power . . . as far-reaching as any the court has seen."

That same vision is apparent in many other actions. Just to mention one: we learn from Bob Woodward that the administration diverted funds earmarked for Afghanistan to preparations for an invasion of Iraq without asking or even notifying Congress.

What Mr. Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn't obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public.

Not long ago I would have thought it inconceivable that the Supreme Court would endorse that doctrine. But I would also have thought it inconceivable that a president would propound such a vision in the first place.

[b]By Paul Krugman, N.Y. Times[/b], http://nytimes.com/2004/04/27...

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS BUSH: "I REQUEST SOMETHING FOR MY HANGOVER!"

04.27.04 (7:27 am) [edit]

WHY WON'T BUSH PROVE HIS GUARD SERVICE??? ... BECAUSE HE CAN'T!!!

04.27.04 (7:25 am) [edit]

[b]Kerry Questions Bush Attendance in Guard in 70's[/b]

In a day of piercing and personal exchanges, John Kerry questioned on Monday whether President Bush skipped National Guard duty 30 years ago, while Vice President Dick Cheney disparaged Mr. Kerry as an opportunist unfit to lead the nation in wartime.

Mr. Kerry had previously declined to join other Democrats in raising questions about Mr. Bush's National Guard attendance record. But during a contentious interview on national television on Monday, when pressed on whether he threw away his Vietnam war medals in a protest in 1971, he defended himself and attacked the president.

"This is a controversy that the Republicans are pushing," Mr. Kerry said on "Good Morning America" on ABC. "The Republicans have spent $60 million in the last few weeks trying to attack me, and this comes from a president and a Republican Party that can't even answer whether or not he showed up for duty in the National Guard. I'm not going to stand for it."

Later in the day, Mr. Kerry challenged what he called attacks on his military record from Republicans who did not fight in Vietnam.

"I did obviously fight in Vietnam, and I was wounded there, and I served there and was very proud of my service," Mr. Kerry said. "To have these people, all of whom made a different choice, attack me for it is obviously disturbing."

Mr. Cheney came here to Westminster College, where Winston Churchill first used the term Iron Curtain to describe the imposition of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, to offer a sharply drawn comparison between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush. The vice president drew snickers from the heavily Republican invited audience as he read quotations from Mr. Kerry intended to portray the senator as equivocating on major issues of national security.

"The contrast between the candidates this November will be sharper than it has been in many years," Mr. Cheney said. "The senator from Massachusetts has given us ample grounds to doubt the judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security."

The developments on Monday illustrated how the White House is planning to anchor Mr. Bush's re-election campaign to the war on terrorism and showed the imperative his aides see in trying to undercut Mr. Kerry's foreign policy credentials, including his decorated service in Vietnam. Democrats hope Mr. Kerry's r�sum� will help neutralize Mr. Bush's presumed advantage on these issues.

Mr. Cheney's appearance also signaled the extent to which the White House intends to press him into the vice president's traditional role of raising the sword against a challenger.

It was Mr. Cheney's third speech attacking Mr. Kerry. His words on Monday were so sharp that the president of Westminster College, Fletcher M. Lamkin, sent out a notice to students and faculty chastising Mr. Cheney for the tone he set and promising to extend a similar invitation to Mr. Kerry.

"Frankly, I must admit that I was surprised and disappointed that Mr. Cheney chose to step off the high ground and resort to Kerry-bashing for a large portion of his speech," Mr. Lamkin said. "The content and tone of his speech was not provided to us prior to the event; we had only been told the speech would be about foreign policy, including issues in Iraq."

A spokesman for Mr. Bush, Nicolle Devenish, said Mr. Cheney had intended to "put the war on terror in its historical context" and address the "very different views held by President Bush and his opponent."

"A robust debate on how best to protect our country from the threat of global terror is central to this election and it is unfortunate that the college experienced any surprise and we will work to maintain strong ties to Westminster College," she said.

Back in Washington, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman, jumped into the fray, attacking Mr. Cheney for attacking Mr. Kerry. He even came up with a new nickname for Mr. Cheney: The Bush Campaign's Attack Dog in Chief.

Mr. McAuliffe also criticized the vice president for not serving in Vietnam. "When John Kerry was risking his life for his country in Vietnam," Mr. McAuliffe said, "Dick Cheney was getting deferments because, in his words, he had other priorities than military service. And he feels qualified to tell us that John Kerry won't do whatever it takes to defend America?"

While Mr. Kerry and Mr. Cheney went after each other with a vigor that made it hard to believe Election Day was still 27 weeks away, the president sought to sail above it all, a course that Mr. Bush's aides said they hoped he would take frequently, with Mr. Cheney's help. Mr. Bush headed to another swing state, Minnesota, to deliver a speech on technological innovation to an association of community colleges.

Mr. Bush did not mention Mr. Kerry's name once. Nor did he address Mr. Kerry's reference to the questions about whether Mr. Bush showed up for some of his National Guard duties in the 1970's. The White House tried to put the questions to rest in February by releasing hundreds of pages of President Bush's National Guard records. But a number of men who served in Mr. Bush's Alabama National Guard unit in 1972 have said they did not recall seeing him there.

Mr. Kerry began a three-day bus trip on Monday, starting in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, intending to focus on some of the most economically distressed swing states. The bus tour was intended to begin a more aggressive phase of Mr. Kerry's campaign against Mr. Bush.

He accused the Bush administration of failing to enforce the United States' trade agreements, saying, "What America really needs is a president who's going to be able to get our economy back in line with American values."

But for much of the day, instead, Mr. Kerry and his campaign struggled with questions about national security and his youthful role as an antiwar protester. The questions were driven in part by an orchestrated Republican effort that included a new series of Bush television advertisements highlighting votes by Mr. Kerry cutting military spending, as well as Mr. Cheney's speech on Monday.

Much of Mr. Kerry's energy, starting with his morning interview on ABC and continuing with interviews throughout the day, was spent trying to explain a 1971 television interview in which he said that he had thrown away his medals as part of a protest by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In other interviews, Mr. Kerry said he had thrown away only the ribbons, and kept the medals. Republicans have seized on the issue to portray him as both inconsistent and unprincipled.

Mr. Kerry said there was no inconsistency in his statements because there was no real difference between the medals and the ribbons. But Mr. Kerry also said he would not now display his medals or ribbons to resolve questions about whether he discarded them after returning from Vietnam and joining the antiwar movement.

"When they start questioning what I did or didn't do 35 years ago, or said, on a personal level, I'm going to fight back," he told NBC News. "If George Bush wants to ask me questions about that through his surrogates, he owes America an explanation about whether or not he showed up for duty in the National Guard. Prove it."

But Mr. Kerry's aides asserted that the debate played to his advantage, noting that he had received three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star during his time commanding Navy Swift boats.

"Every time the Republicans force this debate, the only thing that comes across is that John Kerry is a war hero," said Stephanie Cutter, a senior Kerry aide. "And that is a stark comparison with George Bush, who still can't prove he showed up for National Guard duty."

Ms. Devenish, the Bush campaign spokeswoman, asserted that Mr. Bush had already released enough records to allay any doubt about his National Guard record.

"Attacking the president is not going to solve Senator Kerry's current problem of explaining inconsistent statements," she said.

Mr. Cheney sought throughout his speech to lampoon Mr. Kerry.

The vice president took note of an interview on "Meet the Press" on April 18 in which Mr. Kerry sought to respond to assertions by Republicans that he had, in an appearance in Florida, claimed to have international support for his presidential campaign. Mr. Kerry in that appearance had made a vague reference to "leaders" who had told him he had to win.

Mr. Cheney noted that in the interview, Mr. Kerry said, "I mean, you can go to New York City and you can be in a restaurant and you can meet a foreign leader."

Mr. Cheney paused.

"Maybe next time he'll narrow it down for us a little more," he said. "Maybe the name of the restaurant. The leader." [Why don't you tell the names of your corporate pimps who you waged war for in Iraq, Cheney?] - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

BUSH AND CHENEY EXTOL THE JOYS OF MASSACRE & MISERY IN IRAQ, 'CAUSE THEY'RE GETTING RICH!

04.27.04 (7:20 am) [edit]

[b]Bush Whoops Up the Enormous Profits of Iraq War! [/b]

President Bush, offering new rationalizations for war in Iraq, said Wednesday that ''ending this obscure and imaginary threat'' from Saddam Hussein would pave the way for conquest in the Middle East and encourage subservience throughout the Arab world.

While saying the Iraqi regime has tried to avoid war, Bush told conservative backers that U.S. troops are ready for war and spoke at length about his plans for Iraq once Saddam is gone.

''The United States has every intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice belongs to the Iraq's conquerors,'' Bush told the American Enterprise Institute. ''We will ensure that one brutal dictator is replaced by another.''

The address came at the end of a day marked by intense diplomatic subterfuge, as Bush struggled to find votes in favor of a war-making resolution at the United Nations Security Council. The United States, Britain and Spain need nine votes and no vetoes to pass the measure.

Answering critics who say war would destabilize the region, Bush predicted there would be a ''new stage for Middle East exploitation'' once Saddam loses power.

Iraq was never a threat to dominate the region with weapons of mass destruction, Bush said, but he accused Saddam personally of financing suicide bombers, a charge Iraq has denied.

"We have not financed any bombings that were not specifically cleared by the CIA," said a spokesman for the Iraqi government.

''An obliterated Iraq can show the power of force to transform that vital region, by bringing despair and misery to the lives of millions,'' Bush said.

There was some evidence that Bush was gaining ground at the United Nations, including signals that Mexico, after an enormous bribe by the Bush White House, would back the resolution. But new obstacles emerged, including a plan by Canada to reconcile bitter differences between Bush's position and a French-Russian-German proposal to continue weapons inspections until at least July.

French President Jacques Chirac reiterated Wednesday that ''we are opposed to all new resolutions,'' no help to Bush but also no aid to the alternative the United States opposes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters in Moscow, ''We are not ready to fight, and we think that is a bad solution. George Bush and Dick Cheney are obviously bloodthirsty maniacs, and the world community must not let them spread their terrorism throughout the globe.''

Even so, U.S. officials said intense negotiations to stave off a veto from Russia yielded some results.

"We told that Russian shit that his country has no real power compared to us, and we can destabilize his government just as easily as we are doing to that beaner in Venezuela," said George Tenet, CIA director.

Saddam is trying to convince U.N. nations that he is complying with their anti-arms resolutions, despite the United States' speculation and lies that he is not. In a rare interview with a U.S. journalist, Saddam dismissed U.S. efforts to encourage his exile.

''We will die here,'' Saddam told an obviously amused Dan Rather, the well-know administration toady at CBS.

Bush sought to prepare the nation for the costs of conflict - both financially and in soldiers' lives, calling for a ''sustained commitment from many nations, including our own. The American taxpayers will have to pony up at least 150 billion a year. 'We will remain in Iraq as long as it proves profitable to my family and our friends,'' he told the American Enterprise Institute, where Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne, has been a senior fellow.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. military will control Iraq in the long-term after Saddam's removal. Troops will maintain security, ensure that other nations respect American hegemony, and 'find' and 'destroy' planted weapons of mass destruction.

"We have a lot of 'em," said General Tommy Franks, "so we won't miss any."

Once those tasks are complete, a civilian administrator, probably Elliott Abrams, would take over and begin the work of engaging Iraqis in the formation of a puppet government. The official said the administrator would necessarily be an American.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Lieberman said Bush's plans to appoint an American to oversee Iraq after Saddam is removed would put the United States ''in the position of an occupying power, not a liberator.''

Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was not impressed.

"Fuck Joe Lieberman. Let him take that crap to the American people. With the control of the media we have, we'll make those fools see him as Saddam's penis."

Answering critics who say war in Iraq will destabilize the Middle East, Bush said: ''A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and chilling warning to other nations of the region.I expect that if we are brutal enough in Iraq, Iran will sell the naming rights to its country to Amoco.''

Neither he nor his advisers explained why the Middle East peace process made no major advances while Saddam was contained in the 1990s. He did mention other nations tied to unrest in the Middle East, such as Iran, and said removing Saddam would ''signal to sovereign governments regimes that in this new century the boundaries of civilized behavior will not be respected.''

He said Saddam's removal will give both sides a chance to bury their dead in a more stable environment.

''The profits of the American elites depends on killing Saddam,'' he said.

While State Department flunkies fanned out across the world to press Bush's case, the president met with Azerbaijan leader Geidar Aliev. The country, 250 miles northeast of Iraq, has backed U.S. calls for Saddam's disarmament. Bush admitted that he had to offer Aliev a bigger piece of the pie."

Bush spoke by telephone with Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy of Hungary and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. It is not yet known what bribes he was offering.

Canada proposed giving Iraq until the end of March to complete a list of remaining disarmament tasks identified by U.N. weapons inspectors.

Rejecting the plan, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said it ''only procrastinates on a decision we have already made. One wonders why a puny country like Canada thinks it can have any real role in the formulation of international policy.''

A senior Defense Department official said it will cost $160 billion to $185 billion per year for military operations in Iraq and elsewhere.

Another official said the State Department and related agencies are discussing foreign bribes and diplomatic payoffs ranging from $12 billion to $18 billion. - http://www.theassassinatedpre...

BUSH HYPOCRISY, LIES, BETRAYAL: 'LIMITED' SOVEREIGNTY FOR IRAQ [BUSH'S CORPORATE RAPE AIN'T OVER!

04.27.04 (7:12 am) [edit]

[b]Powell Sees Limits on Iraq Sovereignty Post-June 30[/b]

Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said on Monday the still undefined government due to take power in Iraq (news - web sites) on July 1 would have to give back some of its sovereignty to U.S.-led military forces.

Powell also told Reuters the United States would take a little time to see if joint U.S.-Iraqi patrols could work in Falluja before deciding whether to take military action there.

With the clock ticking down to a formal handover of power to Iraqis on June 30, the U.S.-led occupation authority is racing to extinguish a challenge to its military control in Falluja while avoiding inflaming Iraqi public opinion.

U.S. forces have encircled the city, where Sunni insurgents have fought a three-week battle with U.S. Marines.

U.S. officials said President Bush (news - web sites) had asked commanders to keep up talks to try to find a solution. But they may start sending joint U.S.-Iraqi patrols into the city as early as Tuesday, risking serious confrontations.

"What we are looking at tomorrow is the beginning of joint patrols and to see if those joint patrols result in people coming forward with information or the turning over of arms," Powell said. "If that doesn't work -- and (we) have to give it a little bit of time to work -- if that doesn't work, then we will review the bidding again with our commanders."

Powell said a new Iraqi authority must accept some limits on its sovereignty by giving U.S.-led forces a free hand. "Some of its sovereignty will have to be given back, if I can put it that way, or limited by them, (with an) understanding by them that it is important to let the multinational force be able to operate under its own command," he said. - http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm...

BUSH HYPOCRISY, LIES, BETRAYAL: 'LIMITED' SOVEREIGNTY FOR IRAQ [BUSH'S CORPORATE RAPE AIN'T OVER!]

04.27.04 (7:10 am) [edit]

52 PROMINENT BRITISH DIPLOMATS BLAST BLAIR FOR FAILED 'U.S. FOREIGN POLICY'

04.27.04 (7:04 am) [edit]

[b]Diplomats blast Blair for 'US' foreign policy[/b]

A roll-call of former British diplomats blasted Tony Blair on Monday and said it was time for the prime minister to start influencing America's "doomed" policy in the Middle East or stop backing it.

In an unprecedented letter signed by 52 former ambassadors, high commissioners and governors - the top ranks of British diplomacy - Blair was urged to sway U.S. policy in the region as "a matter of the highest urgency".

The diplomats, among them former ambassadors to Iraq and Israel, told Blair they had "watched with deepening concern the policies which you have followed on the Arab-Israel problem and Iraq, in close cooperation with the United States.

"We feel the time has come to make our anxieties public, in the hope that they will be addressed in parliament and will lead to a fundamental reassessment," said the letter, sent to Blair on Monday and made available to Reuters.

A spokesman would not be drawn into how Blair would respond to the attack, which the diplomats believe is unprecedented in scope and scale.

"The prime minister rejects the idea that there is in some sense a score card between British objectives and U.S. objectives," the aide told reporters. "Britain's objective is a democracy in Iraq, a two-state solution in the Middle East; those are objectives that Britain will work with our allies, including the U.S., to achieve."

The protest letter comes as Blair faces deep discontent among voters for backing a U.S.-led war that most Britons had opposed and for endorsing a Washington-driven policy that has put London on a collision course with allies in Europe.

The diplomatic swipe is bound to be seized upon by Blair critics as fresh evidence that British interests come second to America's because of Blair's zealous alliance with President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative agenda.

The diplomats zeroed in on two key initiatives dominated by Washington -- Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and the war in Iraq -- and wrote off both as "doomed to failure".

[b]ROAR OF DIPLOMATIC DISQUIET[/b]

"Never has government policy been so controversial. It is an indication of our serious concern that what is probably the biggest ever such collective group has gone straight to government in this way," the letter's coordinator Oliver Miles, a former ambassador to Greece, told Reuters.

"Our objective is not to damage Blair politically but to strengthen the hand of those who feel as we do," said Miles. "Our voice will be heard."

Among the signatories are former ambassadors to Baghdad and Tel Aviv, top Arabists and non-regional specialists who served from Moscow to Brussels to the United Nations.

The career diplomats urged Blair to use his alliance with Bush to exert "real influence as a loyal ally... If that is unacceptable or unwelcome, there is no case for supporting policies which are doomed to failure."

Bush and Blair have been staunch allies in war, joining forces last year to oust President Saddam Hussein and struggling to bring stability to Iraq after weeks of renewed bloodshed.

[b]WAITING FOR WASHINGTON[/b]

The diplomats criticised the toll of the war and apparent lack of a plan for life in the country post-Saddam. "The Iraqis killed by coalition forces probably total

between 10,000 and 15,000," they said, estimating the number killed in the last month in Falluja alone at several hundred.

"There was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement...To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful."

On the Middle East, the diplomats said big powers had waited for U.S. leadership to advance a "road map" for peace that had raised expectations of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

"The hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence. Britain and the other sponsors of the road map merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain," it said.

"Worse was to come," they continued, attacking Bush's decision this month to endorse an Israeli plan to retain some settlements in the West Bank as an illegal and one-sided step.

"Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land."

Blair has backed Bush in public but, privately, government sources fear the road map is in tatters. The prime minister has also attacked Israel's assassination of two Hamas leaders, in sharp contrast to Washington. - http://news.ft.com/servlet/Co...

52 PROMINENT BRITISH DIPLOMATS BLAST TONY BLAIR FOR FAILED 'U.S. FOREIGN POLICY'

04.27.04 (7:01 am) [edit]

DUBYA'S FIASCO HAS TURNED LIBERATION INTO HATED OCCUPATION, ALLY SAYS IN IRAQ

04.27.04 (6:55 am) [edit]

[b]US Army has turned liberation into occupation, ally complains[/b]

MASSOUD Barzani, Iraq's governing council president, said yesterday that the US has only itself to blame for the military deadlock at Najaf and Falluja because it allowed "an army of liberation" to turn into "an army of occupation".

Barzani warned that the United States must not act softly in the besieged cities and give insurgents "the impression that they have the upper hand" but also must make sure that civilians are not harmed if military force is used.

The comments from a close US ally signal the deepening dissatisfaction between the United States and top Iraqi politicians. Barzani supported the US war effort and members of his militia fought alongside US soldiers in northern Iraq.

For more than a decade, Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic party and another Kurdish party controlled an autonomous area protected by US warplanes during the Saddam Hussein era. Barzani's forces continue to dominate parts of northern Iraq, a region that has been largely stable.

Barzani holds the council's rotating presidency for April.

Some members on the council � seen by many Iraqis as tainted for the close association with the United States � have complained that US commanders have acted heavy-handedly in the Falluja siege and launched military action without consulting them.

Barzani talks to Paul Bremer, the top US official in Iraq, several times a week.

When asked whether Bremer consults the council or merely informs it of US decisions, Barzani said: "It depends on the nature . . . of the subject."

"The fact that should not be forgotten is that Iraq today is under occupation," Barzani said. "Iraq does not have sovereignty or independence today."

April has been the bloodiest month since the US invasion.

At least 114 American soldiers and up to 1200 Iraqis have died as troops confronted Shi'ite militiamen in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf and Sunni militiamen in Falluja. US soldiers still surround both cities, unable to force militants to disarm and fearful that assaulting the city would lead to large numbers of casualties on both sides.

If the US takes military action, Barzani said, it must make a "clear distinction between civilians and terrorist elements".

But Barzani also cautioned that "at the same time no impression can be given to the terrorists that they will be negotiated with or they are seeing any chance that they will win at the end of the day".

"What was a mistake is, they were liberators," Barzani said. But the US Army turned into "an army of occupation", he added. - http://www.theherald.co.uk/ne...

BUSH'S FIASCO HAS TURNED LIBERATION INTO HATED OCCUPATION, SAYS US ALLY IN IRAQ

04.27.04 (6:49 am) [edit]

DUBYA CAN'T EVEN GET A FLAG THE IRAQI PEOPLE LIKE!!! IT'S UGLY!!!

04.27.04 (6:43 am) [edit]

[b]New Iraqi Flag Flap

Here's the ugly flag the Iraqi Puppet Council today agreed should replace the current Iraqi flag.[/b]

=http://img33.photobucket.com/...

"[i]When I saw it in the newspaper, I felt very sad[/i]," said Muthana Khalil, 50, a supermarket owner in Saadoun, a commercial area in central Baghdad. "[i]The flags of other Arab countries are red and green and black. Why did they put in these colors that are the same as Israel? Why was the public opinion not consulted[/i]?" - http://www.antiwar.com/blog/i...

[b]Iraqis Say Council-Approved National Flag Won't Fly [/b] - http://www.washingtonpost.com...

It was supposed to be the perfect symbol for a new and unified Iraq: an Islamic crescent on a field of pure white, with two blue stripes representing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and a third yellow stripe to symbolize the country's Kurdish minority.

But the new national flag, presented Monday after an artistic competition sponsored by the Iraqi Governing Council, appears to have met with widespread public disapproval here -- in part because of its design and in part because of the increasing unpopularity of the U.S.-appointed council.

In interviews in several Baghdad neighborhoods, a variety of residents expressed strong negative reactions to the flag, which was reproduced in most daily newspapers. In particular, people objected to the pale blue color of the crescent and stripes, saying it was identical to the dominant color in the flag of Israel, a Jewish state.

"When I saw it in the newspaper, I felt very sad," said Muthana Khalil, 50, a supermarket owner in Saadoun, a commercial area in central Baghdad. "The flags of other Arab countries are red and green and black. Why did they put in these colors that are the same as Israel? Why was the public opinion not consulted?"

Other residents objected to the removal of the phrase, "God is greatest," which adorned the previous national flag, and said there was no need for a new one until national elections are held next January and a new constitution is written.

Hamid Kifaie, the chief spokesman for the Governing Council, said Monday night that the winning design, by Rifaat Chaderchi , an Iraqi artist, was chosen from among 30 entries. A committee of council members felt best it represented the major values and attributes of Iraq, Kifaie said.

"This flag represents the democracy and freedom of the new Iraq, where the old one represented killing and oppression and dictatorship," he said. "We are not imposing this flag on the people; it was chosen by the legitimate representatives of Iraq. When a new national assembly is elected, it can decide whether to keep it or change it."

To a large extent, however, public objections to the new flag seem to be intertwined with broader unhappiness over the 25-member Governing Council, which many Iraqis closely identify with American interests.

Criticism of council members, and disputes among them, have sharply increased with the approach of the June 30 deadline for U.S. authorities to hand over power to a new interim government, which is to remain in office until elections are held early next year.

Some members have made it clear they want to be part of the new government. But both U.S. and U.N. officials here have suggested a clean sweep may be in order.

A proposal by Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special representative to Iraq, calls for the council to be scrapped and replaced by what he described in an interview Friday as a government composed of technocrats who are "acceptable to the Iraqi people." He said the United Nations would insist on qualities of "credibility, honesty and expertise," but would also seek a balance among major ethnic and religious groups.

In commenting on the new flag, some Baghdad residents quickly shifted to criticism of the council, saying it had no independent authority -- even to introduce a national emblem -- and was too deferential to American wishes.

"I will be delighted when this council is dissolved and a new government is formed," said Amer Abdulaimy, 38, a day laborer, who said he preferred the old flag and saw no reason to change it. "The council has done nothing for us, and it is the same as the American government. We need free elections."

As June 30 approaches, some council members have broken publicly with U.S. officials here and have become embroiled in internal spats.

Last week, when U.S. officials criticized a program created last year to review petitions from former members of Hussein's Baath Party who had been fired from government jobs, Ahmed Chalabi, the council member in charge of the program, reacted strongly. Chalabi, an exile leader once highly favored by Washington, said the Americans' call to reform the review process was equivalent to allowing former Nazis to return to power in Germany.

Meanwhile, aides to Chalabi excoriated Adnan Pachachi, another council member. In an essay Monday in the newspaper published by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, Pachachi was accused of being a dictator and a paranoid power-monger who was working with U.S. authorities to squeeze political party leaders out of the new government.

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS BUSH: "I REQUEST BOOZE & A SLUT"!

04.26.04 (7:37 am) [edit]

STICKING TO FALSEHOODS MEANS STICKING TO FAILURE

04.26.04 (7:34 am) [edit]

[b]Sticking to Falsehoods Means Sticking to Failure [/b]

A new poll shows that as of mid-March, 57% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had given substantial support to al-Qaeda. Worse, 45% actually say that "clear evidence" has been found in Iraq to support this allegation! As for weapons of mass destruction 45 percent say they believe Saddam had them before the recent war, and 22 percent say that he had a major program for developing them.

There is no documentary or physical evidence for any of these assertions.

The only good thing about the poll is that it showed that a majority of Americans now believes the Iraq war will not bring greater peace and stability to the Middle East (56% did believe it in May 2003), and 51% believe that Iraqis want US troops out of their country (this may actually be overly simplistic).

The poll was commissioned by the "University of Maryland's Program in International Policy Attitudes, conducted by Knowledge Networks from March 16 to 22, was released yesterday. It surveyed 1,311 adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points."

Why would so many Americans cling to patently false beliefs? One can only speculate of course. But I would suggest that the two-party system in the US has produced a two-party epistemology. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. If it were accepted that Saddam had virtually nothing to do with al-Qaeda, that he had no weapons of mass destruction (nor any significant programs for producing them), and that no evidence for such things has been uncovered after the US and its allies have had a year to comb through Baath documents � if all that is accepted, then President Bush's credibility would suffer. For his partisans, it is absolutely crucial that the president retain his credibility. Therefore, rather than face reality, they re-jigger it to create a fantasy world in which Saddam and Usamah are buddies (as in the Jimmy Fallon/ Horatio Sanz skits on the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live), and in which David Kay (of whom respondents say they've never heard) never recanted his earlier belief that the WMD was there somewhere.

Of those who maintain that Iraq actually did have WMD, 72% say they are going to vote for Bush.

If 57% of Americans believe that Saddam was supporting Usama in the late 1990s through 2003, it means that not insignificant numbers of Democrats believe this. It shows that the Democratic party leadership has not developed an effective critique of Bush administration approaches to the 'war on terror,' and that in effect the Republicans are poaching on Democratic territory successfully in this regard.

It is bad for the country for policy to be made based on falsehoods, and it is even worse for failed policies not be be recognized as such because the public clings to myths.

I saw how the mythical opinions are generated at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations where I testified last Tuesday. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger testified, and began his testimony with a long quote from Usama Bin Laden about how the US was timid and had easily been chased out of Lebanon and Aden with a few bombs. It was an odd way to begin a hearing on what has gone wrong in Iraq.

I don't have my degree in Neocon studies, but as I thought about this, it occurred to me that Schlesinger must count as one of the early Neocons, having gone over to Nixon at a time when the junior members of the club still clustered around Democrat Scoop Jackson. As a historian, I respect several of Schlesinger's achievements, and I know for a fact that he was very suspicious of Nixon during Watergate and put in safeguards against Nixon going to the officer corps and trying to declare martial law. But it is also clear that Schlesinger has what can charitably be called blind spots on the Middle East. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, British official Lord Cromer became alarmed at his views: "But it was the substance of Schlesinger's remarks which set alarm bells ringing. '[One] outcome of the Middle East crisis,' he told Lord Cromer, 'was the [sight] of industrialised nations being continuously submitted to [the] whims of under-populated, under-developed countries, particularly [those in the] Middle East.' Schlesinger did not draw any specific conclusion from this but the unspoken assumption came through ... that it might not ... be possible to rule out a more direct application of military force." That is, he was at least talking about invading Saudi Arabia and occupying its oil fields, and he appears to have had rather dismissive views of Middle Easterners. (The area is not under-populated, by the way; the Middle East if we include from Morocco to Iran, and Turkey to Saudi Arabia, surely has a population comparable to that of the US). And, after the recent Iraq war, Schlesinger seemed to argue that no Arab would ever again lift a hand against the United States, since they had been taught a decisive lesson.

So it seems clear to me that Schlesinger was trying to shape his Senate testimony so as to hint around that the Iraq War was somehow connected to al-Qaeda, even though we all know that it wasn't. The only one who challenged Schlesinger on this was Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee:

"SEN. CHAFEE: I know these gentlemen have good opinions, but they don't speak for the administration. Those are the people we're going to get the answers from ultimately. But nonetheless, Secretary Schlesinger, in your opening comments, you quoted some very chilling testimony from Osama bin Laden. Why use that testimony at a hearing on Iraq?

"MR. SCHLESINGER: The mention of that is to discuss why it is that the United States is engaged in the Middle East, because we were attacked, because of a declaration of war against Americans.

"The question of Iraq, which is what you point to, it may or may not have been, as some stated, central at the time we went in. It may have been secondary or peripheral at the time we went in. But the administration is quite right that it is now the central front in the war against terrorism, because much of what we see in Fallujah today are terrorists who have come from the outside world. They are the ones primarily who have been setting the car bombs and have been doing the training.

"So it has now become central, even for those who might, at the outset, not have thought it central.

"SEN. CHAFEE: Well, it's become central because we invaded. But certainly I think you'd even agree there's never been any connection between Osama bin Laden and Iraq. They're very, very different issues. And Afghanistan is �

"MR. SCHLESINGER: Well, I think you've had �

"SEN. CHAFEE: � a long way from Iraq.

"MR. SCHLESINGER: I think you've had testimony, or a letter, at least, from George Tenet talking about the contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam going back at least a decade. But that is � we are there. We are where we are. And the consequences of not winning, of not being successful, would be disastrous not only for the United States �

"SEN. CHAFEE: I agree with that, but I don't think there's any connection with al Qaeda. We're there and now we have to be successful. I agree with that."

Actually, George Tenet has testified that there was no relation between Saddam and 9/11. What is interesting here is how completely honest and aboveboard Chafee was being, in taking on the Neocon Consensus. That consensus has been adopted by the Right of the Republican Party as its election playbook, and it is repeated on Fox Cable News, on rightwing talk radio, at Republican fundraisers, dinners, and in television interviews all through the Red States. So far the Republican Right has been able to keep its partisans with it on these matters. You might think that a Republican like Chafee standing up for the truth is a good sign. And it is, of course, in some ways. But the Associated Press worries that centrist Republicans like Chafee and Spector are a "dying breed."

Still, that Senator Lugar agreed with ranking minority Senator Biden to hold the hearings at all was clearly an expression of extreme anxiety about where Iraq policy is going and about the potential catastrophe that lies ahead if his party cannot begin facing facts. (Biden has been courageous and straightforward that we are in big trouble; Lugar tends to signal it in more low-key ways). Senator Hagel clearly also has severe concerns. The Democrats, not being obliged to try to reelect a sitting president, in general are more clear-sighted on the problems right now, but many of the Republicans are also clearly alarmed. There wasn't much partisanship at the hearings, since after all, Iraq affects all Americans. The only exception was Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who seemed angry about the hearings and kept throwing leading questions only at Richard Perle. It seems clear that the momentum of the Republican Party at the moment is in the hands of the Brownbacks and the Santorums, and it is they who are shaping opinion among the rank and file, aided by the Limbaugh megaphone.

If nearly half the country cannot even see that things are going badly wrong in Iraq, one despairs that anyone will work up the political will to try to fix the problems before it is too late.

[b]By Dr. Juan Cole [/b]- http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?...

BUSH LEGACY: STICKING TO FALSEHOODS MEANS STICKING TO FAILURE

04.26.04 (7:33 am) [edit]

FASCIST FOX NEWS: BUSH'S NEO-CON NAZI PROPAGANDA CHANNEL!!!

04.26.04 (7:28 am) [edit]

[b]Is FOX News Supporting the Troops or the President?[/b]

What fascinates me is how people at FOX News have convinced themselves that they�re �supporting the troops� while supporting the U.S. government�s continued occupation of Iraq. After all, no one can honestly still claim that the troops are dying for �freedom� because Saddam Hussein is now in jail. Moreover, according to Iraqi Shi'ite Sheik Raed Saadi, it is now Sunni and Shi'ite Muslems in Iraq who are uniting �to liberate� (his words) Iraq from the occupiers.

�Well, they�re dying in the war on terrorism,� is now the response of FOX News commentators, embracing the government�s attempt to morph its unprovoked war of choice against Iraq into its �war on terrorism.�

Pardon me, but isn�t there a difference between Middle East terrorists who are retaliating for prior acts of U.S. foreign policy and Iraqi insurgents who are simply resisting a foreign occupation of their country?

Moreover, how can the installation of U.S. troops in a land thousands of miles away for the purpose of serving as a magnet for millions of people in that part of the world who hate the United States because of its brutal, deadly, and hypocritical decades-long Middle East foreign policy honestly be considered �supporting the troops�? And isn�t it possible that some of those people who are now killing American soldiers in Iraq are simply responding to President Bush�s �Bring it on!� taunt that he issued to all those nearby Middle East terrorists several months ago?

What are U.S. soldiers in Iraq dying for now? They�re dying to maintain a brutal military occupation, an occupation whose mission is to prevent what President Bush calls a �power grab� of Iraqis trying to oust a U.S.-appointed puppet ruling regime known as the Iraqi Governing Council, a council that includes the U.S.-appointed Ahmed Chalabi, who hadn�t been in Iraq for 45 years, who just happens to on the lam for a conviction for bank fraud and embezzlement in Jordan, who is proud that he misled America into falsely believing that Saddam Hussein still possessed weapons of mass destruction, and whose pockets are currently being stuffed with $350,000 in U.S. taxpayer money every single month.

Shouldn�t the commentators at FOX News be piercing themselves with some critical questions regarding their �support of the troops� in Iraq? Why are the occupation of Iraq and the installation of a corrupt U.S.-appointed puppet regime there worth dying for? Why are they worth sacrificing the life of even one U.S. soldier for? Indeed, why are they worth killing for? What exactly is the relative worth that FOX News puts on the lives and psychological well-being of the troops they claim to support?

More fundamentally, of course, U.S. troops are killing and dying in Iraq because U.S. officials, including the president and others in his administration, the Pentagon, and certain members of Congress, with the full support of some of the FOX News commentators, sent them into a hotbed of rattlesnakes in Iraq for the purpose of accomplishing a �regime change,� a goal that has turned into a deadly trap for U.S. troops from which there is now no escape, at least not before the November elections. For U.S. officials know that if the occupation troops are withdrawn, the result might well be worse than having left Saddam Hussein (a former U.S. government ally) in power, which could obviously jeopardize the president�s bid for reelection.

Moreover, let�s not forget that those who are ambushing and attacking U.S. troops in Iraq might be more motivated by their causes � the ouster of a foreign occupier from their land and vengeance for many years of a deadly and hypocritical U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East � than U.S. troops are motivated by the cause that U.S. officials have assigned to them � the installation of a U.S.-approved puppet regime in Iraq.

So excuse me for asking an indelicate and perhaps trite question, but with friends like FOX News �supporting the troops,� who needs enemies?

[b]Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation[/b]. - http://www.fff.org/comment/co...

FASCIST FOX NEWS: BUSH'S NEO-CON NAZI PROPAGANDA CHANNEL!!!

04.26.04 (7:26 am) [edit]

ARE THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN, FASCIST BUSH & CHENEY TRYING TO COLONIZE IRAQ?

04.26.04 (7:23 am) [edit]

[b]Colonizing Iraq?[/b]

Will President Bush share with the American people the reason he is planning a long term American military occupation of Iraq?

You ask, "Isn�t the occupation scheduled to end on June 30 when we hand rule over to a provisional government?"

Not on your life!

On April 23 General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters that the US occupation of Iraq will last a very long time: "Decades is probably not unreasonable," said General Myers.

With 4,600 dead and wounded American soldiers as of April 24 (the first year of the occupation), and with Republican Senator John McCain calling for President Bush to send more divisions to Iraq, shouldn�t Bush first tell us why US troops will be occupying Iraq for decades?

Indeed, isn�t it time for President Bush to tell us the real reason he ordered the Iraq invasion in the first place?

"Weapons of mass destruction" was the first reason Bush gave for invading Iraq. Now that it has been proven beyond all doubt that Iraq had no such weapons, why does the US need to occupy Iraq for decades?

Removing Saddam Hussein was the second reason Bush gave. Now that Saddam is gone, why do we need to remain one more day?

Bringing Iraqis "freedom and democracy" was the third reason Bush invented. Why then did Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman tell Congress last week that the US military occupation force and the new American ambassador would be the real rulers of Iraq for the foreseeable future?

If the US is gifting democracy and freedom to Iraqis, why did Mr. Grossman tell Congress that the handover of "sovereignty" on June 30 was just a device for putting an "Iraqi face" on the American occupation?

Asked what would happen if the make-believe Iraqi government attempted to exercise real sovereignty, Mr. Grossman indicated that it would not be tolerated.

How can a decades-long US occupation of Iraq be the same as bringing "freedom and democracy" to Iraqis?

Many Iraqis already know that they are occupied, not liberated, and others will discover it soon after June 30. Will Iraqis submit to American rule? If not, insurgency will increase, and more of our troops will be killed and wounded. Why?

Gen. Myers justified the long-term occupation as part of the "war against terrorism." But, of course, there were no terrorists in Iraq until we invaded. We brought terrorism and terrorists to Iraq. Every day that we stay, we create more terrorists. How do we fight terrorism by creating more terrorists?

Until last week, the Bush administration blamed Iraqi insurgency on remnants of Saddam�s Ba'ath Party. Now the US plans to bring back the banned Ba'athists, install them in the new puppet government and make them the generals in the Iraqi security force. Obviously, the US plan is to rule through the Ba'athists of Saddam�s regime, a regime Bush claims to have overthrown in the name of "democracy."

The commitment for US troops to occupy Iraq for decades has not been explained to the American people. A commitment of this magnitude must be debated by foreign policy experts and examined in congressional hearings. President Bush never told us that he intended to occupy Iraq for decades. We were promised a "cakewalk" and troops home by Thanksgiving.

Why hasn�t Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry asked Bush this most obvious of all questions: Why are we still in Iraq and planning to stay for decades?

Where is the American press corps? The "watchdog" burnt itself out in its opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and to Reagan in the 1980s. Today the media functions as a public relations office for the Bush administration. Fox News is the Ministry of War Propaganda.

President Clinton did Bush the favor of establishing the convention that it is no big deal for an American president to be caught in lies. Sex, war, what does it matter?

September 11 has made Americans fearful that they live in dire danger from terrorists. This fear causes Americans to accept whatever the government does in the name of "fighting terrorism."

The American people are far more quiescent than Iraqis in accepting Bush�s unexplained policy of converting Iraq into a permanent American base. Unless Iraqis become as accepting of this mad enterprise as Americans, or unless Americans become as unaccepting of it as Iraqis, the blood and treasure thus far squandered in Iraq is but a drop in the bucket to what we will be forced to pay.

[b]Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the [i]Wall Street Journal [/i]and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of [i]The Tyranny of Good Intentions[/i].[/b] - http://www.antiwar.com/robert...

ARE THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN, FASCIST BUSH & CHENEY TRYING TO COLONIZE IRAQ?

04.26.04 (7:22 am) [edit]

ARE THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN, FASCIST BUSH & CHENEY TRYING TO COLONIZE IRAQ?

04.26.04 (7:19 am) [edit]

TO DEFEAT AL QAEDA BUSH HAS TO STOP PLAYING CORRUPT POLITICS

04.25.04 (6:58 am) [edit]

[b]The Wrong Debate on Terrorism[/b]

The last month has seen a remarkable series of events that focused the public and news media on America's shortcomings in dealing with terrorism from radical Islamists. This catharsis, which is not yet over, is necessary for our national psyche. If we learn the right lessons, it may also prove to be an essential part of our future victory over those who now threaten us.

But how do we select the right lessons to learn? I tried to suggest some in my recent book, and many have attempted to do so in the 9/11 hearings, but such efforts have been largely eclipsed by partisan reaction.

One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower � as we were before Sept. 11, 2001 � we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam � not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West � is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.

What we have tried in the war of ideas has also fallen short. It is clear that United States government versions of MTV or CNN in Arabic will not put a dent in the popularity of the anti-American jihad. Nor will calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet. The Bush administration's much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative, therefore, was dead on arrival.

We must also be careful, while advocating democracy in the region, that we do not undermine the existing regimes without having a game plan for what should follow them and how to get there. The lesson of President Jimmy Carter's abandonment of the shah of Iran in 1979 should be a warning. So, too, should we be chastened by the costs of eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein, almost 25 years after the shah, also without a detailed plan for what would follow.

Other parts of the war of ideas include making real progress on the Israel-Palestinian issue, while safe-guarding Israeli security, and finding ideological and religious counter-weights to Osama bin Laden and the radical imams. Fashioning a comprehensive strategy to win the battle of ideas should be given as much attention as any other aspect of the war on terrorists, or else we will fight this war for the foreseeable future. For even when Osama bin Laden is dead, his ideas will carry on. Even as Al Qaeda has had its leadership attacked, it has morphed into a hydra, carrying out more major attacks in the 30 months since 9/11 than it did in the three years before.

The second major lesson of the last month of controversy is that the organizations entrusted with law enforcement and intelligence in the United States had not fully accepted the gravity of the threat prior to 9/11. Because this is now so clear, there will be a tendency to overemphasize organizational fixes. The 9/11 commission and President Bush seem to be in a race to propose creating a "director of national intelligence," who would be given control over all American intelligence agencies. The commission may also recommend a domestic security intelligence service, probably modeled on Britain's MI-5.

While some structural changes are necessary, they are a small part of the solution. And there is a risk that concentrating on chain-of-authority diagrams of federal agencies will further divert our attention from more important parts of the agenda. This new director of national intelligence would be able to make only marginal changes to agency budgets and interactions. The more important task is improving the quality of the analysts, agents and managers at the lead foreign intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.

In addition, no new domestic security intelligence service could leap full grown from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, creating another new organization while we are in a key phase in the war on terrorism would ignore the lesson that we should have learned from the creation of Homeland Security. Many observers, including some in the new department, now agree that the forced integration and reorganization of 22 agencies diverted attention from the missions of several agencies that were needed to go after the terrorists and to reduce our vulnerabilities at home.

We do not need another new agency right now. We do, however, need to create within the F.B.I. a strong organization that is vastly different from the federal police agency that was unable to notice the Al Qaeda presence in America before 9/11. For now, any American version of MI-5 must be a branch within the F.B.I. � one with a higher quality of analysts, agents and managers.

Rather than creating new organizations, we need to give the C.I.A. and F.B.I. makeovers. They cannot continue to be dominated by careerists who have carefully managed their promotions and ensured their retirement benefits by avoiding risk and innovation for decades. The agencies need regular infusions throughout their supervisory ranks of managers and thinkers from other, more creative organizational cultures.

In the new F.B.I., marksmanship, arrests and skill on the physical training obstacle course should no longer be prerequisites for recruitment and retention. Similarly, within the C.I.A. we should quash the belief that � as George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the 9/11 commission � those who have never worked in the directorate of operations cannot understand it and are unqualified to criticize it.

Finally, we must try to achieve a level of public discourse on these issues that is simultaneously energetic and mutually respectful. I hoped, through my book and testimony, to make criticism of the conduct of the war on terrorism and the separate war in Iraq more active and legitimate. We need public debate if we are to succeed. We should not dismiss critics through character assassination, nor should we besmirch advocates of the Patriot Act as fascists.

We all want to defeat the jihadists. To do that, we need to encourage an active, critical and analytical debate in America about how that will best be done. And if there is another major terrorist attack in this country, we must not panic or stifle debate as we did for too long after 9/11.

[b]Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is the author of "[i]Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror[/i][/b]." - http://nytimes.com/2004/04/25...

TO DEFEAT AL QAEDA BUSH HAS TO STOP PLAYING CORRUPT POLITICS

04.25.04 (6:57 am) [edit]

DUMB BUSH SHOULD GIVE-UP ON INCOMPETENT RUMSFELD'S FLAWED WAR 'THEORIES'!!!

04.25.04 (6:54 am) [edit]

[b]A Stronger Force in Iraq[/b]

President Bush should be sending yellow roses to Gen. Eric Shinseki and begging him to come back. Before the war in Iraq, General Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, said that Mr. Bush was going to need "several hundred thousand" soldiers to occupy and stabilize the country. The general was denounced by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's civilian team and then ushered into retirement. Mr. Bush clung to Mr. Rumsfeld's misguided idea that a minimal force could not only capture Baghdad but could also hold, stabilize and rebuild an entire country.

Mr. Rumsfeld was right about the lightning strike into Baghdad. But he was tragically wrong about everything else, and the deeper the United States gets into this badly planned occupation, the more American soldiers are paying the price. In the 13 months of war, about 700 American soldiers have been listed as killed, including at least 100 just in April. The White House cannot continue to deny our forces and the Iraqi people the protection that adequate troop strength would provide.

The administration agreed to increase the occupation force from about 115,000 to about 135,000 after being surprised by an easily predictable uprising this month. But it did so by extending the stay of already exhausted soldiers. And it authorized the increase for just 90 days, suggesting that it is continuing to put off hard decisions and deny unpleasant realities. The White House does not talk about it much, but the Pentagon is planning to stay in Iraq at least until the end of 2006. Even that timetable is extremely optimistic. It assumes everything will go precisely according to a plan that no one outside Mr. Bush's circle seems to understand and that has certainly not worked well so far.

It is past time for the president to let go of Mr. Rumsfeld's flawed theories of war and authorize a real long-term increase in the force in Iraq. There is debate about how many more soldiers are needed � some experts say at least 50,000 in the short term, while others say even more. What is certain is that the nation cannot continue limping along on small, politically calibrated 90-day infusions. The White House likes to shift responsibility to those in uniform by saying it is up to the military to figure out what it needs to do its job. Unfortunately, military planners are not certain what that job is in broad political terms. They stick to the safer ground of figuring an adequate force to handle very specific, immediate assignments. The administration needs to create a long-term military strategy and accept the burden of providing the troops to carry it out.

The failure to do that reflects the overarching error of the Iraqi invasion, one that has defined the entire Bush administration � the refusal to take the political risk that comes with asking the voters for real sacrifice. The president led the public to underestimate the time it would take to turn Iraq into a stable democracy and the likely cost in money and blood. Even now he is trying to avoid admitting that Congress needs additional appropriations for the war, while preaching an election-year gospel of tax cuts.

Right now, the wrong people are bearing the burden. The reserves have done far more than their fair share and many men and women on active duty are also being kept in the field too long. Iraqi civilian casualties mount and the Iraqi people, who were supposed to get their freedom, are prisoners in their homes while street crime, terrorist violence and insurrection are rife.

Sending more troops will cause further pain to an already strained military and it means acknowledging that units now being rotated home could be sent back to Iraq. But there seems to be no other choice. Much of the current trouble could have been avoided if Mr. Rumsfeld had not been so determined to disprove the doctrine named for his rival, Secretary of State Colin Powell, which posits that force, if it is to be used at all, should be overwhelming. The period after the fall of Baghdad was catastrophic: Iraq was looted, its police and army were disbanded, its civil servants were fired in a needless political purge, armed militias formed, and the thin American ranks could do little more than watch in horror. The United States should have had a much larger military force ready to actually occupy Iraq and restore order.

As much as we hope that Mr. Bush's very belated agreement to involve the United Nations in Iraq can clear the way for greater international military assistance, it would be folly to count on more than symbolic help in the near future. Any real increase in the military force in Iraq will have to come from the United States.

This page felt it was a mistake to invade Iraq without broad international support, and since then we have seen few indications that Mr. Bush's notion of establishing a stable democracy there is anything but a dream. Yet leaving Iraq now would create a situation so horrific that the United States is obliged to press forward as long as there seems any hope of making progress. The only possible, but by no means certain, road to a good outcome is to stick with the plan to allow the United Nations to set up an interim Iraqi government, to expand international political support, and to work with moderate Shiite and Sunni leaders to isolate the violent radicals. The Iraqi security forces have to be made into something far better than what they are now. It was a relief last week to see the occupation authorities finally start to reverse a foolish policy that denied work to Iraqis who had been forced to join Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in order to serve in the middle and lower levels of the deposed government and disbanded army.

We may, in the end, find that the task Mr. Bush has laid out for the brave men and women in the military and the brave Iraqi citizens who are struggling to create a better future is simply impossible to achieve. But we have not reached that point. This is not the moment for retreat and it certainly is not the moment for half measures. - http://nytimes.com/2004/04/25...

IT'S BUSHWORLD: WE JUST GET SCREWED AND DIE IN IT!!!

04.25.04 (6:51 am) [edit]

[b]The Orwellian Olsens[/b]

It's their reality. We just live and die in it.

In Bushworld, our troops go to war and get killed, but you never see the bodies coming home.

In Bushworld, flag-draped remains of the fallen are important to revere and show the nation, but only in political ads hawking the president's leadership against terror.

In Bushworld, we can create an exciting Iraqi democracy as long as it doesn't control its own military, pass any laws or have any power.

In Bushworld, we can win over Falluja by bulldozing it.

In Bushworld, it was worth going to war so Iraqis can express their feelings ("Down With America!") without having their tongues cut out, although we cannot yet allow them to express intemperate feelings in newspapers ("Down With America!") without shutting them down.

In Bushworld, it's fine to take $700 million that Congress provided for the war in Afghanistan and 9/11 recovery and divert it to the war in Iraq that you're insisting you're not planning.

In Bushworld, you don't consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can't talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes.

In Bushworld, it's O.K. to run for re-election as the avenger of 9/11, even as you make secret deals with the Arab kingdom where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from.

In Bushworld, you get to strut around like a tough military guy and paint your rival as a chicken hawk, even though he's the one who won medals in combat and was praised by his superior officers for fulfilling all his obligations.

In Bushworld, it makes sense to press for transparency in Mr. and Mrs. Rival while cultivating your own opacity.

In Bushworld, you can reign as the antiterror president even after hearing an intelligence report about Al Qaeda's plans to attack America and then stepping outside to clear brush.

In Bushworld, those who dissemble about the troops and money it will take to get Iraq on its feet are patriots, while those who are honest are patronizingly marginalized.

In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America.

In Bushworld, you can claim to be the environmental president on Earth Day while being the industry president every other day.

In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying and the Taliban are running freely around the border areas, hiding Osama and delaying elections.

In Bushworld, imperfect intelligence is good enough to knock over Iraq. But even better evidence that North Korea is building the weapons that Saddam could only dream about is hidden away.

In Bushworld, the C.I.A. says it can't find out whether there are W.M.D. in Iraq unless we invade on the grounds that there are W.M.D.

In Bushworld, there's no irony that so many who did so much to avoid the Vietnam draft have now strained the military so much that lawmakers are talking about bringing back the draft.

In Bushworld, we're making progress in the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists.

In Bushworld, you don't need to bother asking your vice president and top Defense Department officials whether you should go to war in Iraq, because they've already maneuvered you into going to war.

In Bushworld, it's perfectly natural for the president and vice president to appear before the 9/11 commission like the Olsen twins.

In Bushworld, you expound on remaking the Middle East and spreading pro-American sentiments even as you expand anti-American sentiments by ineptly occupying Iraq and unstintingly backing Ariel Sharon on West Bank settlements.

In Bushworld, we went to war to give Iraq a democratic process, yet we disdain the democratic process that causes allies to pull out troops.

In Bushworld, you pride yourself on the fact that your administration does not leak to the press, while you flood the best-known journalist in Washington with inside information.

In Bushworld, you list Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" as recommended reading on your campaign Web site, even though it makes you seem divorced from reality. That is, unless you live in Bushworld.

[b]By Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VS. AWOL DUBYA: "I REQUEST DUTY IN HOOTERS"!

04.25.04 (6:49 am) [edit]

GAO FINDS: MISSILE DEFENSE BOONDOGGLE UNPROVEN, TESTS UNREALISTIC

04.25.04 (6:44 am) [edit]

[b]Missile defense called unproven

So far, testing is unrealistic, GAO finds [/b]

A congressional audit of the Bush administration's efforts to build a nationwide defense against ballistic missile attack warned Friday that the system, due to be fielded later this year, will be "largely unproven" because of a lack of realistic testing.

The report, by the General Accounting Office, said the eight flight intercepts attempted so far have been largely "repetitive and scripted," and that critical parts of the system have yet to be flight-tested together.

Some elements that were to be part of the initial deployment phase have been deferred because of developmental glitches and production delays, the report noted. Nevertheless, the cost in 2004 and 2005 for developing and fielding the initial system -- which is to include 20 missile interceptors along with several ground- and sea-based radars -- rose by $1.12 billion to $7.36 billion over the past year, the report disclosed.

The report's title -- "Actions Are Needed to Enhance Testing and Accountability" -- summed up the GAO's concerns.

A number of the report's findings echo earlier reviews by the GAO and others, but the study represents the most extensive assessment so far by the agency, an investigative branch of Congress. It comes as the Pentagon is preparing to start lowering the first interceptor missiles into newly built silos in Alaska and California and declare the system operational during the summer or autumn.

Construction of the system has been a high priority for the Bush administration, which is pursuing a series of anti-missile technologies with the aim of erecting a network of defenses to target warheads in various stages of flight. Funding for these projects has absorbed more research and development dollars than any other military program -- more, in fact, than the Army's entire R&D budget. The administration's request for fiscal 2005 tops $10 billion. - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin...

BUSH'S FIASCO: U.S. STARTING FROM SQUARE ON IN IRAQ, ONE YEAR LATER!

04.24.04 (6:20 am) [edit]

[b]US Starting From Square One in Iraq, One Year Later [/b]

One year after invading U.S. and British forces consolidated their control over Iraq, the administration of President George W. Bush appears to be back at Square One, if not in negative territory, over how to ensure that control in the short to medium term.

The problem, however, is that the administration lacks any comprehensive strategy and remains internally divided over precisely what to do.

Neo-conservative hawks centered in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office and their allies outside the administration remain strongly opposed to giving the United Nations a major substantive role in any aspect of the occupation or abandoning plans to ensure that their Iraqi collaborators, notably Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi, retain power in any transition.

The administration's latest policy revision was confirmed in Baghdad on Friday with the announcement by Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer that the "de-Ba'athification" policy he carried to Iraq almost 11 months ago had been "poorly implemented" and needed to be reviewed.

The plain meaning of his remarks, despite his continued insistence that the policy "was and is sound," was that thousands of former senior and mid-level members of the Ba'ath Party of former President Saddam Hussein will now be brought back into the government, especially the military and the police, presumably to secure the stability and order that some 160,000 US and British troops and their auxiliaries from the ever-shrinking "coalition of the willing" have been unable to impose.

Bremer's announcement followed by just a few days another by Bush himself that United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will be given the lead to determine the shape and composition of a new transitional authority that will replace the current Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) from Jun. 30, when "limited sovereignty" will revert to Iraqis, until elections for a new government can be held, hopefully in January 2005.

The hope is that Brahimi's and the U.N.'s imprimatur on the interim government will provide it with the international � and, more important, an Iraqi domestic � acceptance and legitimacy that have also eluded the widely discredited IGC.

While both steps have been in the works since last year, the past month's setbacks � especially the unprecedented violence that has taken the lives of more than 100 US troops and more than 1,000 Iraqis in Fallujah, parts of Baghdad and the predominantly Shia south � made them all the more urgent.

Suddenly the administration, which was in the process of drawing down its troops from 150,000 to about 100,000 by the Jun. 30 transition date, was facing what many now call popular uprisings in both the "Sunni Triangle" and among the majority Shiite population, whose acquiescence in the U.S.-led occupation has long been seen as absolutely indispensable to the success of Washington's Iraq agenda.

US efforts to suppress the insurgency in Fallujah were, by all accounts, politically disastrous. With hundreds of Iraqis � including women and children � killed in the fighting, the city quickly became a rallying cry for both Sunnis and Shias but also nationalists and Islamists fed up with the CPA's incompetence and the humiliations of occupation.

"I am convinced now (that the CPA) created a situation where Iraqis are in total psychological revolt," Gailan Ramiz, a U.S.-educated political scientist in Baghdad, told the Christian Science Monitor this week.

That U.S.-trained and supervised Iraqi military and security forces by and large failed to back up coalition troops during the fighting has added to the sense that Washington's hopes of transferring security duties to Iraqis and withdrawing most of its forces to discreet bases away from population centers were based on wishful thinking.

US generals in Iraq admitted this week that as much as 10 percent of Iraqi security forces worked with or joined the rebels, and that an additional 40 percent simply melted away or refused US orders. Other analysts say those estimates are low.

"The 'Iraqization' security plan must be thoroughly reexamined," noted analysts Jessica Mathews and Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), who wrote in the Financial Times this week that Washington's political and security strategy is now "in tatters."

The problem is that the US reaction � including Bush's delegation of authority to Brahimi and Bremer's recruitment of former Ba'athists � appears driven more by ad hoc emergencies than an overall strategy for both stabilizing the country and implementing a credible "exit strategy."

As a result, each policy issue is likely to be the subject of major internal fights between the "realists," based in the State Department, the uniformed military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the neo-conservative hawks around Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, fights of the kind detailed in reporter Bob Woodward's new insider account, Plan of Attack.

"Without a really well-thought-out strategy that has the support of all the major players, the administration is going to have a really hard time getting anywhere," said one State Department source who asked not to be identified. "I see lots of room for sabotage by one faction or another if they don't get what they want."

Indeed, neo-conservative forces, such as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, concerned about reports that Brahimi is unlikely to recommend Chalabi � who has led and championed an aggressive de-Ba'athification campaign � to a position in the interim government, are loudly complaining that the Algerian diplomat is the spearhead of a U.N.-State Department-CIA plot to take control of the transition. They also worry that greater U.N. influence could result in a less aggressive military policy toward Iraqi insurgents.

The lack of a comprehensive strategy was underlined in the reaction of Republican Senator John McCain, who emerged from a closed briefing with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice muttering "There is no plan."

Three days of hearings on Iraq policy on Capitol Hill this week, which culminated in testimony by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman, also confirmed to many analysts that the administration is engaged in wishful thinking and ad hoc planning.

Pressed for details, Grossman repeatedly stated that the shape and leadership of the interim government will be determined by Brahimi next month � less than 60 days before the scheduled transition � but that Washington will remain in charge of all security and military forces and oppose any attempts by the new body to pass new laws or amend existing ones during the interim period.

As noted by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, "The big problem with the new Iraqi policy is that it's at war with the old one."

At a time when the administration appears to be embracing a more U.N.-centered approach, it is also imposing strict limits on the ability and power of any new authority to depart from policies put in place by the CPA and the neo-conservatives' favorites on the IGC.

Democrats also suggested that the proposed "limited sovereignty" framework risked a major backlash by Iraqis, who have been told that real sovereignty would be returned to them as of Jun. 30.

Iraqis are "going to wake up (on Jul. 1) and there's going to be 160,000 (US) troops and a US ambassador pulling the strings," noted Sen. Joseph Biden. "How does that take the American face off 'the occupation'?"

That point was echoed by British professor Toby Dodge, an author of two recent books on Iraq, who also warned in testimony this week, "there is so much uncertainty in a very uncertain and disturbed country that Jun. 30 may well add to our problems, not detract from them."

[b]Jim Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau. He has followed the ups and downs of neo-conservatives since well before their rise in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks[/b]. - http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?...

CHURCHILL FOR DUMMIES: SEND A COPY TO DUBYA, TOO STUPID TO KNOW!

04.24.04 (6:16 am) [edit]

[b]Churchill for dummies[/b]

[i][b]Winston S. Churchill is the hero of George W. Bush and the neocons. But, says Michael Lind, they know very little about the great wartime leader. If they did, they�d be horrified[/b][/i].

Soon after the installation by the Republican-majority Supreme Court of George the Second of the House of Bush, the American people learned that they had a new Founding Father: Winston Churchill. President George W. Bush let it be known that he had placed a bust of the British statesman in the White House Oval Office he had inherited from his dad. After the attack on the World Trade Center, the President�s speeches became self-consciously Churchillian. Earlier this year, marking the opening of a Churchill exhibition at the Library of Congress, Bush observed that Churchill was not just �the rallying voice of the second world war� but also �a prophet of the Cold War�.

Like his grand strategy, with its combination of unilateral American world domination with nearly indiscriminate support for Israel�s Ariel Sharon, the cult of Churchill has been adopted by Bush from American neoconservatives. Churchill looms far larger in the mythology of neoconservatives than in the minds of mainstream Americans, who think of him as the brave and witty ally of President Franklin Roosevelt in the war against Hitler.

The Weekly Standard, the neoconservative magazine funded by Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, has become the centre of the neocon Churchill cult. A Nexus search of the Weekly Standard of the past five years alone reveals 122 articles that mention Churchill. Typical is an essay of 4 March 1999 entitled �How Winston Churchill Can Save Us � Again� by one Larry Arn, a frequent contributor who is an academic adviser to something called the International Churchill Society.

On 10 January 2000, the Weekly Standard declared that Winston Churchill was �Man of the Century�. This view is the consensus among the neocons. Charles Krauthammer, the Canadian �migr� pundit, has written, �After having single-handedly saved Western civilisation from Nazi barbarism � Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory, but he was uniquely necessary � he then immediately rose to warn prophetically against its sister barbarism, Soviet communism.� Krauthammer�s fellow Canadian �migr�, David Frum, denounced Bill Clinton for declaring that Franklin Roosevelt was the �Man of the Century�. According to Frum, who was still a subject of Her Majesty when he was hired as a speechwriter by George W. Bush�s White House, �FDR has to be found wanting. Of the three great killers of this century, one (Mao) was aided by Communist sympathisers within the Roosevelt administration ...Another (Stalin) benefited from Roosevelt�s almost wilful naivet� about the Soviet Union ...Roosevelt�s record even on the third killer, Hitler, is spotty. Roosevelt recognised Hitler�s danger early, but he hesitated to jeopardise his hopes for an unprecedented third term by riling isolationist opinion...�. Reading Krauthammer and Frum, you have to wonder whether Winston Churchill might not have �single-handedly� won the second world war and saved civilisation even sooner, if he had not been handicapped by his alliance with the United States.

Only a Canadian like Frum could claim that FDR was an appeaser, compared with Churchill. It was Churchill who, in 1937, wrote in his book Great Contemporaries, �One may dislike Hitler�s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.� Churchill�s posthumous reputation as an uncompromising anti-Soviet hardliner is another neocon myth. True, Churchill�s �Iron Curtain� speech of 1946 was seen as too strident by the Truman administration and much of the American public. But during the war it was Churchill, not FDR, who haggled with Stalin over �percentages� of postwar influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. And in the mid-Fifties Churchill thought that Eisenhower was too hard on the Soviets and kept pushing the naive idea that a big-power summit could end the Cold War. The neocons never quote Churchill�s statement of 1954, �To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.� The neocon goal of promoting democracy worldwide was shared by FDR and Woodrow Wilson, but not by the Tory Prime Minister who called Gandhi a �fakir� and announced that he would not preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.

The peculiar neocon cult of Churchill has several sources. One is the veneration by the neocons of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish �migr� philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago and indoctrinated many leading neocon thinkers, including the late Allan Bloom. In declaring Churchill the �Man of the Century�, the Weekly Standard piously reprinted remarks that Strauss made at the time of Churchill�s death in 1965. Strauss�s Churchill was Hitler�s nemesis: �The contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant � this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.�

Straussians like Leon Kass, the president of Bush�s bioethics panel, are opposed not only to reproductive cloning, but also to therapeutic cloning, embryonic stem-cell research and the well established practice of in vitro fertilisation. In an essay entitled �Can There Be Another Winston Churchill?�, published in 1981, the Straussian scholar Harry V. Jaffa claimed that Churchill would have opposed modern biotechnology: �Churchill�s most formative years were spent during the heyday of what we might call the evolutionary enlightenment. This was the period when the progress of Science, and in particular biological Science, gave rise to widespread hopes that the human species itself might deliberately be evolved ...The fittest might be planned in laboratories, and the test of their fitness would be their faculty for the harmonious and simultaneous enjoyment of all the objects of their desires.� Churchill, Jaffa tells us, �implied that this state of perfect freedom, were it possible, would be a state of perfect misery�.

Jaffa doesn�t quote Churchill on this subject � possibly because, contrary to his implication, Churchill, unlike today�s American neocons, was an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, who told Asquith in 1910, �The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.� Hitler�s ultimately genocidal programme of �racial hygiene� began with the kind of compulsory sterilisation of �the feeble-minded and insane classes� that Churchill urged on the British government (and which was carried out in many states in the US in the early 20th century).

Two other factors influencing neocon Churchill mania are �the Anglosphere� and Israel. As Jeet Heer pointed out in the National Post of Canada on 29 March 2003, �Today�s advocates of empire share one surprising trait: very few of them were born in the United States. [Dinesh] D�Souza was born in India, and [Paul] Johnson in Britain � where he still lives. [Mark] Steyn, [Charles] Krauthammer and [Michael] Ignatieff all hail from Canada ...� Heer quotes Max Boot, a Russian-born neocon: �I think there�s more openness among children of the British Empire to the benefits of imperialism.� Like Churchill, whose mother was American and who chronicled the history of the English-speaking peoples, the neocons and allied British conservatives like Conrad Black and John O�Sullivan, now editor of the Washington-based journal the National Interest, are enthusiastic about the idea that the world should be led by the �Anglosphere�. Outside these circles, however, the idea of an English-speaking union is ignored today as in the past by most Americans, who don�t see why Australia�s south-east Asian borders should be America�s.

As for the Israeli connection � a familiar feature of neocon ideology � Churchill, a lifelong supporter of Zionism, was a social Darwinist who preferred Jews to Arabs. On one occasion he wrote of the legitimacy of displacing �the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.� Churchill�s Zionism coexisted with a fear that the Jews, deprived of a homeland, might make trouble for the world. In an essay that he wrote for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920 entitled �Zionism versus Bolshevism�, which the neocons never quote, Churchill ranted that Jews were behind world revolutions everywhere: �This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky [Russia], Bela Kun [Hungary], Rosa Luxemburg [Germany], and Emma Goldman [the United States] ... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.� If Jews, whom Churchill described as denizens of �the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America�, could have their homeland, perhaps they would not � to use Churchill�s words � conspire �for the overthrow of civilisation�.

Most American neocons know only the sanitised version of Churchill as a philo-semitic Zionist fellow traveller presented by Martin Gilbert. In an essay entitled �Israel at 50�, Alan Bock wrote, �Sir Martin Gilbert, the incredibly prolific British historian (and secular Jew, as he described himself to me), best known for his multi-volume treatment of the life and times of Winston Churchill, puts it this way in his new book, Israel: A History: �Israel is not only a nation that for the first three decades of its existence was surrounded by sworn enemies, but one that, following a victorious war in 1967, has had to share part of its own land with another people.�� According to Churchill hagiographer Gilbert, then, even before 1967 the West Bank and Gaza were part of Israel�s �own land�.

While most Americans think of Churchill as the foe of the Nazis, many right-wing Jews in the United States and Israel revere him for his role in promoting European-Jewish colonisation of Palestine at the expense of the Arabs. When he was colonial secretary in the early 1920s, Churchill hived off Jordan from the rest of the Palestinian mandate. For years, American neocons, disseminating the propaganda of the Israeli Right, have claimed that Jordan or the �Trans-Jordan� is, or should be, the only �Palestinian� state. This Likud party propaganda line is echoed by non-Jewish neocons including William Bennett, who wrote in an essay entitled �Standing with Israel�, �There is no reason Jews should not be able to live in the West Bank.� The fact that the UN partition of Palestine in 1947�48 superseded all previous British decisions is ignored by radical Jewish and Christian Zionists in the US and Israel.

In a speech to the House of Commons on 26 January 1949, Churchill repeated the Israeli lie that the Palestinians had voluntarily fled the country: �All this Arab population fled in terror to behind the advancing forces of their own religion.� The Israeli historian Benny Morris, on the basis of Israeli archives, has shown how the Israeli government carried out a premeditated policy of deliberate ethnic cleansing during the war. When he turned 80 in 1954, the state of Israel sent Churchill a floral arrangement in the shape of a cigar.

It should be no surprise, then, that the neocon cult of Churchill flourishes in Israel as well as in the US. Shortly before he was appointed as senior director for Near Eastern and North African affairs at the National Security Council � a post that gave him responsibility for Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Iran � Elliott Abrams gave a speech comparing Ariel Sharon to Winston Churchill. �Sharon�s no Churchill,� complained Don Feder, another neoconservative, on 15 March 2002. �Ariel Sharon has a split personality. He wants to be both Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain. His unilateral concessions, his unwillingness to treat Zion�s fight for survival as the war it is and the weakness he exhibits to a remorseless foe have his country on the edge of extinction.� Yes, that�s right � Israel, in 2002, according to this typical American neocon, was on the edge of extinction! Fortunately, according to Feder, there was a Churchill in Israel: �Bibi [Netanyahu] waits in the wings....� Whether or not Sharon or Netanyahu are Churchill, Yasser Arafat and any enemy of the state of Israel is Hitler � on that all neocons can agree.

The obsession of the neocons with Israel�s regional enemy Saddam Hussein has a Churchill connection, too. On 16 March 2003, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Churchill�s grandson and namesake, Winston S. Churchill, entitled �My Grandfather Invented Iraq: And He Has Lessons for Us Today�. He wrote, �It was my grandfather, Winston Churchill, who invented Iraq and laid the foundation for much of the modern Middle East.� This is not an accomplishment of which to be proud, one might think. Churchill went on to draw the conventional comparison between the threat of Saddam and the threat of Hitler: �Had the allies held firm and shown the same resolve to uphold the rule of law among nations that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair are demonstrating today, there is little doubt that World War II, with all its horrors, could have been avoided.� Churchill�s grandson then compared the threat of Saddam�s supposed weapons of mass destruction with the Soviet atomic bomb: �As leader of the opposition in the British Parliament [in the 1950s] Churchill was gravely alarmed at the prospect of the Soviet Union acquiring atomic, and eventually nuclear, weapons of its own.� If the world refused to follow those Churchillian leaders, Bush and Blair, then �a marriage of convenience would be consummated between the terrorist forces of al-Qa�eda and the arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities which Saddam possesses�.

Citing Churchill to support Bush�s war to rid Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction was particularly ironic in light of Churchill�s own record with respect to WMDs in Iraq. As colonial secretary in 1919, Churchill wanted to use gas against the �unco-operative Arabs� in Iraq. He explained, in terms that Saddam might have used to justify his gassing of Iraqi Kurds, �I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.�

It is now clear that Saddam possessed no �arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities� and the US government has reluctantly admitted that there are no credible links, prewar or postwar, between Saddam�s regime and al-Qa�eda. Even their harshest critics, therefore, must acknowledge that in one respect the neocons have lived up to the words of Winston Churchill: �In wartime ...truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.�

[b]Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and author of[i] Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics[/i][/b]. - http://www.antiwar.com/specta...

BUSH'S TAX POLICIES: FEED THE RICH & TO HELL WITH THE REST OF US!

04.23.04 (8:42 am) [edit]

[b]Feed the Rich[/b]

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities http://www.cbpp.org/ has come out with the most comprehensive study to date of three years of George W. Bush's tax policies. Highlights put together by CBPP can be found here http://www.cbpp.org/4-14-04ta... , but I'll cherry pick a few of the more telling:

* Families making more than $1 million a year will enjoy 2004 tax cuts, on average, of $123,600 each.

* Middle-class families will enjoy 2004 tax cuts, on average, of $647.

* A crack team of White House experts has taken the middle-class families, mixed in the super-wealthy families and crunched out an "average" -- so that the President can cite a higher tax cut that the "average" family will get. Of course, the "average" family is not the typical family. If Bill Gates moves into your neighborhood, than the "average" wealth of families on your street moves into the billions, but that doesn't do you much good, does it.

* Without the tax cuts, deficits would be modest, and ten years from now would be at about $100 billion. With them, the deficit is on a pace to balloon to six or seven times that.

* Since we're borrowing money, at interest, to fund these tax cuts, we have tremendous interest payments. The President has proposed new tax cuts in his 2005 budget and has also proposed making permanent the fine work he's already done. Assuming he gets his way, then over the next ten years, we'd have coughed up $1.1 trillion in interest payments alone.

The CBPP doesn't make this calculation, but luckily I am an expert in back-of-the-envelope long division. So $1.1 trillion divided by the US population (of 293 million) works out to just over $3,754 per American in interest payments; or, for a family of four, $15,016.

Hmm. From the perspective of a middle-class family of four, that's the annual equivalent of about $1,500 in interest payments on debt -- so as to finance about $647 in annual tax relief. What a bargain! Four more years! Four more years!

[b]By Matt Bivens, Daily Outrage, The Nation [/b]- http://www.thenation.com/outr...

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS: GET RID OF THE DIM-WIT TRAITOR BUSH RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLING THEM!

04.23.04 (8:37 am) [edit]

[b]LET'S SEND DIM-WIT DUBYA BACK TO THE CRAWFORD PALACE THAT HE BOUGHT WITH MONEY EMBEZZLED WITH THE HELP OF POPPY'S CORPORATE CRONIES ... WITHOUT POPPY BUSH WHO SPOILED BRAT BABY BUSH [i]TREATS LIKE SHIT[/i] http://www.thenation.com/outr... , DUBYA COULDN'T GET A JOB WIPING TOILETS IN WAL MART ...[/b]

[u][b]Going Back Where They Came From[/b][/u] - http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a...

"If we have to make common cause with the more hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives, that is fine with me," William Kristol has told the [i]New York Times[/i].

[i]The Weekly Standard [/i]editor added that the neoconservatives may just abandon the Right altogether and convert to neo-liberalism.

Alluding to his father Irving's definition of a neoconservative as a liberal who has been mugged by reality, Kristol describes a neoliberal as a "neoconservative who has been mugged by reality in Iraq."

Ranking his political preferences, Kristol added, "I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan....If you read the last few issues of The Weekly Standard, it has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional conservatives."

Yes, it does. But as John Kerry backs partial birth abortion, quotas, raising taxes, homosexual unions, liberals on the Supreme Court and has a voting record to the left of Teddy Kennedy, how can Kristol prefer him to other conservatives? Answer: War and Israel.

Like Kristol, Kerry wants more U.S. troops sent to Iraq where they can advance the neocons' project for empire. And at a fund-raiser in Juno Beach, Fla., Kerry declared eternal fealty to Israel: "I have a 100 percent record � not a 99, a 100 percent record � of sustaining the special relationship and friendship that we have with Israel."

Kristol's warning that the neocons could break with the Right and go to Kerry is an admission of what many conservatives have long argued. To neocons, Israel comes first, second, and third, conservative principles be damned.

The day after Kristol said he preferred Kerry to conservatives skeptical of committing more troops to Iraq, this item appeared in [i]The Wall Street Journal[/i]:

"[i]Mr. Kristol thinks Mr. Bush should use the revelations [from the Woodward book] to shake up his war cabinet by firing Mr. Powell...along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has pushed for smaller deployments of U.S. forces than some critics, including Mr. Kristol, think wise[/i]."

Set aside the suicidal folly of Bush dynamiting his war cabinet in an election year by firing its most famous members, and consider the ingratitude, the ruthlessness, and the cynicism on display here.

When it was launched in 1995, [i]The Weekly Standard [/i]called on Colin Powell to run for president and offered its endorsement. Purpose: Hook up with the most popular man in the GOP who could restore the neocons and Kristols to preeminence and power. Powell rebuffed the offer. Ever since, he has been a target of abuse for having repelled the boarding party.

As for Rumsfeld, he has been a hero of neoconservatives for two decades. He co-signed the neocons' 1998 open letter to Clinton urging war on Iraq. He brought Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith into his Pentagon in the No. 2 and 3 slots. He put Perle in charge of the Defense Review Board. After 9/11, according to Richard Clarke, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were making the case for attacking Iraq immediately, even before Bush had ousted the Taliban enablers of Al Qaeda and Bin Laden.

Agree or disagree with the defense secretary, Rumsfeld has been a lion in the neocon cause. To see the [i]Weekly Standard [/i]snake on him like this brings to mind that wretched crowd in Yankee Stadium that took to booing Joe Dimaggio at the end of his career.

With Iraq turning into the Mesopotamian morass some of us warned it would become, the neo-Jacobins have decided they are not going to be the ones to ride the tumbrels.

In times like this character comes through. By turning on the men they persuaded to go to war, by fabricating alibis and inventing excuses to absolve themselves of culpability for what they labored to create, they have revealed themselves for what they are: hustlers and opportunists devoid of principle, driven by an ideology of power and a passionate attachment to a nation not their own.

The Old Right curmudgeons who warned us against giving these vagabonds food, shelter and a warm place by the fire were right. We should have put them back out on the street.

President Bush should have listened to his father who kept the neocons at some remove, and he had best beware, because they have a major card yet to play. That card is escalation.

With the situation in Iraq deteriorating, the neocon agenda is to widen the war into Syria, Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia, and convert it into "World War IV," the war of their dreams, a war of civilizations, an Armageddon, with America and Israel on one side and Islam on the other.

Exiting Iraq with honor and avoiding the wider war for which the neocons are even now scheming is the first duty of patriots.

[b]By Patrick J. Buchanan [/b]- http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a...

KERRY: "I REQUEST DUTY IN VIETNAM" VERSUS AWOL BUSH: "I NEED TO PEE AFTER SWILLING BOOZE"

04.23.04 (8:24 am) [edit]

GEORGE W. BUSHY-BOY LIES, LIES, LIES, LIES, LIES & MORE LIES ...

04.23.04 (8:17 am) [edit]

[b]CAUGHT ON FILM: THE BUSH CREDIBILITY GAP ON [/b] http://www.house.gov/appropri...

[b]CHECK OUT THE D-BUNKER EXPOSING BUSH'S MANY LIES ABOUT JOHN F. KERRY ON [/b] http://blog.johnkerry.com/dbu...

[b]SURE, THERE ARE EVEN MORE BUSH LIES ON [/b] http://www.bushlies.net/pages...

DUMB DUBYA'S "COALITION" CRUMBLES: EVEN BLAIR AIN'T SENDING MORE TROOPS TO DIE FOR HALLIBURTON

04.22.04 (8:30 pm) [edit]

[b]'No extra troops'[/b]

Tony Blair has ruled out sending more British troops to Iraq despite the worsening security situation.

The Prime Minister told the Commons yesterday that the Government was satisfied there were sufficient troops in Basra. "We don't have plans to increase that number," he said.

Mr Blair added that the situation would be kept under review, "but at the present time British troops are managing extremely well down there".

He had been challenged by Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, on whether British commanders had asked for reinforcements.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, condemned yesterday's bombings and said they deliberately targeted Iraqis working hard to build a new Iraq.

"Those responsible clearly have no respect for the lives of their fellow Iraqi Muslims," he said.

[b]The Telegraph[/b], http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...;$sessionid$0H35CAM4GSMIJ QFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/ news/2004/04/22/wbasra322 .xml&sSheet=/news/2004/04/ 22/ixnewstop.html

DELUSIONAL SCHIZOID DUBYA PRETENDS GOD WANTS HIM TO BE A WAR CRIMINAL

04.22.04 (8:26 pm) [edit]

[b]With God on His Side...

By invoking a higher power, Bush sidesteps pesky constitutional issues [/b]

So, it was a holy war, a new crusade. No wonder George W. Bush could lie to Congress and the American public with such impunity while keeping the key members of his Cabinet in the dark. He was serving a higher power, according to Bob Woodward, who interviewed the president for a new book on the months leading up to the Iraq invasion.

Of course, as a self-described "messenger" of God who was "praying for strength to do the Lord's will," Bush was not troubled about shredding a little secular document called the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution reserves to Congress the authority to allocate funds and to declare war. Thus it would seem to be an impeachable offense to misappropriate $700 million that had been earmarked to restore order to Afghanistan and put it toward planning an invasion of Iraq � in a secret scheme hatched, according to Woodward, only 72 days after 9/11.

But not only has the president rejected the checks and balances installed by the nation's founders to avoid the "foreign entanglements" George Washington warned us about, he again is shown to have pursued a foreign policy that stands as a sharp rebuke to his more worldly and cautious father. During the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush wisely heeded the concerns of Congress, as well as a broad coalition of regional and international allies, and kept to clear, limited and sound goals.

In contrast, the younger Bush vocally disdains world opinion and international bodies like the United Nations, seeming instead to relish his role as an avenging Christian crusader who seeks � under the guiding hand of the Almighty � to cleanse the Arab world of "evildoers."

Asked by Woodward, an assistant managing editor at the Washington Post, if he had ever consulted the former president before ordering the invasion of Iraq, Bush replied that "he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher father that I appeal to."

Reading the elder Bush's books and even his speeches before the latest Iraq war, one finds that the former president at least seems to understand that diplomacy, international cooperation and patience are not just the tools of naive do-gooders but in fact are far more effective at advancing global stability and American aims than reckless adventures like the current quagmire in Mesopotamia. Religious crusades are often counterproductive; they tend to end up in unsustainable occupations of people who � surprise! � believe they have their own pipeline to the Almighty.

Thus, if George W. had consulted his father, he probably would have heard the message that he didn't want to hear from Secretary of State Colin Powell about the "Pottery Barn rule" � the idea that you own what you break. What Powell meant is not that you own Iraq's oil and the lucrative contracts that you parcel out to your friends at Halliburton and Bechtel. Rather, it is that if you occupy a failed state, you are stuck with the difficult, costly and lengthy task of nation-building.

That Powell and the first President Bush did not break more forcefully with the current president over their apparent differences on Iraq is not excusable, despite their party and familial ties. As both men seem to have expected, what we have now is a deadly mess that has weakened us in the war on terror, both as a distraction and by inflaming the Muslim world's latent mistrust of the West.

After the bloodiest month of the entire war and occupation, we are told by the nation's media and political elites that we must "stay the course," "get it right" and, in the words of the president himself, "honor the fallen." How do we honor the fallen by sending more soldiers to die in a war based on lies now amply documented by insiders?

Surely the best way to honor them is to right our course and turn to the United Nations, not as a fig leaf to conceal an ongoing disaster but to admit that it was wrong to undermine the best mechanism we have for international cooperation. An honorable retreat from this calamity requires U.N. supervision of an orderly withdrawal.

The president conceded to Woodward that he had the good sense not to "justify war based upon God" but would ask for forgiveness if he took the wrong path. It is time he found God's grace in the exercise of humility rather than plunging deeper into this madness.

[b]By Robert Scheer[/b], http://www.robertscheer.com/

FANATICAL MADMEN AND IMBECILIC DIM-WITS LED US TO WAR

04.22.04 (8:24 pm) [edit]

[b]Fanatics and Fools: How the Dysfunctional White House Led Us to War[/b]

For the past year, I�ve been studying and writing about the Fanatics running the White House and the Fools on both sides of the aisle who have enabled them to prevail.

Bob Woodward has now given us a chilling behind-the-scenes look at how this dysfunctional dynamic drove us to war in Iraq � providing devastating snapshots of both the evidence-be-damned zealotry of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their minions and the craven capitulation of White House enablers Powell, Tenet, Rice, and Hughes.

Woodward�s portrait of this last group is particularly damning: an assemblage of cowards and sycophants who knew full well that the truth was being sacrificed on the altar of Dick Cheney�s �fevered� obsession with Saddam but did nothing to stop the butchery. A very special Circle of Hell must be reserved for them.

Piled on top of the insider accounts by Paul O�Neill and Richard Clarke, Woodward�s book delivers the coup de grace to any lingering doubt that the Bush administration is teeming with fanatics for whom evidence is little more than an obstacle on the path to greater glory.

We see a president for whom staying the course � even if the course is leading us over the edge of a cliff � is a badge of honor, and for whom a questioning mindset is anathema reserved for, well, wimps. And George the Younger was going to have none of that this time around. Sorry, Dad. Bush is also terrifyingly insulated; if it wasn�t coming from Cheney or Rummy � or Prince Bandar � he wasn�t listening.

We see a vice president so obsessed with linking Saddam to 9/11, that no piece of intelligence that supports this hypothesis is deemed too unreliable to be used. Cheney was like an al-Qaida alchemist, converting shards of faulty or ambiguous information into golden reasons for pre-emptive war. Who knew that the soundtrack to the shock and awe of Baghdad would be Cheney�s karaoke take on Peggy Lee: �Fever �til you sizzle/What a lovely way to burn!�?

As frightening as this collective fanaticism is � and there can be few things more unnerving than leaders willing to lie to get their way � it�s hardly surprising. Bush and Co. have been flouting the truth since the moment the Supreme Court handed them the keys to the White House.

What is a surprise is how easily � and willingly � the White House Fools went along with the program.

Colin Powell believed in his heart that war with Iraq could � indeed, should � be avoided. But instead of making a principled stand, he made like a Good Soldier and fell into line. He was further out of the war loop than the ambassador from the home country of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers � but when the president asked him to carry his sample vial of anthrax at the United Nations, Powell was so flattered he dutifully set out to hoodwink the world.

In Dante�s �Inferno,� deceivers are sentenced to have their souls encased in flames, hypocrites are forced to wear a cloak weighted with lead, and those who use their powers of persuasion for insidious ends are doomed to suffer a continual fever so intense that their body sizzles and smokes like a steak tossed on a George Foreman grill. Maybe Satan will give Powell a three-afflictions-for-the -price-of-one deal.

At least the secretary of state won�t be lonely in the underworld. He�ll have George Tenet and Karen Hughes right by his smoldering side.

Tenet knew that the intel on Iraqi WMD was thinner than Lara Flynn Boyle on Dexatrim but was so desperate to get on Cheney and Bush�s good side that he turned himself into the Dick Vitale of WMD: �It�s a slam dunk, baby!�

Hughes was just as spineless. After listening to Scooter Libby foam at the mouth for an hour, rabidly trying to sell the Cheney case for war to a jury of administration heavy-hitters, Hughes gave the overheated and hyperbolic presentation two thumbs down. But instead of counseling the president to rethink his pre-emptive plans, Hughes sat back and watched as the job of making the shaky case to the world was transferred from Libby to Powell. Forget fixing the message; they merely switched messengers.

In the Bible, Jesus makes it clear that those who have been exposed to the truth have a higher obligation than the uninformed: �If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, you cannot escape your guilt.�

The White House Fanatics � blinded by their zealotry � should suffer the wrath of the electorate and be voted out of office. But the Fools who enabled them must face an even harsher form of retribution. Eternal damnation is the ultimate long, hard slog.

[b]Arianna Huffington[/b], http://www.ariannaonline.com/...

BUSH: A TRUE CHIMP, DUMB ASS BASED GOING TO WAR ON BODY LANGUAGE!

04.22.04 (8:20 pm) [edit]

[b]The Body Politic[/b]

Not since Jane Goodall lived with chimps in Tanzania has there been such a vivid study of the nonverbal patterns of primates engaged in a dominance display.

Bob Woodward's new book, "Plan of Attack," reveals that President Bush decided to go to war based mostly, believe it or not, on body language.

Like his father, Mr. Bush prefers more elemental means of self-expression than the verbal. (Not long before the first gulf war, Bush senior's masseuse told a client that the president's neck was so tight, she assumed we were going to war.)

The younger Bush, suspicious of Clintonesque dialectical fevers and interminable analyses, did not bother to ask most of his top advisers what they thought. The less Dick Cheney talked, the more power Mr. Bush entrusted in him.

Like the silent, cool-hand cowboy he aspires to be, who would shoot a man just because he didn't like the way the varmint was looking at him, the president preferred doing gut checks, visually sizing up advisers and Saddam, rather than dwelling on pesky facts.

He did not probe deeply to reconcile advisers' assessments. He cared only about their spine, figuratively and literally. There was no skeptical debate in the Oval Office like the one before the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

The president explained to Mr. Woodward that he had wanted to talk to Tommy Franks in person about the Iraq war plan. " `I'm watching his body language very carefully,' Mr. Bush recalled. He emphasized the body language, the eyes, the demeanor. It was more important than some of the substance. . . . `Is this good enough to win?' he recalled asking Franks, leaning forward in his chair and throwing his hand forward in a slicing motion at my face to illustrate the scene."

As the president studied the physio-semiotics of those around him, they studied his. " `I knew my relationship with the president and the access and his interest and how he feels and his body language on things,' " a typically cocky Donald Rumsfeld said.

The author writes of the Cheney aide and Iraq hawk Scooter Libby: "He was watching the president carefully, noting the body language and the verbal language ordering war planning for Iraq, the questions, attitudes and tone."

When the C.I.A. briefers told Mr. Bush that to recruit sources inside Iraq, they would have to say the U.S. was coming with its military � putting him in the awkward position of simultaneously pursuing diplomatic and military solutions � Condoleezza Rice watched the president. "The president's body language suggested he had received the message, but he didn't make any promises."

Nick Calio, the White House legislative affairs director, realized the endgame by September 2002: "Judging from Bush's side comments and body language, Calio assumed that the question on Iraq was not if but when there would be a war."

When George Tenet was telling a dubious president that the W.M.D. "evidence" would be there when he needed it, he knew how to physically underscore his point. "Tenet, a basketball fan who attended as many home games of his alma mater Georgetown as possible, leaned forward and threw his arms up again. `Don't worry, it's a slam-dunk!' "

When the president at long last informed his top diplomat that he was going to war, Colin Powell could tell from the president's body language that there was no point in arguing: "It was the assured Bush. His tight, forward-leaning, muscular body language verified his words."

After a while, the usually literal Mr. Woodward also began dipping into the science of kinesics. When he greeted Mr. Bush at a White House Christmas party in 2002, he interpreted the president's body language as blessing the prospect of a sequel to his last book, "Bush at War."

The end of "Plan of Attack" says that when Mr. Woodward asked the president how history would judge his Iraq war, Mr. Bush smiled. " `History,' he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. `We won't know. We'll all be dead.' "

Soon, these people had the problem of the body language of more than 700 dead soldiers. Some persuasive non-body language is way overdue.

[b]By MAUREEN DOWD, N.Y. TIMES[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

U.K. TONY BLAIR: 'NO MORE TROOPS' FOR IRAQ ... LET AMERICANS DIE TO ENRICH HERR FUHRER BUSH!!!

04.22.04 (6:21 am) [edit]

INCOMPETENT BUSH PENTAGON "SURPRISED" IRAQ FIASCO GOING 'OVER-BUDGET': I'M NOT!!!

04.22.04 (6:20 am) [edit]

[b]Pentagon: Iraq Operation to Go Over Budget [/b]

A top Pentagon (news - web sites) official told lawmakers Wednesday the Iraqi military operation "is going to cost us more money" than anticipated, and the White House left open the possibility it will seek the additional funds before the end of the year.

A rough first estimate showed that the decision to keep 20,000 troops in Iraq (news - web sites) for some 90 days longer to deal with increased violence will cost about $700 million, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee.

Defense officials are studying their budget now to determine how much and whether some monies can be moved from other Pentagon accounts, Myers said. "We're in the middle of that analysis right now," he said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House had received assurances from Pentagon officials "that the funding they have now is more than adequate to meet their needs."

But he said the issue was constantly being evaluated. "The decisions should be based on what the commanders in the field feel is necessary," he said.

McClellan spoke as Myers told lawmakers that the extended deployments of forces in Iraq and the increased tempo of operations "is going to cost us more money." Myers said defense officials are studying their budget now to determine how much.

"We're in the middle of that analysis right now," he said.

President Bush (news - web sites), meanwhile, met Wednesday morning with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. There was no immediate indication what they discussed.

On Capitol Hill, two leading lawmakers urged the Bush administration to present Congress with projected price tag of Iraq operations next year, a politically delicate step the White House has said it does not intend to take in an election year.

"They haven't asked for one single penny for next year for Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq," said Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. "Give me a break. Give me a break!"

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said he smelled election-year politics.

"The administration would be well served here to come forward now, be honest about this, because the continuity and the confidence in this policy is going to be required to sustain it," Hagel said. "And that means be honest with the Congress, be honest with the American people.

"Every ground squirrel in this country knows that it's going to be $50 billion to $75 billion in additional money required to sustain us in Iraq for this year."

Both senators spoke on the NBC program "Today."

White House budget director Joshua Bolten said earlier this year that the administration will eventually need more money beyond the $87 billion Congress authorized for this year. But Bolten said the administration would not request it this year, meaning such a multibillion-dollar appeal will come after the November election.

Some lawmakers fear that spiraling violence in Iraq mean that more money will be needed soon.

Biden and Hagel, another senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also raised the possibility that compulsory military service might be necessary to relieve pressure on U.S. troops stretched around the globe.

The nation is engaged "in a generational war here against terrorism," Hagel said. "It's going to require resources."

"Should we continue to burden the middle class who represents most all of our soldiers, and the lower-middle class?" Hagel said. "Should we burden them with the fighting and the dying if in fact this is a generational � probably 25-year � war?"

"I am not proposing a draft, but I think some kind of mandatory service for this country for all our citizens, for the privileged, the rich, all those who have a lot, should be something we take seriously here," Hagel said.

"Our military is not large enough. Our standing Army is not large enough," Biden added.

McClellan said a draft was not currently under consideration.

The spokesman also deflected questions about whether Bush's coalition in Iraq is unraveling. The Dominican Republic on Tuesday joined Spain and Honduras in announcing it was withdrawing its troops from Iraq.

"The coalition remains strong. Their resolve is strong," he said.

He noted that there have been strong statements issued by Great Britain, Japan, Italy, Portugal.

And McClellan condemned suicide bombings in Basra that killed nearly 70 people Wednesday � the bloodiest attacks in Basra since the war began a year ago.

"It's another indication of the level to which the terrorists and thugs will go to spread fear and chaos," McClellan said.

[b]Associated Press[/b], http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

PENTAGON CENSORS RUMSFELD WAR TIP-OFF TO SAUDIS: BECAUSE IT'S TREASON!!!

04.22.04 (6:14 am) [edit]

[b]Pentagon censors Rumsfeld war tip-off to Saudis[/b]

The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, made to the author Bob Woodward suggesting that the Administration assured Saudi Arabia two months ahead of time that Iraq was to be invaded.

At issue was a passage in Woodward's Plan of Attack, a new account of President George Bush's decision-making about the war, quoting Mr Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January last year that he could "take that to the bank" that the invasion would happen.

The comment came in a key moment before the war, when Mr Rumsfeld and others were briefing Prince Bandar on a military plan to attack and invade Iraq, and pointing to a top-secret map that showed how the war plan would unfold. The book reports that the meeting with Prince Bandar was held on January 11, in the office of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended.

Pentagon officials omitted the discussion of the meeting from a transcript they posted on the Defence Department website on Monday. Mr Rumsfeld told reporters on Tuesday that he may have used the phrase "take that to the bank", but no final decision had been made to invade.

"To my knowledge, a decision had not been taken by the President to go to war at that meeting," Mr Rumsfeld said.

Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Mr Rumsfeld told him on October 23 last year: "I remember meeting with the Vice-President and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the President that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

The transcript made it clear that the foreign dignitary Woodward was discussing was Prince Bandar, although Mr Rumsfeld would not say that. "We're going to have to clean some of this up in the transcript," Mr Rumsfeld said in the omitted passage. "We'll give you a - I mean you just said Bandar and I didn't agree with that so we're going to have to - I don't want to say who it is but you are going to have to go through that and find a way to clean up my language too."

[b]The Washington Post[/b], http://www.smh.com.au/article...

TRAITOR BUSH HANDS OVER FOREIGN POLICY TO SHARON IN SELL-OUT OF AMERICA!!!

04.22.04 (6:13 am) [edit]

[b]Bush outsources Mideast policy[/b]

"Speaking of the Palestinians, they were dealt a lethal blow," exulted a jubilant Ariel Sharon, "It will bring their dreams to an end."

Sharon was bragging about his trip to Washington where he bullied Bush into selling out the Palestinians as thoroughly as Neville Chamberlain sold out the Czechs at Munich.

"Sharon Got It All" blared a banner headline in Israel. Indeed, he did.

And Raging Bull celebrated his diplomatic victory by ordering up a Saturday night hit on Abdel Rantisi, the Hamas leader who replaced Sheik Yassin, whom Sharon had assassinated by Apache gunship in March as the crippled sheik was being wheeled out of a mosque after dawn prayers.

As he surely intended, Sharon left the Arab world with the clear impression that the Americans had given a green light to his "extrajudicial" killings. Sharon seeks to make his war on the Palestinians America's war. If Bush lets him succeed, we are finished in the Middle East.

But how did Sharon, under a cloud of scandal and corruption, at the end of his tether, badger Bush into abdicating our role as "honest broker" of Mideast peace, and into signing on to a "Sharon Plan" even a Palestinian quisling would reject?

According to the New York Times, Sharon threatened not to come to Washington unless Bush, in advance and in writing, agreed to capitulate. "In a moment of diplomatic brinkmanship," writes James Bennet, Sharon threatened to cancel his trip if Bush refused to give him "the guarantees he wanted in exchange for his plan to withdraw settlers from the Gaza Strip."

Still, one must marvel at Sharon's savvy in sizing up Bush, and at the man's chutzpah. Look at what he got for giving up less than nothing.

Gaza was captured from Egypt in 1967. Though almost all Israelis wish to be rid of it, 7,500 Jewish squatters have moved into the enclave that is home to 1.2 million Palestinians. Israelis now occupy 20 percent of Gaza, though they are but one-half of 1 percent of the population.

However, under the occupation, Hamas has flourished in Gaza and Israeli troops have been tied down there. About to be forced out of Gaza by Hamas, as Israel was forced out of Lebanon by Hezbollah, Sharon decided to get Bush to reward him for doing what he had to do.

Sharon's ultimatum: In return for giving up Gaza, Bush must give him title to more desirable Palestinian lands on the West Bank.

Bush, who once traded Sammy Sosa away, agreed. Only this time, he traded America's reputation for honest dealing for a few words of fatuous praise from Sharon about what a great battler against terrorism he is. All to help Bush and Rove carry the south Florida condos.

But John Kerry is not a man easily out-pandered.

"That Bush's move was good politics," writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, "was evidenced by Democratic rival John F. Kerry's quick move not to let Bush outflank him among pro-Israel voters."

"I think that could be a positive step," said Kerry of the Bush sellout of the Palestinians. Our first presidents were George Washington and John Adams. Now we have on offer George Bush and John Kerry. Does that not tell you something about what has become of the old republic?

What did Bush give up? None of the Palestinians driven out of their homes by the Irgun massacre at Deir Yassin and during the 1948 war will ever be allowed to return. Palestinian rights in that 78 percent of Palestine that is already Israel, and in the sectors of the remaining 22 percent Sharon plans to annex, are forfeit forever. At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered Arafat a more generous peace than Bush � under Sharon's direction � is willing to give the Palestinians.

Second, major Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, planted by Sharon in violation of international law, which every U.S. president has called "obstacles to peace," are now deeded to Israel. Like Lord Balfour, Bush is surrendering title to Arab lands he does not own and surrendering Palestinian rights that are not his to give up.

As for the Sharon Wall that snakes in and out of the West Bank, incorporating Palestinian fields, olive groves, homes and villages, Bush no longer insists it be confined to Israeli territory.

What does the mini-Munich mean? The great Zionist land thief has gotten America's blessing to keep his stolen goods. George Bush has outsourced his Mideast policy to Tel Aviv. The custodian of our reputation for decency and honor in an Arab world of 22 nations is now Sharon. As for Palestinians who put their faith and trust in the United States, they have been exposed as fools.

Can anyone in the White House believe that Bush's capitulation is anything but a formula for endless war and enduring hatred of an America that cannot say no to Ariel Sharon?

Any Arab leader who signed on to this Sharon-Bush plan, which cedes huge swatches of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem to Israel and leaves Palestinians in bantustans walled in with Israeli concrete, would be regarded as a traitor to his people, and deservedly so.

[b]By Patrick J. Buchanan[/b], http://www.wnd.com/news/artic...

U.K. TONY BLAIR: 'NO MORE TROOPS' FOR IRAQ ... LET AMERICANS DIE TO ENRICH HERR FUHRER BUSH!!!

04.22.04 (6:11 am) [edit]

PENTAGON CENSORS RUMSFELD WAR TIP-OFF TO SAUDIS: BECAUSE IT'S TREASON!!!

04.22.04 (6:08 am) [edit]

INCOMPETENT BUSH PENTAGON "SURPRISED" BY THEIR IRAQ FIASCO GOING 'OVER-BUDGET':-- I'M NOT!!!

04.22.04 (6:03 am) [edit]

BUSH GESTAPO PUTS A 'SMILEY FACE' ON FASCIST IMPERIALISM

04.22.04 (5:58 am) [edit]

[b]Putting a smiley face on an imperial act [/b]

'We're not an imperial power," President Bush said in his press conference of April 13. He seemed sure about that, as he was about everything else.

Are we? If you mean that we intend to make Iraq another Puerto Rico, then no. But Americans do come to Iraq with definite ideas. The new Iraq will have to allow democratic elections. It will have to accept the existence of Kuwait and Israel, allow some autonomy for the Kurds, status for women and, the president says, "a bill of rights that is unprecedented in the Arab world."

On what authority does America demand these things? We invaded Iraq saying that we were defending ourselves from "weapons of mass destruction." We didn't find any such weapons. Now, when we assert the right to recapture Fallujah, shut down a newspaper or institute a bill of rights, we are asserting the authority of � what?

It is easier to see some things about ourselves from a foreign place. In the early 1990s, I worked in Hong Kong. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, my colleagues talked about it, and from sharply different perspectives. We Americans discussed what "we" should do. Colleagues from Canada, Australia and the U.K. tended to discuss what "should be done," as if their countries might have the honor of being consulted. Colleagues from India, Pakistan, Malaysia and the Philippines assumed their countries would not matter in any way. They were more cynical about American motives, and particularly about our presumption to make the world's moral judgments.

You can hear that presumption in the president's statement that "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein." It was picked up immediately by his supporters. I heard Sean Hannity say it on talk radio, and with the air of a man repeating the obvious.

It is not obvious that the war made humanity better off. For America, the war has ended the problem of "weapons of mass destruction" and begun a new problem of nation-building. That is, we have traded an imaginary problem for a real one. Few Americans have been killed, as wars go, but the arithmetic is bloody, still. At least $100 billion has been expended, all of it borrowed. So much for death and taxes. There is also a cost in mental clarity. For the six months before the war, the country was awash in propaganda.

Is Iraq better off after having been conquered? That is a question for Iraqis to answer. Some have thanked us, though at the moment others are behaving as if they would like us to leave.

We have not asked the world whether it is better off. It is a slogan only, a smiley-face sticker to put a meaning on a thing already done. It also sets a low standard for starting another war. Under the world-is-better-off standard, we could start a war with North Korea, with Cuba, with Venezuela, with Zimbabwe, and, until a month or so ago, with Libya. It would justify any of a dozen imaginable wars of aggression.

Funny, you don't hear that word "aggression" anymore. I grew up with it. America was always fighting aggression and aggressors. I can still see the black-and-white image of Lyndon Johnson and hear him slipping that word past his Texas jowls. I can't remember Bush referring to aggression, or Clinton either. Now, our government openly reserves the right to strike first, anywhere in the world, to prevent the possession of weapons that we have and our friends have.

That is the prerogative of an imperial power.

American motives are benign, as imperial powers go. We are not in Iraq to steal the oil or to force the Iraqis into Christianity. But we are there to change it. Says Bush, "My job as the president is to lead this nation into making the world a better place."

Republicans and Democrats will interpret that mandate a little differently, but all agree with it, and each, in their own way, leads us to war.

Now the realists among us say, "We can't get out now." Spain can get out. It had an election, and it is getting out, just like that. We are also having an election, but not with the same opportunities. Well, we are not Spain.

[b]Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com [/b] - http://seattletimes.nwsource....

DUBYA IS A POOR IMITATION OF NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: AN AMERICAN SELL-OUT!!!

04.21.04 (7:29 am) [edit]

NEO-CONSERVATIVES LOVE FASCISM: BUSH'S "IRAQIZATION" SCAM!!!

04.21.04 (7:21 am) [edit]

[b]The �Iraqization� Scam[/b]

In the wake of the embarrassing Shiite uprising and Fallujah catastrophe, George W. Bush said at his April 13 press conference that the United States must use �decisive force� in Iraq, and yet he also maintained his promise to hand over power on June 30, as initially planned by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council.

This might seem like a bit of a contradiction�with Bush intensifying his war rhetoric, yet staying committed to the handover plan. There is no irony, however, because the �handover� plan does not involve the United States pulling out. About 100,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq after the so-called handover, and the coalition will still assert its influence from the U.S. embassy.

Those Americans who want the United States to pull out of Iraq completely�including many who supported the war but see no point in staying there now�have little to look forward to. With such a large U.S. military presence in Iraq and with such strong ties to the Iraqi governing council, Americans will continue to be targets of a swelling anti-U.S. resentment and violent insurgency. The huge cost to American taxpayers for maintaining a neo-imperialist satellite in Mesopotamia will definitely continue. And with the coalition and governing council not even preparing to have elections before or shortly after the handover date, the Iraqi people will probably feel as powerless over the new governing regime as they do now under U.S. occupation and did under Saddam�s rule.

Thus, the growing solidarity between Shiites and Sunnis in their opposition to what they see as U.S. hegemony will likely continue, and the hatred against the United States in the Middle East, which breeds terrorists, will flourish. Just as the number of Americans who have died after Bush triumphantly stood in front of the now-famous �Mission Accomplished� banner exceeds by several times the U.S. death count of 140 before the war �ended,� the number of American fatalities after the Iraqi handover may make the current death toll seem like a drop in the bucket.

The Bush Administration has no intention of allowing the kind of Iraqi self-rule and self-determination invoked by the president in his speeches over the last year and a half. The fear is that pulling out may prove that the Iraq experiment was a failure, as the country descends into chaos and war. But even after Richard Nixon lost more than twenty thousand troops in his incremental attempts at �Vietnamization,� the United States eventually pulled out only to see South Vietnam fall to communism anyway. Some folks, nostalgic for the Cold War, say that if the United States had pressed on, it could have defeated the Viet Cong. Few Americans, though, believe that the sacrifice of another fifty thousand of America�s young would have been worth victory over the communists in that single arena, considering that Communist Vietnam ending up posing no real threat to America.

Vietnamization took years and was messy, and �Iraqization��a term one might imagine invoked by our verbally inventive president�will also be far from a quick and clean process. Remembering the body-bags from the futile last years of Vietnam, few Americans today want to see tens of thousands of their sons and daughters die in an Iraqization scheme that will almost certainly fail to free Iraq from the kind of brutal oppression or chaotic war that constitute the norm, and not the exception, to life in the Middle East and much of the world.

And yet, President Bush has not lost his resolve to send more troops to Iraq, his lip service to Iraqi sovereignty notwithstanding. In the end, short of bringing the troops home, there is little hope in stopping the carnage in Iraq emerging from a conflict between a grumbling occupying force of American soldiers, who want to come home, and a resentful occupied Iraqi population who would likewise prefer to see their occupiers leave.

As time goes on, and many more Americans continue to die in Iraq for reasons that increasingly seem unpersuasive to the public, the troops will come home. The only question that remains is how long this war, which now only survives by its own inertia, will continue to consume human lives. The United States can cut its losses now or we can maintain a war with no clear and just purpose, no victory in sight, and no realistic chance of reducing terrorism or bringing freedom to Iraq.

[b]By Anthony Gregory, The Independent Institute[/b], http://www.independent.org/ti...

THE ARROGANCE OF CONSERVATIVES WHO REALLY DO HATE AMERICA!!!

04.21.04 (7:14 am) [edit]

[b]Why Do Conservatives Hate America?[/b]

While discussing a book about the State Department on The [i]700 Club [/i]Pat Robertson advocated destroying the State Department offices with a nuclear device.

"I read your book," Robertson said, according to a transcript of the interview posted on his Christian Broadcasting Network's website (www.cbn.com).

"When you get through, you say, 'If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that's the answer'," he said.

"I mean, you get through this, and you say, 'We've got to blow that thing up.' I mean, is it as bad as you say?" Robertson asked.

This isn't the first anti-American sentiments have been expressed on Robertson's TV program. Two days after the attacks of September 11 on the same program Robertson's guest, Jerry Falwell declared that the victims deserved to die because God was punishing America for being too secular, to which Robertson replied, "I totally concur."

[b]CLICK ON [/b] http://www.tblog.com/template...

HYPOCRITICAL BUSH'S PHONY "FAMILY VALUES": DUBYA TREATS HIS FATHER LIKE SHIT!!!

04.20.04 (6:49 pm) [edit]

[b]I never cared for Poppy Bush, another neo-fascist who pandered to corporations. However, looking back, at least Poppy Bush had the brain-matter to involve a real international coalition in his 'Gulf War' (The U.S. only paid $7 Billion, with the rest of the Middle East countries and EU making up the balance of the total cost of $61 Billion. http://people.psych.cornell.e...~fhoran/gulf/GW_cost/GW_p ayments.html Contrast that with Idiot Dubya who has no real international coalition and is saddling the U.S. with over $200 Billion and no end in sight to the cost and the blood-shed). Instead of seeking advice, the dumb-bunny off-spring of Poppy Bush, Dumb Dubya simply stumbles along like a deaf, dumb and blind buffoon.

But take a look at Bush's so-called "family values": the asshole treats his own father (without whom Bushy-boy would be lucky to get a job cleaning toilets in Wal Mart) like SHIT![/b]

[u][b]White House Brat, Matt Bivens, The Nation[/b][/u], http://www.thenation.com/outr...

The core conservative value I admire most is a respect for the past -- and for one's elders.

So I was startled to hear that George W. Bush never sought his father's advice before deciding to invade Iraq -- and, what's more, he then went and basically bragged about it, speaking to a journalist about his own father with something bordering on contempt.

Bob Woodward, who interviewed the President for his new book, says he asked him whether, in pondering a war with Iraq, he'd ever asked his father's advice.

"And President Bush said, 'Well, no,' and then he got defensive about it," Woodward says.

"Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, 'He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.' And then he said, 'There's a higher Father that I appeal to.'"

So let's get this straight: There's only one other living person in the whole entire world who's ever seriously faced the question before our president -- whether to send American ground forces into a land war in the Middle East. This person did so, successfully, leaning upon the exact same men: Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. And miracle of fortunate miracles -- what are the odds? -- this person is the President's own father. Hey, get him on the phone! He's your dad; he'll give you his best and most honest and well-intentioned read, and as an adult you then thank him and make up your own mind.

Instead, the President refuses to even seek his own father's advice (which, if heeded, might have saved us a helluva lot of trouble); gets us bogged down in a miniature Vietnam that makes no sense whatsoever; tells a press conference he can't think of a single mistake he's made since 9/11; and then, no doubt feeling defensive about things, he lashes out at ... his father.

In the most public of forums -- a journalist's interview -- the President of the United States runs his father down as a weakling -- "the wrong father to ... appeal to in terms of strength."

How old is this President again? Eleven years old? Twelve? Remind me again how our Republic ended up in the hands of this petulant child?

BUSH'S NEO-CON HENCHMAN LIED ABOUT WMDs -- NOW THEY ARE LYING ABOUT JOHN F. KERRY!!!

04.20.04 (11:32 am) [edit]

[b]CHECK OUT KERRY DBUNKER TO EXPOSE BUSH'S LIES ABOUT KERRY [/b] http://blog.johnkerry.com/dbu...

[u][b]Bush Misleads America on Iraq War Plans[/b][/u]

* We learn that $700 million, directed to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan, was diverted to fund the secret war plans for Iraq in July 2002, just months after the attacks of 9/11.

* Then we learn that Secretary Powell got briefed on the President's war plans after the President told Saudi government officials.

* Finally, we learn that Bush went to war in Iraq when he doubted the proof Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and kept the CIA director who had apparently given him misleading information.

[b]CONTINUE[/b] http://blog.johnkerry.com/dbu...

TYRANNY UNDER DUBYA: IGNORE TERRORISM -- LIE TO WAGE BLOODY WARFARE -- AIDE AND ABET TERRORISM!!!

04.20.04 (11:14 am) [edit]

[b]Before 9/11: White House Received Warnings[/b] - http://www.americanprogress.o...

After September 11, both President Bush and his top national security adviser denied having any prior knowledge that Al Qaeda was planning an attack involving airplanes. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on 5/16/02, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." Similarly, President Bush denied having any idea about the threat, saying on 5/17/02, "Had I know that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people." These denials belie the record.

1999 �EXPLICIT WARNING THAT AL QAEDA HAD PLANS TO FLY AIRPLANES INTO BUILDINGS: A 1999 report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council "warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon." The report specifically said, "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives�into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House." In response to the ominous warnings, the New York Times reports "under Janet Reno, the Justice Department's counterterrorism budget increased 13.6% in the fiscal year 1999, 7.1% in 2000 and 22.7% in 2001." During the Clinton Administration "the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack." [Source: CBS, 5/17/02; NY Times, 2/28/02; WSJ, 4/1/04]

EARLY 2001 � MAJOR SURGE IN AL QAEDA ACTIVITY: "In late spring 2001, a sudden surge in activity began among known Al Qaeda operatives�a reporter from Middle East Broadcasting visited bin Laden at a camp in Afghanistan and noted that his supporters were preparing for attacks against American 'interests.'"[Source: The Age of Sacred Terror, 2003]

EARLY 2001 � WHITE HOUSE DEPARTS FROM EFFORTS TO TRACK TERRORIST MONEY: The new Bush Treasury Department "disapproved of the Clinton Administration's approach to money laundering issues, which had been an important part of the drive to cut off the money flow to bin Laden." Specifically, the Bush Administration opposed Clinton Administration-backed efforts by the G-7 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that targeted countries with "loose banking regulations" being abused by terrorist financiers. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration provided "no funding for the new National Terrorist Asset Tracking Center." [Source: The Age of Sacred Terror, 2003]

APRIL 30, 2001 - BUSH ADMINISTRATION SAYS BIN LADEN FOCUS WAS "MISTAKE": The Bush Administration released the government's annual report on terrorism, but unlike previous Administrations, it decided to specifically omit an "extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden." Similarly, AP reported in 2002 that the Bush Administration's "national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions." [Source: CNN, 4/30/01; AP, 6/29/01]

JULY 2001 �ANOTHER WARNING THAT AL QAEDA PLANNED TO USE PLANES AS MISSILES: The LA Times reported that U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July 2001 that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations." [Source: LA Times, 9/27/01]

JULY 2001 � ASHCROFT STOPS FLYING COMMERCIAL BECAUSE OF "THREAT ASSESSMENT": Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines and instead began "traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines" because of "what the Justice Department called a 'threat assessment.'" That "threat assessment" has never been made public. [Source: CBS, 7/26/01]

AUGUST 2001 - PRESIDENT PERSONALLY WARNED OF AL QAEDA AIRPLANE PLOT: ABC News reported, Bush Administration "officials acknowledged that U.S. intelligence officials informed President Bush weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks that bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes." Dateline NBC reported that on August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." [Source: ABC News, 5/16/02; NBC, 9/10/02]

SEPTEMBER 2001 - PENTAGON OFFICIALS CHANGE FLIGHTS ON 9/11 BECAUSE OF SECURITY: Newsweek reported that on 9/10/01 "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns." Newsweek also reported "that as many as 10 to 12 warnings" were issued before 9/11, and "more than two of the warnings specifically mentioned the possibility of hijackings." [Source: Newsweek, 9/24/01]

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 � RICE SPEECH ON SECURITY GOALS HAS NO MENTION OF TERRORISM: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to give a speech outlining "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday." But instead of focusing on the new challenges, Rice instead was set to address Cold War-type challenges by "promoting missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy." The address "contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups." [Source: Wash Post, 4/1/04]

[b]Before 9/11: Reducing Counter-Terrorism[/b]

The federal government was rapidly increasing its counter-terrorism efforts at the time President Bush took office. As the New York Times reported, Attorney General Janet Reno ended her tenure as "perhaps the strongest advocate" of counterterrorism spending. Similarly, Newsweek and the Washington Post reported National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was "totally preoccupied" with the prospect of a domestic terror attack, telling his replacement that they need to be "spending more time on this issue" than on any other. The focus changed dramatically when the Bush Administration took office.

ADMINISTRATION SHIFTED LAW ENFORCEMENT'S FOCUS OFF OF COUNTER-TERRORISM: The New York Times reported that in the lead-up to 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft "said fighting terrorism was a top priority of his agency," yet upon entering office, "he identified more than a dozen other objectives for greater emphasis within the Justice Department before the attacks." On Aug. 9, the Administration distributed a strategic plan to the Justice Department highlighting its new goals from a list of Clinton Administration goals. The item that referred to intelligence and investigation of terrorists was left un-highlighted. [Source: NY Times, 2/28/02]

ASHCROFT OVERRULED EFFORTS FOCUSED ON COUNTER-TERROR: Newsweek reported that "in the spring of 2001, the attorney general had an extraordinary confrontation with the then FBI Director Louis Freeh at an annual meeting of special agents." The two talked before appearing, and Ashcroft laid out his priorities for Freeh: "basically violent crime and drugs," recalls one participant. Freeh replied bluntly that those were not his priorities, and began to talk about terror and counterterrorism. "Ashcroft didn't want to hear about it," says a former senior law-enforcement official." [Source: Newsweek, 5/27/02]

BUSH ADMINISTRATION TERMINATED PROGRAM THAT TRACKED AL QAEDA: "In the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called 'Catcher's Mitt' to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States." [Source: Newsweek, 3/21/04]

SO LITTLE CONCERN FOR COUNTER-TERROR THAT A WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE NEVER MET: In January of 2001, the U.S. Government's bipartisan Commission on National Security gave the White House a report that warned of an attack on the homeland and urged the new Administration to implement its specific "recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism. The Administration rejected the Commission's report, "preferring to put aside the recommendations." Instead, the Administration waited until May of 2001 to appoint Vice President Cheney to head a task force "to combat terrorist attacks on the United States." But according to the Washington Post, neither "Cheney's review nor Bush's took place." Meanwhile, Newsweek reported that when senators "sent a copy of draft legislation on counterterrorism and homeland defense to Cheney's office on July 20," they were told by Cheney's top aide "that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material." [Source: Salon, 9/12/04; White House release, 5/8/01; Washington Post, 1/20/02; Newsweek, 5/27/02]

WHITE HOUSE BEGAN EFFORT TO CUT COUNTER-TERRORISM PROGRAMS: The New York Times reported that in its final 2003 budget request, the Administration "called for spending increases in 68 programs, none of which directly involved counterterrorism...In his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Ashcroft did not endorse FBI requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators. Ashcroft proposed a $65 million cut for a program that gives states and localities counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training." By comparison, "Under Janet Reno, the department's counterterrorism budget increased 13.6% in the fiscal year 1999, 7.1% in 2000 and 22.7% in 2001." [Source: NY Times, 2/28/02]

ADMINISTRATION LEFT "GAPS" IN MILITARY'S REQUEST FOR COUNTER-TERROR FUNDS: The Washington Post reported that in its first budget, the White House left "gaps" between "what military commanders said they needed to combat terrorists and what they got." Newsweek noted that, among other things, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to re-launch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden. When the Senate Armed Services Committee tried to fill those gaps, "Rumsfeld said he would recommend a veto" on September 9. [Source: Washington Post, 1/20/02; Newsweek, 5/27/02; NY Times, 2/28/02]

ADMINISTRATION STOPPED PREDATOR FLIGHTS TRACKING AL QAEDA IN AFGHANISTAN: AP reported "though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months." Additionally, "the military successfully tested an armed Predator throughout the first half of 2001" but the White House "failed to resolve a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators" and the armed Predator never got off the ground before 9/11. [Source: AP, 6/25/03]

WHILE CUTTING COUNTER-TERROR, THE WHITE HOUSE SENT FUNDING TO THE TALIBAN: At the same time the White House was trying to cut counter-terrorism funding, it gave "$43 million in drought aid to Afghanistan after the Taliban began a campaign against poppy growers." As the 5/29/01 edition of Newsday noted, the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan "are a decidedly odd choice for an outright gift of $43 million from the Bush Administration. This is the same government against which the United Nation imposes sanctions, at the behest of the United States, for refusing to turn over the terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden." [Washington Post, 9/23/01; Newsday, 5/29/01]

[b]Before 9/11: Despite Terror Ties, Bush-Saudi Bonds Strengthen[/b]

According to Time Magazine, President Bush is far "cozier than most [Presidents] to Riyadh." But with the LA Times pointing out that the Saudi government "provided significant money and aid to the 9/11 suicide hijackers," Vanity Fair notes that "the Bush-Saudi relationship raises serious questions" about why the Administration ignored the clear Saudi ties to terror before 9/11.

SAUDI TIES TO TERROR KNOWN LONG BEFORE 9/11: According to U.S. News and World Report, a 1996 CIA report found that a third of the 50 Saudi-backed charities it studied "were tied to terrorist groups." Similarly, a 1998 report by the National Security Council had identified the Saudi government as "the