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'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' BAITS BUSH -- AND SPRINGS THE TRAP ...

06.30.04 (7:00 am) [edit]

[b]'Fahrenheit 9/11' Baits Bush -- and Springs the Trap[/b]

The media chatter about Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" comes down to three basic issues:

--Is the film 100 percent accurate, or is it fundamentally misleading?

--Can it sway the undecideds and thereby affect the election itself, or will only partisans fork out their money for a ticket?

--Is this a legitimate use of a medium whose role is to entertain us, not ridicule the government or lecture the populace?

Those three media preoccupations largely miss the point, however. Moore's brilliant political achievement -- whether intended or not -- doesn't happen directly on the screen, and it's not likely to show up in weekend polls.

This is not an electorate easily swayed by reasoned discourse. If it were, the war on Iraq might never have been initiated. The winning formula for this election won't be convincing the formerly hostile; it will be mobilizing the already convinced.

Moore may conceivably nudge a few undecideds, but his real accomplishment may be firing up his own partisans, especially the cynical young and the economically ignored. By legitimizing their anger and alienation, he may motivate them to participate in what otherwise seems to many of them a futile electoral exercise.

Not only will this be an election campaign to mobilize the partisans; it will also be a tug of war to define the subject matter. Is it the economy, stupid? Is it wounded pride and feel-good patriotism? Is it fear of terrorism? The war on evil? Iraq? Torture? Education? Abortion and gay marriage? Civil liberties? The Ten Commandments?

We've all grown accustomed to manipulation by carefully posed photos, orchestrated "messages of the day" and focus-grouped slogans for which candidates pay consultants exorbitant fees. They're the essence of contemporary American politics, but no one would maintain that they are exercises in reasoned debate. Rather, they're attempts to stake out territory as one's own, with little or no regard for policy content.

"The Education President," for example, makes no pretense of telling the voter what the candidate would do for education -- only that he's a guy who really, really cares a whole lot more than his opponent about that issue. For instance, here he is reading to a grade-school class.

The key to those "messages of the day" is to grab the initiative; to make sure that the contest is fought in your home stadium. And THAT's where Michael Moore has thrown his monkey wrench into George Bush's finely tuned campaign machine. For no matter what you think of Moore's arguments, no matter what you think of his film's persuasiveness, no matter what you think of his factual assumptions ... Michael Moore has rewritten the agenda. He has seized home-field advantage.

No doubt the disintegration in Iraq softened the opposition for Moore. But both in his film and in the buzz surrounding it, he has brashly commandeered attention. The press, the public and especially the Bush White House, normally so adept at guiding the media discourse, must deal with Moore's images and his issues, and that can only work to John Kerry's advantage.

A White House that stage-manages every single photo op to the tiniest detail (and a press corps that compliantly retails those images) is now forced to contend with unscripted, real-world images -- sometimes as goofy as the official photos are saccharine.

Moore's issues, too, are in the national spotlight, driven partly by attempts to suppress them or challenge them. Did the president's negligence or his loyalty to the Saudis or the Bin Laden family distort his response to 9/11? The answer is debatable, but the focus now, belatedly, is on the question itself. Was the war in Iraq all about the poor being cajoled into risking their lives on behalf of oil plutocrats, ideologues and defense contractors? Once again, Moore's answer is not as significant as the fact that the question is being asked -- and heard.

If the White House had its way, this campaign would not be waged on issues like the undue influence of Saudi potentates or greedy defense contractors ... or on economic equity ... or whether the president was on autopilot while New York and Washington burned.

But for the past week (and, with its unprecedented box-office popularity, for the foreseeable future), those have indeed become issues in this campaign, whether John Kerry raised them or not -- and whether or not Michael Moore has every last one of his facts right. What's more, the issues are being addressed not in Washington code talk but in language and images familiar to the average dude.

THAT is Michael Moore's great achievement. He got the White House and its allies to lunge for his bait. It's rather like an animal trap -- the more aggressively the prey fights back, the more tightly bound it becomes.

Brilliant.

'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' BAITS BUSH -- AND SPRINGS THE TRAP ...

06.30.04 (6:59 am) [edit]

'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' BAITS BUSH -- AND SPRINGS THE TRAP ...

06.30.04 (6:57 am) [edit]

WHO LOST IRAQ?

06.30.04 (6:53 am) [edit]

[b]Who Lost Iraq?[/b]

The formal occupation of Iraq came to an ignominious end yesterday with a furtive ceremony, held two days early to foil insurgent attacks, and a swift airborne exit for the chief administrator. In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave. But it's already worth asking why things went so wrong.

The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start — but we'll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country.

Up to a point, the numbers in the Brookings Institution's invaluable Iraq Index tell the tale. Figures on the electricity supply and oil production show a pattern of fitful recovery and frequent reversals; figures on insurgent attacks and civilian casualties show a security situation that got progressively worse, not better; public opinion polls show an occupation that squandered the initial good will.

What the figures don't describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance.

The insurgency took root during the occupation's first few months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed oddly disengaged from the problems of postwar anarchy. But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, "Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold."

Plans for privatization were eventually put on hold. But as he prepared to leave Iraq, Mr. Bremer listed reduced tax rates, reduced tariffs and the liberalization of foreign-investment laws as among his major accomplishments. Insurgents are blowing up pipelines and police stations, geysers of sewage are erupting from the streets, and the electricity is off most of the time — but we've given Iraq the gift of supply-side economics.

If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections — people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, a prominent neoconservative, told a forum that "the level of casualties is secondary" because "we are a warlike people" and "we love war."

Still, given Mr. Bremer's economic focus, you might at least have expected his top aide for private-sector development to be an expert on privatization and liberalization in such countries as Russia or Argentina. But the job initially went to Thomas Foley, a Connecticut businessman and Republican fund-raiser with no obviously relevant expertise. In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he's Ari Fleischer's brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: "The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

Checks and review? Yesterday a leading British charity, Christian Aid, released a scathing report, "Fueling Suspicion," on the use of Iraqi oil revenue. It points out that the May 2003 U.N. resolution giving the C.P.A. the right to spend that revenue required the creation of an international oversight board, which would appoint an auditor to ensure that the funds were spent to benefit the Iraqi people.

Instead, the U.S. stalled, and the auditor didn't begin work until April 2004. Even then, according to an interim report, it faced "resistance from C.P.A. staff." And now, with the audit still unpublished, the C.P.A. has been dissolved.

Defenders of the administration will no doubt say that Christian Aid and other critics have no proof that the unaccounted-for billions were ill spent. But think of it this way: given the Arab world's suspicion that we came to steal Iraq's oil, the occupation authorities had every incentive to expedite an independent audit that would clear Halliburton and other U.S. corporations of charges that they were profiteering at Iraq's expense. Unless, that is, the charges are true.

Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

BUSH/CHENEY NEO-CON IDEOLOGY & CRONYISM LOST THE WAR IN IRAQ!

06.30.04 (6:50 am) [edit]

FREE SPEECH IN AN AGE OF TERROR ...

06.29.04 (6:49 am) [edit]

[b]Free speech in an age of terror[/b]

A WIDELY MISUNDERSTOOD and under-appreciated aspect of the First Amendment's free speech guaranty was reaffirmed earlier this month by a federal jury in Idaho. At the same time, however, the principle was being undermined by some of the nation's premier charitable foundations. The issue? Protection of speech that advocates violence, including violence against the very system of constitutional government that brings us the First Amendment.

In terms of the never-ending battle for free speech, it's always the hardest sell -- protecting speech that's often violent, subversive, revolutionary. And yet it's precisely the kind of speech where the First Amendment plays its most important role.

After seven days of deliberations, the jury acquitted Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a 34-year-old Muslim Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho, of charges that he provided "expert advice or assistance" to terrorist organizations by operating websites and e-mail discussion groups that advocated what lead prosecutor Kim Lindquist termed "extreme jihad."

Boise federal prosecutors had brought the case under a controversial provision of the US Patriot Act that broadened a Clinton-era prohibition against lending assistance to causes designated by the federal government as "foreign terrorist organizations." To support their contention that Al-Hussayen had assisted a terrorist conspiracy, prosecutors pulled several examples of inflammatory speech from Al-Hussayen's otherwise mundane collection of Muslim-themed websites and discussion groups. These included his redistribution of four fatwas issued by radical clerics offering religious justifications for "martyrdom attacks" and his hyperlinks to a Hamas-affiliated website.

But the prosecutors ran up against the First Amendment. As US District Judge Edward Lodge instructed the jury, the Constitution protects expression of beliefs "even if those beliefs advocate the use of force or violation of law, unless the speech is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action."

Civil liberties and legal communities widely viewed this case as a terrorism-era test of the free speech protections first articulated in a McCarthy-era Supreme Court opinion; that ruling protected the right of public university professor Paul Sweezy, a self-styled "classical Marxist," to argue that the capitalist system would collapse when confronted by violence on the part of those seeking to create a "truly human society."

This protection was broadened and clarified in 1969 when the court, in a case involving pro-violence rhetoric at a Klan rally, held that speech-restrictive legislation had to be limited to "advocacy [that] is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

In this age of terrorism, it is not "classical Marxists" but fundamentalist religious radicals -- and those who disseminate their sermons and writings -- who are increasingly targeted by such viewpoint-based prosecutions. And like the anti-Communist purges of the '50s, these government actions are inspiring similar private sector purges

[i]The Full Story [/i] http://www.boston.com/news/gl...

FREE SPEECH IS NEEDED NOW MORE THAN EVER BEFORE ...

06.29.04 (6:46 am) [edit]

IRAQIS "HOPE" FOR REAL "SOVEREIGNTY" (IRAQ IS IN A SHAMBLES) ... THEY BETTER NOT "HOLD-THEIR-BREATHE

06.29.04 (6:42 am) [edit]

[b]Iraqis[i] hope [/i]for real sovereignty[/b]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - When the U.S. formal transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government was televised on Monday, some Iraqis on a bustling downtown street dismissed it as a cosmetic change in a country destabilised by occupation.

But others said the handover was a step in the right direction, and called on Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to take stern measures to restore stability.

"We are happy. Although Allawi was chosen by the Americans, at least now we have some sovereignty," said Mohammed al-Daraji, a driver for a transport company.

"Allawi may succeed if he is very tough."

At a grimy transport firm, long-haul drivers predicted more trouble on Iraq's roads, where they have seen everything from suicide bombings to carjackings in the last 14 months.

"What could change now? I was held up by armed men and then detained by the Americans for a month for holding a weapon in my vehicle for protection," said Ali Ibrahim.

"How can sovereignty mean anything when American soldiers are going to stay in Iraq? If they leave it will be stable."

U.S. troops will lead a multinational force of more than 160,000 soldiers that will support Allawi's government.

At the handover ceremony, Allawi said in his speech that security was under control in the new sovereign Iraq.

Although Iraqis were happy to see their interim government take over after the occupation that ended 24 years of Saddam Hussein's rule, some questioned the extent of their sovereignty.

"We will have an American embassy here with thousands of employees, the biggest embassy in the world. The Americans will keep interfering," said the transport company's manager, Bashar. "Sovereignty means full sovereignty -- no American troops."

[b]LONGING FOR RESPECT[/b]

Many of his drivers hope sovereignty means Iraqis will no longer be treated as second-class citizens on the Jordanian border, where passport inspections became rigorous after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

"We have been treated badly for so long. I drove Iraqi families to Jordan and the customs people would just send them back. This Iraqi passport has no value in the rest of the world," said driver Abbas Mahmoud, waving a friend's passport.

The al-Quds transport company, with its diverse ethnic mix of employees, offers a glimpse into the minds of a people who have seen no way out of suffering for decades.

First there was Saddam's brutal one-party state. Then U.S. President George W. Bush's troops invaded with promises of prosperity and democracy. Now Allawi's untested government faces a host of challenges, with security as the highest priority.

Violence has become so pervasive that many want to see stern measures to restore security. Allawi says the government plans to introduce emergency laws, including curfews.

"I want to behead Saddam Hussein for what he did. He killed four members of my family," said Akeel Kathim, another driver. "Despite that I hope he comes back because only he can end the security crisis."

The roads were safe under Saddam because criminals faced severe sentences such as long prison terms, or the severing of hands for illegal money dealing. During the chaos of occupation, armed gangs preyed on motorists. Now al-Quds's 25 drivers can only wait to see if Allawi delivers.

"I used to take jobs at two in the morning. Now I shut down at six because it is too dangerous to drive at night," Bashar said. "The future is uncertain now. I hope I we can work at night again soon." - http://www.reuters.co.uk/news...

IRAQIS "HOPE" FOR REAL "SOVEREIGNTY" (IRAQ IS IN A SHAMBLES) ... THEY BETTER NOT "HOLD-THEIR-BREATHE

06.29.04 (6:10 am) [edit]

BUSH'S RATING FALLS TO ITS LOWEST POINT, NEW SURVEY FINDS

06.28.04 (7:19 pm) [edit]

President Bush's job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found Americans stiffening their opposition to the Iraq war, worried that the invasion could invite domestic terrorist attacks and skeptical about whether the White House has been fully truthful about the war or about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

A majority of respondents in the poll, conducted before yesterday's transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government, said that the war was not worth its cost in American lives and that the Bush administration did not have a clear plan to restore order to Iraq.

The survey, which showed Mr. Bush's approval rating at 42 percent, also found that nearly 40 percent of Americans say they do not have an opinion about Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, despite what have been both parties' earliest and most expensive television advertising campaigns.

[i]The Full Story [/i] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

91% PUBLIC LOVES IT - 90% CRITICS GIVE IT A THUMBS-UP: 'FAHRENHEIT 9/11'

06.28.04 (6:58 am) [edit]

[b]Red-Hot 'Fahrenheit 9/11' a No. 1 Hit Across America [/b]

Bush-bashing became the nation's favorite spectator sport over the weekend as Michael Moore's red-hot documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" earned more in its first three days of release across North America than his previous record-breaking movie did in its entire run.

According to studio estimates issued on Sunday, "Fahrenheit 9/11," in which Moore takes aim at President Bush, and the war in Iraq, opened at No. 1 after selling about $21.8 million worth of tickets in the United States and Canada since June 25.

All told, the movie's total stands at $21.96 million, because it got a head-start on Wednesday in two Manhattan theaters to help build more media buzz before expanding to a relatively modest 868 theaters two days later. (By contrast, most of the other movies in the top five were playing in more than 2,500 theaters each.)

Moore's previous movie, "Bowling for Columbine," which nabbed the Academy Award for best documentary last year, grossed about $21.5 million during its nine-month run, peaking at about 250 theaters, according to Moore. That haul was a record for a documentary in regular movie theaters.

"These are mind-blowing numbers," Moore said during a conference call, "And the fact that all the predictions that the movie would only speak to the choir and that it would only be those who don't like Bush coming to the movie, I don't think have turned out to be true."

Indeed, "Fahrenheit 9/11" played strongly in big cities and small towns, in Democrat and Republican states, said Tom Ortenberg, the president of distribution at Lions Gate Films, one of the firms that backed the movie.

[b]"FAHRENHEIT" FRENZY[/b]

According to exit surveys in about 15 cities, 91 percent of respondents gave the film an "excellent" rating, while 93 percent said they would "definitely recommend" the film -- tallies that Ortenberg said were the best he had ever seen. The core audience was aged between 25 and 34, he added.

Lions Gate, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, partnered on the film's distribution with IFC Films, a unit of Cablevision Systems Corp.'s Rainbow Media Holdings LLC, and Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein. The Weinsteins bought the movie's rights with their own money after Miramax parent Walt Disney Co. refused to let them release it under the Miramax banner.

The Disney brouhaha, which broke in early May, weeks before "Fahrenheit 9/11" went on to win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, helped give the movie a huge public profile virtually unprecedented for a $6 million documentary.

Moore and the Weinsteins, well-practiced masters of media spin, were also helped in their efforts by grassroots groups from both sides of the political fence that chimed in with their opinions. Moore thanked his detractors for helping boost awareness and ticket sales.

While Moore has previously boasted that "Fahrenheit 9/11" would help Bush lose his job in November, he backed down during the teleconference, merely hoping that the film would inspire the large non-voting bloc to be "an active participant in our democracy." Similarly, Moore reversed himself on previously stated plans to release the DVD version of the film in October. "No deal has been done to do that," he said.

But one thing is certain. The Oscar race is now definitely underway ahead of next year's Feb. 27 ceremony, with "Fahrenheit 9/11" joining Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" as the highest-profile contender. "We have big plans for the award season, absolutely," Ortenberg said.

Elsewhere at the box office, the comedy "White Chicks" opened at No. 2 with $19.6 million for the weekend, and $27.1 million since bowing nationally on Wednesday. Last weekend's champion, "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," fell to No. 3 with $18.5 million, and a 10-day haul of $67.2 million.

Steven Spielberg's "The Terminal," starring Tom Hanks, fell two places to No. 4 with $13.9 million, and a 10-day total of $41.8 million. Director Nick Cassavetes' "The Notebook," a tear-jerker romance based on the Nicholas Sparks bestseller," opened at No. 5 with a solid $13 million.

"White Chicks" was released by Columbia Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp . "Dodgeball" was released by Twentieth Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.'s Fox Entertainment Group Inc . "The Terminal" was released by DreamWorks SKG, which is privately held. "The Notebook" was released by New Line Cinema, a unit of Time Warner Inc . - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

91% PUBLIC LOVES IT - 90% CRITICS GIVE IT A THUMBS-UP: 'FAHRENHEIT 9/11'

06.28.04 (6:53 am) [edit]

91% PUBLIC LOVES IT - 90% CRITICS GIVE IT A THUMBS-UP: 'FAHRENHEIT 9/11'

06.28.04 (6:50 am) [edit]

THE DISASTER OF FAILED [IRAQ] POLICY ...

06.28.04 (6:29 am) [edit]

In its scale and intent, President Bush's war against Iraq was something new and radical: a premeditated decision to invade, occupy and topple the government of a country that was no imminent threat to the United States. This was not a handful of GIs sent to overthrow Panamanian thug Manuel Noriega or to oust a new Marxist government in tiny Grenada. It was the dispatch of more than 100,000 U.S. troops to implement Bush's post-Sept. 11 doctrine of preemption, one whose dangers President John Quincy Adams understood when he said the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy."

In the case of Vietnam, the U.S. began by assisting a friendly government resisting communist takeover in a civil war, though the conflict disintegrated into a failure that still haunts this country. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, under Bush's father, was a successful response to Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait — and Bush's father deliberately stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq.

The current president outlined a far more aggressive policy in a speech to the West Point graduating class in 2002, declaring that in the war on terror "we must take the battle to the enemy" and confront threats before they emerge. The Iraq war was intended as a monument to his new Bush Doctrine, which also posited that the U.S. would take what help was available from allies but would not be held back by them. It now stands as a monument to folly.

The planned transfer Wednesday of limited sovereignty from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government occurs with U.S. influence around the world at a low point and insurgent violence in Iraq reaching new heights of deadliness and coordination. Important Arab leaders this month rejected a U.S. invitation to attend a summit with leaders of industrialized nations. The enmity between Israelis and Palestinians is fiercer than ever, their hope for peace dimmer. Residents of the Middle East see the U.S. not as a friend but as an imperial power bent on securing a guaranteed oil supply and a base for U.S. forces. Much of the rest of the world sees a bully.

[b]The War's False Premises[/b]

All the main justifications for the invasion offered beforehand by the Bush administration and its supporters — weapons of mass destruction, close ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, a chance to make Baghdad a fountain of democracy that would spread through the region — turned out to be baseless.

Weeks of suicide car bombings, assassinations of political leaders and attacks on oil pipelines vital to the country's economy have preceded the handover.

On Thursday alone, car bombs and street fighting in five cities claimed more than 100 lives. Iraqis no longer fear torture or death at the hands of Hussein's brutal thugs, but many fear leaving their homes because of the violence.

The U.S. is also poorer after the war, in lives lost, billions spent and terrorists given new fuel for their rage. The initial fighting was easy; the occupation has been a disaster, with Pentagon civilians arrogantly ignoring expert advice on the difficulty of the task and necessary steps for success.

Two iconic pictures from Iraq balance the good and the dreadful — the toppling of Hussein's statue and a prisoner crawling on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison with a leash around his neck. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to a hero's welcome and a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."

A year later, more than 90% of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave their country. The president boasted in July that if Iraqi resistance fighters thought they could attack U.S. forces, "bring them on." Since then, more than 400 personnel have been killed by hostile fire.

Iraqis hope, with little evidence, that the transfer of limited sovereignty to an interim government will slow attacks on police, soldiers and civilians. Another goal, democracy, is fading. The first concern remains what it should have been after the rout of Hussein's army: security. The new Iraqi leaders are considering martial law, an understandable response with suicide bombings recently averaging about one a day but a move they could hardly enforce with an army far from rebuilt.

The new government also faces the difficulty of keeping the country together. In the north, the Kurds, an ethnically separate minority community that had been persecuted by Hussein, want at least to maintain the autonomy they've had for a decade. The Sunnis and Shiites distrust each other. Within the Shiite community, to which the majority of Iraqis belong, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the violent Muqtada Sadr are opponents. Sadr was a relatively minor figure until occupation officials shut his party's newspaper in March and arrested one of his aides, setting off large protests and attacks on U.S. troops.

The U.S. carries its own unwelcome legacies from the occupation:

• Troops are spending more time in Iraq than planned because about one-quarter of the Army is there at any one time. National Guard and Army Reserve forces are being kept on active duty longer than expected, creating problems at home, where the soldiers' jobs go unfilled and families go without parents in the home.

• The Abu Ghraib prison scandal has raised questions about the administration's willingness to ignore Geneva Convention requirements on treatment of prisoners. Investigations of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay must aim at finding out which high-ranking officers approved of the abuse or should have known of it. The U.S. also must decide what to do with prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention requires they be released when the occupation ends unless they have been formally charged with a crime. The International Committee of the Red Cross says fewer than 50 prisoners have been granted POW status. Thousands more detained as possible security threats also should be released or charged.

• The use of private contractors for military jobs once done by soldiers also demands closer examination. Civilians have long been employed to feed troops and wash uniforms, but the prevalence of ex-GIs interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison raises harsh new questions. For instance, what, if any, charges could be brought against them if they were found complicit in mistreatment?

[b]Investigate the Contracts[/b]

The administration also put private U.S. contractors in charge of rebuilding Iraq. Congress needs to take a much closer look at what they do and how they bill the government.

Halliburton is the best-known case, having won secret no-bid contracts to rebuild the country. A Pentagon audit found "significant" overcharges by the company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney; Halliburton denies the allegations.

Iraqis say they want the Americans out, but most understand they will need the foreign forces for many more months. A U.S. troop presence in Iraq should not be indefinite, even if the Iraqis request it. By the end of 2005, Iraq should have enough trained police, soldiers, border guards and other forces to be able to defend the country and put down insurgencies but not threaten neighboring countries.

The Bush administration should push NATO nations to help with the training. Once the Iraqis have a new constitution, an elected government and sufficient security forces, the U.S. should withdraw its troops. That does not mean setting a definite date, because the U.S. cannot walk away from what it created. But it should set realistic goals for Iraq to reach on its own, at which time the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad becomes just another diplomatic outpost. It also means living up to promises to let Iraq choose its own government, even well short of democracy.

France, Germany and others that opposed the war seem to understand that letting Iraq become a failed state, an Afghanistan writ large, threatens them as well as the U.S. and the Middle East. But other nations will do little to help with reconstruction if Iraq remains a thinly disguised fiefdom where U.S. companies get billion-dollar contracts and other countries are shut out.

[b]A Litany of Costly Errors[/b]

The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation's unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm's length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire.

It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world's most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans' memory banks.

Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility. - http://www.latimes.com/news/o...,1,5326006.story?coll=la-news-commen t-editorials

THE DISASTER OF FAILED POLICY ...

06.28.04 (6:25 am) [edit]

THE DISASTER OF FAILED [IRAQ] POLICY ...

06.28.04 (6:21 am) [edit]

40,000 PROTEST BUSH IN TURKEY-- BUSH HAS TO TOUR THRU DESERTED STREETS OF EUROPE (THEY HATE HIM)

06.28.04 (6:17 am) [edit]

[u][b]More Than 40,000 Protest Bush in Turkey[/b][/u]

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) -- Tens of thousands of Turks chanting anti-Bush slogans demonstrated against the president's visit to their country on Sunday and a NATO summit.

Bush is unpopular in Turkey, where the overwhelming majority of the public opposed the Iraq war. As the president arrived in Turkey Saturday, supporters of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said they kidnapped three Turkish workers in Iraq, Arab TV station al-Jazeera reported. The group has threatened to behead the hostages, an al-Jazeera employee told The Associated Press.

The protest in the Kadikoy district, on the Asian side of Istanbul, attracted more than 40,000 people, mostly members of leftist groups, police said. There were some 100 foreign protesters from Greece, Britain, The Netherlands, Portugal and Syria.

[i]The Full Story [/i] http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/...

[u][b]Bush tours through the deserted streets of Europe[/b][/u]

From Co Clare's cliffs to the Anatolian plain; from medieval battlements to Ottoman minarets; from the slate grey Atlantic to the Golden Horn; from armoured cars on deserted streets to, er, armoured cars on deserted streets.

President George W Bush took in the full East-West sweep of Europe this weekend, travelling from the mouth of the Shannon to the Bosphorus via Ankara in less than 24 hours. He also appeared to have fostered a rare unanimity on the streets of two of Europe's geographical extremes.

Hours after anti-Bush Irish demonstrators outwitted the Garda and delayed the president's plans, Turkish police in Ankara clashed with protesters trying to break through a barricade outside Mr Bush's hotel.

The only difference was the colour of the armoured cars: in Ireland they were khaki; in Ankara and Istanbul they were black.

Otherwise the impression from the motorcade was the same: anti-Bush graffiti, lines of armed policemen, roadblocks, and emptied roads.

The tour began on Friday night in Co Clare's Dromoland Castle, yet weeks of preparations almost went awry. Mr Bush was changing for dinner when a cameraman snatched an "unauthorised" shot of him at his window in a T-shirt, the cue for the briefest of losses of presidential cool. Memos went out insisting it was not for use.

[i]The Full Story [/i] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...

40,000 PROTEST BUSH IN TURKEY-- BUSH HAS TO TOUR THRU DESERTED STREETS OF EUROPE (THEY HATE HIM)

06.28.04 (6:15 am) [edit]

PANICKY-BUSH/FUCK-YOU-CHENEY'S EARLY "HANDOVER" 'CAUSE THEY'VE FUCKED-IT-UP & DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO

06.28.04 (6:05 am) [edit]

[b]U.S. transfers sovereignty to Iraq 2 days early

[i]Ministers sworn in; Bremer leaves country after surprise power shift[/i][/b]

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on Monday, speeding up the move by two days in an apparent bid to surprise insurgents who might have tried to sabotage the step toward self rule.

The new interim government was sworn in six hours after the handover ceremony. The Arab world voiced cautious optimism, but maintained calls for the U.S. military to leave the country quickly.

Members of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s Cabinet each stepped forward to place their right hand on the Quran and pledged to accept their new duties with sincerity and impartiality. Behind them, a bank of Iraqi flags lined the podium.

“Before us is a challenge and a burden and we ask God almighty to give us the patience and guide us to take this country whose people deserves all goodness,” said President Ghazi al-Yawer after taking his oath. “May God protect Iraq and its citizens.”

Sovereignty documents were earlier handed over by outgoing U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer to Allawi in a small ceremony attended by about a half dozen Iraqi and coalition officials in the heavily guarded Green Zone.

“This is a historical day,” Allawi said during that ceremony. “We feel we are capable of controlling the security situation.”

[b]Bremer leaves Iraq[/b]

Two hours after the ceremony Bremer left Iraq on a U.S. Air Force C-130, said Robert Tappan, an official of the former coalition occupation authority. Bremer was accompanied by coalition spokesman Dan Senor and close members of his staff.

Although the interim government will have full sovereignty, it will operate under major restrictions — some of them imposed at the urging of the influential Shiite clergy, which sought to limit the powers of an un-elected administration.

The new government’s major tasks will be to prepare for elections by Jan. 31, handle the day to day running of the country and work along with the U.S.-led multinational force, which is responsible for security. The Iraqis can in principle ask the foreign troops to leave — although it is unlikely this will happen.

However, the United States and its partners hope that the transfer of sovereignty will serve as a psychological boost for Iraqis, who have been increasingly frustrated by and hostile to foreign military occupation. U.S. officials hope Iraqis will believe that they are now in control of their country and that that will take the steam out of the insurgency.

Asked why the new government decided to hold the transfer earlier, a senior coalition official said on condition of anonymity that Allawi had indicated his ministries were already fully staffed. - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5...

PANICKY-BUSH/FUCK-YOU-CHENEY'S EARLY "HANDOVER" 'CAUSE THEY'VE FUCKED-IT-UP & DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO!

06.28.04 (5:56 am) [edit]

AN ANALYSIS OF 'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' & WHY THE NEO-CONS ARE MAD-DOGS FOAMING AT THE MOUTH!!!

06.27.04 (7:07 pm) [edit]

[b]'Fahrenheit 9/11' did exceptionally well at the American Box Offices http://www.commondreams.org/h... on its opening day (Friday, 25.June.04) ... Roger Ebert gave Michael Moore's movie a big '[i]Thumbs-Up[/i]' http://www.suntimes.com/ebert... , citing that Bush "comes across as a shallow, inarticulate man, simplistic in speech and inauthentic in manner" ... Finally,[i] the truth [/i]is being told to the American people ...[/b]

Today is the nationwide premiere of Michael Moore's new movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" – an analysis of how the president misled the country to war in Iraq and how the Bush-Saudi relationship has compromised America's national security. Even before the movie was public, the White House and its right-wing allies sought to smear both the film and Moore personally. Last month, White House communications director Dan Bartlett said the movie "was so outrageously false it's not even worth comment," even though he had not yet seen the film. Meanwhile, the [i]Hollywood Reporter [/i]discovered that "big-time conservative donors" are funding a slew of anti-Moore activities. Following the White House's tactic of attacking critics' patriotism, the right-wing is also apparently bankrolling a movie called "Michael Moore Hates America." But despite conservatives' best efforts to discredit the film, the [i]NY Times [/i]notes, "central assertions of fact in 'Fahrenheit 9/11' are supported by the public record." When the movie was aired at the Cannes Film Festival, it won top prize from a panel made up of mostly American and British judges.

[b]ACCURATE – NEW REPORT SAYS SAUDI FLIGHTS OCCURRED ON 9/13:[/b] Critics have accused Moore of wrongly claiming a group of Saudis were allowed to fly out of the United States on September 13, when much of American airspace was still closed. In fact, the movie accurately reports that 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave after September 13 – a fact well documented by the 9/11 Commission http://www.9-11commission.gov... . Additionally, new reports prove that Saudi flights did occur on 9/13, despite three years of Bush administration denials. As the [i]St. Petersburg Times [/i]reports, on September 13,"with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left" for Lexington, KY. The Saudis "then took another flight out of the country." Because the information is so new, it was not in the 9/11 Commission's preliminary report. Subsequently, however, the commission has asked the Tampa airport "for any information about 'a chartered flight with six people, including a Saudi prince, that flew from Tampa, Florida on or about Sept. 13, 2001.'"

[b]ACCURATE – BUSH WAS NOT FOCUSED ON TERRORISM:[/b] In the movie, Moore charges that President Bush did not pay enough attention to pre-9/11 warnings that al Qaeda was about to attack. Instead of focusing on terrorism, charges the movie, the president spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation. That figure "came not from a conspiracy-hungry Web site but from a calculation by [i]The Washington Post[/i]. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/art... " Read American Progress's report http://www.americanprogress.o... "[i]Truth & Consequences: The Bush Administration and 9/11[/i]" for a comprehensive history of how the White House underfunded counter-terrorism and downgraded terrorism as a priority before 9/11. See American Progress's new "[i]Complete Saudi Primer[/i]" - http://www.americanprogress.o... a guide to everything you always wanted to know about the Bush-Saudi connection but were afraid to ask.

[b]DISNEY'S EFFORT TO CENSOR MICHAEL MOORE:[/b] At the direction of CEO Michael Eisner (who is a Bush campaign contributor http://www.opensecrets.org/in...(all+states)&txtZip=&txtE mploy=Disney&txtCand=Bush &txt2004=Y&txt2002=Y&txt2 000=Y&Order=N ), the Walt Disney Company prohibited its Miramax division from distributing "Fahrenheit 911." The company enjoys a cozy relationship with President Bush's brother, Jeb. As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush serves as a trustee for the state employees' pension fund. That fund owns approximately 7.3 million shares of Disney stock. Eisner told reporters he was refusing to distribute the film because Disney is "such a nonpartisan company, do not look for us to take sides."

[b]RIGHT-WING EFFORTS TO CENSOR MICHAEL MOORE:[/b] The campaign to silence Moore was taken up by the right-wing group with the ironic name Move America Forward. The group is headed by right-winger Howard Kaloogian, who also spearheaded the partisan campaign to quash a miniseries about Ronald Reagan and led the partisan fight to recall California Gov. Gray Davis. Kaloogian also "credits himself with helping elect President Bush because he was No. 4 of 25 elected officials who signed a letter asking him to run in January 1999." The group, without having seen the film, "launched a preemptive attack against" the movie "by requesting movie theaters across the country not to show the film."

[b]DAVID BOSSIE'S HYPOCRISY:[/b] The conservative front group "Citizens United," which is headed by Clinton attacker David Bossie, is trying to get the Federal Election Commission to intervene and censor advertising for "Fahrenheit 9/11". Just two years ago, however, it was Bossie who led the charge against FEC interventions. On 6/12/02, [i]The Hill [/i]newspaper reported him saying his group feels "FEC rules and regulations are abhorrent…they restrict the American people's ability to have an influence in politics."

[b]RATED R FOR REALITY:[/b] The Motion Picture Association of America saddled the movie with an R rating. Tom Ortenberg, president of the company releasing the film, "argued that 15- and 16-year-olds, who might end up fighting in the war on terrorism," should be able to see the film, which shows the true cost of war - gravely wounded Iraqi citizens and U.S. troops. Much of that cost has been hidden by the Bush administration, which has banned photos of flag-draped coffins coming home (even though the Bush campaign uses flag draped corpses at Ground Zero in its political commercials). President Bush has also refused to attend funerals of the fallen in Iraq. Moore argues that the movie needs to be seen by the widest possible audience to give the public a glimpse of the reality of war. All told, between the start of war on March 19, 2003 and June 16, 2004, 952 coalition forces were killed, including 836 U.S. military. For more on the hidden cost of war, read this summary http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/co... by the Institute for Policy Studies.

[b]Update:[/b] Hot off the press on Sunday afternoon, 27.June.04: "'Fahrenheit 9/11' tops North American box office" http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/n... : [i]"Fahrenheit 9/11," in which Moore takes aim at U.S. President George W. Bush, and the war in Iraq, opened at No. 1 after selling about $21.8 million worth of tickets in the United States and Canada since June 25.[/i]

[b]Source:[/b]

[i]SamAdams' CounterPoint[/i]: http://samadams.tblog.com

ARE THE MAD KING GEORGE & 'FUCK-YOU' CHENEY LOSING IT???

06.27.04 (6:52 pm) [edit]

One thing you've got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the world. Right into the ground.

This week, it's not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it's bizarre that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won't even find described in Bill Clinton's "My Life."

While Democratic lawmakers delayed final passage of a defense spending bill so they could mingle with Michael Moore, the once sweat-free Bushies were acting jangly.

First Vice chewed out The Times for accurately reporting that the 9/11 commission said there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Then Paul Wolfowitz called the reporters risking their lives in Iraq craven rumormongers. Then came Mr. Cheney's F-word. (Not Fox, the other one.)

Finally, President Bush got agitated when an Irish TV interviewer said most of the Irish found the world more dangerous now than before the Iraq invasion. "First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq," Mr. Bush declared. (It's all in how you define "Europe.")

Even as Tom Daschle proposed bipartisan family retreats to heal the harsh mood, even as the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act," Mr. Cheney profanely laced into Mr. Leahy for criticizing Halliburton's getting no-bid contracts.

"I felt better afterwards," he told Neil Cavuto during a no-bid interview with Fox News. Hey, if it feels good, Dick, do it.

He said he had no regrets about his "little floor debate in the United States Senate." He didn't want to go along with Mr. Leahy's attitude that "everything's peaches and cream" when the Democrat had just been jawing about Halliburton war profiteering. Peaches and cream have never been on the Bush-Cheney menu, only brimstone and gall.

By playing on the insecurities of an inexperienced leader, Mr. Cheney has managed to change W. from a sunny, open, bipartisan, uniter-not-a-divider, non-nation-builder into a crabby, secretive, partisan, divider-not-a-uniter, inept imperialist. Vice is bounding around the country, talking to his usual circumscribed audiences of conservatives, right-wing think tanks and Fox News anchors. No need to burrow in the bunker when you've turned America into one.

As they used to say about the Soviet Union, the defensive Bush imperialists have to keep expanding because they're encircled. Mr. Cheney's gloomy, scary, contentious world view has fueled a more gloomy, scary, contentious world.

After disastrously dividing the world into the strong (Bush hawks) and the weak (everyone else), Vice turned his coarseness into another macho, tough-guy moment against a Democrat considered a pill by many Republicans. "I think a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue," he preened.

The conservatives defending Mr. Cheney are largely the same crowd that went off the deep end because of a glimpse of breast on the Super Bowl, demanding everything from fines to new regulations to protect red states from blue language.

Mr. Cheney's foul outburst was not as bad as his foul reasoning. On Fox, he again belabored his obsession with "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Exhibiting WASP chutzpah, this time he used The Times to bolster his faux case.

But the Thom Shanker story he cited said only that in the mid-1990's, Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda and that a request from Osama "to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered."

Rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda? As a threat to U.S. security, that's right up there with Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Mr. Cheney assured Fox's anxious viewers that he would stay on the ticket and in the White House until January '09. (No four letter words, dear Democrats.) Vice said of W., "he knows I'm there to serve him."

Mr. Bush must have missed that classic "Twilight Zone" episode where the aliens arrive with a book entitled, "To Serve Man." It turns out to be a cookbook. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' IS CASTING A WIDE NET AT THEATRES!!!

06.27.04 (6:48 pm) [edit]

[i]Anti-Bush sentiment runs high at showings of the documentary, which has had a strong opening weekend on 868 screens[/i].

Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.

"I prayed the Lord would open my eyes," she said.

For months, her son Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate. He'd tell her she shouldn't trust President Bush. He'd tell her the Iraq war was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the president, supported him fiercely

But Joshua kept at her, until she prayed for help understanding her son's fervor.

Emerging from Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood. "My emotions are just.... " She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. "I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before."

That's the reaction Moore hopes to provoke with his film, which explores the ties between the Bush family and Osama bin Laden's relatives, the president's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq. Moore has said he aims to shake the apathetic, move the undecided -- and inspire voters to deny President Bush a second term.

Riding a week of enormous publicity, and controversy, "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a hit at the box office. Opening Friday on 868 screens, the movie grossed more than the farces "White Chicks" and "DodgeBall," even though those films showed on far more screens.

Industry sources estimated that the weekend gross for "Fahrenheit 9/11" could approach $20 million. That's close to the $21.6 million that Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" -- until now, the highest-grossing documentary ever -- took in during its entire run.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" got a shot of free publicity when Walt Disney Co., concerned about the movie's partisan edge, barred its subsidiary from releasing it. The buzz only grew last month when the film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yet its appeal seemed to take some by surprise: In the heavily Latino and Asian community of Downey, theater manager William Vasquez was surprised at the line -- which was so long, he decided to show the film on two screens simultaneously Friday night. "I don't know of any documentary that has created this kind of stir," he said, noting that even teenagers seemed "glued to the screen."

In many cities, and even in conservative suburbs, the crowds were predictably (and loudly) liberal, hissing and hooting their reactions to Bush on screen.

Here in suburban St. Louis -- in a multiplex catering to well-off neighborhoods that were flocked with Bush/Cheney signs in 2000 -- the rowdy throng cheered when a man in back stood to shout an appeal for Democratic Party volunteers. "Anyone here for [Ralph] Nader?" another man called out. He was booed.

Across the country, in another conservative neighborhood, the audience at an Orange County multiplex chanted: "Throw Bush out! Throw Bush out!" as the lights came on.

College student Jebodiah Beard, 25, summed up the crowd this way: "I think we're preaching to the choir."

Moore acknowledged as much -- but saw no need to apologize.

"It's good to give the choir something to sing," he said at a politician-packed premiere in Washington last week. "The choir has been demoralized."

If so, the movie was an electric wake-up call.

Outside a sold-out screening Friday on Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, activists stamped hands with peace signs and passed around petitions calling for universal healthcare, gay rights and the repeal of the Patriot Act.

"I can't imagine anyone coming out of [the movie] and not working their brains out to get rid of this administration," said Mimi Adams, 70, who was holding a sign that said: "No One Died When Clinton Lied."

In theaters nationwide, many viewers said they couldn't imagine loyal Republicans coming to see a movie the Bush administration had dismissed as a twisted montage of misleading innuendo and outright falsehoods. But for all the partisan hooting, the movie did appear to draw at least a strong smattering of the Republican and the undecided voters that Moore most desperately hopes to reach.

And some of them said they were deeply moved.

Moved enough, perhaps, to consider voting for Kerry in November.

For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: the raw cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops. A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong Republican.

"Seeing [the war] brings it home in a way you don't get from reading about it," he said. "I won't be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time."

Mary Butler, too, may not bring herself to punch the ballot for Bush.

She didn't vote for him in 2000. But Butler, 48, said until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward supporting him this year. "In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable," she said.

Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in Moore's film made her rethink.

After showing faces of the men and women of America's military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he says: to send them into harm's way only when we absolutely must.

That got Butler. She doesn't feel the war in Iraq fits into that category. And that one sentence -- a filmmaker's accusing voice-over -- might cost Bush her vote in the pivotal swing state of Missouri: "This is probably the strongest I've ever felt about voting against him," she said.

Their tears reflected in the bluish light of the movie screen, many viewers here and elsewhere seemed especially moved by the story of Lila Lipscomb, the mother at the heart of "Fahrenheit 9/11." When Moore first encounters her in Flint, Mich., she speaks with pride of her children's military service, of all the opportunities the armed forces can give them. Then her son was killed in Iraq.

Appearing with Moore at the film's premiere in Washington, Lipscomb received a standing ovation.

"President Bush said he was a president of war," Lipscomb said. "Well, I stand before you tonight as a mother that is now a mother of war. I urge all of America to stop being ignorant. Open your eyes to see. Open your ears to hear. Open your mouth to speak."

Many who watched "Fahrenheit 9/11" over the weekend vowed the movie would spur them to do just that -- to look deeper, listen closer, to speak out with conviction.

In the end, however, some doubted whether a summer movie, however pointed, could really affect the outcome of November's election.

"It will have an impact of some sort," said Rep. Jim McDermott, (D-Wash.), who is interviewed by Moore in the film, "but I'm not sure what." - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

EU & NATO SAY "NO TROOPS" FOR IRAQ ... BUSH PROPAGANDA MACHINE PLAYS IT AS A "SUCCESS"!!! LOL!!!

06.27.04 (5:46 am) [edit]

NEWMARKET-ON-FERGUS, Ireland (Reuters) - President Bush declared an end on Saturday to Western rifts over Iraq but won little in his search for European military help and took heat over prisoner abuse.

"The bitter differences of the war are over," Bush told a news conference, which was delayed by anti-American protests staged around the lightning U.S.-EU summit in Ireland.

Fenced off from his detractors by 2,000 soldiers and 4,000 police -- a third of the Irish security forces -- Bush holed up in a western Irish castle with European Union leaders.

He flew later to the Turkish capital Ankara, where he was due to have talks with Turkey's president and prime minister on Sunday before joining other world leaders at a NATO summit in Istanbul.

NATO leaders will rubber-stamp a deal to train Iraqi security forces, a concrete sign of new transatlantic unity.

But it fell far short of Washington's original goal of getting NATO troops into Iraq, and diplomats said it may be just the lowest common denominator the two sides can live with.

With continued violence in Iraq denting his re-election chances in November, Bush challenged European partners in the NATO military alliance to help him end the U.S.-led occupation.

"NATO has the capability and I believe the responsibility to help the Iraqi people defeat the terrorist threat that's facing their country," Bush said.

"The faster the Iraqis take over their own security needs, the faster the mission will end."

In their private talks and a joint U.S.-EU statement, European leaders made clear their disquiet over both the detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the U.S. military abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail.

The statement pointedly stressed "the need for full respect of the Geneva Conventions."

Bush responded that the Abu Ghraib scandal made him "sick."

"MACBUSH" MOCKED

Protesters were kept well away from 16th-century Dromoland Castle where Bush met Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, whose country holds the EU rotating presidency, plus other top officials of the newly-expanded 25-nation bloc.

"This summit has re-affirmed the strength, the depth and the significance of our relationship in a spirit of partnership," said Ahern, echoing the upbeat U.S. line.

Yet as the leaders talked, Iraq's plight was highlighted by the latest car bomb that killed a man and wounded 40 people in the Kurdish city of Arbil as insurgents kept up a bloody drive to derail the transition to an interim government in four days.

As on Bush's previous trips to Europe, few on Ireland's street were ready to forgive and forget the U.S.-led invasion.

Around 10,000 protesters took to Dublin's streets on Friday and while demonstrations close to the summit venue were smaller, they made up for low numbers with high theater.

One group staged a version of Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth at a police roadblock half a mile from the castle, with "MacBush" cast as the ruthless Scottish king.

"The Irish government has no guts. It should stand up to Bush and tell him we don't want his war, we don't want his planes at our airport," said demonstrator Robert Sheehy.

The whistling and jeering was a sharp contrast to the jubilant welcomes usually afforded American presidents. Past U.S. leaders, from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, have been feted for their Irish roots and the strong bilateral ties. Former President Bill Clinton was embraced as a conquering hero.

Bush shrugged off his low standing in Europe, saying the polls he cared most about "are those that are going to take place in early November" to elect the next U.S. president.

"As far as my own personal standing goes, my job is to do my job," he said. "I will lead, and we'll just let the chips fall where they may." (Additional reporting by Adam Entous, Gideon Long, Carmel Crimmins in Ireland; Meg Clothier in London) SM - http://news.myway.com/top/art...|top|06-26-2004::15:45|re uters.html

EU & NATO SAY "NO TROOPS" FOR IRAQ ... BUSH PROPAGANDA MACHINE PLAYS IT AS A "SUCCESS"!!! LOL!!!

06.27.04 (5:44 am) [edit]

'FUCK-YOU' CHENEY'S NEW DESK PLAQUE READS: "IF IT FEELS GOOD, DO IT!!!"

06.27.04 (5:40 am) [edit]

[b]Are They Losing It?[/b]

One thing you've got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the world. Right into the ground.

This week, it's not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it's bizarre that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won't even find described in Bill Clinton's "My Life."

While Democratic lawmakers delayed final passage of a defense spending bill so they could mingle with Michael Moore, the once sweat-free Bushies were acting jangly.

First Vice chewed out The Times for accurately reporting that the 9/11 commission said there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Then Paul Wolfowitz called the reporters risking their lives in Iraq craven rumormongers. Then came Mr. Cheney's F-word. (Not Fox, the other one.)

Finally, President Bush got agitated when an Irish TV interviewer said most of the Irish found the world more dangerous now than before the Iraq invasion. "First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq," Mr. Bush declared. (It's all in how you define "Europe.")

Even as Tom Daschle proposed bipartisan family retreats to heal the harsh mood, even as the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act," Mr. Cheney profanely laced into Mr. Leahy for criticizing Halliburton's getting no-bid contracts.

"I felt better afterwards," he told Neil Cavuto during a no-bid interview with Fox News. Hey, if it feels good, Dick, do it.

He said he had no regrets about his "little floor debate in the United States Senate." He didn't want to go along with Mr. Leahy's attitude that "everything's peaches and cream" when the Democrat had just been jawing about Halliburton war profiteering. Peaches and cream have never been on the Bush-Cheney menu, only brimstone and gall.

By playing on the insecurities of an inexperienced leader, Mr. Cheney has managed to change W. from a sunny, open, bipartisan, uniter-not-a-divider, non-nation-builder into a crabby, secretive, partisan, divider-not-a-uniter, inept imperialist. Vice is bounding around the country, talking to his usual circumscribed audiences of conservatives, right-wing think tanks and Fox News anchors. No need to burrow in the bunker when you've turned America into one.

As they used to say about the Soviet Union, the defensive Bush imperialists have to keep expanding because they're encircled. Mr. Cheney's gloomy, scary, contentious world view has fueled a more gloomy, scary, contentious world.

After disastrously dividing the world into the strong (Bush hawks) and the weak (everyone else), Vice turned his coarseness into another macho, tough-guy moment against a Democrat considered a pill by many Republicans. "I think a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue," he preened.

The conservatives defending Mr. Cheney are largely the same crowd that went off the deep end because of a glimpse of breast on the Super Bowl, demanding everything from fines to new regulations to protect red states from blue language.

Mr. Cheney's foul outburst was not as bad as his foul reasoning. On Fox, he again belabored his obsession with "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Exhibiting WASP chutzpah, this time he used The Times to bolster his faux case.

But the Thom Shanker story he cited said only that in the mid-1990's, Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda and that a request from Osama "to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered."

Rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda? As a threat to U.S. security, that's right up there with Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Mr. Cheney assured Fox's anxious viewers that he would stay on the ticket and in the White House until January '09. (No four letter words, dear Democrats.) Vice said of W., "he knows I'm there to serve him."

Mr. Bush must have missed that classic "Twilight Zone" episode where the aliens arrive with a book entitled, "To Serve Man." It turns out to be a cookbook. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

'FUCK-YOU' CHENEY'S NEW DESK PLAQUE READS: "IF IT FEELS GOOD, DO IT!!!"

06.27.04 (5:37 am) [edit]

MAD KING GEORGE & 'FUCK-YOU' CHENEY EDICTS CURB POWER OF IRAQ LEADERS (SOVEREIGNTY???)

06.27.04 (5:35 am) [edit]

[b]U.S. Edicts Curb Power Of Iraq's Leadership [/b]

U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer [Mad King George & 'Fuck-You' Cheney's Puppet-boy] has issued a raft of edicts revising Iraq's legal code and has appointed at least two dozen Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political authority on Wednesday.

Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq's interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.

The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government that is to take over next year.

Bremer also has appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential positions in the interim government. He has installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry. He has formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. He named a public-integrity commissioner who will have the power to refer corrupt government officials for prosecution.

Some Iraqi officials condemn Bremer's edicts and appointments as an effort to exert U.S. control over the country after the transfer of political authority. "They have established a system to meddle in our affairs," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council, a recently dissolved body that advised Bremer for the past year. "Iraqis should decide many of these issues."

Bremer has defended his issuance of many of the orders as necessary to implement democratic reforms and update Iraq's out-of-date legal code. He said he regarded the installation of inspectors-general in ministries, the creation of independent commissions and the changes to Iraqi law as important steps to fight corruption and cronyism, which in turn would help the formation of democratic institutions.

"You set up these things and they begin to develop a certain life and momentum on their own -- and it's harder to reverse course," Bremer said in a recent interview.

As of June 14, Bremer had issued 97 legal orders, which are defined by the U.S. occupation authority as "binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people" that will remain in force even after the transfer of political authority. An annex to the country's interim constitution requires the approval of a majority of Allawi's ministers, as well as the interim president and two vice presidents, to overturn any of Bremer's edicts. A senior U.S. official in Iraq noted recently that it would "not be easy to reverse" the orders.

It appears unlikely that all of the orders will be followed. Many of them reflect an idealistic but perhaps futile attempt to impose Western legal, economic and social concepts on a tradition-bound nation that is reveling in anything-goes freedom after 35 years of dictatorial rule.

The orders include rules that cap tax rates at 15 percent, prohibit piracy of intellectual property, ban children younger than 15 from working, and a new traffic code that stipulates the use of a car horn in "emergency conditions only" and requires a driver to "hold the steering wheel with both hands."

Iraq has long been a place where few people pay taxes, where most movies and music are counterfeit, where children often hold down jobs and where traffic laws are rarely obeyed, Iraqis note.

Other regulations promulgated by Bremer prevent former members of the Iraqi army from holding public office for 18 months after their retirement or resignation, stipulate a 30-year minimum sentence for people caught selling weapons such as grenades and ban former militiamen integrated into the Iraqi armed forces from endorsing and campaigning for political candidates. He has also enacted a 76-page law regulating private corporations and amended an industrial-design law to protect microchip designs. Those changes were intended to facilitate the entry of Iraq into the World Trade Organization, even though the country is so violent that the no commercial flights are allowed to land at Baghdad's airport.

Some of the new rules attempt to introduce American approaches to fighting crime. An anti-money-laundering law requires banks to collect detailed personal information from customers seeking to make transactions greater than &dol;3,500, while the Commission on Public Integrity has been given the power to reward whistleblowers with 25 percent of the funds recovered by the government from corrupt practices they have identified.

In some cases Bremer's regulations diverge from the Bush administration's domestic policies. He suspended the death penalty, and his election law imposes a strict quota: One of every three candidates on a party's slate must be a woman.

Iraqis have already scoffed at some of the requirements. Judges on the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, who were appointed by Bremer, have refused to impose 30-year sentences on people detained with grenades and other military weapons. At the same time, many Iraqi politicians contend that banning the death penalty was a mistake. Several have said they will push to reinstate capital punishment after the transfer of political authority.

Some of the Iraqis recently appointed by Bremer as inspectors and commissioners said they should have been given their jobs months ago. Had that happened, they insisted, they would have had more time to build support for the activities.

"There are some doubts about my work," said Nabil Bayati, the inspector general in the Ministry of Electricity, who is charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. People in the ministry, he said, "don't understand it yet."

Siyamend Othman, the chief executive of the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission, said his fellow commissioners were only appointed three weeks ago. "Had this commissions been set up six months ago, we would have been in a far more secure position than we are today," he said. "We would have had six months to prove and to show to the Iraqi people our worth and what we're capable of doing, and why this commission is such an important institution."

In recent weeks, Bremer has issued orders aimed at setting policy for a variety of controversial issues, including the future use of radioactive material, Arab-Kurd property disputes and national elections planned for January.

On June 15, Bremer signed an order establishing the Iraqi Radioactive Source Regulatory Authority as an independent agency regulating radioactive material in Iraq. His order forbids, even after the transfer of sovereignty, any activity involving radioactive material except under requirements established by the agency.

On June 19, in an effort to keep unemployed Iraqi weapons scientists from working for other nations, Bremer established the Iraqi Non-Proliferation Programs Foundation, a semi-governmental organization set up to provide grants and contracts to people who worked on Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs. An initial grant of &dol;37.5 million was set aside by Bremer to pay the scientists' expenses to attend international conferences so they can be retrained for non-weapons employment.

The foundation, which has been exempted from a ban on government support to former high-ranking members of Hussein's Baath Party, is also supposed to establish a venture capital fund to promote the commercial development of products and technologies by former employees of Iraqi weapons programs, according to the order setting up the foundation.

On May 28, Bremer signed an order establishing a Special Task Force on Compensating Victims of the Previous Regime. The task force, appointed by Bremer, is to devise a means for determining the number of victims, estimate fair compensation and recommend a system under which claims could be made and adjudicated. An endowment of &dol;25 million was set aside from oil income to be used to compensate victims and their families, according to the order authorizing the task force.

But perhaps Bremer's most far-reaching and potentially contentious order is the election law, which he signed June 15. The law states that no party can be associated with a militia or get money from one. It also requires the electoral commission to draft a code of conduct barring campaigners from using "hate speech, intimidation, and support for, the practice of and the use of terrorism."

The law, signed last week, is intended to establish the framework and policies that will govern next year's national elections to select a 275-member national assembly. But experts in Arab world elections have questioned how the law will be received by the Iraqi people once its terms are widely known. Some predicted that the rules would be challenged and perhaps ignored by the interim Iraqi government.

"I foresee real political conflict about these rules," said Amy Hawthorne, an Arab specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies elections.

"The laws came out from behind a curtain while armed conflict is going on," said Hawthorne, who expects people and parties to challenge the laws after July 1 because "they were created under the [occupation] authority and their legal status is a bit murky."

"The notion of [the U.S.] decreeing election law prior to June 30 is unfortunate," said Leslie Campbell, who has worked in Iraq for the National Democratic Institute.

Financing elections, difficult in the United States, could be an even greater problem in Iraq where not only the wealthy but also foreign countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and even the United States are openly putting money into political parties and politicians. The Bremer law calls on parties to "strive to the extent possible to achieve full transparency in all financial dealings" and calls on the electoral commission to consider issuing regulations.

Campbell said such a law "may be a lot cleaner than letting the commission have it out with the interim government in a messy way, but it is not good that the electoral commission is not promulgating key parts of the law."

Campbell said it would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce the provision separating militia members from politics since all the major Iraqi political parties are associated with armed organizations. Although the occupation authority has attempted to demobilize militias, most have not yet disbanded.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in Iraq, said the appointed electoral commission's power to eliminate political parties or candidates for not obeying laws would allow it "to disqualify people someone didn't like."

He likened the power of the commission to that of religious mullahs in Iran, who routinely use their authority to remove candidates before an election. "In a way, Mr. Bremer is using a more subtle form than the one used by hard-liners in Iran to control their elections," Cole said. - http://www.washingtonpost.com...

MAD KING GEORGE & 'FUCK-YOU' CHENEY EDICTS CURB POWER OF IRAQ LEADERS (SOVEREIGNTY???)

06.27.04 (5:32 am) [edit]

BUSH'S FIASCO: SO-CALLED "HANDOVER (NOT)" TO IRAQ OF SECURITY NIGHTMARE!!!

06.27.04 (5:27 am) [edit]

[b]Fearful Iraq sets out on journey to the unknown [/b]

[i]Peter Beaumont in Baghdad says the allies are forced to put their trust in the magical powers of semi-democracy to hold back the Islamist insurgents [/i]

Riding in his Humvee, First Lieutenant Chris Manglicmot of the US 10th Cavalry's C troop is travelling along Route 5, a main supply road for US forces and a favourite location for roadside bombs and sniper fire.

He steps down from time to time to talk to the small groups of Iraqi soldiers that his men have dropped off at key points to guard the road.

On the eastern edge of the city, Manglicmot stops by one group, clustered by a shack in the shade of a handful of palm trees. The evening before, he says, a bomb was left 50 yards from the men guarding this point and they had failed to spot it. Today Manglicmot wants to encourage the Iraqi soldiers to leave their position hidden among the trees and low shrubs and walk the road.

The Iraqis do not seem so keen. And when we return that afternoon with a second US patrol, it is to find them with helmets off, weapons on the ground, sitting in the shade. As we approach, one of the National Guard is picking berries.

We had returned to this group because a US sergeant had spotted a group of men rooting in the drifts of rubbish by the road, not far from where the bomb was placed the day before.

Sergeant Charles Cotton is furious when the soldiers amble out to greet him. 'That is where they placed the bomb last night,' he shouts, his face close to the Iraqi sergeant. 'Did you check them out? Did you physically walk up the road and challenge them? Did you pat them down?' The soldiers shrug. This week, the soldiers and policemen of Iraq's forces will - as coalition officials are fond of repeating - 'step up and take ownership' of the security of Iraq.

And how good these soldiers are is a crucial issue. For these young soldiers deployed on Route 5, and on roads and in government buildings from Irbil to Basra, are the very future of Iraq.

Iraq's economic and political development depends on security and stability. After the multiple failures of imposed political solutions from Washington, these young men represent the last chance to hold free elections and establish a democratic government.

It is not that these young men are not willing or brave or even determined to forge a new nation, for it is brave enough these days simply to put on the uniform of the country's security forces.

It is rather that they are hopelessly under-equipped in terms of training, morale, leadership and equipment. Each carries just three magazines of ammunition, in comparison with their US allies who typically have at least a dozen magazines for their personal weapons.

But there is a wider problem, as a US soldier from a separate unit acknowledges. 'These are farmers, not warriors,' he complains. 'These are the guys who don't have any jobs. The real warriors, the guys who are motivated and willing to fight, and risk their lives, are on the other side, shooting at us.'

Despite the dressing down he has delivered, Cotton insists that the Iraqi troops have improved from training on the job, but from a low base. 'Two months ago, if some of these guys heard gunfire, they would just run away or spray gunfire around. Now they do know how to handle themselves and their weapons better.'

But he concedes that it is a big mountain that the Iraqi security forces have to climb in the coming weeks, following the transfer of sovereignty on Wednesday.

Just how big was revealed last Thursday, as the insurgents whom they will be fighting gave a powerful demonstration of how sophisticated and entrenched they have become, launching a series of co-ordinated, lethal attacks on Iraqi police in four cities.

It was a series of attacks that underscored the fact that few believe Iraq's security forces are ready for that challenge, or that coalition forces will be able to take a back seat after this week and become the 'silent coach'. Instead, most agree, things will be much the same - foreign patrols of the newly named 'Multinational Forces' maintaining the lead in trying to stabilise Iraq.

It was not how it was meant to be. What was envisaged in the period in the weeks after the handover of power, most officials agreed, was that it should be visible to Iraqis that Iraqis were in the driving seat. Impressions associated with a hated occupation - the patrolling Humvees and Bradleys and US troops - should begin to disappear.

The nature of that security problem is in many ways defined by the nature of those fighting against the coalition, an insurgency that US Secretary of State Colin Powell was forced to admit last Friday that the US had underestimated, even as the Pentagon has drawn up plans to send another 15,000 US troops.

While it is commonplace to blame all the violence on the al-Zarqawi network of jihadist fighters, it is a claim that does stand up.The majority of anti-coalition acts are still being committed by Iraqis, largely from the Sunni Triangle and Baghdad, whose agenda is shaped by a hatred of an occupation they believe is not really ending this week.

Unlike the forces ranged against them, it is a resistance - as its members made clear when it was still possible to talk to them - that has no policies or political agenda or vision for a future of Iraq beyond the expulsion of foreign forces.

It is on this point that their struggle and that of al-Zarqawi's fighters coincide. But it is an insurgency that, by its very existence, has imposed its own social consequences in the areas where the fighting is most bitter. For while Prime Minister Ayad Allawi may threaten curfews and martial law, in Fallujah the residents already live under their own martial law imposed by the insurgents. Also in place are summary executions of those suspected of being spies or collaborators. The insurgency, in that sense, is one step ahead of the government.

And what values that the anti-coalition forces do hold dear are in direct opposition with the West's vision for a democratic Iraq. The insurgents promote a hardened version of Iraq's tribal society - hierarchical, male-dominated, conservative, traditional and socially cohesive - that has turned the notion of blood honour into a national appeal.

They are values with a widespread appeal. And it is these that the weak institutions of the new Iraq must somehow overcome.

Worrying, too, is that the lack of readiness of Iraq's security forces is matched by an intensification of the violence on the ground, a worsening crisis borne out not only by the lethal bombings and assassinations, but also by the coalition's own Hostile Incidents Summary for the past six months, a graph that shows a doubling of serious attacks.

It is a table that does not even take account of the hidden violence and intimidation aimed at those Iraqis who would change their country's future: the kind of violence described by a senior British officer in the Office of Security Transition, which is preparing Iraq's security forces to take over, who tells me that, of the nine Iraqis 'embedded' in his office, four have been either killed, or so badly injured or so frightened by intimidation that they have been lost to the effort.

It is not that the coalition and the new Iraqi Interim Government have not been trying. The scale of the effort to prepare Iraq's security forces to take control of their future - for all its shortcomings - has been huge. The coalition has ordered 174,000 sets of body-armour, enough for every soldier and policeman, cornering the global market.

Police units are being equipped with 13,000 new pistols, new vehicles and heavy machineguns to mount on them. Iraqi army recruits are being rushed through redesigned courses that, in some cases, have multiplied the number of US trainers ten-fold, to equip them for fighting the insurgents and the rebels' allies in the al-Zarqawi network as quickly as possible.

But still the number of men trained lags seriously behind the number required. Of an intended army of 25,000, 5,000 are in training as handover dawns. In the new National Guard - until last week named the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps - 35,000 out of an intended 50,000 are 'trained', but many only to the poor standard of the men guarding Route 5.

A special Intervention Force, designed to fight the insurgents in such places as Fallujah - who will be paid a risk bonus of $80 a month on top of the basic salary of $250 - has 2,300 in training, out of an intended strength of 7,000.

And the question remains whether Iraqis will fight Iraqis in areas such as Fallujah, where the solitary experiment in Iraqi-isation of the conflict has seen Iraqi soldiers refuse to fight.

Senior British officers counter that the newly specialist forces have signed up for precisely that kind of combat. Yet they remain to be tested. The same officers admit that mistakes have been made, not least, says one, in the previous emphasis on quantity over quality of training and recruits.

But after the events of the past week, the question must be whether these new Iraqi soldiers can be a match for them any time soon.

And so the coalition and anti-insurgent Iraqis alike are putting their trust in the future, not in weapons nor manpower; not in the new government of Prime Minister Allawi or the governments in London and Washington that support him. They are putting their hope in the unknowable.

They trust that, by the simple process of transferring sovereignty - without removing any coalition soldiers - ordinary Iraqis will be convinced of a new political reality, and of their own responsibilities in it. That they will feel that the occupation has come to an end, and that they will turn on the men of violence in their midst. They are hoping that a newly minted politics of national emotion can succeed where the coalition's guns and soldiers have not.

It is a hope that resides not only in the hands of the Iraqi soldiers on Route 5 and their colleagues, but in newly revitalised institutions across the country, from universities, to district and city councils, and the new media outlets.

An ambitious gamble is being taken on a project that is not only barely close to completion, but also, in too many instances, seems barely to have begun.

It is a state of play summed up by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and a supporter of the war against Iraq, in a damning critique in New Republic magazine last week. 'The real lesson of the last year,' wrote Zakaria, 'is that the Bush administration's inept version of nation-building failed. The administration's strategists used Iraq as a laboratory to prove various deeply held prejudices ...

'In almost every case, facts on the ground quickly disconfirmed these theories. But, so committed were these government officials to their ideology - and so powerful within the administration - that it took 14 months for policy to adjust to these failures ... This shift in policy is already making a difference, easing the anti-Americanism and the sense of international isolation that has plagued the Iraq mission. If they keep up the reversals, Iraq still has a chance.'

It is a qualified judgement. For it is a chance that depends on whether the belated efforts of the coalition authorities in their last few weeks and months have been enough to catalyse the creation of a new Iraq, underpinned by the first stirrings of a civic society.

It is a half-baked future for which Iraq has been prepared. The good news is submerged beneath the bad not because the media - as US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suggested last week - is lazy or lacking in courage to find it, but because the bad news is more urgent and important. Because the implication of the bad news hangs like a sword over the future of 27 million people.

And there is good news. On the economic front, Iraq now has a stable currency. Eight hundred thousand cars were imported last year (though largely because of a zero tax regime). Basic salaries for those in work have risen from $5 per month to $200.

But, like every other issue in Iraq, economic growth is contingent on improving security, as former British special envoy Sir Jeremy Greenstock recently made clear to an oil conference in Kuala Lumpur, where he reported a poorer-than-expected response from investors in raising the $20 billion needed to refurbish Iraq's production capacity. 'If it were not for the violence,' he said, 'we could be optimistic about Iraq.'

'If not for the violence' is the caveat on Iraq's hoped-for future. It is a future that the new Allawi government has suggested may be secured only by more violence, by 'drastic measures' and martial law - more violence by Iraqi on Iraqi. Implicit is a rejection of the long-promulgated idea that Iraqi sovereignty in itself will bring an end to bloodshed.

On Wednesday, another group at the front line of the battle to rebuild Iraq sat down in a former hunting club close to the massive bulk of Baghdad's Doura power plant - members of Baghdad's Rashid District Council. They are also at risk from terrorist gunmen, so much so that a US tank sits outside to guard their meeting, while US and Iraqi soldiers man the gate and positions on the roof.

The reason is clear when you talk to the councillors inside. They moved to their new, more defensible site after their old offices were mortared. Then, on 5 June, assailants critically wounded Councillor Ali Ameri, a professor at Baghdad University, as he drove to work. A week later, gunmen attacked the home of a female colleague on the council, Nisreen Haider.

They are not random occurrences. According to Mohammed Zamil Sa'edi, a member of the Rashid council, 56 members of Baghdad's nascent local representative bodies have been killed. Across Iraq, more than 100 have been murdered.

'All of us are on the list for assassination,' he says. That its 30-odd members are meeting at all is an enormous step forward for Iraqis, but serious questions remain about many aspects of the drive to a local democracy in Iraq, which has been offered as one of the coalition's great priorities and success stories.

Among them are some of the most pressing issues of all: a lack of definition of the separation of powers between local and central administration, which looks certain to be a point of friction, and - most critical of all - whether these bodies have the legitimacy that is claimed for them.

It is an issue that goes to the heart of Iraq's new political process, and indeed of the success of Wednesday's transfer of power: how legitimate the exercise of power by the new Iraqi institutions - from the Allawi government down to the smallest of local councils - will be seen to be.

For while the new government has still a large measure of support, the risks that it faces are underlined by the experience of the local councils. It is an issue that was raised at Wednesday's council meeting by Aqeel Abdul Rudhah Kadem, a USAID-funded adviser on civil society, who warned the councillors of the gap between them and local society and the pressing need to bridge it.

I ask him later what he meant. 'A gap has developed between the councillors and the people they represent,' he says. 'Where did it come from? From the perception that they were not selected in the right way. People look at the councils and say, they are not trustworthy.'

It is not simply over the issue of legitimacy that councillors are struggling. Over the issue of their authority, too, there hangs a haze. Without budgetary control or authority to act, so far they have been able to do little more than be consultants to the largely US dispensers of cash. How much that will change after next week remains unclear.

When I ask Sami Ahmad Sharif, chairman of the council, about issues of budget and authority, he admits he is vague about quite what will happen. 'After 30 June, we are supposed to have the authority of local government,' he says. 'Supposedly.'

All this is critical precisely because of the emphasis that Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority has placed on fostering a roots-up local democracy.

The implications of the shortfall in the democratic experiment in local governance were dramatised last week by the comments of Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, who worked on democracy issues for the CPA before leaving Iraq this spring, to the Washington Post. 'Iraq may get to a semi-democratic outcome. But the more democratic outcomes that were possible a year ago are much more difficult to imagine now because of the security situation.'

Mike Hardiman, a former Washington lobbyist on local governance, who was involved in fostering the councils, believes the experiment in local democracy is 'going to stick'. He points to the fact that Iraqis are still coming forward to risk their lives for this experiment.

But politics is about more than courage. And in Iraq there are many who wonder how far the habits of democracy have sunk in.

The question of Iraq's political consciousness is an issue that I have come across a lot in the three weeks before the transfer of sovereignty, and it is posed not by foreign advisers and consultants, but by Iraqis themselves.

It is an issue raised by Ahmad Rikaby, an energetic former exile who returned to Iraq, but who fell out with the coalition over the Iraqi Media Network, for which he once worked. Now he is broadcasting for himself with Radio Dijla.

He tells me the story of a young member of his news staff who could not distinguish between the concept of a parliament and the process of government. 'He was supposed to be a news reporter. It was not his fault. He belongs to a generation that grew up under Saddam, where many of the terms of democracy were simply unknown. What we have been left with is a whole generation - and more - that that has lost the ability for analytical political thought. It is what makes the message of the extremists so appealing: that it is so simple and that, like the old days, it is ordered.'

Rikaby is also sceptical about the agenda behind a rapid transition to democracy and the consequences of that alacrity. 'I am generally optimistic for the future. But there is an undeclared notion that it needs to be done quickly. It is in the nature of this thing that it cannot be done quickly. Democracy is so far slogans and a wish.'

This is not quite true. The coalition has committed funds and efforts to the promotion of democracy, but it has been a process fraught with both danger and with questionable success. In financial terms, the promotion of democracy is costing almost $750 million. In human terms it has been no less costly.

In the past few months, a number of foreigners involved in the process have been attacked as they went about their business. Among them was Scott Erwin, a 22-year-old CPA staff member, who was critically wounded in an ambush as he drove away from a Baghdad university, where he was teaching a class on democracy. Two other CPA employees who worked on civic education initiatives were shot dead in March near Hilla.

Dr Sayeed al-Ta'ee, a lecturer in political systems at Baghdad University, is also sceptical about whether Iraqis are prepared for what is expected of them over the next year in the run-up to municipal elections in October and general elections in January next year.

'The Iraqi political mentality is very different to the political mentality of the West,' he says in an office on the campus, after taking a break from reviewing a thesis on political attitudes in the pre-invasion period. 'The key to what is going on now is how you define the key political power points in Iraq. How do you define the real leaders of Iraq's society? I am really confused how a country as modern as the US cannot understand this issue.'

But al-Ta'ee is not without praise for some of the appointments to the interim government, including that of President Ghazi al-Yawer, who he feels represents the kind of compromise that Iraq's politics requires in the next year.

But if al-Ta'ee is certain of one thing about Iraq's future, it is not far distant from the prognosis of former CPA adviser Larry Diamond that it will at best be semi-democratic.

'I think, given the make-up of Iraq's society, that we will end up with an element of authoritarianism. You are going to have a pyramid of authorities under each minister and director-general. Each one will have its own small dictatorship. We will have a hierarchy of little dictators.' - http://www.guardian.co.uk/Ira...,2763,1248348,00.html

BUSH'S FIASCO: SO-CALLED "HANDOVER (NOT)" TO IRAQ OF SECURITY NIGHTMARE!!!

06.27.04 (5:25 am) [edit]

MOTHER-FUCKER CHENEY ON FUCKING CIVILITY & FUCKING MORALITY!!! LOL LOL LOL!!!

06.26.04 (7:39 am) [edit]

[b]NOW:[/b]

“Go F___ Yourself''
- Dick Cheney to US Senator Patrick Leahy, 6/23/04

[b]THEN:[/b]

"Governor Bush and I are also absolutely determined that [we] will restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington."
- Dick Cheney, 8/4/00

[b]THEN:[/b]

"I look forward to working with you, Governor, to change the tone in Washington, to restore a spirit of civility and respect and cooperation."
- Dick Cheney, 7/25/00

[b]THEN:[/b]

"My administration pledged to bring civility and high standards to Washington."
- George W. Bush, 8/3/01

IN ADDITION TO MASS-MURDER, BUSH WAS AWOL IN A DRUKEN STUPOR DURING VIETNAM-- HE SHOULD RESIGN!!!

06.26.04 (7:30 am) [edit]

[b]Bush should be impeached for lying us into WAR.

The right-wing neo-cons claim that the WMDs have been found: [i]Funny [/i]how the White House seems to be keeping silent while their attack-dogs are spreading this lie.

The right-wing neo-cons claim that Clinton was linked to al-Qaeda: [i]Funny[/i] how Bush praised Clinton and that there is no evidence of these lies, slander and libel.

The right-wing neo-cons are making up crap about Kerry every day, affairs - treason - statements he never made: [i]Funny[/i] how people are laughing at Bush and his $80 million squandered thus far trying to destroy Kerry ... Bush's mud-slinging isn't working! (Correction: Except with the brain-dead sheeple who lap-up Limbaugh's vomit!)[/b]

[b]But Bush really should [i]resign[/i] [/b]--- http://www.awolbush.com/

BUSH & CHENEY Inc. ARE DESTROYING DEMOCRACY IN THE U.S.A.!!!

06.26.04 (7:21 am) [edit]

When we Americans first begun, our biggest danger was clearly in view. We knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an executive, whether he be a king or a president.

Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power; it is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced in order to ensure the survival of freedom.

In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy, because under the right circumstances, it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.

It truly is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self- governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's stewardship now, at the beginning of this 21st century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely, without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime? All that is necessary, according to our president, is that he, the president, label any citizen an unlawful enemy combatant and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty without due process, even for the rest of his life if the president so chooses. There's no appeal.

What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our current Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture or prisoners, and that any law or treaty which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war would itself be a violation of the Constitution our founders put together? What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power, even without a declaration of war by the Congress, to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth at any time he chooses for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States? How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current president's recent claim in Department of Justice legal opinions that he is no longer subject to the rule of law, so long as he is acting in his role as commander in chief? I think that it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy, and that they would feel that we, here, now, are facing a clear and present danger with the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.

Shouldn't we be equally concerned, and shouldn't we ask ourselves how it is that we have come to this point? Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, a potential that is all too real, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history, a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of selfgovernance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person.

Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and its weaknesses. And during their debate, they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious one, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent: that is, when war transformed America's president into our commander in chief. They worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundary and upset the delicate checks and balances which they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty. That is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the Constitution, assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president but retaining for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not and when our nation might decide to go to war.

Indeed, that limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson these words: "The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature," end quote.

Now of course, in more recent decades the emergence of new, modern weapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to war or the declaration to war and the actual waging of war have naturally led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-making power. But the practicalities of modern warfare, which do necessarily increase the war powers of the president at the expense of Congress, do not thereby render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the making of war by the president, when added to his other powers, carries with it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our constitution and, in the process, actually threatening our liberties.

They, our founders, were greatly influenced far more than we can imagine by a careful reading of the history and human drama surrounding the democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic.

They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Roman Senate's long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces. Though the senate lingered in form and was humored for decades, when Caesar impolitically combined his military commander role with his chief of state role, the Roman Senate, and with it the Roman Republic and the dream of democracy, withered away; and for all intents and purposes democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for 17 centuries, until its rebirth in our land.

Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander in chief role and his head of government role as a means of maximizing the power that people are naturally eager to give those who promise to defend them against active threats. But as he does so, we are now witnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a healthy democracy in America.

In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel case back in the 1950s, the single most important Supreme Court case ever on the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time of war, Justice Jackson wrote: The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercise by George III, and the description of its evils in the Declaration of Independence leads me to doubt that they created their new executive in their image.

And if we seek instruction from our own times -- he, again, writing in the 1950s, continued, we can match it only from the executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian.

I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism, as serious a threat as that is, but how we react to terrorism; and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

Our current president has gone to war and has crossed back into the city and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power as president at the expense of Congress, the courts and every individual citizen. We must surrender some of our traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient power to protect us against those who would do us harm.

Public fear remains at an unusually high level almost three years after we were viciously attacked on September 11th, 2001.

In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly and skillfully assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were harbored, and planned their assault, but then just as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade another country, a country that, according to the best evidence now compiled in a new, exhaustive, bipartisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attack against us.

As the main body of our troops were deployed for the new invasion, those who had organized the attack against us escaped, and many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice. And then the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the United States in those lands, and, according to several studies, has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm.

A little over a year ago, when we launched this war against the second country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us, al Qaeda, and that Iraq not only provided a geographic base for them but was also close to providing them with weapons of mass destruction, including even nuclear bombs.

But now the extensive independent investigation by this bipartisan commission formed to study the 9/11 attack has just reported that there was no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind; and of course, over the past year we had previously found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

So now the president and the vice president are arguing with this commission and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are right and that there actually was a working, cooperative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Now, the problem for President Bush is that he does not have any credible evidence to support this claim, and yet in spite of that, he persists in making that claim repeatedly and vigorously.

And so I would like to pause here for a moment today to address the curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that most people who have investigated it know is wrong. And I think it's a particularly important question because it is closely connected to the questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech; and the way we answer it will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among our three branches of government.

To begin with, our founders would not be the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us about why it's so important politically for President Bush to keep the American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda just isn't true. Among those Americans who still believe that there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the president's decision to invade Iraq, but among those who accept the commission's new detailed finding that there is no connection, support for the war in Iraq and the decision to launch it dries up pretty quickly.

And that's understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that launched the attack against us, then that means the president took us to war when he didn't have to, a war in which almost 900 of our soldiers have been killed and almost 5,000 have been wounded and many thousands of Iraqis have been killed and wounded.

Thus, for all of these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have evidently decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there is and was a meaningful connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. They think that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they will not only lose support for that controversial decision to go to war against Iraq, but also lose some of the new power they have picked up from the Congress and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

If he actually believed in the linkage that he asserts, that would by itself, in light of the available evidence, make him genuinely unfit to lead our nation's struggle against al Qaeda.

(Laughter, applause, cheers.) If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge of anything? (Laughter.) Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.

(Laughter.) But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the president's determined dissembling. Listen, for example, to the words of this editorial this week from the Financial Times, and I quote: "There was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD fear" -- the weapons of mass destruction fear -- "nothing ignoble about the opposition to Saddam's tyranny, however late Washington developed this. But the purported link between Baghdad and al Qaeda, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and is nonsense." End quote.

Now of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.

Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from tyranny. And it has been a positive good to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but our troops were not greeted with the promised garlands of flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92 percent of Iraqis, while only 2 percent see them as liberators, according to a careful poll by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

But alongside those two rationales, right from the start, beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath, in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind.

He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.

Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording. Indeed, President Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie, visibly circumnavigating the truth, over and over again, as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth.

But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also sometimes slipped away from their usual tricky wording and in careless moments resorted to statements that were clearly outright falsehoods on their face.

In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that fully 70 people of the people had gotten the message that he wanted them to get and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together was no accident. The president and vice president deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services, from the CIA and from their own Pentagon that the claim was false.

Europe's top terrorism investigators said in 2002, and I quote, "We have found no evidence of any links between Iraq and al Qaeda. If there were such links, we would have found them, but we have found no serious connections whatsoever." End quote. A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Top officials in the Pentagon told newspaper reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was an exaggeration, in their words.

And at least some honest voices within the president's own party admitted the same thing.

Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, and I quote, "Saddam is not in league with al Qaeda. I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda." Period, end quote.

But these voices and others did not stop the deliberate campaign to mislead America. Over the course of a year, the president and vice president used their carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing there was an imminent threat from al Qaeda that was going to be armed by Iraq.

In the fall of 2002, President Bush actually told the country, and I quote, "You cannot distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam," end quote. He also said, and I quote, "The true threat facing our country is an al Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam," end quote. At the same time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that -- and I quote -- "there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government," end quote. By the spring, Secretary of State Powell was in front of the United Nations, in an appearance he now says he regrets, claiming a -- and I quote -- "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network," end quote.

But after the invasion, no ties were found, no evidence emerged. In June of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al Qaeda- monitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the Iraqi regime to al Qaeda.

By August 3, former Bush administration national security and intelligence officials admitted that the evidence that had been used to make this Iraq-al Qaeda claim was, in their words, "tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies," end quote.

And earlier this year, Knight Ridder newspapers reported, and again I quote, "Senior U.S.

officials now say there never was any evidence of a connection." So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report last week finding no credible evidence of an Iraqi-al Qaeda connection, it should not have caught the White House off guard.

(Laughter.) Yet, instead of the candor that Americans need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more insistence without evidence.

Vice President Cheney, for example, said even this week, and I quote, "There clearly was a relationship" and there was "overwhelming evidence." Even more shockingly, Cheney put forward this question. Quote, "Was Iraq involved with al Qaeda in the attack on 9/11? We don't know." (Laughter.) And then he claimed that he probably had more information than the commission had, but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more insults.

The president was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions about his statements by saying, and I quote, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda was because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." (Laughter.) And he provided no evidence whatsoever.

Friends of the administration have tried mightily to rehabilitate their cherished by now shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on the 9/11 commission, offered up what sounded at first like new evidence that a Saddam henchman had attended an al Qaeda meeting. But within hours, the commission's files yielded definitive evidence that no, that was another man with a similar name -- (laughter) -- ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush's entire symbolic argument. (Applause.) They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admit the truth, lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless totally discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever.

But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to the misallocation of military and economic and political resources, not limited even to the loss of blood and treasure, because whenever a chief executive -- whenever a president spends prodigious amounts of energy in an effort to convince the American people of a falsehood, he damages the fabric of democracy and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government.

And that creates a need for -- that they feel for control over the flood of bad news and bad policies and bad decisions, and that also explains their striking attempts to influence and control news coverage.

To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly eager and ready to do battle with the news media when he went out on CNBC earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Iraq did not have a relationship with al Qaeda. He lashed out at The New York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11 commission finds no Qaeda-Iraq tie, a clear statement of the obvious. (Laughter.) And he then said that there is no, quote, "fundamental split here and now between what the president said and what the commission said." End quote. He tried to deny that he had ever personally been responsible for helping to create the false impression that there was linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq.

Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.

(Laughter, applause.) And Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague, and then Stewart froze Cheney's image and played the exact video clip when Cheney had indeed said exactly that in exactly the words he had denied, catching him on videotape in a lie. And at that point, Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the television screen, "It's my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire." (Laughter, applause.) It's not unusual in the news-gathering environment of the kind that exists in our country today for comedians to be able to say things that others feel like they can't. Dan Rather, for example, said that the post-9/11 patriotism stifled journalism -- has stifled journalists from asking government officials, quote, "the toughest of the tough questions." Rather went -- (chuckles) -- so far as to reach for a metaphor and compare administration efforts to intimidate the press to necklacing in apartheid South Africa. While acknowledging it as a, in his phrase, "an obscene comparison," here's the point he made, and I use his words. "The fear is that you will be necklaced; you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck," Rather explained.

It was his network, CBS, remember that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush administration.

I have a close friend whose young son was staying with a family in Barcelona, Spain, for the spring quarter. And he called his father in anguish during that two-week period and said the Spanish family with whom he was living was telling him, in the Spanish he had not yet perfected, that America had been found to be torturing Iraqi prisoners, stripping their clothes off and making them do all the things we saw in the pictures. "And Dad, it's not true, is it?" And his father said, "No, son, it's not true. Of course it's not true. You tell them that I don't know what they have on their television there, but this is not true. This is not America." His son relayed the response from his Spanish host family, who said, "Tell your father that they don't show you these pictures in the United States now, but we see them." Three days later, this father called his son back, embarrassed and chagrined, and said it was us. "I can't believe it." And that's kind of the reaction most all of us had.

But the fact that others around the world saw these pictures before we did is itself an issue that runs to the core of important concerns about the course of our democracy.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that current criticisms of the administration's policy in Iraq, and I quote, "makes it complicated and more difficult to fight the war." CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on another network last September, and I quote, "I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television -- and perhaps, to a certain extent, my station -- was intimidated by the administration." End quote.

The administration works closely with a network of rapid responders, a group of digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors and publishers and advertisers, and are quick to accuse them of undermining support for our troops.

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the president's consistent distortion of the facts. Krugman writes, and I quote, "Let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president, you had to expect right wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation." Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusion, while attempting to punish in any way they can any reporters who stand in the way of the confusion.

It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist that kind of pressure, which in the case of individual journalists can threaten their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because without a press able to report without fear or favor, our democracy will disappear.

Recently the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media, which is so dominant in America, to never let this happen again.

We must help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake or else we risk other wrongheaded decisions being based upon false and misleading impressions.

So now we are left with an ongoing, unprecedented, high-intensity conflict every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this administration's policies have been based and the reality of the world in which the American people live their lives.

When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it's actually fairly simple: He adopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of this spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all too painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered.

Of course, there have been several other collisions between President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war.

But there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this president's policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation's conscience over the last month. First came those extremely disturbing pictures that document the strange forms of physical and sexual abuse and even torture and even murder by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in Iraq, an estimated 90 percent of them innocent of any charge.

And then the second shock to our conscience came just this past week with the strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for the sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American people; activities which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as war crimes.

In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the president, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above and immune from the rule of law. At least we don't have to guess what our founders would have to say about that bizarre and un-American theory.

And by the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, in their words, irrelevant and over-broad. But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong, and in fact, a Department of Justice spokesman today confirmed that they stand by the tortured definition of torture.

In addition, the broad analysis regarding the commander in chief powers that they had asserted has explicitly not been disavowed. And the view of the memo -- that it was within the commander in chief's power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information -- most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

We also know that President Bush rewarded the principal author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. And the president himself meanwhile continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants, who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.

I call today on this administration to disclose all of its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those employed by the CIA at any detention centers operated outside the U.S., as well as all of the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.

We deserve to know what and why it's being done in our name. (Applause.) Policies matter. The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary was what led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another, based on one mistaken assumption after another.

But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison and out.

The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant within our constitutional system. Our founders understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his famous aphorism that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power, even absolute power.

Ironically, all of the administration's didactic messages about how democracies don't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the Bush administration to ignore the United Nations, to do serious damage to our most important alliances in the world, to violate international law, and risk the hatred and contempt of many in the rest of the world. The seductive exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers under the Constitution in a way what would have been the worst nightmare of our framers.

And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fool's gold in any case. Just as its pursuit in Iraq has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers and the Iraqi people and everything we think is important, in the same way the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that ends up weakening the Congress, the courts and civil society is not good for either the presidency or the rest of the nation. If the Congress becomes an enfeebled enabler to the executive and the courts become known for political calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers.

The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged in order to aggrandize power have included censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, the silencing of dissent, the ignoring of intelligence. And although there have been other efforts by other presidents to encroach upon the legitimate prerogatives of Congress and the courts, there has never been this kind of persistent, systematic abuse of the truth and the institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.

Two hundred and twenty years ago John Adams wrote, in describing one of America's most basic founding principles -- and I quote: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men." The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard Nixon told an interviewer, David Frost -- he said, and I quote, "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." (Laughter.) He went on to elaborate: "If the president, for example, approves something, approves an action because of national security or, in this cases, because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant order, then the president's decision in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating the law," end quote.

Fortunately for our country, President Nixon was forced to resign before he could implement his outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis. The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity. And even though they were loyal Republican partisans, they were more loyal to the Constitution, and they resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. And then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon's abuses of power and launched impeachment proceedings. Some of our Congress's proudest hours in recent decades came in that trial, in that struggle.

But you know, in some ways our current president is actually claiming more extraconstitutional power vis-a-vis Congress and the courts than Richard Nixon did.

For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens indefinitely with no charge of a crime, with no access to a lawyer and notification to their family.

And in this administration, this time the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede -- (laughter) -- an abuse of power. (Applause.) In fact, it seems like whenever there's an opportunity to abuse power in this administration -- (laughter) -- Ashcroft seems to be out there leading the charge. And he's the one, after all, who's responsible for picking those staff lawyers at the Justice Department, responsible for those embarrassing memos justifying and enabling torture.

Moreover, in contrast, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress that helped to save our country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the current Congress, controlled by the president's party, has virtually abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal branch of government. Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for the most part, to take orders from the president on what to vote for and what to vote against. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee meetings, where legislation takes its final form; and instead, they let the president's staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for them.

Come to think of it, the decline and lack of independence shown by this Congress would shock our founders more than anything else, because they believe that the power of the Congress was the single most important check and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by the executive branch. I wish the Republican leaders of this Congress would show some backbone and discharge their constitutional responsibilities to the American people. (Applause.) This administration has not been content simply to reduce the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy in order to deny the American people access to crucial information with which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions, and they have launched a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image of the administration to the American people.

Listen to what U.S. News and World Report recently had to say about their secrecy, and I quote: "The Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government, cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety and environmental matters." Here are just a few examples, and for each one you have to ask, what are they hiding and why are they hiding it? First of all, more than 6,000 documents have been removed by the Bush administrations from governmental websites; to cite only one example, a document on the EPA website giving citizens crucial information on how to identify chemical hazards near to where their families live. Some have speculated that the principal threat to the Bush administration is a threat by the chemical hazards if the information remains available to American citizens.

To head off complaints from our nation's governors over how much they would receive under federal programs, the Bush administration simply stopped printing the primary state budget report.

To muddy the clear consensus of the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major changes and deletions to an EPA report -- changes that were so egregious that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language insisted upon by the political employees at the White House.

And of course, they've kept hidden from view Vice President Cheney's ultra-secret energy task force. They've pitched a -- they fought a pitched battle in the courts for more than three years to continue denying the American people the ability to know which special interests and which lobbyists advised Vice President Cheney on the design of the new law.

We know that Ken Lay was in charge of vetting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and we've recently seen some of the evidence of what Enron did to circumvent the regulators.

And another example. When mass layoffs became too embarrassing, this administration simply stopped publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been receiving for decades.

For this administration, the truth hurts; that is, when the truth is available to the American people. Instead, they often find bliss in the induced ignorance that comes when they deprive the American people of access to information that they have a right to. What are they hiding, and why are they hiding it? In the end, for this administration it is all about power. This lie about the invented connection between al Qaeda and Iraq was and is the key to justifying the current ongoing constitutional power grab by the president. So long as their big, flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public's mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim.

He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil liberties, again on his personal discretion. He will continue to intimidate the press, and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the American people during his bid for reelection.

War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules. We know that in our wars there have been dissents from these standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the president. Nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by directives signed by the secretary of Defense, as it is alleged, and supported by the national security adviser.

Always before, we could look to the chief executive as the point from which redress would come and law would be upheld. That was one of the great prides of our country, humane leadership faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a president and an administration for whom the best law is no law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.

In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an aroused Congress, whose bipartisan members know that they will stand before the judgment of history. We cannot depend upon a debased Department of Justice, given over to the hands of zealots. Congressional oversight and special prosecutor are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns; it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves.

Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people; it came from the belief that, in the end, this was and is a country which should -- which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole. And that although we might deviate, we would return and find our path in the name of our founders for the sake of posterity. This is what we as Americans must now do. Thank you. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

BUSH & CHENEY Inc. ARE DESTROYING DEMOCRACY IN THE U.S.A.!!!

06.26.04 (7:17 am) [edit]

BUSH & CHENEY Inc. ARE DESTROYING DEMOCRACY IN THE U.S.A.!!!

06.26.04 (7:16 am) [edit]

HOW LOW WILL NEO-CON GOPs STOOP? BLAME CLINTON, KERRY & MOORE (& TORTURE VICTIMS) FOR BUSH'S CRIMES!

06.26.04 (7:10 am) [edit]

[b]How low will GOP go?[/b]

A few months ago I got cable TV installed in my office so I could monitor the "news" channels while I work. I knew better than to switch on Fox News but I tried keeping CNN on in the background. Still, one day the inanity got to me and I started yelling at the TV. My baritone outburst startled our dogs, who are accustomed to a placid life when they are not out chasing squirrels or other varmints. I had to coax our easily-startled Shelty mix to come out from under a chair.

Thank goodness I wasn't in the press gallery of the Senate committee room when Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., dismissed the outrage over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US troops. "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," Inhofe bloviated during the May 11 hearing on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He surmised that the Iraqis depicted in widely broadcast photographs probably had "blood on their hands." He ignored Red Cross and Army estimates that 70% to 90% were innocents who were caught up in dragnets.

A few Republicans, such as Sen. John McCain. R-Ariz., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., disassociated themselves from Inhofe's "blame the victim" outburst. "When you are the good guys, you've got to act like the good guys," Graham said. But incredibly other Republicans saw the opportunity to demagog the Democrats as soft on terror because the foolish Dems wanted the US to follow its own laws as well as international treaties.

Then we found out that the Bush administration had been drafting legal memos trying to define how far they could push "aggressive interrogation techniques" before they crossed the line into torture. The government lawyers basically decided that the president was not bound by US laws or international agreements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority can't be prosecuted. Whatever the president said was OK was legal. Never mind Geneva, never mind Nuremberg. Never mind the Constitution.

Republicans who a few years ago impeached a Democratic president in a dispute over whether fellatio was sex now were bending the definition of torture to excuse the use of sodomy and attack dogs in controlling Iraqi prisoners.

Some Republicans criticized Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., for holding hearings on the abuse of prisoners. US Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who heads the House Armed Services Committee, said the Senate committee was "basically driving the story" of prisoner abuse. Hunter chided Warner for focusing on the abuses and for calling in military leaders from Iraq to testify.

Hunter, who held a private hearing and one public briefing on the issue, rejected demands by some House members for their own public hearings on the prison abuse. He also refused an offer from Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez to testify before the House committee. Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, also said the publicity over the prison abuses may endanger US soldiers and distract from the war effort.

Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said physical abuse may be warranted if it saves American lives. "Frankly, to save some American troops' lives or a unit that could be in danger, I think you should get really rough with them," Lott told a Jackson, Miss., TV station. He said there was nothing wrong with a prisoner being threatened with a dog, "unless it ate him." Lott was reminded that at least one prisoner had died at the hands of his captors after a beating. "This is not Sunday school," he replied. "This is interrogation. This is rough stuff."

The same party line played out over the GOP talk shows (at least according to websites that monitor them, such as fair.org and mediamatters.org, and trusty blogs). Meanwhile, it turned out the torturers seldom, if ever, turned up useful information.

Then the 9/11 Commission staff reported it found "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein helped al Qaeda plan and train for attacks against the US, debunking claims the White House has been making to justify the war since before it was launched in March 2003.

Vice President Dick Cheney has continued to insist that Saddam "had long-established ties with al Qaeda." He said so in a June 14 speech, despite doubts of intelligence officials and Middle East experts.

Bush on June 15 defended Cheney's statement. He said the presence of Islamist militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq is "the best evidence'' of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. Bush failed to note that Zarqawi was operating in an area of northern Iraq that was outside Hussein's control.

On June 16, after the 9/11 Commission debunked the Saddam-al Qaeda link, White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended the president's previous comments. ''What we've always said is that Saddam Hussein's regime harbored and supported terrorists,'' he said.

In fact they have gone much further.

On Oct. 7, 2002, in a televised, primetime speech on the threat from Iraq, Bush said: "We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. ... We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."

Bush used the pretext of a Saddam-al Qaeda link in a letter to Congress on March 19, 2003 -- the day the war in Iraq began. Bush wrote that the war was permitted under legislation authorizing force against those who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept. 14, 2003, ''I think it's not surprising that people make that connection'' between Saddam and Sept. 11. Asked if there was a connection, Cheney replied, "We don't know." But he then went on to suggest a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in 1993 as well as a possible, if unknown, role in 9/11.

Eric Alterman, whose book, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, is due out in September quotes Ben Bradlee saying, "Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face." Alterman noted in his June 21 "Altercation" column for msnbc.msn.com the following exchange from CNBC's Capital Report for June 17:

Gloria Borger: "Well, let's get to Mohammed Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was quote, "pretty well confirmed."

Vice President Cheney: "No, I never said that."

BORGER: "OK."

CHENEY: "Never said that."

BORGER: "I think that is ..."

CHENEY: Absolutely not.

Now see the transcript, NBC's Meet the Press, Dec. 9, 2001:

CHENEY: "It's been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April."

Turns out it was not confirmed. Cheney was lying. Bush was lying. We were buffaloed into a war based on lie after lie.

When Bill Clinton lied, the only victim was a blue dress but Congress impeached him. When George W. Bush lied, thousands of Iraqis were killed, more than 800 Americans already have lost their lives, thousands more GIs are wounded and the Republican House can't be bothered to hold hearings to get to the bottom of these discrepancies.

At some point those who support Bush must answer for their enabling of those lies. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

TORTURE INC.: REAGAN'S BAND OF THUGS JOIN BUSH'S SADISTIC MURDER-TORTURE-RAPE PARTY!!!

06.26.04 (7:04 am) [edit]

[b]Torture, Incorporated

Oliver North Joins the Party[/b]

The U.S. Army has employed as many as 27 contractors to run its interrogation operations, according to media reports. But while CACI and Titan are getting all the mainstream media play, it appears that far more than 27 contract employees were involved in recruiting and placing interrogators in various locations. Some of the firms involved in the Bush administration's "TortureGate" include an odd assortment of telecommunications companies and executive placement firms that have jumped into the lucrative torture business in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and at secret locations throughout Central Asia and North Africa.

Interrogators can earn up to $120,000 per year plying their trade and most are former military and law enforcement personnel. More ominously, these so-called "private military contractors" are nothing of the sort. They are paramilitary organizations that are funded by the US Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State, and assorted other agencies through contract vehicles known as Basic Ordering Agreements or "BOAs" hidden throughout the vast US government bureaucracy. It now is well known that CACI got its money through a BOA with the Department of the Interior.

[b]Ollie -- He's Baaack![/b]

On January 12, 2004, United Placements ran an advertisement for Army Interrogators. "Job State: IRAQ, Job Number: 8. Interrogators: 30 Positions. Compensation to $120,000. Individuals must be trained Interrogators with at least five years of experience in interrogation. Individuals must be knowledgeable of Army/Joint interrogation procedures, data processing systems such as CHIMs and SIPRNET search engines. Knowledge of the Arabic language and culture a plus...Candidates must have documented in their resumes five years of Humint collection and/or interrogation experience. This is a requirement of the client. Some locations require individuals to work and live in a field environment with minimum medical facilities. Must possess the ability to work extended work hours in difficult surroundings for up to one year."

United Placements' lists none other than Oliver North--a member of Ronald Reagan's NSC and focal point of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980's--as one of its two "Industry Associates." North is currently the host of Fox News Channel's "War Stories." United Placement's second "Industry Associate" is Intelligencecareers.com run by former intelligence analyst Bill Goldman.

While TortureGate festers, it is noteworthy that as late as May 7, 2004 the same posting for interrogators was listed through Design Staffing LLC. Evidently, a new batch of interrogators is needed to replace those now under criminal investigation. "Job Nr 85832--Conduct interrogations. Conduct pre-brief and debrief preparation which includes researching, compiling, and preparing supporting material; prepare all-source target overview/summaries to include cultural, religious, and sociological factors; and identify information required for immediate processing and dissemination including support to ongoing and planned operations and force protection. This listing opened 07-May-04 and is valid for 90 days." The listing goes on to say that the openings will be available "until filled." It was listed under the categories "Analyst (Intelligence) & Knowledge Specialists.

Another company, ZKD, Inc. ran advertisements for interrogators on February 4, 2004. "This listing opened 10-Feb-04 and is valid for 180 days. The company's closing date comments for this listing are: "Open Till Filled. Category: Military Arts, Operations and Science. Send resume to careers@zkdinc.com." It seems interrogators are not only knowledge specialists but artists too.

[b]Who Are Those Guys?[/b]

Just who are these people? It shouldn't be a surprise that Oliver North is back in the war crimes business, but some of the organizations getting into the act seemingly don't belong in the murky field of recruitment for the US military's shadow paramilitary force. But, then again, some of these groups have some of the trademarks of CIA or other intelligence agency cut-out operations. Flush with seed money from existing government contracts, small and medium-sized government contractors and recruiting firms were able to launch major drives to draft language-capable interrogators from the ranks of America's ex-military, law enforcement, and intelligence cadres and the immigrant community.

ZKD, Inc., located in Fairfax, Virginia, bills itself as a veteran-owned, minority owned and women owned firm that provides "Staffing Solutions, Security and Language Services." It's President and CEO is Zachary K. Duck. The May 2004 issue of Black Enterprise states that ZKD, "as a staffing agency, analyzes current labor market trends and matches qualified applicants with employment opportunities. After 9-11, the company doubled its efforts to provide security services to meet increased demand. ZKD also offers a comprehensive communications service." ZKD has seen a meteoric rise in profits thanks mostly to the Pentagon and Transportation Security Administration. Black Enterprise states that ZKD was founded in 2001 with only two employees but now has more than 250 people with revenues totaling more than $ 10 million in 2003.

ZKD has a growing roster of clients, including the Transportation Security Administration and McNeil Technologies. In January of this year, ZKD was awarded a five-year, $ 53.7 million contract from the Department of Defense. The company now enjoys a solid $34.5 million in contracts for 2004 with another $13 million in the contracting queue.

It is noteworthy that according to The Washington Post, CACI and McNeil Technologies are the recipients of Federal contracts to process Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Federal agencies, including the Pentagon and Homeland Security and Justice Departments. In what could be a major conflict of interest, any FOIA request from the public or the media for information on Pentagon or intelligence agency contracts with CACI or ZKD on their interrogation/translation work abroad could be handled by employees of CACI, an interrogation contractor, or McNeil, a client of ZKD, another interrogation contractor.

Design Staffing, LLC is located in Boyds, Maryland has all the trademarks of an operation run by an ex-military or intelligence agency veteran. The language is classic military gangland style "Beyond [the] core categories, we also assist companies with those hard-to-fill positions that do not fit in the traditional molds. Our method, which we call the Design Staffing Approach, DSA, is critical to the success of our business - and yours. The DSA model is an innovative systematic, seven-tier approach..."

A search of the U.S. Business Directory reveals Design Staffing, LLC is an "employment agency & opportunities firm" and has one employee, an unknown credit status, and a business address at 14024 Clopper Road, Boyds, Maryland. Its principal-listed by email as mpoage@designstaffing.com -is very particular about what he/she is looking for in an interrogator.

"For interrogators I look for experience conducting interrogations, conduct of personnel screenings of local nationals and conduct of tactical debriefings."

He/she goes on to imply that embellishment of experience may not be a bad idea to make the resume look stronger to the customer.

[b]If North is There, the Carlyle Group Can't be Far Behind[/b]

Then there's CalNet, a Vienna, Virginia-based company that says it provides "Agile Solutions for the New Customer Economy." It is run by President and CEO Kaleem Shah. The U.S. Business Directory provides the following sketchy information on CalNet: its description is "Computer-Systems Designers and Consultants," and it has four employees. A CalNet Ltd., also listed as a "computer related" company and located in West Yorkshire, England, was dissolved on March 20, 2001.

According to its website, "Since 1989, CalNet has used its business and technology consultancy to help many of the largest telecom, financial, public sector, high-tech and services organizations remain agile by obtaining explicit business results through the rapid application and delivery of advanced information and telecom solutions." That may be so, but CalNet posted the same interrogators-wanted ad that United Placements ran in January of 2004. Interested parties are encouraged to apply for a position with the Iraq Survey Group. "...please send resume to bcoleman@CALNET.com. Reference job number DISG2."

USIS, or U.S. Investigations Services, bills itself as "one of the largest Intelligence and Security Services companies in North America." Hoover's Company Capsules has a very unusual descriptive background for the firm. "Formally a US government agency, USIS was spun off as a private company in 1996." A recent job fair it hosted in Falls Church, Virginia, sought "Interrogators, Strategic Debriefers and Protection Specialists for Overseas Assignments."

One of the USIS investors is the omnipresent Carlyle Group, a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm with close ties to George H. W. Bush, former British Prime Minister John Major, and former Secretary of State James Baker, and past ties to the Saudi Bin Laden Companies, which has its tentacles into many of the Bush administration's major foreign adventures. USIS also owns a subsidiary, Total Information Services, Inc., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which ironically is similar to the name of the defunct Pentagon program to glean personal information from databases on U.S. and foreign citizens. That program, called the Total Information Awareness (TIA) system was headed by Iran-contra felon retired Admiral John Poindexter before he resigned. TIA, according to media reports, is alive and well in the offices of DARPA in Northern Virginia.

Since the US Congress, the Pentagon, the White House and US Department of Justice seem determined to sweep the entire TortureGate disaster under the rug before the November 2004 elections, the only check on their power appears to be the financial markets. As was recently reported by the Washington Post, directors of one of CACI's pension funds, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or Calpers, planned to meet with CACI in early July "...to discuss concerns about [CACI] management controls, training and legal procedures at the Arlington-based government contractor... What the management of this company owes [shareholders] is a full explanation of exactly what has occurred, exactly who was responsible and a full accounting of what will be done to reform its practices."

Maybe if the money talks, Bush--and the Gordon Gecko's of the defense contracting world--will walk. - http://www.counterpunch.com/s...

CONGRESS TO SHARON: TAKE ALL YOU WANT!!!

06.26.04 (6:56 am) [edit]

[b]Congress to Sharon: Take All You Want [/b]

On Wednesday, June 23, 2004, the U.S. House of Representatives, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, endorsed right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s efforts to colonize and annex large sections of the Palestinian West Bank, seized by Israel in the June 1967 war.

This was not just another "pro-Israel" (or, more accurately, "pro-Israeli right") resolution, but an effective renunciation of the post-World War II international system based upon the premise of the illegitimacy of the expansion of a country’s territory by military force.

House Concurrent Resolution 460, sponsored by right-wing Republican leader Tom DeLay, "strongly endorses" the letter sent by President George W. Bush to the Israeli prime minister in April supporting his so-called "disengagement" plan. This unilateral initiative calls for withdrawing the illegal Israeli settlements from the occupied Gaza Strip, but – far more significantly – would incorporate virtually all of the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank into Israel, leaving the Palestinians with a series of non-contiguous and economically unviable cantons, each surrounded by Israeli territory, collectively constituting barely 10% of historic Palestine. (Even in the case of the Gaza Strip, Sharon’s plan would allow Israel to control the borders, the ports, and the airspace, as well as having the right to conduct military operations inside Palestinian areas at will.)

The vote was 407 in favor of the resolution and only 9 opposed.

The Bush letter so overwhelming supported by the House declares that "the United States will do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan." Indeed, the resolution appears to be part of an effort to short-circuit last fall’s Geneva Initiative, a comprehensive peace plan supported by the Palestinian leadership and leading Israeli moderates. In that proposal, the Palestinians agreed that Israel could annex some blocs of settlements, but only along Israel’s internationally recognized borders and only in exchange for an equivalent amount of territory currently part of Israel that would be granted to the new Palestinian state. According to public opinion polls, the majority of Americans – including a majority of American Jews – support this approach over the Bush-backed Sharon plan so overwhelming endorsed by Congress.

The resolution does not even make mention of the once highly-touted "road map" for Israeli-Palestinian peace that the United States drew up with representatives of Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations. The "road map" demanded that any growth in the settlements be frozen and that the remaining outstanding issues, such as borders and the status of Palestinian refugees be left for negotiations between the two parties.

Congressman Pete Stark of California, one of the nine dissenters, observed how the resolution did not call on both Israelis and Palestinians to work together to find a peaceful solution to this conflict, correctly observing that "all parties in the process must work together," something the resolution notably omitted. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Deputy minority leader Steny Hoyer (who was a cosponsor of the DeLay resolution) refused to place a resolution cosponsored by Stark (H.R. 479), which applauds Israelis and Palestinians who are working together to conceive pragmatic, serious plans for achieving peace and encourages both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to capitalize on the opportunity offered by these peace initiatives.

According to Israeli press reports, Sharon brought four separate disengagement plans to Washington requiring various degrees of Israeli withdrawal, but President Bush ended up endorsing the one which allowed Israel to annex the largest amount of Palestinian territory. Now, much to the chagrin of progressive and moderate Israelis, Congress has also chosen to throw its weight behind the most right-wing of the four proposals.

Most observers – including leading Israeli military and intelligence officials – recognize that by leaving the Palestinians with little hope of achieving a viable state through negotiations, this will only swell the ranks of extremist Palestinian groups and produce more terrorism. Congress has rejected this analysis, however, insisting that Sharon’s land grab will somehow "enhance the security of Israel and advance the cause of peace in the Middle East."

The resolution calls for the Palestinian "state" that could eventually emerge to be "based on rule of law and respect for human rights," but does not call on Israel to respect the rule of law and human rights, which its occupation forces and colonists – according to reputable human rights organization in Israel and elsewhere – are violating on a daily basis.

The resolution also repeatedly cites Palestinian terrorism as the obstacle to peace and security, not the Israeli occupation and repression that has spawned it. Furthermore, the resolution calls for the United States to further strengthen Israel’s military prowess and defends Israel’s right to launch attacks against Palestinian groups that "threaten Israeli citizens," which presumably includes settlers and their militias which have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including large numbers of children.

In supporting this resolution, Congress has effectively renounced UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which call on Israel – in return for security guarantees from its Arab neighbors – to withdraw from territories seized in the June 1967 war. All previous U.S. administrations of both parties had seen these resolutions as the basis for Arab-Israeli peace.

These Israeli settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which deem it illegal for any country to transfer any part of its civilian population onto territories seized by military force. UN Security Council resolutions 446, 452, 465 and 471 explicitly call on Israel to remove its colonists from the occupied territories. The vast majority of these settlements that the Bush-Sharon plan seeks to formally annex into Israel were built after these resolutions were passed.

In an incredible act of chutzpah, however, the resolution claims that Israel should not be expected to withdraw from these settlements "in light of new realities on the ground," namely the settlements built in violation of these UN Security Council resolutions.

Congress, however, apparently agrees with President Bush that Sharon’s Israel, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, need not abide by UN Security Council resolutions.

In that clause, the resolution refers to the illegal settlements euphemistically as "Israeli population centers." More significantly, the resolution refers to these settlements as being "in Israel," effectively already recognizing their annexation.

The resolution also insists that supporting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel – or even in the occupied territories to be annexed by Israel under the Bush-Sharon plan – would not be "just" or "fair."

The Bush letter endorsed by Congress effectively destroys the once highly-touted "road map" and marks the first time in the history of the peace process that a U.S. president has preempted negotiations by announcing support of such a unilateral initiative by one party. Both Israel and the United States continue to refuse to even negotiate with Palestine Authority President Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Prime Minister Amhed Qureia, or any other recognized Palestinian leader, on substantive issues dealing with a peace settlement.

Supporting the resolution were the fundamentalist Christian Coalition, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and other right-wing groups. Leading the opposition to the resolution were Churches for Middle East Peace, the Tikkun Community, and similar progressive organizations. That the entire House Democratic leadership and all but a handful of Democrats overall supported the resolution is demonstrative of just how far to the right the Democratic Party has gone. In short, the Democrats, like the Republicans, now support the neoconservative doctrine that places the right of conquest over the rule of law.

More fundamentally, Congress’ effective endorsement of an Israeli annexation of land it conquered in the 1967 war is a direct challenge to the United Nations Charter, which forbids any country from expanding its territory through military conquest. The vote, therefore, constitutes nothing less than an overwhelming bipartisan renunciation of the post-World War II international system, effectively recognizing the right of conquest. - http://www.antiwar.com/orig/z...

CHENEY SAYS HE "FELT BETTER" AFTER "FUCK-YOU"-- WHAT HAPPENS WHEN HE "FEELS BETTER" KILLING SOMEONE?

06.25.04 (7:30 pm) [edit]

[b]Cheney Owns Up to Profanity Incident and Says He 'Felt Better Afterwards'[/b]

Vice President Dick Cheney, long portrayed by his aides as unperturbed by partisan attacks, admitted Friday that he "probably" cursed at a senior Democratic senator this week, said he did not regret it and added that he "[i]felt better afterwards[/i]." Other Senators who witnessed the incident said that he did use the word: [b]FUCK[/b] [ [i]The Full Story [/i] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... ]

[b]So what happens when the Mother Fucker Cheney-the-Goon "[i]feels better[/i]" after killing someone with the balls to stand-up against him? When will this asshole finally be held accountable for his heinous crimes (i.e. lies, felonies, treason and embezzlement)?[/b]

NEO-CON HYPOCRITES EXCUSE 'F*cking' CHENEY'S "Tony-Soprano" OBSCENITY!!! HO HO HO!!!

06.25.04 (8:54 am) [edit]

[b]["Fucking"] Cheney obscenity shocks senators[/b]

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has resorted to the use of obscenities to defend his former employer Halliburton.

Cheney blurted out the "F word" at Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont during a heated exchange on the Senate floor on Tuesday, his aides said.

The terse discussion between the two ended with Cheney finally telling Leahy to "f... off" or "go f... yourself", the aides said.

"I think he was just having a bad day," Leahy was quoted as saying on CNN, which first reported the incident. "I was kind of shocked to hear that kind of language on the floor."

"That doesn't sound like language the vice-president would use but there was a frank exchange of views," said Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems.

According to congressional aides, Leahy said "hello" to Cheney following the taking of the Senate group photo on the floor of the chamber.

[b]Not permitted[/b]

Cheney then ripped into Leahy for the Democratic senator's criticism this week of alleged war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, the oil-services company that Cheney once ran.

Leahy and other Democrats have called for congressional hearings into whether the vice-president helped the firm win lucrative contracts in Iraq after the US-led invasion of the oil rich country.

During their exchange, Leahy noted that Republicans had accused Democrats of being anti-Catholic because they are opposed to some of President George Bush's anti-abortion judges, the aides said.

That's when Cheney unloaded with the "F-bomb", aides said.

According to Senate rules, profanity is not permitted in the chamber. But when the exchange occurred between Leahy and Cheney, the Senate was not in session, so there was technically no foul. - http://english.aljazeera.net/...

NEW POLL: MOST AMERICANS NOW THINK THAT SENDING TROOPS TO IRAQ WAS A MISTAKE!!!

06.25.04 (6:48 am) [edit]

[b]CNN/USA Poll: Sending troops to Iraq a mistake[/b]

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- For the first time since the start of the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans surveyed in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll say the United States made a mistake in sending troops to that country.

Fifty-four percent of those polled said it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq, compared with 41 percent who expressed that sentiment in early June.

Most respondents to the poll, 55 percent, also said they don't believe the war has made the United States safer from terrorism -- rejecting an argument that President Bush has repeatedly advanced in his rationale for the war.

Yet the poll, results of which were released Thursday, also found that Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has made little headway among respondents on the issue of Iraq, which has figured prominently on the campaign trail.

Kerry, a four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts, and Bush are essentially tied when poll respondents are asked who would better handle the situation in Iraq.

Forty-seven percent said Bush would do a better job on Iraq, compared with 46 percent who picked Kerry.

[b]Commander in chief[/b]

And while six in 10 of those polled said they believe Kerry could handle the job of commander-in-chief, most indicated that they trust Bush more in that role, 51 percent to 43 percent.

The poll, based on interviews with 1,005 Americans -- including 521 likely voters -- was conducted by telephone June 21-23.

The margin of error varied by question, from a low of 3 percentage points to 4.5 percentage points.

The poll was released on the same day that a wave of attacks on Iraqis and coalition forces left more than 90 dead. (U.S. could send more troops to Iraq)

The impact of the attacks on opinion recorded in the poll was not a factor since the survey was taken earlier this week.

Looking at the presidential race, the poll found a tie among likely voters: 49 percent for Bush and 48 percent for Kerry.

When poll respondents were asked to consider independent Ralph Nader, the breakdown was: 48 percent for Bush, 47 percent for Kerry and 3 percent for Nader.

The poll found some advantages for Kerry. His favorable rating is higher than Bush's, 58 percent to 53 percent, and it has grown over the past few months as Bush's has fallen.

Kerry also gets higher ratings on who would better handle the economy -- 53 percent of respondents picked the Democrat, while 40 percent selected Bush.

And the economy was identified by more voters, 41 percent, as the most important role for the president -- ahead of both managing the government or acting as commander in chief. - http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO...

NEW POLL: MOST AMERICANS NOW THINK SENDING TROOPS TO IRAQ WAS A MISTAKE!!!

06.25.04 (6:46 am) [edit]

THE NEO-CONS DESERVE AN "F'!!!

06.25.04 (6:42 am) [edit]

When an off-Broadway show opened a few seasons ago with the deliciously relevant title, Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty, it made me think of the bright, clever neoconservatives I have known. Looking back, many of their prominent publications and groups were far too inflexible to accept that the USSR was no longer an invincible 50-foot military monster incapable of change. By then many neoconservatives (though the term was and remains somewhat imprecise) "were no longer an adequate guide for interpreting a changing reality," as Richard Ehrman aptly put it in his book The Rise of Neoconservatism (Yale, 1995). The sad fact is they haven't changed much.

By the time George W. Bush entered the White House, younger second-string, and too often second-rate, neocons had already arrived, courtesy of well-funded ubiquitous think tanks, articles, books, TV spots, and subsidized magazines and newspapers. Typically, their writings were the sort of essays that might merit an A– or B+ in class, well written but drowning in speculation, guesswork, and supposedly definitive judgments too often fashioned out of whole cloth. They didn't appear to have much of a sense of the past, given their subsequent misjudgments and given the fact that so many of them are rigid ideologues, utopians in a menacing and chaotic world. After 9/11 they helped spread rumors about Iraqi WMDs, Saddam's close ties to the 9/11 attacks, dismissed the United Nations and European roles and wholeheartedly backed the Patriot Act, parts of which represent a danger to future dissenters, right and left. Like Vice President Cheney and others in the Bush White House, they were exalters of an American imperium, proud as punch that despite his modest anti-nation-building campaign speeches, President Bush quickly came to mirror their thinking.

Dependent on and beholden to wealthy foundations and individuals with their own agendas, the neocons, well schooled in Washington's Byzantine political climate, savvy about popularizing their points of view; had captured the presidency. Along the way they found new mantras and embraced vague, untested shibboleths such as "national greatness" and "benevolent global hegemony." Perhaps their greatest weakness has been their refusal to test critically the fundamental axiom on which they concocted a fantasy of democracies springing up in the Muslim Middle East following a walkover military victory and joyous reception in Iraq. Democracy is admirable, of course, but their theoreticians and polemicists never bothered explaining how establishing a democratic state in Iraq, a nation which had never known democracy, could stimulate the spread of democracy to other Arab states which also had no experience with it. Nor were they ever skeptical that voting equated automatically with democracy. Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, anyone? True believers, they listened to and promoted the views of Iraqi exiles who lacked believability.

Even more ominous was the Paul Wolfowitz-neocon doctrine of preemptive war, "a program breathtaking in its ambition," wisely observed George Szamuely, former editorial writer for the Times (London), the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement, a genuine and thoughtful conservative. "Wolfowitz," he wrote, "was advocating total global supremacy by the United States. In every single region of the world the United States was to ensure that no power or coalition of powers could emerge that would challenge the rule of the United States in that region. … Any power seeking to challenge this order could expect a vigorous and forceful U.S. response."

It was, as critics left and right rightly recognized, a prescription for endless war.

After the fall of Iraq in 2003, they seemed remarkably prescient. They had won! But had they? Now we know they were painfully wrong. The callow generalizations of living-room warriors without military or significant political experience told little of what the Iraq invasion would become: no flowers and kisses from ebullient crowds, savage guerilla resistance, the ever-present possibility of religious civil war, and the birth of new terrorists. Nor have they expressed any regret, sorrow or shame about the many Americans, allies and Iraqi dead, wounded, tortured and terrorized in Iraq.

Neocons are the heirs of Woodrow Wilson, not because of his ill-formed fantasies of world peace through war, but because he's the man who invaded Mexico, took the country into WWI, gave dissenters such as Eugene V. Debs with brutal prison sentences and who viewed blacks as inferior – and had a failed and confusing vision of newly created and artificial rump states in a League of Nations. But neocons have yet another American imperial ancestor: Senator Albert Beveridge, a passionate supporter of American imperialism during the Spanish-American War and the subsequent bloody invasion of the Philippines, which cost 4,000 American lives and 250,000 Filipino deaths. When Beveridge pontificated, "We are the trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. … His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world," he anticipated his spiritual heirs in the Weekly Standard, New York Post, Fox TV, Pentagon civilian corps and the White House.

It will take a long time before this generation of neocons will be able to atone for their profound blunders. Nor will they be able to satisfy millions of us who still have never heard an honest explanation of why we invaded Iraq instead of going after Osama, which has caused problems that may take generations to resolve. I hope that some day the neocons can find time to attend a ceremony for our Iraqi war dead and then pray for forgiveness.

[b]Murray Polner is the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and most recently co-authored Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan[/b]. - http://www.antiwar.com/orig/p...

THE INTERROGATION ...

06.25.04 (6:40 am) [edit]

[b][i]The Interrogation of George W. Bush

The Plame Affair, Chalabi's lies, and the Niger uranium forgeries: connecting the dots [/i]

by Justin Raimondo [/b]

Asked about the implications of the President's interview with Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, the special counsel appointed to look into the "outing" of a CIA agent by hawkish government officials, White House spokesman Scott McClellan wasn't lying when he replied:

"No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States."

Reflexive Bush-haters are quick to dismiss this as obfuscating rhetoric, meaningless noises emitted as a matter of course, like other bodily functions best unnamed. Yet I believe McClellan, if only because the President, in an important sense, is as much the victim as the perpetrator of the crimes under investigation. A lot is going on here, and yet, so far, only one or another tentacle of the monster has surfaced at a time, with the details of Fitzgerald's multi-pronged investigation kept under wraps. The interrogation of the President, however, indicates that the creature is about to surface, along with some indictments.

We don't know what was said during the interview, a little over an hour long, but we can tease out a few safe surmises from the tangle of speculation. First, whomever "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame in order to get at her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson – a prominent critic of the Iraq war – probably didn't get their orders directly from the President. Secondly, assuming Dubya didn't personally get on the phone to columnist Bob Novak and divulge Ms. Plame's identity and occupation, it was probably one of his henchmen, or, more likely, one of Dick Cheney's minions, although we can be fairly certain the President didn't issue a direct order to that effect.

So why question the President?

The reason is because it's very likely that the investigation has branched out considerably since Attorney General John Ashcroft stepped aside and let Fitzgerald take on the case.

The "outing" of Valerie Plame – a CIA agent involved in sensitive nuclear proliferation work – came about as a result of the War Party's attempt to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had gone public with the truth about Saddam's alleged attempts to secure high-grade uranium in the African country of Niger. The President, in his State of the Union address, had announced this evil intention of the Iraqi dictator as a rationale for going to war, but Wilson revealed that he had been sent by the CIA to that country in an effort to learn the facts, and had found no evidence for the accusation. The War Party had been caught in a rather embarrassing lie: badly stung, they struck back….

The rumor was spread that Wilson, supposedly a partisan Democrat, had gotten himself the (non-paying) job of going to Niger entirely on account of his wife's influence, and, besides that, he was said to have no special expertise in this area. That's horse-hockey: having served as an ambassador in the region for a decade, Wilson certainly had the experience and the contacts for the job. His only disqualification seemed to be that he was a professional diplomat who saw his job as reporting reality, rather than some party-lining neoconservative who sees everything through the distorting prism of ideology.

Furthermore, it turned out that the alleged documentary evidence pointing to Iraq's guilt in this matter were crude forgeries. The President of the United States had been made a fool of – which, in George W. Bush's case, may seem redundant, and therefore all the more humiliating.

When you start turning over rocks, all kinds of creepy-crawlies go skittering for cover, and if you disturb enough turf whole swarms will come pouring out of their holes, blinded by the sunlight and bumping into each other, desperate to regain the darkness. And that's what's been happening lately, with charges of espionage openly leveled against Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) by the U.S. intelligence community. Patrick Lang, former head of the CIA's Middle East desk, told Newsday that the U.S.-funded INC "intelligence collection" program had essentially functioned as an Iranian spy network:

"'They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,' he said. Lang described it as 'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history...I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work.'"

Eager to rid themselves of their old Iraqi enemy, and pave the way for the southward extension of their own influence, the Iranians fed Chalabi a stream of lies, possibly including the Niger uranium forgeries. The "intelligence" gleaned from these dubious documents somehow wormed its way into the President's state of the union address through some process that can only be described as treason.

Chalabi, the favorite of the neoconservatives centered in the Vice President's office and the civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon, regularly fed the White House (and the American media) dubious "intelligence" that went unvetted by the mainline intelligence agencies, and was "stove-piped" via Cheney directly onto the President's desk. If Chalabi, the Great Embezzler, ripped off the White House with fake "evidence" of Iraq's nuclear ambitions, and if this caused the administration no end of political embarrassment – remember the infamous "16 words" controversy? – then no wonder they cut off his allowance and raided his Baghdad headquarters.

But Chalabi didn't act alone: he had loyal friends and supporters inside the administration, who flew him to Iraq after the "liberation" and touted him endlessly and openly as the George Washington of his country – and the neocons defend him to this day. The Office of Special Plans, under Pentagon policy honcho Douglas Feith, functioned as a disinformation factory, taking the raw lies wholesaled by Chalabi's operation and retailing them as finished "intelligence."

If Chalabi got his hands on top secret information, and then passed it to the Iranians, then who in the U.S. government were his collaborators – and what other joint projects did Chalabi and his American fan club undertake?

Is it really a coincidence that Fitzgerald is questioning the President while FBI agents set up a polygraph machine in the Pentagon?

Whoever "outed" Valerie Plame had one goal in mind: to discredit her husband, who had exposed the Niger uranium gambit as a hoax. To suspect that the same crew knows a lot about the true origins of the Niger uranium forgeries hardly requires an imaginative leap. Back in February, when the Washington Post reported very "aggressive" questioning of White House aides, it wasn't only the Plame case FBI agents seemed concerned about:

"A parallel FBI investigation into the apparent forgery of documents suggesting that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger is 'at a critical stage,' according to a senior law enforcement official who declined to elaborate. That probe, conducted by FBI counterintelligence agents, was launched last spring after U.N. officials pronounced the documents crude forgeries."

It seems logical to assume that George W. Bush's testimony in this matter would be far more relevant, and interesting, than his no doubt limited knowledge of the Plame affair.

In any case, what fascinates is the interconnectedness of the various scandals that threaten to engulf this administration – WMD-gate, Chalabi-gate, Niger-gate, etc., etc. All share a common narrative thread, the theme of some foreign or outside force manipulating the White House to achieve its own ends. Chalabi figured prominently in all these deceptions, but he was just an instrument in the hands of the neocons, who used him as a front man for their foreign policy agenda.

It's all very cloak-and-daggerish, with spy-versus-spy plots and counter-plots, and, with so many layers of deception, somewhat confusing. But we can see what this complicated game was all about if we look at the results, i.e. what is happening on the ground in Iraq. As Iran takes the southern provinces, and the Israelis extend their influence into the northern part of the country, where the Kurds predominate, the real allegiances of the various players stand revealed. - http://www.antiwar.com/justin...

THE INTERROGATION OF GEORGE W. BUSH

06.25.04 (6:38 am) [edit]

[b][i]The Plame Affair, Chalabi's lies, and the Niger uranium forgeries: connecting the dots [/i]

by Justin Raimondo [/b]

Asked about the implications of the President's interview with Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, the special counsel appointed to look into the "outing" of a CIA agent by hawkish government officials, White House spokesman Scott McClellan wasn't lying when he replied:

"No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States."

Reflexive Bush-haters are quick to dismiss this as obfuscating rhetoric, meaningless noises emitted as a matter of course, like other bodily functions best unnamed. Yet I believe McClellan, if only because the President, in an important sense, is as much the victim as the perpetrator of the crimes under investigation. A lot is going on here, and yet, so far, only one or another tentacle of the monster has surfaced at a time, with the details of Fitzgerald's multi-pronged investigation kept under wraps. The interrogation of the President, however, indicates that the creature is about to surface, along with some indictments.

We don't know what was said during the interview, a little over an hour long, but we can tease out a few safe surmises from the tangle of speculation. First, whomever "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame in order to get at her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson – a prominent critic of the Iraq war – probably didn't get their orders directly from the President. Secondly, assuming Dubya didn't personally get on the phone to columnist Bob Novak and divulge Ms. Plame's identity and occupation, it was probably one of his henchmen, or, more likely, one of Dick Cheney's minions, although we can be fairly certain the President didn't issue a direct order to that effect.

So why question the President?

The reason is because it's very likely that the investigation has branched out considerably since Attorney General John Ashcroft stepped aside and let Fitzgerald take on the case.

The "outing" of Valerie Plame – a CIA agent involved in sensitive nuclear proliferation work – came about as a result of the War Party's attempt to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had gone public with the truth about Saddam's alleged attempts to secure high-grade uranium in the African country of Niger. The President, in his State of the Union address, had announced this evil intention of the Iraqi dictator as a rationale for going to war, but Wilson revealed that he had been sent by the CIA to that country in an effort to learn the facts, and had found no evidence for the accusation. The War Party had been caught in a rather embarrassing lie: badly stung, they struck back….

The rumor was spread that Wilson, supposedly a partisan Democrat, had gotten himself the (non-paying) job of going to Niger entirely on account of his wife's influence, and, besides that, he was said to have no special expertise in this area. That's horse-hockey: having served as an ambassador in the region for a decade, Wilson certainly had the experience and the contacts for the job. His only disqualification seemed to be that he was a professional diplomat who saw his job as reporting reality, rather than some party-lining neoconservative who sees everything through the distorting prism of ideology.

Furthermore, it turned out that the alleged documentary evidence pointing to Iraq's guilt in this matter were crude forgeries. The President of the United States had been made a fool of – which, in George W. Bush's case, may seem redundant, and therefore all the more humiliating.

When you start turning over rocks, all kinds of creepy-crawlies go skittering for cover, and if you disturb enough turf whole swarms will come pouring out of their holes, blinded by the sunlight and bumping into each other, desperate to regain the darkness. And that's what's been happening lately, with charges of espionage openly leveled against Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) by the U.S. intelligence community. Patrick Lang, former head of the CIA's Middle East desk, told Newsday that the U.S.-funded INC "intelligence collection" program had essentially functioned as an Iranian spy network:

"'They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,' he said. Lang described it as 'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history...I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work.'"

Eager to rid themselves of their old Iraqi enemy, and pave the way for the southward extension of their own influence, the Iranians fed Chalabi a stream of lies, possibly including the Niger uranium forgeries. The "intelligence" gleaned from these dubious documents somehow wormed its way into the President's state of the union address through some process that can only be described as treason.

Chalabi, the favorite of the neoconservatives centered in the Vice President's office and the civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon, regularly fed the White House (and the American media) dubious "intelligence" that went unvetted by the mainline intelligence agencies, and was "stove-piped" via Cheney directly onto the President's desk. If Chalabi, the Great Embezzler, ripped off the White House with fake "evidence" of Iraq's nuclear ambitions, and if this caused the administration no end of political embarrassment – remember the infamous "16 words" controversy? – then no wonder they cut off his allowance and raided his Baghdad headquarters.

But Chalabi didn't act alone: he had loyal friends and supporters inside the administration, who flew him to Iraq after the "liberation" and touted him endlessly and openly as the George Washington of his country – and the neocons defend him to this day. The Office of Special Plans, under Pentagon policy honcho Douglas Feith, functioned as a disinformation factory, taking the raw lies wholesaled by Chalabi's operation and retailing them as finished "intelligence."

If Chalabi got his hands on top secret information, and then passed it to the Iranians, then who in the U.S. government were his collaborators – and what other joint projects did Chalabi and his American fan club undertake?

Is it really a coincidence that Fitzgerald is questioning the President while FBI agents set up a polygraph machine in the Pentagon?

Whoever "outed" Valerie Plame had one goal in mind: to discredit her husband, who had exposed the Niger uranium gambit as a hoax. To suspect that the same crew knows a lot about the true origins of the Niger uranium forgeries hardly requires an imaginative leap. Back in February, when the Washington Post reported very "aggressive" questioning of White House aides, it wasn't only the Plame case FBI agents seemed concerned about:

"A parallel FBI investigation into the apparent forgery of documents suggesting that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger is 'at a critical stage,' according to a senior law enforcement official who declined to elaborate. That probe, conducted by FBI counterintelligence agents, was launched last spring after U.N. officials pronounced the documents crude forgeries."

It seems logical to assume that George W. Bush's testimony in this matter would be far more relevant, and interesting, than his no doubt limited knowledge of the Plame affair.

In any case, what fascinates is the interconnectedness of the various scandals that threaten to engulf this administration – WMD-gate, Chalabi-gate, Niger-gate, etc., etc. All share a common narrative thread, the theme of some foreign or outside force manipulating the White House to achieve its own ends. Chalabi figured prominently in all these deceptions, but he was just an instrument in the hands of the neocons, who used him as a front man for their foreign policy agenda.

It's all very cloak-and-daggerish, with spy-versus-spy plots and counter-plots, and, with so many layers of deception, somewhat confusing. But we can see what this complicated game was all about if we look at the results, i.e. what is happening on the ground in Iraq. As Iran takes the southern provinces, and the Israelis extend their influence into the northern part of the country, where the Kurds predominate, the real allegiances of the various players stand revealed. - http://www.antiwar.com/justin...

THE INTERROGATION OF GEORGE W. BUSH: DE-MASKING NEO-CON CROOKS!!!

06.25.04 (6:36 am) [edit]

BUSH'S PHONY TORTURE DOCUMENT DUMP: ANOTHER NEO-CON SCAM ...

06.24.04 (6:40 am) [edit]

[b]Torture document dump[/b]

Michael Froomkin http://www.discourse.net/arch... and Billmon http://billmon.org/archives/0... both have good posts up about yesterday's White House and Pentagon document dump. Froomkin concentrates on the order signed by Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, which contains what Froomkin refers to as the " Royalist theory of Presidential power," in point 2b: “[i]I accept the legal conclusion of the attorney general and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time[/i].” Also see this post http://www.discourse.net/arch... on the OLC's repudiation of it's torture justification memo.

Billmon points out that none of the released documents cover the critical period during which most of the Iraqi torture occurred:

It also appears that neither the White House's nor the Pentagon's document dump extend much beyond the spring of 2003. This leaves out the critical period in the fall and winter of last year, when the Iraqi insurgency exploded into a major problem and the administration's demands for better, more actionable intelligence jumped off the chart. According to Sy Hersh, this is when the Pentagon extended "Copper Green" http://www.newyorker.com/fact... - the Pentagon's existing secret program for capturing and interrogating high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives - to Iraq. - http://www.antiwar.com/blog/i...

BUSH'S PHONY TORTURE DOCUMENT DUMP: OLD VOMIT & LOTS OF STUFF MISSING!!!

06.24.04 (6:37 am) [edit]

THE MEANING OF PUTIN'S LIES: I'LL LET YOU (Bush) BE A MASS-KILLER, IF YOU'LL LET ME MASS-MURDER!!!

06.24.04 (6:31 am) [edit]

[b]The Meaning of Putin's Pronouncement

Mutually Assured Pre-Emption[/b]

For those wondering about the veracity of Vladimir Putin's sudden peculiar claim that Russian intelligence, sometime after the 9-11 attacks, had passed along to the Bush administration a vague warning that Iraq might be planning "terror" attacks against the U.S., there is another explanation besides the one put forth in the June 21 issue of CounterPunch by Gary Leupp, who suggests Putin is just currying favor with Bush by trying to help him out of a domestic political jam.

And this alternate explanation should cause Bush, John Kerry, and indeed every American, to think long and hard about the much ballyhooed Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war.

The Bush Doctrine, recall, is that America (and by extension every country on the globe) has the absolute right to attack a foreign foe if the government believes the U.S. is in danger of imminent attack.

Now, put aside the important question of whether Iraq really was planning some "imminent" attack on the U.S. back in the fall of 2001-something for which there is absolutely no evidence.

Who was, in the fall of 2001, without a doubt planning an imminent attack?

Bingo! It was the U.S., which almost before the smoke cleared at the World Trade Center ruins, was hard at work plotting a full-scale war against Iraq.

The point to remember is that according to the logic of the new Bush Doctrine, and indeed under established international law, whatever we may think about Saddam Hussein, Iraq had every right to take pre-emptive measures to counter the imminent U.S. threat posed by Bush's war preparations.

As to the legality of those presumptive measures, it would all depend upon what it might have been that Iraq was allegedly planning.

As I wrote in an earlier CounterPunch column (April 2, 2003, "Legitimizing Terrorism? Making America Safer... for Iraq Fighters"), international law experts say that if Iraqi agents in the U.S. had attacked military, or even certain strategic civilian targets (for example, CIA headquarters, the Pentagon, a military base, an oil storage facility, a communications center, or a government building of any kind), and if the perpetrators of the attack wore military uniforms during any action, it could be properly considered not an act of terror, but an act of war.

What's sauce for the goose, as the saying goes, is sauce for the gander.

Odds are that this talk of an Iraq attack in 2002 is all nonsense-just a case of one leader helping another in trouble. But the American public nonetheless should take note.

All this anti-terrorism stuff, and particularly the doctrine of pre-emptive war, to which John Kerry has added his endorsement, carries with it some nasty baggage.

If other countries (North Korea, for example, or Iran, come to mind) were to learn that the U.S. was planning an attack, they would be within their rights to act pre-emptively.

For that matter, as long as the U.S. continues to battle insurgents in Iraq, the doctrine of reciprocity means that embattled Iraqi insurgents are entitled to respond in kind-both within Iraq and also against American interests abroad and in the U.S. itself. If they were to do this, their actions would have to be defined as acts of war, not of terror, which could limit America's punishment options.

The American public, and certainly Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry, need to think this all through very carefully, instead of just talking tough about terror. The expansive and unending so-called "War on Terror" begun with such bluster by the Bush administration in the wake of 9-11, far from making America safer, is inviting those nations which we threaten to take not just retaliatory, but even pre-emptive action themselves against us.

Putin's claim concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged terror plans may well be bogus, but the logic behind his having been planning something to counter America's war plans could well lead other threatened leaders to think along similar lines.

Is this what we want happening? - http://www.counterpunch.com/l...

RIDICULING NEOCON IGNORANCE

06.24.04 (6:25 am) [edit]

[b]Ridiculing neocon ignorance[/b]

Col. Lounsbury whacks http://www.livejournal.com/us... the idiots in the CPA, ruthlessly criticizing their utter failure from the perspective of a businessman in Baghdad trying to work with them. After reading Lounsbury's scathing commentary, you'll really appreciate this delicious skewering of Ari Fleischer's brother Michael http://digbysblog.blogspot.co... by Andrew Zajac http://www.chicagotribune.com...,1,6574250.story?coll=chi-newsnation world-hed of the Chicago Tribune. (credit to digby for spotting it.)

As long as we're discussing ignorant neocons, don't miss Juan Cole's devastating exposure http://www.juancole.com/2004_... of neocon idiocy:

[i]Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment's thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture[/i]. - http://www.antiwar.com/blog/i...

RIDICULING NEOCON IGNORANCE: THESE BUNGLING CROOKS SURE AIN'T 'GENIUSES'!!!

06.24.04 (6:21 am) [edit]

TREATED LIKE CHILDREN ...

06.24.04 (6:14 am) [edit]

[b]On Iraq, White House treats public like children[/b]

You always promised yourself you weren't going to say it.

You hated when it was said to you and you swore that when you had children, you'd never say it to them. Then comes a day when the little monsters have you encircled like the wagon train in an old Western. Having been told they can't do whatever foolish or dangerous thing they had their hearts set on, they hit you with a whining litany: Why? Why? Why?

And before you know it, you hear yourself explode. "Why? Because I said so, that's why!"

It feels more satisfying than you'd have imagined, a forceful reminder that you're the parent and you don't have to explain.

George W. Bush had himself a moment like that last week while responding to the latest finding by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. No credible evidence of a tie between Iraq and Sept. 11 can be found, it said.

Yet when asked why he keeps insisting such a tie exists, the president said, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida."

In other words, there's a tie because he said so.

Bush followed that rather peevish performance by dancing a spiffy Macarena on a rhetorical tightrope, noting that his administration never explicitly said Iraq had a hand in the 2001 terrorist attacks. Which is true enough as far as it goes. But the administration never missed a chance to imply such a link. Just last year, the president told us that combat in Iraq "is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001."

Small wonder polls show that the American people believe Saddam Hussein somehow had a hand in the attacks. And even now, Vice President Dick Cheney can't quite let it go. Asked directly on CNBC whether Iraq was involved in the atrocity, the best he could muster was, "We don't know."

Let's review, shall we?

In January of this year, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill accuses President Bush of having come into office intent on finding a rationale for invading Iraq. A White House official calls that "laughable."

In March, former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke accuses the president of obsessively asserting an Iraqi connection to Sept. 11 for which there is no evidence. The White House describes him as incompetent and uninformed.

Now comes June, and a bipartisan commission - that means Republicans AND Democrats, folks - says that after reviewing U.S. and foreign intelligence, it can find no evidence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. In response to which, Vice President Cheney accuses the media(!) of being "malicious," "irresponsible" and "lazy."

What does all this tell us? Beside the fact that the messenger better wear a bulletproof vest around these people, I mean?

Well, I can't put it any better than Clinton-era terrorism expert Daniel Benjamin, who was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying, "At this point, the White House position is just frankly bizarre. ... They're just repeating themselves, rather than admit they were wrong."

Which is the most troubling aspect of this. I can accept that mistakes are made by competent people acting in good faith. What is impossible to accept is the stonewalling refusal to concede that mistakes were made or indeed, were even possible. This is a White House that creates its own reality, that will insist till the end of days that white is black and right is left and smear you blind if you disagree.

Meantime, we pour treasure and blood into Iraq for reasons that seem more insubstantial and insupportable everyday. And when you ask the White House about it, it wraps itself in the flag and repeats the party line in a louder voice.

"Because I said so" may silence children, but we are not children. It's time the White House stopped treating us as if we were. - http://www.pjstar.com/news/ed...

BUSH WHITE HOUSE MONSTERS TREAT US LIKE CHILDREN (LET'S GROW UP & OUST THEM)!!!

06.24.04 (6:10 am) [edit]

IRAQ WAR ANALYSIS PAINTS GRIM PICTURE

06.24.04 (6:06 am) [edit]

[b]Iraq War Analysis Paints Grim Picture [/b]

Unless you own a lot of stock in Halliburton or other big defence, security, or construction companies, chances are the Iraq war has turned out to be a pretty bad investment, both in human lives and taxpayer dollars, according to a new assessment by a progressive Washington-based think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

In what it claims is the first comprehensive accounting of the costs of the war on the U.S., Iraq, and much of the rest of the world, IPS concludes that not only have U.S. taxpayers paid a "very high price for the war," they have also become "less secure at home and in the world."

Citing a number of recent studies, the report, "Paying the Price: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War," also notes that the $151.1 billion that will have been spent through this fiscal year could have paid for comprehensive health care for 82 million U.S. children or the salaries of nearly three million elementary school teachers. According to one study cited in the 54-page report, the war and occupation will cost the average U.S. household at least $3,415 through the end of this year.

If spent on international programs, the same sum could have cut world hunger in half and covered HIV/AIDS medicine, childhood immunization, and clean water and sanitation needs of all developing countries for more than two years.

The report's release comes just a week before the planned handover by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq's "sovereignty" to the interim government, although its authors stress that the new Iraqi authorities will exercise only very limited authority given the continuing presence and autonomy of more than 160,000 U.S. and foreign troops under U.S. military command and their inability to rescind nearly 100 orders decreed by the CPA chief Paul Bremer.

It also comes amid a number of other negative assessments, including by Bremer himself, as well as by a series of public-opinion surveys in Iraq about the occupation's achievements, both for the U.S. and Iraqis.

According to one mid-May poll that was commissioned for the CPA, more than 80 percent of Iraqis say they have no confidence in the occupation authorities, and 55 percent said they would feel safer if coalition forces left the country.

While the financial costs of the war are enormous, according to the report, the costs in blood, both for U.S. citizens and Iraqis, are by no means insignificant.

More than 850 U.S. troops have been killed since the start of the war on March 19, 2003, just over 700 of them since U.S. President George W. Bush declared the end of major hostilities on May 1, 2003, making the post-combat phase of the war by far the bloodiest U.S. engagement since the Indochina conflict.

In addition, more than 5,134 troops were wounded through June 16, 4,593 of them since the official end of combat. Nearly two-thirds of the wounded, according to the report, received injuries serious enough to prevent them from returning to duty.

But despite precision bombing and other weapons and tactics designed to reduce "collateral damage," the toll among Iraqis has been far more dramatic, according to the report whose principal author was Phyllis Bennis, IPS' main Middle East analyst.

As of June 16, it estimates that between 9,436 and 11,317 civilians have been killed as a direct result of the U.S. invasion and ensuing occupation, while an estimated 40,000 Iraqis have been injured. In addition, during "major combat" operations both during the invasion and after May 1, 2003, the report estimates that between 4,895 and 6,370 Iraqi soldiers and insurgents were killed as of mid-June.

Moreover, these figures do not take account of the long-run health impacts of the estimated 1,100 to 2,200 tons of ordnance made from depleted uranium (DU), which many scientists blamed for illnesses among U.S. soldiers in the first Gulf War and a seven-fold increase in child birth defects in southern Iraq since 1991, that were expended during the March 2003 bombing campaign.

Nor do they account for the psychological impact of both the war and the skyrocketing violence, including murders, rapes, and kidnapping, that followed the invasion and that now keeps many Iraqi children from attending school and requires many women to stay off the streets at night. Violent deaths, according to the report, rose from an average of 14 per month in 2002 to 357 per month in 2003.

Despite promises by the Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) to rebuild and expand Iraq's infrastructure, the country is still not producing as much electricity or as much oil on a sustained basis as it was just before the war, according to the report. Its authors blame a combination of sabotage by insurgents and incompetence and profiteering by big U.S. companies like Halliburton that captured virtually all of the reconstruction contracts despite the much greater experience of Iraqi firms.

Due to security concerns, school attendance is reportedly running below pre-war levels, while Iraq's hospitals and health systems have been overwhelmed by a combination of lack of supplies and unprecedented demand created by the ongoing violence.

"We have played a large part in destroying this country," said Bennis, who recalled the first Gulf War and the 13 years of U.S.-backed UN sanctions that had already weakened much of Iraq's infrastructure before the war.

Washington's invasion and occupation have also exacted other costs for which the United States may have to pay for a very long time, according to the report, which cites a recent assessment by the conservative International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) that the Iraq war has greatly increased recruitment by al-Qaeda and similar radical groups. The London-based think tank estimated al-Qaeda's membership at 18,000 with 1,000 active in Iraq.

That assessment also echoes the conclusion of a new book by a top active-duty Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer to be released next week that "there is nothing that (al-Qaeda chief Osama) bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq." The author, "Anonymous," until recently headed the CIA efforts to track down bin Laden and is considered an expert on al-Qaeda.

Washington has also dealt a serious blow to its own standing and credibility in the larger world, as well as in Arab and Islamic nations, according to the report, which cites recent surveys of public opinion in more than two dozen countries, including its closest European allies; the weakening of the United Nations and international law resulting from both the precedent created by going to war unilaterally and in the inhumane treatment of detainees in both Afghanistan and Iraq; and the alienation of the Iraqi public.

"Rather than winning hearts, U.S. actions have destroyed lives," said Anas Shallal, an Iraqi-American who founded the Mesopotamia Cultural Society and contributed to the report.

[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/?articleid=2870" title="http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2870" target="_blank"http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?...

BUSH'S FIASCO: IRAQ WAR ANALYSIS PAINTS A GRIM PICTURE!!!

06.24.04 (6:03 am) [edit]

MEDIA REFORM NEEDED: U.S. MEDIA CORPORATE-OWNED & PROPAGANDIZE FOR CORRUPT BUSHIES

06.23.04 (2:34 pm) [edit]

[b]This is the Fight of Our Lives

by Bill Moyers

Keynote speech
Inequality Matters Forum
New York University
June 3, 2004[/b]

"The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us."
-- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004

It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about.

Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city's elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year -- for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library -- no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes -- "b" and "r" -- missing. There is no card catalog in the library -- no index cards or computer.

Something to get mad about.

Here's something else: Caroline Payne's face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit. Because they don't fit, she is continuously turned down for jobs on account of her appearance. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler's new book,' The Working Poor: Invisible in America'. She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned her own home and having earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will to move up, but not the resources to deal with unexpected and overlapping problems like a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots and move on. "In the house of the poor," Shipler writes "...the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another."

Here's something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year -- families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington Post called this "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed," said the Post, "but they're not."

And this, too, is something to get mad about. Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years -- the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it -- among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns. During the last decade, I produced a series of documentaries for PBS called "Surviving the Good Times." The title refers to the boom time of the '90s when the country achieved the longest period of economic growth in its entire history. Some good things happened then, but not everyone shared equally in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began with a sustained period of downsizing by corporations moving jobs out of America and many of those people never recovered what was taken from them. We decided early on to tell the stories of two families in Milwaukee -- one black, one white -- whose breadwinners were laid off in the first wave of layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping with the wrenching changes in their lives, and we stayed with them over the next ten years as they tried to find a place in the new global economy. They're the kind of Americans my mother would have called "the salt of the earth." They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week -- both mothers have had to take full-time jobs.

During our time with them, the fathers in both families became seriously ill. One had to stay in the hospital two months, putting his family $30,000 in debt because they didn't have adequate health insurance. We were there with our camera when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of the other family because they couldn't meet the mortgage payments after dad lost his good-paying manufacturing job. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that they are patriotic. They love this country. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. When our film opens, both families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade they were no longer paying attention to politics. They don't see it connecting to their lives. They don't think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them. They know this, and we know this. For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the case. As the economist Jeff Madrick reminds us, the pressures of inequality on middle and working class Americans are now quite severe. "The strain on working people and on family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. And life has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means." You can find many sources to support this conclusion. I like the language of a small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American Democracy. They conclude that working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."

Household economics is not the only area where inequality is growing in America. Equality doesn't mean equal incomes, but a fair and decent society where money is not the sole arbiter of status or comfort. In a fair and just society, the commonwealth will be valued even as individual wealth is encouraged.

Let me make something clear here. I wasn't born yesterday. I'm old enough to know that the tension between haves and have-nots are built into human psychology, it is a constant in human history, and it has been a factor in every society. But I also know America was going to be different. I know that because I read Mr. Jefferson's writings, Mr. Lincoln's speeches and other documents in the growing American creed. I presumptuously disagreed with Thomas Jefferson about human equality being self-evident. Where I lived, neither talent, nor opportunity, nor outcomes were equal. Life is rarely fair and never equal. So what could he possibly have meant by that ringing but ambiguous declaration: "All men are created equal"? Two things, possibly. One, although none of us are good, all of us are sacred (Glenn Tinder), that's the basis for thinking we are by nature kin.

Second, he may have come to see the meaning of those words through the experience of the slave who was his mistress. As is now widely acknowledged, the hands that wrote "all men are created equal" also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman named Sally Hennings. She bore him six children whom he never acknowledged as his own, but who were the only slaves freed by his will when he died -- the one request we think Sally Hennings made of her master. Thomas Jefferson could not have been insensitive to the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms. He had to know she was his equal in her desire for life, her longing for liberty, her passion for happiness.

In his book on the Declaration, my late friend Mortimer Adler said Jefferson realized that whatever things are really good for any human being are really good for all other human beings. The happy or good life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction of the same needs inherent in human nature. A just society is grounded in that recognition. So Jefferson kept as a slave a woman whose nature he knew was equal to his. All Sally Hennings got from her long sufferance -- perhaps it was all she sought from what may have grown into a secret and unacknowledged love -- was that he let her children go. "Let my children go" -- one of the oldest of all petitions. It has long been the promise of America -- a broken promise, to be sure. But the idea took hold that we could fix what was broken so that our children would live a bountiful life. We could prevent the polarization between the very rich and the very poor that poisoned other societies. We could provide that each and every citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a voice in the system of self-government, and a better chance for their children. We could preclude the vast divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the very countries from which so many of our families had fled.

We were going to do these things because we understood our dark side -- none of us is good -- but we also understood the other side -- all of us are sacred. From Jefferson forward we have grappled with these two notions in our collective head -- that we are worthy of the creator but that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Believing the one and knowing the other, we created a country where the winners didn't take all. Through a system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a safe, if shifting, equilibrium between wealth and commonwealth. We believed equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy. So early on [in Jeff Madrick's description,] primary schooling was made free to all. States changed laws to protect debtors, often the relatively poor, against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most, if not all, white comers, rather than held for the elite. The government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. The court challenged monopoly -- all in the name of we the people.

In my time we went to public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first car for $450 I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and stopped to rest in state-maintained public parks. This is what I mean by the commonwealth. Rudely recognized in its formative years, always subject to struggle, constantly vulnerable to reactionary counterattacks, the notion of America as a shared project has been the central engine of our national experience.

Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on -- the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.

We could have seen this coming if we had followed the money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here -- has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."

Small wonder that with the exception of people like John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. Hit the pause button here, and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White House with President Clinton; he wanted help in securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him called before congressional hearings on the financial excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they pressed him he told the senators: "Look, when it comes to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just playing by your rules." One senator then asked if Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in his reply: "No, senator, I think money's a bit more (important) than the vote."

So what does this come down to, practically?

Here is one accounting:

"When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed."

I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. Time's premier investigative journalists -- Donald Bartlett and James Steele -- concluded in a series last year that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many." Economic inequality begets political inequality, and vice versa.

That's why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned off by politics. It's why we're losing the balance between wealth and the commonwealth. It's why we can't put things right. And it is the single most destructive force tearing at the soul of democracy. Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' " Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.

I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.

To create the intellectual framework for this takeover of public policy they funded conservative think tanks -- The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute -- that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.

To put political muscle behind these ideas they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class -- Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post -- wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who mounted a cultural war providing a smokescreen for the class war, hiding the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the cause of privilege.

In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman describes what he calls the "neo-economy -- a place without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds -- and [said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won."

Look at the spoils of victory:

Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts -- almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country.

Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.

Cuts in taxes on investment income.

And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.

Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.

These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" -- with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

And they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of practicing journalism I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers report that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in social security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter."

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.

But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy -- is no laughing matter. Go online and read the transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the California power market in telephone calls in which they gloat about ripping off "those poor grandmothers." Read how they talk about political contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in loans to low-income, high risk borrowers - the largest penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few clicks later, you can find the story of how a subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip off the government and the poor.

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this isn't class war, what is?

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this gathering confirms that while an America with liberty and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media -- my industry -- would help mend this broken promise and save this cause. After all, the sight of police dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America to recognize the reality of racial injustice. The sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us to recognize the war was unwinnable. The sight of terrorists striking the World Trade Center woke us from a long slumber of denial and distraction. I thought the mass media might awaken Americans to the reality that this ideology of winner-take-all is working against them and not for them. I was wrong. With honorable exceptions, we can't count on the mass media.

What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes -- there's plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives. - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

UN SLAMS US OVER BUSH'S FRAUDULENT SPENDING (THEFT) OF IRAQI OIL FUNDS

06.23.04 (6:28 am) [edit]

[b]UN slams US over spending Iraq funds[/b]

[[i]While you read this consider that Bush is stealing over $1 Billion per week from the US Treasury (i.e. US Taxpayers-- not the rich who were awarded massive tax cuts by Bush!) that he is funnelling into his Crime Family's pockets as well as his corporate pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.][/i]

United Nations-mandated auditors have sharply criticised the US occupation authority for the way it has spent more than $11bn in Iraqi oil revenues and say they have faced "resistance" from coalition officials.

In an interim report, obtained by the Financial Times, KPMG says the Development Fund for Iraq, which is managed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority and channels oil revenue into reconstruction projects, is "open to fraudulent acts".

The auditors criticise the CPA's bookkeeping and warn: "The CPA does not have effective controls over the ministries' spending of their individually allocated budgets, whether the funds are direct from the CPA or via the ministry of finance."

The findings come after US complaints about the UN's administration of the oil-for-food programme under Saddam Hussein.

According to the CPA, the Development Fund for Iraq has taken in $20.2bn since last May and has disbursed $11.3bn, with $4.6bn left in outstanding commitments.

One adviser to a member of the recently disbanded Iraqi Governing Council said the report raised the fear that no audit of the CPA's work would ever be completed. "If the auditors don't finish by June 30, they never will, because the CPA staff are going home," he said. "I lament the lack of transparency and lack of involvement by Iraqis."

The KPMG auditors are answerable to the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, set up by the UN Security Council in May last year to oversee coalition spending from the development fund. The account contains oil revenues, frozen assets and money left over from the UN's oil-for-food programme.

The watchdog comprises representatives of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. It spent much of last year battling with occupation administrators over the watchdog's remit. Officials said they were able to begin working in earnest only in April.

In their first interim report, KPMG said it had "encountered resistance from CPA staff". CPA staff told KPMG they were overworked and had given them a "low priority".

The UN decided this month that responsibility for the Development Fund for Iraq will pass to the Iraqi interim government and be monitored by the the IAMB. The panel also intends to widen its scrutiny of past CPA spending by examining reports and audits by the Pentagon's inspector general and the General Accounting Office, an official said.

IAMB officials were meeting in Paris on Monday and were not available for comment.

Some of KPMG's most damning criticisms were of the State Organisation for Marketing Oil, responsible for the sale of Iraq's most crucial asset. Oil sales, which go into the US-controlled fund, have topped $10bn since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Somo's only record of barter transactions was "an independent database, derived from verbal confirmations gained by Somo staff", the report found.

The CPA declined to address the KPMG report, saying only that it "has been and will continue to discharge its responsibilities under the Iraqi Development Fund".

One Iraqi minister due to take office on June 30 told the FT he and many colleagues felt "let down by how the CPA has controlled resources". - http://news.ft.com/servlet/Co...

BUSH'S FRAUDULENT RAPE OF IRAQI OIL & US TAXPAYERS: BIGGEST CASH COW FOR BUSH CRIME FAMILY & CO.

06.23.04 (6:21 am) [edit]

BUSH LIES IN COVER-UP & RUMSFELD APPROVED USE OF TORTURE ...

06.23.04 (6:16 am) [edit]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush said he has never ordered the torture of Iraqi or al Qaeda prisoners as the White House on Tuesday released secret documents showing the use of dogs to induce fear was approved among interrogation methods at Guantanamo Bay and then abandoned.

The White House release of a thick file of newly declassified papers tried to demonstrate that Bush and his top aides, in setting policy on interrogation methods, insisted that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be treated humanely.

"Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being," Bush told reporters at the White House.

But Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont accused the White House of releasing a "self-serving selection" of documents. "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," he said.

The documents showed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved harsh interrogation techniques for Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, only to rescind many of those weeks later and approve less aggressive techniques in April of 2003.

Treatment of the Guantanamo detainees, including interrogation methods, has come under scrutiny following a scandal over abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Rumsfeld originally approved aggressive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay after military leaders there complained in a memo that "current guidelines for interrogation procedures at GTMO limit the ability of interrogators to counter advanced resistance."

The Guantanamo Bay leaders requested permission to use a wet towel and dripping water to induce "the misperception of suffocation" and the use of "mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing."

In response, in December 2002 Rumsfeld approved tactics such as forcing a detainee to stand up for up four hours, forced isolation for up to 30 days, deprivation of light, use of 20-hour interrogations, removal of clothing, forced shaving of facial hair, "inducing stress by use of detainee's fears (e.g., dogs)," and use of mild physical contact that did not cause injury.

A Pentagon legal brief recommending the use of the tactics argued that the proposed techniques were likely to pass constitutional muster as long as they were applied "in a good faith effort and not maliciously or sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm."

"The federal torture statute will not be violated as long as any of the proposed strategies are not specifically intended to cause severe physical pain or suffering or prolonged mental harm," the legal brief said.

White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales played down some of the documents produced by lawyers as "abstract legal theories" that "do not reflect the policies the administration ultimately adopted."

The methods actually used, according to a memo, fell somewhat short of what Rumsfeld approved, such as 20-hour interrogations and deprivation of light and forced shaving.

Rumsfeld abruptly rescinded most of the aggressive tactics in a Jan. 15, 2003, order and said if any of them were believed needed a request should be forwarded to him for a decision with a "thorough justification" and a "detailed plan for the use of such techniques."

Then in April 2003, Rumsfeld outlined a new list of interrogation techniques that permitted significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee, "sleep adjustment," "changing the diet of a detainee" with no intended deprivation of food or water, and isolation of detainees.

An August 1, 2002, Justice Department memo detailed how to avoid violating U.S. and international terror statutes while interrogating prisoners.

White House officials insisted the broad policy was that prisoners should be treated humanely, but included in the documents was an active discussion of how far interrogations could go without being called torture.

"We're going to be aggressive in our interrogations. There's no question about that," Gonzales said. He insisted that the United States would not engage in torture and said the administration uses the definition of torture provided by Congress as "a specific intent to inflict severe physical or mental harm or suffering."

The documents outlined previous and current techniques for nearly 600 al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners now at Guantanamo Bay, most taken in Afghanistan.

A Feb. 7, 2002, memo from Bush to top members of his administration said al Qaeda and Taliban detainees were to be "treated humanely and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles" of the Geneva Convention.

Gonzales denied Bush's determination contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. "We categorically reject any connections," he said.

A top Pentagon lawyer, Daniel Dell'Orto, said it was clear from the start that the Geneva Convention would apply in Iraq.

He said any abuses at Guantanamo were punished.

He cited an incident in which a female interrogator took off her blouse, kept her T-shirt on, sat on a detainee's lap "as part of her interrogation technique" and ran her hands through his hair. She was suspended from duties for 30 days. - http://news.myway.com/top/art...|top|06-22-2004::19:25|re uters.html

BUSH LIES (AGAIN) & RUMSFELD APPROVED USE OF TORTURE ...

06.23.04 (6:15 am) [edit]

[b]U.S. Approved Use of Dogs Against Prisoners[/b]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush said he has never ordered the torture of Iraqi or al Qaeda prisoners as the White House on Tuesday released secret documents showing the use of dogs to induce fear was approved among interrogation methods at Guantanamo Bay and then abandoned.

The White House release of a thick file of newly declassified papers tried to demonstrate that Bush and his top aides, in setting policy on interrogation methods, insisted that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be treated humanely.

"Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being," Bush told reporters at the White House.

But Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont accused the White House of releasing a "self-serving selection" of documents. "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," he said.

The documents showed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved harsh interrogation techniques for Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, only to rescind many of those weeks later and approve less aggressive techniques in April of 2003.

Treatment of the Guantanamo detainees, including interrogation methods, has come under scrutiny following a scandal over abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Rumsfeld originally approved aggressive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay after military leaders there complained in a memo that "current guidelines for interrogation procedures at GTMO limit the ability of interrogators to counter advanced resistance."

The Guantanamo Bay leaders requested permission to use a wet towel and dripping water to induce "the misperception of suffocation" and the use of "mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing."

In response, in December 2002 Rumsfeld approved tactics such as forcing a detainee to stand up for up four hours, forced isolation for up to 30 days, deprivation of light, use of 20-hour interrogations, removal of clothing, forced shaving of facial hair, "inducing stress by use of detainee's fears (e.g., dogs)," and use of mild physical contact that did not cause injury.

A Pentagon legal brief recommending the use of the tactics argued that the proposed techniques were likely to pass constitutional muster as long as they were applied "in a good faith effort and not maliciously or sadistically for the very purpose of causing ha