Tuesday, August 12, 2003
8/12
These aren't "misstatements" or "slight exaggerations". These are well-crafted, finely tuned deceptions used to induce the citizens of a nation into war and occupation of another territory. The disgraceful use of our government for this purpose should sicken and disgust honest Americans - oliverwillis.com, re Bush on war
The Washington Post's Mixed Report Card:
Arguably the best account of the record of deception made it to Sunday's Post. The thorough examination by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
... indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied...
The account spelled out the pervasive misrepresentations that pervaded the policy.
WP Editorial Board Raps Gore
Despite their lead article in the Sunday Post, the editorial board took a rather Lieberman-ish position in decrying the Gore speech. Excerpt: The 2004 Presidential race seems to be carrying the Democratic Party in a dangerous direction on the issues of the Iraq war and national security -- dangerous for the nation and risky for the party too. Some of the candidates are more off course than others. If they listen to former vice president Al Gore, who took it upon himself last week to suggest a theme of attack for the nine candidates, they will all go off the cliff.
Mr. Gore, who not so long ago was describing Iraq as a "virulent threat in a class by itself," validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left. President Bush, in distorting evidence about the Iraqi threat, was pursuing policies "designed to benefit friends and supporters." The war was waged "at least partly in order to ensure our continued access to oil." And it occurred because "false impressions" precluded the nation from conducting a serious debate before the war.
This notion -- that we were all somehow bamboozled into war -- is part of Mr. Gore's larger conviction that Mr. Bush has put one over on the nation, and not just with regard to Iraq.
You can see why he might want to think so. Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents "a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism." But then how to explain that 98 senators -- including all four Democratic senators now running for president -- voted for it? The president's economic and environmental policies represent an "ideologically narrow agenda" serving only "powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle."
But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: "The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies. . . . "
Thus, Mr. Gore maintains, we were all under the "false impression" that Saddam Hussein was "on the verge of building nuclear bombs," that he was "about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs," that he was partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And because of these "false impressions," the nation didn't conduct a proper debate about the war. But there was extensive debate going back many years; last fall and winter the nation debated little else. Mr. Bush took his case to the United Nations. Congress argued about and approved a resolution authorizing war. ...He's not the only Democrat who thinks he can have it both ways, pandering to anti-Bush passion while protecting his national-security flank. Sen. John Kerry has been trying something similar with, for example, this applause line, which he must know can only stoke isolationist sentiment: "We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in Brooklyn." It would be possible to support firefighters in Brooklyn without questioning U.S. commitment to Iraq. Sen. Joe Lieberman has found plenty to criticize in the Bush administration foreign policy without abandoning his longstanding support of American strength and democracy promotion. It's an honorable position, and one that doesn't depend on portraying everyone else as poor saps duped by wizardly Bush propaganda.
Africa: Liberia and beyond:
I can't remember Africa dominating the news since the Congo's early years. With peacekeepers entering Liberia, perhaps we'll be able to acknowledge other countries and not merely assume Liberia is 'taken care of.' In fact, we've mostly monitored the Liberian situation from off-shore, and as the Washington Post noted, the Administration "made no provision for reigning in the rape, looting and gunfire..." As oft-observed, we intervene where we're at best questionably wanted, and are reluctant to act where the population desires our intervention. As food runs out, some question whether our inaction is racist.
Beyond Liberia- Burundi has had 10 years of civil war, reportedly resulting in 300,000 deaths. There's an historic ethnic division between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi.
A shaky peace exists between factions in Somalia, which is hoped to quiet 12 years of anarchy. Most of Somalia is a series of militia fiefdoms.
Health Care:
(1) single payer: A new clarion call for national health insurance was announced today at a press conference in New York. 7,782 U.S. physicians supported the call for single payer in the accompanying article in the current issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. A program on the issue was on On Point, WBUR's program today, Tuesday. One can hear it at www.onpointradio.org. Marcia Angell and David Himmelstein were guests.
(2) Fraud: Long invisible in major media, the Redding Hospital case had a page 1 article in Tuesday's NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/12/business/12TENE.html?hp). This is a truly amazing story of tens of thousands of unnecessary cardiac tests and proceedures at a small, rural community California hospital. Fabulous reading. Chuck Palson has steered me to a companion volume, Malcolm Sparrow's License to Steal which details the massive fraud in health care. Mind-boggling reading! Chuck talked with Sparrow, and elicited the thought that a single payer system would make fraud detection much easier.
What's Happening, Iraq:
* "To a man, morale is low" - NPR commentary, after announcement of deployment of troops is now 1 year
* Not in the news, but on the United States Central Command website, (http://www.centcom.mil/) one learns of three soldiers dying in their sleep and one from the heat. Added to the two that died in combat, it makes six deaths in the last four days.
* Bulgaria’s 500-man peacekeeping battalion is heading for the Southern Iraqi city of Kerbala. The Administration continues to seek additional help.
* The Independent's (UK, independent.co.uk) Justin Huggler ran a piece on how "Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
The Liberal Media: Pat Buchanan speaks:
“Bush also has something Nixon and Reagan never did.... Conservatives, libertarians, and populist of the right dominate talk radio, the Internet, and the cable-TV channels that are nibbling the network news to death, and they are fully competitive on the op-ed pages of the national press." - Patrick Buchanan, Atlantic Monthly, September, p.38
No Nukes:
An Anti-nuke rally at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory drew 1,200. The Contra Costa Times (bayarea.com, Sarah Krupp) Organizers reasoned that anger over the Iraqi policy and announcements as to a new generation of nuclear weapons had bolstered their numbers.
Liberal Media, II: Editor and Publisher (editorandpublisher.com,Greg Mitchell) writes of the dominance of conservatives in the media: "So-called 'liberal' newspapers tend to be more open-minded and willing to criticize a like-minded U.S. president than their "conservative" counterparts, according to a report released last week. In a study for The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, Michael Tomasky looked at 510 editorials over the past decade. He found that on their editorial pages The New York Times and The Washington Post criticized the Clinton administration 30% of the time. By contrast, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times opposed the Bush White House 7% of the time.
What's Happening: Afghanistan: Still more word re the Taliban's return. This time, from afgha.com
Afghanistan's former Taliban regime have decided to extend their guerilla attacks on the U.S.-led forces and their Afghan allies to the north of the country, a news report said on Sunday.
The Pakistani newspaper, The News, quoted a Taliban spokesman Mohmammad Amin as saying the Taliban soldiers had staged some attacks on the U.S.-backed Afghan government forces in some northern provinces in recent weeks.
Amin said these guerilla attacks would now be "stepped-up and spread to all of northern Afghanistan in the coming days and weeks".
Amin said the Taliban had named Mullah Mohammad Asim Muttaqi as its military commander for northern Faryab province bordering Turkmenistan and also appointed two deputies for him to intensify attacks against the forces of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a senior http://www.afgha.com/?af=article&sid=36160
Finally, it's vacation time. While most of us are taking some time, it is the ideal time to reach our legislators, as they are "home." Consider contacting your senators and representative in the next weeks.
-R
These aren't "misstatements" or "slight exaggerations". These are well-crafted, finely tuned deceptions used to induce the citizens of a nation into war and occupation of another territory. The disgraceful use of our government for this purpose should sicken and disgust honest Americans - oliverwillis.com, re Bush on war
The Washington Post's Mixed Report Card:
Arguably the best account of the record of deception made it to Sunday's Post. The thorough examination by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
... indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied...
The account spelled out the pervasive misrepresentations that pervaded the policy.
WP Editorial Board Raps Gore
Despite their lead article in the Sunday Post, the editorial board took a rather Lieberman-ish position in decrying the Gore speech. Excerpt: The 2004 Presidential race seems to be carrying the Democratic Party in a dangerous direction on the issues of the Iraq war and national security -- dangerous for the nation and risky for the party too. Some of the candidates are more off course than others. If they listen to former vice president Al Gore, who took it upon himself last week to suggest a theme of attack for the nine candidates, they will all go off the cliff.
Mr. Gore, who not so long ago was describing Iraq as a "virulent threat in a class by itself," validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left. President Bush, in distorting evidence about the Iraqi threat, was pursuing policies "designed to benefit friends and supporters." The war was waged "at least partly in order to ensure our continued access to oil." And it occurred because "false impressions" precluded the nation from conducting a serious debate before the war.
This notion -- that we were all somehow bamboozled into war -- is part of Mr. Gore's larger conviction that Mr. Bush has put one over on the nation, and not just with regard to Iraq.
You can see why he might want to think so. Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents "a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism." But then how to explain that 98 senators -- including all four Democratic senators now running for president -- voted for it? The president's economic and environmental policies represent an "ideologically narrow agenda" serving only "powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle."
But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: "The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies. . . . "
Thus, Mr. Gore maintains, we were all under the "false impression" that Saddam Hussein was "on the verge of building nuclear bombs," that he was "about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs," that he was partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And because of these "false impressions," the nation didn't conduct a proper debate about the war. But there was extensive debate going back many years; last fall and winter the nation debated little else. Mr. Bush took his case to the United Nations. Congress argued about and approved a resolution authorizing war. ...He's not the only Democrat who thinks he can have it both ways, pandering to anti-Bush passion while protecting his national-security flank. Sen. John Kerry has been trying something similar with, for example, this applause line, which he must know can only stoke isolationist sentiment: "We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in Brooklyn." It would be possible to support firefighters in Brooklyn without questioning U.S. commitment to Iraq. Sen. Joe Lieberman has found plenty to criticize in the Bush administration foreign policy without abandoning his longstanding support of American strength and democracy promotion. It's an honorable position, and one that doesn't depend on portraying everyone else as poor saps duped by wizardly Bush propaganda.
Africa: Liberia and beyond:
I can't remember Africa dominating the news since the Congo's early years. With peacekeepers entering Liberia, perhaps we'll be able to acknowledge other countries and not merely assume Liberia is 'taken care of.' In fact, we've mostly monitored the Liberian situation from off-shore, and as the Washington Post noted, the Administration "made no provision for reigning in the rape, looting and gunfire..." As oft-observed, we intervene where we're at best questionably wanted, and are reluctant to act where the population desires our intervention. As food runs out, some question whether our inaction is racist.
Beyond Liberia- Burundi has had 10 years of civil war, reportedly resulting in 300,000 deaths. There's an historic ethnic division between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi.
A shaky peace exists between factions in Somalia, which is hoped to quiet 12 years of anarchy. Most of Somalia is a series of militia fiefdoms.
Health Care:
(1) single payer: A new clarion call for national health insurance was announced today at a press conference in New York. 7,782 U.S. physicians supported the call for single payer in the accompanying article in the current issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. A program on the issue was on On Point, WBUR's program today, Tuesday. One can hear it at www.onpointradio.org. Marcia Angell and David Himmelstein were guests.
(2) Fraud: Long invisible in major media, the Redding Hospital case had a page 1 article in Tuesday's NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/12/business/12TENE.html?hp). This is a truly amazing story of tens of thousands of unnecessary cardiac tests and proceedures at a small, rural community California hospital. Fabulous reading. Chuck Palson has steered me to a companion volume, Malcolm Sparrow's License to Steal which details the massive fraud in health care. Mind-boggling reading! Chuck talked with Sparrow, and elicited the thought that a single payer system would make fraud detection much easier.
What's Happening, Iraq:
* "To a man, morale is low" - NPR commentary, after announcement of deployment of troops is now 1 year
* Not in the news, but on the United States Central Command website, (http://www.centcom.mil/) one learns of three soldiers dying in their sleep and one from the heat. Added to the two that died in combat, it makes six deaths in the last four days.
* Bulgaria’s 500-man peacekeeping battalion is heading for the Southern Iraqi city of Kerbala. The Administration continues to seek additional help.
* The Independent's (UK, independent.co.uk) Justin Huggler ran a piece on how "Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
The Liberal Media: Pat Buchanan speaks:
“Bush also has something Nixon and Reagan never did.... Conservatives, libertarians, and populist of the right dominate talk radio, the Internet, and the cable-TV channels that are nibbling the network news to death, and they are fully competitive on the op-ed pages of the national press." - Patrick Buchanan, Atlantic Monthly, September, p.38
No Nukes:
An Anti-nuke rally at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory drew 1,200. The Contra Costa Times (bayarea.com, Sarah Krupp) Organizers reasoned that anger over the Iraqi policy and announcements as to a new generation of nuclear weapons had bolstered their numbers.
Liberal Media, II: Editor and Publisher (editorandpublisher.com,Greg Mitchell) writes of the dominance of conservatives in the media: "So-called 'liberal' newspapers tend to be more open-minded and willing to criticize a like-minded U.S. president than their "conservative" counterparts, according to a report released last week. In a study for The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, Michael Tomasky looked at 510 editorials over the past decade. He found that on their editorial pages The New York Times and The Washington Post criticized the Clinton administration 30% of the time. By contrast, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times opposed the Bush White House 7% of the time.
What's Happening: Afghanistan: Still more word re the Taliban's return. This time, from afgha.com
Afghanistan's former Taliban regime have decided to extend their guerilla attacks on the U.S.-led forces and their Afghan allies to the north of the country, a news report said on Sunday.
The Pakistani newspaper, The News, quoted a Taliban spokesman Mohmammad Amin as saying the Taliban soldiers had staged some attacks on the U.S.-backed Afghan government forces in some northern provinces in recent weeks.
Amin said these guerilla attacks would now be "stepped-up and spread to all of northern Afghanistan in the coming days and weeks".
Amin said the Taliban had named Mullah Mohammad Asim Muttaqi as its military commander for northern Faryab province bordering Turkmenistan and also appointed two deputies for him to intensify attacks against the forces of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a senior http://www.afgha.com/?af=article&sid=36160
Finally, it's vacation time. While most of us are taking some time, it is the ideal time to reach our legislators, as they are "home." Consider contacting your senators and representative in the next weeks.
-R
