Thursday, August 14, 2003
PROTESTS
It was not just 16 words. It was every word concerning Iraq's nuclear weapons program in George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech.
The president's principal argument for going to war -- to prevent a "smoking gun that would appear as a mushroom cloud" -- was based on bad intelligence that was misused while good intelligence was ignored. - Peter D. Zimmerman, "The Bush Deceit", Washington Post, 8/14, p.A19
Protests!
They're happening all the time, and not just in Iraq. For oh so long the major media have not done their job in reporting grass roots protests as well as Democratic press conferences denouncing Bush Administration policies. So, we turn to the local, independent or internet press. This time:
According to the Arizona Daily Star (Michael Marizco and Tim Steller),
More than 200 people lined the Catalina Highway, and about 550 demonstrated in front of Republican headquarters in two separate protests Monday, denouncing foreign and domestic policies of President Bush... Monday morning, 200 people stood at the base of Mount Lemmon and blasted Bush's forest-management proposals as a pro-business fraud.
While Bush promoted his Healthy Forests Initiative at Inspiration Rock, 5,000 feet above the demonstration, protester Jeff Larson stood in the heat below and called the initiative a sham.
"They're using forest health as a euphemism for handing free timber to industry," said Larson, 30, a University of Arizona graduate student in sociology.
Meanwhile, the BBC reported that the almost commonplace "large crowds of Iraqi Shia Muslims" again demonstrated in Baghdad, this time accusing them (the U.S.) of defiling a religious school. The protests, involving thousands, were triggered when the crew of an American helicopter flying close to the school's communications tower appeared to try to tear down an Islamic flag.
An Iraqi civilian was killed after US troops opened fire on the demonstrators who started throwing stones and chanting "No, no to America".
Additionally, the Information Clearinghouse (informationclearinghouse.com) reported that Prominent Iraqis who despised Saddam Hussein will take up arms against U.S. forces if life under occupation does not quickly improve, a senior U.N. official told the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur in an interview published Wednesday. .
Economics: Widely reported were quotes from two notables, Professor George Akerlof, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner and professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, who said "The proper reference point is that the Bush fiscal policy is the worst policy in 200 years." And, Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize winner of economics and former prof. at MIT, added, "There has been a dissipation of the huge budget surplus, and all we have to show for that is the city of Baghdad."
Follow-up: Letter-to-the-editor at the Washington PostI noted in the previous blogs (a reminder: if you're a glutton, you can re-read at http://www.global-equality.org/news/blog/index.shtml. Previous blogs are archived there.) that the Washington Post editorial remained out-of-touch with its damning (of the Bushies) news item of Sunday...(and with today's, noted at the top). The Post's editorial had said that Al Gore had "blurred" vision when he "breathlessly" said that the public was fooled by the Bush administration's "systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology." So, here's the follow-up:
Al Gore's Clear Thinking
Wednesday, August 13, 2003; Page A26
The Post's Aug. 10 editorial "Mr. Gore's Blurred View" warned the Democrats about choosing a "dangerous direction" for the party and the country. Why Al Gore's criticism of President Bush is dangerous for the country goes unsaid.
The editorial associated Mr. Gore's speech with "every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left." But Mr. Gore was criticizing not just the administration but the Washington press corps.
The press, including until recently The Post, has failed to challenge the administration on its factually challenged approach to policy. Polls show that the public is deeply misinformed about the lack of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda (or the 9/11 attacks), and about the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Who is responsible for this?
The Post also dismissed Mr. Gore's criticism of President Bush's economic and environmental policies because "many other people support those policies." That's no response, of course, but even so Mr. Bush's approval rating has fallen to 55 percent because of those policies. And by the way, the fact that 98 senators voted for the Patriot Act doesn't mean that it's not an extreme invasion of privacy rights in the name of fighting terrorism.
Finally, The Post accused Mr. Gore of trying to "have it both ways" by "pandering to anti-Bush passion while protecting his national-security flank." But only a partisan supporter of the president would argue that criticizing Mr. Bush is inconsistent with national security.
So what is incorrect about Mr. Gore's position?
BALDWIN ROBERTSON
Washington
What's Happening, Iraq:
Worsening Relations between troops and Iraqis: More reports of the killing of civilians, including newly "trained" Iraqi police. The Occupation is becoming still more problematic.
Disturbing Report re Payoff: WorldNetDaily.com (Paul Sperry) has a striking report, that the former intelligence head at the Energy Department who played yes-man, seconding the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear arms program, was rewarded with over $20,5000 in bonuses in the months prior to the war.
Thomas Rider, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September.
His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say.
Rider ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting.
CSPAN: Military families' press conference: This is a second-hand report, something I blogged about previously. The demand: US soldiers in Iraq should be brought home NOW. The chaos in Iraq and the soldiers' anger were reported; references to the media were that their reports bore "no resemblance" to what was actually happening.
Accompanying information can come from military web sites; aside from ones listed previously, Soldiers for the Truth (sftt.org) and retired colonel David Hackworth's own site, Hackworth.com are illuminating for what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Worth a visit.
Military Pay being Cut. I've written about this before. Back in April, extra allowances for soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines were granted for those in combat zones and for family separation. However, now they're trying to rescind it, saying that the higher rates don't square with "our other priorities." no comment.(source: San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Epstein) .
WMD: Be prepared. As I've warned, there will be a report, in a better news month, of our finding wmd in Iraq. David Kay will present mounds of paperwork and information that will describe what we already know, that Iraq had a program. The issue, of course, is whether they had an active program in 2002-3, one that posed "an imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies and friends", the phrase that Bush uttered countless times.
Deja Vu: The Return of the Air-Traffic Controllers; Another Busting of the Union?
Weird how they have quietly reconstituted, and now appear headed for a culmination of a labor-management struggle. The issue at hand is privatization, as the government wants to open some of the jobs to non-union workers, ostensibly, as usual, to "manage soaring costs" at the FAA..
Surface-to-air missiles: Unsettling, to say the least, to think of vulnerable civilian airliners. This was a sting operation, the apprehended sleaze never had a weapon, he had made no contact with al-Qaida. The real problem is that there are thousands of such on the 'market'. The sources: Hundreds of such that the U.S. gave the Afghan resistance (vs the Soviets) and an inexactly comparable number of Soviet weapons. Oy vey.
Back to the sting: Newsweek ( Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball ) cautions us to not overly congratulate authorities, as
top Justice Department officials are privately fuming over a premature news leak that may have blown a rare opportunity to penetrate Al Qaeda’s arms-buying network, Newsweek has learned.
The FBI's arrest of London-based arms dealer Hemant Lakhani, 68, at a hotel room near Newark Liberty International Airport this week was supposed to be only an interim step in what officials hoped would be a far more meaningful long-term operation, law-enforcement sources said. The bureau’s plan was to quickly flip Lakhani, a British citizen of Indian extraction, and then use him as an undercover informant who could lead agents to real-life Osama bin Laden operatives seeking sophisticated weapons.
Veteran criminal defense attorney Gerald Lefcourt summarized the sting at abc.com, "One would have to ask yourself, would this have occurred at all without the government?"
What's Happening: Afghanistan According to sify.com (India), the Taliban have now taken control of most of a province southeastern Afghanistan; they had been ousted from Zabul province in November, 2001.
The Qatar site peninsulaqatar.com reports that President Karzai is reshuffling military commanders and provincial governors in a western province. One commander who was removed, Ismail Khan, had been accused by human rights organizations of major human rights abuses.
the 9/11 front, More reports, this time from a terrorist trial in Germany, that the U.S. had information on one of the 9/11 hijackers, but didn't act on it.Marwan Alshehhi was tracked, his cell phone was known, links to suspected al-Qaida contacts were cited, yet... So, this is another report of "(CIA) intelligence failure" http://news.globalfreepress.com/article.pl?sid=03/08/13/139203
-R
The president's principal argument for going to war -- to prevent a "smoking gun that would appear as a mushroom cloud" -- was based on bad intelligence that was misused while good intelligence was ignored. - Peter D. Zimmerman, "The Bush Deceit", Washington Post, 8/14, p.A19
Protests!
They're happening all the time, and not just in Iraq. For oh so long the major media have not done their job in reporting grass roots protests as well as Democratic press conferences denouncing Bush Administration policies. So, we turn to the local, independent or internet press. This time:
According to the Arizona Daily Star (Michael Marizco and Tim Steller),
More than 200 people lined the Catalina Highway, and about 550 demonstrated in front of Republican headquarters in two separate protests Monday, denouncing foreign and domestic policies of President Bush... Monday morning, 200 people stood at the base of Mount Lemmon and blasted Bush's forest-management proposals as a pro-business fraud.
While Bush promoted his Healthy Forests Initiative at Inspiration Rock, 5,000 feet above the demonstration, protester Jeff Larson stood in the heat below and called the initiative a sham.
"They're using forest health as a euphemism for handing free timber to industry," said Larson, 30, a University of Arizona graduate student in sociology.
Meanwhile, the BBC reported that the almost commonplace "large crowds of Iraqi Shia Muslims" again demonstrated in Baghdad, this time accusing them (the U.S.) of defiling a religious school. The protests, involving thousands, were triggered when the crew of an American helicopter flying close to the school's communications tower appeared to try to tear down an Islamic flag.
An Iraqi civilian was killed after US troops opened fire on the demonstrators who started throwing stones and chanting "No, no to America".
Additionally, the Information Clearinghouse (informationclearinghouse.com) reported that Prominent Iraqis who despised Saddam Hussein will take up arms against U.S. forces if life under occupation does not quickly improve, a senior U.N. official told the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur in an interview published Wednesday. .
Economics: Widely reported were quotes from two notables, Professor George Akerlof, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner and professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, who said "The proper reference point is that the Bush fiscal policy is the worst policy in 200 years." And, Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize winner of economics and former prof. at MIT, added, "There has been a dissipation of the huge budget surplus, and all we have to show for that is the city of Baghdad."
Follow-up: Letter-to-the-editor at the Washington PostI noted in the previous blogs (a reminder: if you're a glutton, you can re-read at http://www.global-equality.org/news/blog/index.shtml. Previous blogs are archived there.) that the Washington Post editorial remained out-of-touch with its damning (of the Bushies) news item of Sunday...(and with today's, noted at the top). The Post's editorial had said that Al Gore had "blurred" vision when he "breathlessly" said that the public was fooled by the Bush administration's "systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology." So, here's the follow-up:
Al Gore's Clear Thinking
Wednesday, August 13, 2003; Page A26
The Post's Aug. 10 editorial "Mr. Gore's Blurred View" warned the Democrats about choosing a "dangerous direction" for the party and the country. Why Al Gore's criticism of President Bush is dangerous for the country goes unsaid.
The editorial associated Mr. Gore's speech with "every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left." But Mr. Gore was criticizing not just the administration but the Washington press corps.
The press, including until recently The Post, has failed to challenge the administration on its factually challenged approach to policy. Polls show that the public is deeply misinformed about the lack of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda (or the 9/11 attacks), and about the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Who is responsible for this?
The Post also dismissed Mr. Gore's criticism of President Bush's economic and environmental policies because "many other people support those policies." That's no response, of course, but even so Mr. Bush's approval rating has fallen to 55 percent because of those policies. And by the way, the fact that 98 senators voted for the Patriot Act doesn't mean that it's not an extreme invasion of privacy rights in the name of fighting terrorism.
Finally, The Post accused Mr. Gore of trying to "have it both ways" by "pandering to anti-Bush passion while protecting his national-security flank." But only a partisan supporter of the president would argue that criticizing Mr. Bush is inconsistent with national security.
So what is incorrect about Mr. Gore's position?
BALDWIN ROBERTSON
Washington
What's Happening, Iraq:
Worsening Relations between troops and Iraqis: More reports of the killing of civilians, including newly "trained" Iraqi police. The Occupation is becoming still more problematic.
Disturbing Report re Payoff: WorldNetDaily.com (Paul Sperry) has a striking report, that the former intelligence head at the Energy Department who played yes-man, seconding the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear arms program, was rewarded with over $20,5000 in bonuses in the months prior to the war.
Thomas Rider, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September.
His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say.
Rider ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting.
CSPAN: Military families' press conference: This is a second-hand report, something I blogged about previously. The demand: US soldiers in Iraq should be brought home NOW. The chaos in Iraq and the soldiers' anger were reported; references to the media were that their reports bore "no resemblance" to what was actually happening.
Accompanying information can come from military web sites; aside from ones listed previously, Soldiers for the Truth (sftt.org) and retired colonel David Hackworth's own site, Hackworth.com are illuminating for what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Worth a visit.
Military Pay being Cut. I've written about this before. Back in April, extra allowances for soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines were granted for those in combat zones and for family separation. However, now they're trying to rescind it, saying that the higher rates don't square with "our other priorities." no comment.(source: San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Epstein) .
WMD: Be prepared. As I've warned, there will be a report, in a better news month, of our finding wmd in Iraq. David Kay will present mounds of paperwork and information that will describe what we already know, that Iraq had a program. The issue, of course, is whether they had an active program in 2002-3, one that posed "an imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies and friends", the phrase that Bush uttered countless times.
Deja Vu: The Return of the Air-Traffic Controllers; Another Busting of the Union?
Weird how they have quietly reconstituted, and now appear headed for a culmination of a labor-management struggle. The issue at hand is privatization, as the government wants to open some of the jobs to non-union workers, ostensibly, as usual, to "manage soaring costs" at the FAA..
Surface-to-air missiles: Unsettling, to say the least, to think of vulnerable civilian airliners. This was a sting operation, the apprehended sleaze never had a weapon, he had made no contact with al-Qaida. The real problem is that there are thousands of such on the 'market'. The sources: Hundreds of such that the U.S. gave the Afghan resistance (vs the Soviets) and an inexactly comparable number of Soviet weapons. Oy vey.
Back to the sting: Newsweek ( Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball ) cautions us to not overly congratulate authorities, as
top Justice Department officials are privately fuming over a premature news leak that may have blown a rare opportunity to penetrate Al Qaeda’s arms-buying network, Newsweek has learned.
The FBI's arrest of London-based arms dealer Hemant Lakhani, 68, at a hotel room near Newark Liberty International Airport this week was supposed to be only an interim step in what officials hoped would be a far more meaningful long-term operation, law-enforcement sources said. The bureau’s plan was to quickly flip Lakhani, a British citizen of Indian extraction, and then use him as an undercover informant who could lead agents to real-life Osama bin Laden operatives seeking sophisticated weapons.
Veteran criminal defense attorney Gerald Lefcourt summarized the sting at abc.com, "One would have to ask yourself, would this have occurred at all without the government?"
What's Happening: Afghanistan According to sify.com (India), the Taliban have now taken control of most of a province southeastern Afghanistan; they had been ousted from Zabul province in November, 2001.
The Qatar site peninsulaqatar.com reports that President Karzai is reshuffling military commanders and provincial governors in a western province. One commander who was removed, Ismail Khan, had been accused by human rights organizations of major human rights abuses.
the 9/11 front, More reports, this time from a terrorist trial in Germany, that the U.S. had information on one of the 9/11 hijackers, but didn't act on it.Marwan Alshehhi was tracked, his cell phone was known, links to suspected al-Qaida contacts were cited, yet... So, this is another report of "(CIA) intelligence failure" http://news.globalfreepress.com/article.pl?sid=03/08/13/139203
-R
