Saturday, August 16, 2003
Black-out: Follow-up:
"We’ll have time to look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized. I happen to think it does, and have said so all along.” - Bush, 8/14-15
They lie as they breathe. Actually, in June of 2001, Bush opposed and the congressional GOP voted down legislation that would have provided $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation’s power grid. We did know then of weaknesses in reliability and capacity. Studies by the Energy Department showing that the grid was in desperate need of upgrades were cited. Yet, the Bush Administration lobbied against it and the Republicans voted it down three separate times. Every issue, every issue...
What's Happening Iraq:
The Resistance:NPR did more programming on who is shooting at the US troops, admitting that they are not merely Saddamites, that it's a growing and increasingly organized resistance.
The Sydney Morning Herald (smh.com, Paul McGeough) developed that motif, finding that the U.S. faces "a new guerilla movement with growing popular support":
The Pentagon, the US military and American analysts are reluctant to acknowledge popular support for the Iraqi resistance. If the accounts of the resistance given to the Herald in interviews in the past 10 days are accurate, what is emerging in Iraq is a centrally controlled movement, driven as much by nationalism as the mosque, a movement that has left Saddam and the Baath Party behind and already is getting foreign funds for its bid to drive out the US army.
Just as Iraqi children are being coached to lie when foreigners inquire about their parents or the whereabouts of their homes, the families of resistance fighters deny their involvement in the war.
Finally, the Globe and Mail (Orly Hallpern) reports that Iraqi men are volunteering in droves for the Mahdi Army, an anti-U.S. occupation Shia force, named after a long-lost imam. While no guns have been distributed, one recruiter, who turned away a man trying to sign up his five-year-old son, said: "We don't have the ability, like a state, to import weapons, but everyone has his own gun at home anyway.
WMD Follow-up. Whoops. As the Guardian (Vikram Dodd, Nicholas Watt and Richard Norton Taylor) et al are reporting this AM,
Tony Blair's headline-grabbing claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so was based on hearsay information... The "Hutton inquiry" continues on Monday, and the Government continues to reel from the revelations.
Missile Sting: Follow-up: The FBI blamed the BBC for ruining its attempt to infiltrate al-Qaida when correspondent Tom Mangold ran an "exclusive" 10 O'Clock News report about the missile sting. The senior US government officials told Newsweek magazine that the ultimate aim of the elaborate sting was to catch Mr Lakhani - who has no terrorist links - and turn him into a government informant who might lead them to terrorists trying to buy weapons. The BBC demurred, saying that American correspondents were on the case as well. Mangold cited an ABC report, an internal "news flash" about the story that went out before his report. Whatever!
Pay Cut: Follow-up: All media carried the effort to quash the political quasi-firestorm that greeted the Pentagon's cutting the pay of serviceman by $225 as of September 30. Officially, the Pentagon denied that it would occur, then added that if it did, they would make up the pay "in other ways."
Single Payer Health Care Follow-up: Last Tuesday I buried well into that blog the news that almost 8000 physicians had signed a call for a single payer system. The Boston Globe actually placed that news on the front page on Wednesday, much to the surprise of many. Love that Globe! That same day, the hearing for the single payer bill in Massachusetts was re-scheduled for January, terrible timing for seniors to rally on the state house steps! Calls of protest are encouraged. ACTION: Call the office of the Legislature's Health Care Committee (1-617-722-2130) with the following message:
1. It is simply unacceptable that the hearing for S. 686, the Mass.
Health Care Trust bill, has been moved from October 8 to January 21.
2. You expect the House Chair of the Committee, Rep. Koutoujian, to
find a way to move the hearing for S. 686 back to its original date of October.
Economy: Polls. Here the news keeps getting better. That's why the "Bush Economic Team" is traveling the country saying that the economy is fine, that the upturn that's begun is because of the Bush tax cuts kicking in. Not surprising that this week had more positive economic reports in the media. Remember this stuff works. In 1983, polls found that the public thought little of the Reagan education policies. Reagan then went on a speaking tour re education, but changed no policy. His poll numbers went up dramatically.
Specifically, only 36 percent of those surveyed now approve of Bush's economic performance, while 52% disapprove.(CBS)
California:
Ain't this the perfect example of the celebrity culture and the dumbed-down electorate. Arnold announces his run on the Tonight Show, he's thus far only been interviewed by an entertainment reporter; countless interviewees say variations on 'we know who he is; he's the terminator and we need someone strong; I'll vote for him.'
More importantly, this is a blatantly anti-democratic operation, a coup engineered by the Right wing of the Republican party (that isn't happy w/ Arnold), pushing a recall less than a year after an election. Gray Davis has presided over a sizable surplus becoming a huge deficit (sound familiar??), and yet he's the lesser of the guilty parties as to the state's energy problem as well as the budget.(blame Cheney/Ken Lay and the Legislature)
This is a reminder that the Republicans organize and fight. They are not fair, (nor balanced), and they want to win. They will again make every effort, try every trick to win, including expanded efforts to eliminate voters by purging the voter rolls. They will try to dominate the media with more misleading information, as the Iraq prelude was but one example of their 'style.'
So, resist the media spin that the California election is a circus. It is a coup. We can't wait for better media reports, for a further change in the momentum. We must roll up those sleeves...
California Addendum: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has taken the issue to the federal courts, saying the recall vote is "a fiasco waiting to happen". They hope to have the federal courts step in to delay the election.
Middle East: Rumblings, but little in the major media, that the "peace process" is in trouble. Both sides are gearing up for renewed conflict, Haaretz reports Israel's intelligence chief noting that the cease-fire is in "steep decline", and Israeli warplanes flew at low altitudes over the Syrian President's residence. They had avoided Syrian airspace since 2000 when they ended their 22-year occupation of South Lebanon.
-R
"We’ll have time to look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized. I happen to think it does, and have said so all along.” - Bush, 8/14-15
They lie as they breathe. Actually, in June of 2001, Bush opposed and the congressional GOP voted down legislation that would have provided $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation’s power grid. We did know then of weaknesses in reliability and capacity. Studies by the Energy Department showing that the grid was in desperate need of upgrades were cited. Yet, the Bush Administration lobbied against it and the Republicans voted it down three separate times. Every issue, every issue...
What's Happening Iraq:
The Resistance:NPR did more programming on who is shooting at the US troops, admitting that they are not merely Saddamites, that it's a growing and increasingly organized resistance.
The Sydney Morning Herald (smh.com, Paul McGeough) developed that motif, finding that the U.S. faces "a new guerilla movement with growing popular support":
The Pentagon, the US military and American analysts are reluctant to acknowledge popular support for the Iraqi resistance. If the accounts of the resistance given to the Herald in interviews in the past 10 days are accurate, what is emerging in Iraq is a centrally controlled movement, driven as much by nationalism as the mosque, a movement that has left Saddam and the Baath Party behind and already is getting foreign funds for its bid to drive out the US army.
Just as Iraqi children are being coached to lie when foreigners inquire about their parents or the whereabouts of their homes, the families of resistance fighters deny their involvement in the war.
Finally, the Globe and Mail (Orly Hallpern) reports that Iraqi men are volunteering in droves for the Mahdi Army, an anti-U.S. occupation Shia force, named after a long-lost imam. While no guns have been distributed, one recruiter, who turned away a man trying to sign up his five-year-old son, said: "We don't have the ability, like a state, to import weapons, but everyone has his own gun at home anyway.
WMD Follow-up. Whoops. As the Guardian (Vikram Dodd, Nicholas Watt and Richard Norton Taylor) et al are reporting this AM,
Tony Blair's headline-grabbing claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so was based on hearsay information... The "Hutton inquiry" continues on Monday, and the Government continues to reel from the revelations.
Missile Sting: Follow-up: The FBI blamed the BBC for ruining its attempt to infiltrate al-Qaida when correspondent Tom Mangold ran an "exclusive" 10 O'Clock News report about the missile sting. The senior US government officials told Newsweek magazine that the ultimate aim of the elaborate sting was to catch Mr Lakhani - who has no terrorist links - and turn him into a government informant who might lead them to terrorists trying to buy weapons. The BBC demurred, saying that American correspondents were on the case as well. Mangold cited an ABC report, an internal "news flash" about the story that went out before his report. Whatever!
Pay Cut: Follow-up: All media carried the effort to quash the political quasi-firestorm that greeted the Pentagon's cutting the pay of serviceman by $225 as of September 30. Officially, the Pentagon denied that it would occur, then added that if it did, they would make up the pay "in other ways."
Single Payer Health Care Follow-up: Last Tuesday I buried well into that blog the news that almost 8000 physicians had signed a call for a single payer system. The Boston Globe actually placed that news on the front page on Wednesday, much to the surprise of many. Love that Globe! That same day, the hearing for the single payer bill in Massachusetts was re-scheduled for January, terrible timing for seniors to rally on the state house steps! Calls of protest are encouraged. ACTION: Call the office of the Legislature's Health Care Committee (1-617-722-2130) with the following message:
1. It is simply unacceptable that the hearing for S. 686, the Mass.
Health Care Trust bill, has been moved from October 8 to January 21.
2. You expect the House Chair of the Committee, Rep. Koutoujian, to
find a way to move the hearing for S. 686 back to its original date of October.
Economy: Polls. Here the news keeps getting better. That's why the "Bush Economic Team" is traveling the country saying that the economy is fine, that the upturn that's begun is because of the Bush tax cuts kicking in. Not surprising that this week had more positive economic reports in the media. Remember this stuff works. In 1983, polls found that the public thought little of the Reagan education policies. Reagan then went on a speaking tour re education, but changed no policy. His poll numbers went up dramatically.
Specifically, only 36 percent of those surveyed now approve of Bush's economic performance, while 52% disapprove.(CBS)
California:
Ain't this the perfect example of the celebrity culture and the dumbed-down electorate. Arnold announces his run on the Tonight Show, he's thus far only been interviewed by an entertainment reporter; countless interviewees say variations on 'we know who he is; he's the terminator and we need someone strong; I'll vote for him.'
More importantly, this is a blatantly anti-democratic operation, a coup engineered by the Right wing of the Republican party (that isn't happy w/ Arnold), pushing a recall less than a year after an election. Gray Davis has presided over a sizable surplus becoming a huge deficit (sound familiar??), and yet he's the lesser of the guilty parties as to the state's energy problem as well as the budget.(blame Cheney/Ken Lay and the Legislature)
This is a reminder that the Republicans organize and fight. They are not fair, (nor balanced), and they want to win. They will again make every effort, try every trick to win, including expanded efforts to eliminate voters by purging the voter rolls. They will try to dominate the media with more misleading information, as the Iraq prelude was but one example of their 'style.'
So, resist the media spin that the California election is a circus. It is a coup. We can't wait for better media reports, for a further change in the momentum. We must roll up those sleeves...
California Addendum: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has taken the issue to the federal courts, saying the recall vote is "a fiasco waiting to happen". They hope to have the federal courts step in to delay the election.
Middle East: Rumblings, but little in the major media, that the "peace process" is in trouble. Both sides are gearing up for renewed conflict, Haaretz reports Israel's intelligence chief noting that the cease-fire is in "steep decline", and Israeli warplanes flew at low altitudes over the Syrian President's residence. They had avoided Syrian airspace since 2000 when they ended their 22-year occupation of South Lebanon.
-R
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
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
