Wednesday, February 25, 2004
2000: Nader’s the Problem?; 2004: Nader’s the Problem?
That’s a common spin, which helps us not look at the Democrats as the problem. Aside from the miserable Gore campaign, let’s look at Tom Daschle, the Democratic “leader” in the Senate. For MONTHS following 9/11/01 Daschle’s web site (and home page) had a picture of him hugging Bush. Now, South Dakota’s Rapid City Journal reports that Daschle told constituents in Pierre, SD that he is satisfied with the Rove-Wolfowitz “War on Terror.” The following was posted on the Bush web site. http://www.georgewbush.com/blog/archives/2004_02.html#000607
Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., on Thursday praised the Bush administration's war and nation-building work in Iraq and said he has no serious concerns about the lack of weapons of mass destruction.
Daschle told state chamber of commerce representatives meeting in the South Dakota capital that he is satisfied with the way things are going in Iraq.
"I give the effort overall real credit," Daschle said. "It is a good thing Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. It is a good thing we are democratizing the country."
He said he is not upset about the debate over pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, an issue that has dogged President Bush as Democratic presidential contenders have slogged through the primary season.
"We can argue about the WMD and what we should have known," Daschle, the Senate minority leader, said…
Daschle also praised South Dakota's National Guard troops and their employers Thursday.
The state has the nation's highest per-capita enrollment in the National Guard, something that has been significant as troops have been called up and rotated into active duty during fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We ought to be proud of that, and I think we all are," Daschle said.
And, to give Ralph his due, unlike everyone else, he’s addressed the issue of impeachment:
"If there's any better definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in our Constitution, than misleading or fabricating the basis for going to war, as the press has documented ad infinitum, I don't know any cause of impeachment that's worse.
Re-packaging Bush:
Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot, interviewed by Juan Williams on NPR, was asked about the president's Air National Guard service. He responded that the president's and John Kerry's service "compare very favorably... He (i.e. the president) signed up for dangerous duty. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He wasn’t selected to go, but nonetheless served his country very well …"
Excuse Me? Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam? Hardly. When he signed up for the National Guard, Bush had to note a check box asking if he wanted to volunteer for “overseas service.” Bush checked “do not volunteer.”
They lie as they breathe. More, from the July 29, 1999 Washington Post article
It was May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bush was 12 days away from losing his student deferment from the draft at a time when Americans were dying in combat at the rate of 350 a week. The unit Bush wanted to join offered him the chance to fulfill his military commitment at a base in Texas. It was seen as an escape route from Vietnam by many men his age, and usually had a long waiting list.
Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.
Bush was sworn in as an airman the same day he applied.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072899.htm
Follow-up: Whither the Pentagon Study on Ecological Disaster:
The major media continue to avoid the Pentagon report. The Guardian report I noted in the last blog was actually preceded by a story in the January 26 Fortune magazine (David Stipp).
Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.
Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.
Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,582584,00.html
Washington Post straight talking
The Post is getting more pointed; Three reports that capture the spirit, Generally the press is maintaining a more critical tone.
White House Forecasts Often Miss The Mark (Dana Milbank)
President Bush last week caused a stir when he declined to endorse a projection, made by his own Council of Economic Advisers, that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs this year. But that forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years.
Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for fiscal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit for this year is on course to be $521 billion.
These are not isolated cases. Over three years, the administration has repeatedly and significantly overstated the government's fiscal health and the number of jobs the economy would create, but economists and politicians disagree about why.
http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=f38b840108822ca9792fbfcd5f1fa7a4&lat=1077634098&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05C9112384672B7593E4FC409
For News Hounds, TGIF (Dana Milbank)
The White House is moving swiftly to establish the administration's place in history as the Friday Night Presidency…
It was on a Friday, for example, that the administration disclosed its long-awaited decision that it would eliminate requirements that thousands of the nation's dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries make anti-pollution improvements as they upgrade facilities. On another Friday, the administration announced new rules giving new rights to fetuses. Yet another Friday brought an announcement virtually ensuring that Republicans would prevail in a dispute over the 2000 census count.
Resignations often see daylight on Fridays. The ouster of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and of Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey came on a Friday, as did the resignation of Army Secretary Thomas E. White, a former Enron Corp. executive, announced on a Friday.
Speaking of Enron, the Justice Department chose a Friday night for directing administration officials to preserve papers related to Enron. Likewise, the White House selected Friday as the day to oppose a probe of discussions Karl Rove had with companies in which he held stock. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A491-2004Feb23.html
Bush Assertion on Tax Cuts Is at Odds With IRS Data (Jonathan Weisman)
President Bush defended his tax cuts yesterday as economic fuel for the small-business sector in response to mounting criticism from Democratic presidential candidates that the cuts chiefly benefited the wealthiest Americans.
But the president's contention that upper-income tax cuts primarily benefit entrepreneurs conflicts with some of the government's own data.
Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and John Edwards (N.C.) have pledged to restore the top two income tax rates to a maximum of 39.6 percent if elected president, but Bush and Republican allies say such a move would disproportionately punish small businesses, most of which pay individual income tax rates on their profits.
"If you're worried about job growth, it seems like it makes sense to give a little fuel to those who create jobs, the small-business sector," Bush told a gathering of the nation's governors at the White House. "So I'll vigorously defend the permanency of the tax cuts, not only for the sake of the economy, but for the sake of the entrepreneurial spirit."
Internal Revenue Service statistics cited by a Democratic senator this month show that the vast majority of small businesses do not earn nearly enough money to fall into the highest income tax bracket. According to IRS data from the 2001 tax year, 3.8 percent of the 18.2 million business tax returns filed that year reported taxable income of $200,000 or more. The top tax bracket last year kicked in at $311,950 of taxable income.
In contrast, 62 percent of business filers reported incomes of less than $50,000, putting them at most in the 15 percent tax bracket, the second lowest. Nearly 88 percent of business filers reported income of less than $100,000, keeping them comfortably below the top two tax brackets of 33 percent and 35 percent, which Kerry and Edwards propose to raise. http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=f049f2f461da9575f26b366ba98efcba&lat=1077634098&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05C91153B4672B7593E4FC409
What’s Happening: Middle East Oil
A noteworthy article in Tuesday’s NY Times (Jeff Gerth), noting (without spelling out of the ramifications) as to the declining production from Saudi Arabia’s fields.
For decades, that has largely been true. Ever since its rich reserves were discovered more than a half-century ago, Saudi Arabia has pumped the oil needed to keep pace with rising needs, becoming the mainstay of the global energy markets.
But the country's oil fields now are in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world's thirst for oil in coming years.
Energy forecasts call for Saudi Arabia to almost double its output in the next decade and after. Oil executives and government officials in the United States and Saudi Arabia, however, say capacity will probably stall near current levels, potentially creating a significant gap in the global energy supply. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/business/24OIL.html?pagewanted=print&position
What’s Happening, Iraq: Depleted Uranium
Old issue, still no coverage here. But, the British government is releasing a warning to its military about the dangers of depleted uranium weapons. It’s reported here by the Traprock Peace Center.
Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, manager of the Oncology Center in Basrah, Iraq, has exposed the health effects of wars on Iraq. He has presented the results of cancer studies in Iraq at the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg and the recent Japan Peace Conference, Naha, Okinawa January 29 - February 1, 2004.
He reveals that cancer mortality has increased 19 fold since Gulf War I in Basra, and the occurrence of unusual phenomena, such as familial clusterings of cancers, double and triple cancers in one patient, and cancers usually associated with elderly patients occurring in the young. Rates of cancer and radiation activity have both shown sharp increases since Gulf War I, when about 340 tons of uranium munitions were expended in Iraq, much of this in the Basrah area. (The US refuses to disclose how much tonnage of uranium weapons it used I Iraq during Gulf War II. Estimates have ranged from over 100 tons up to 2000 tons.) http://www.traprockpeace.org/jawad_al-ali_iraq.html
Economic Indicator: The public is not confident
The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index, which had improved last month, weakened significantly in February. The Index now stands at 87.3 (1985=100), down from 96.4 in January. The Expectations Index fell to 96.8 from 107.8. The Present Situation Index declined to 73.1 from 79.4. “Consumers began the year on a high note, but their optimism has quickly given way to caution,” says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center. “Consumers remain disheartened with current economic conditions, and at the core of their disenchantment is the labor market. While the current expansion has generated jobs over the past several months, the pace of creation remains too tepid to generate a sustainable turnaround in consumers’ confidence.
http://www.conference-board.org/economics/consumerConfidence.cfm
What’s Happening, Iraq: False Intelligence
So, the Pentagon is still paying millions to the Iraqi National Congress even though it’s been reported that the Iraqi defectors “exaggerated what they knew, fabricated tales or were coached by others on what to say.” In other words, Ahmad Chalabi and crew sold a war (remember the wild inflammatory tales in 1991 as to alleged atrocities in Kuwait), duping the ‘please dupe me’ Wolfowitz and crew. Chalabi himself doesn’t mind echoing the Administration as to the past lies, that “what was said then doesn’t matter.”
One of the Knight Ridder reports (Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott)
Officials: U.S. still paying millions to group that provided false Iraqi intelligence
The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war.
The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are classified.
The continuing support for the INC comes amid seven separate investigations into pre-war intelligence that Iraq was hiding illicit weapons and had links to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. A probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee is now examining the INC's role. http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/8010308.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Rod Paige:
We know that he cooked the books in Houston, selling “progress” in the Texas schools. Now he terms public school teachers to be terrorists. Should not the Education chief be ousted?
-R
That’s a common spin, which helps us not look at the Democrats as the problem. Aside from the miserable Gore campaign, let’s look at Tom Daschle, the Democratic “leader” in the Senate. For MONTHS following 9/11/01 Daschle’s web site (and home page) had a picture of him hugging Bush. Now, South Dakota’s Rapid City Journal reports that Daschle told constituents in Pierre, SD that he is satisfied with the Rove-Wolfowitz “War on Terror.” The following was posted on the Bush web site. http://www.georgewbush.com/blog/archives/2004_02.html#000607
Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., on Thursday praised the Bush administration's war and nation-building work in Iraq and said he has no serious concerns about the lack of weapons of mass destruction.
Daschle told state chamber of commerce representatives meeting in the South Dakota capital that he is satisfied with the way things are going in Iraq.
"I give the effort overall real credit," Daschle said. "It is a good thing Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. It is a good thing we are democratizing the country."
He said he is not upset about the debate over pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, an issue that has dogged President Bush as Democratic presidential contenders have slogged through the primary season.
"We can argue about the WMD and what we should have known," Daschle, the Senate minority leader, said…
Daschle also praised South Dakota's National Guard troops and their employers Thursday.
The state has the nation's highest per-capita enrollment in the National Guard, something that has been significant as troops have been called up and rotated into active duty during fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We ought to be proud of that, and I think we all are," Daschle said.
And, to give Ralph his due, unlike everyone else, he’s addressed the issue of impeachment:
"If there's any better definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in our Constitution, than misleading or fabricating the basis for going to war, as the press has documented ad infinitum, I don't know any cause of impeachment that's worse.
Re-packaging Bush:
Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot, interviewed by Juan Williams on NPR, was asked about the president's Air National Guard service. He responded that the president's and John Kerry's service "compare very favorably... He (i.e. the president) signed up for dangerous duty. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He wasn’t selected to go, but nonetheless served his country very well …"
Excuse Me? Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam? Hardly. When he signed up for the National Guard, Bush had to note a check box asking if he wanted to volunteer for “overseas service.” Bush checked “do not volunteer.”
They lie as they breathe. More, from the July 29, 1999 Washington Post article
It was May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bush was 12 days away from losing his student deferment from the draft at a time when Americans were dying in combat at the rate of 350 a week. The unit Bush wanted to join offered him the chance to fulfill his military commitment at a base in Texas. It was seen as an escape route from Vietnam by many men his age, and usually had a long waiting list.
Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.
Bush was sworn in as an airman the same day he applied.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072899.htm
Follow-up: Whither the Pentagon Study on Ecological Disaster:
The major media continue to avoid the Pentagon report. The Guardian report I noted in the last blog was actually preceded by a story in the January 26 Fortune magazine (David Stipp).
Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.
Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.
Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,582584,00.html
Washington Post straight talking
The Post is getting more pointed; Three reports that capture the spirit, Generally the press is maintaining a more critical tone.
White House Forecasts Often Miss The Mark (Dana Milbank)
President Bush last week caused a stir when he declined to endorse a projection, made by his own Council of Economic Advisers, that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs this year. But that forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years.
Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for fiscal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit for this year is on course to be $521 billion.
These are not isolated cases. Over three years, the administration has repeatedly and significantly overstated the government's fiscal health and the number of jobs the economy would create, but economists and politicians disagree about why.
http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=f38b840108822ca9792fbfcd5f1fa7a4&lat=1077634098&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05C9112384672B7593E4FC409
For News Hounds, TGIF (Dana Milbank)
The White House is moving swiftly to establish the administration's place in history as the Friday Night Presidency…
It was on a Friday, for example, that the administration disclosed its long-awaited decision that it would eliminate requirements that thousands of the nation's dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries make anti-pollution improvements as they upgrade facilities. On another Friday, the administration announced new rules giving new rights to fetuses. Yet another Friday brought an announcement virtually ensuring that Republicans would prevail in a dispute over the 2000 census count.
Resignations often see daylight on Fridays. The ouster of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and of Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey came on a Friday, as did the resignation of Army Secretary Thomas E. White, a former Enron Corp. executive, announced on a Friday.
Speaking of Enron, the Justice Department chose a Friday night for directing administration officials to preserve papers related to Enron. Likewise, the White House selected Friday as the day to oppose a probe of discussions Karl Rove had with companies in which he held stock. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A491-2004Feb23.html
Bush Assertion on Tax Cuts Is at Odds With IRS Data (Jonathan Weisman)
President Bush defended his tax cuts yesterday as economic fuel for the small-business sector in response to mounting criticism from Democratic presidential candidates that the cuts chiefly benefited the wealthiest Americans.
But the president's contention that upper-income tax cuts primarily benefit entrepreneurs conflicts with some of the government's own data.
Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and John Edwards (N.C.) have pledged to restore the top two income tax rates to a maximum of 39.6 percent if elected president, but Bush and Republican allies say such a move would disproportionately punish small businesses, most of which pay individual income tax rates on their profits.
"If you're worried about job growth, it seems like it makes sense to give a little fuel to those who create jobs, the small-business sector," Bush told a gathering of the nation's governors at the White House. "So I'll vigorously defend the permanency of the tax cuts, not only for the sake of the economy, but for the sake of the entrepreneurial spirit."
Internal Revenue Service statistics cited by a Democratic senator this month show that the vast majority of small businesses do not earn nearly enough money to fall into the highest income tax bracket. According to IRS data from the 2001 tax year, 3.8 percent of the 18.2 million business tax returns filed that year reported taxable income of $200,000 or more. The top tax bracket last year kicked in at $311,950 of taxable income.
In contrast, 62 percent of business filers reported incomes of less than $50,000, putting them at most in the 15 percent tax bracket, the second lowest. Nearly 88 percent of business filers reported income of less than $100,000, keeping them comfortably below the top two tax brackets of 33 percent and 35 percent, which Kerry and Edwards propose to raise. http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=f049f2f461da9575f26b366ba98efcba&lat=1077634098&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05C91153B4672B7593E4FC409
What’s Happening: Middle East Oil
A noteworthy article in Tuesday’s NY Times (Jeff Gerth), noting (without spelling out of the ramifications) as to the declining production from Saudi Arabia’s fields.
For decades, that has largely been true. Ever since its rich reserves were discovered more than a half-century ago, Saudi Arabia has pumped the oil needed to keep pace with rising needs, becoming the mainstay of the global energy markets.
But the country's oil fields now are in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world's thirst for oil in coming years.
Energy forecasts call for Saudi Arabia to almost double its output in the next decade and after. Oil executives and government officials in the United States and Saudi Arabia, however, say capacity will probably stall near current levels, potentially creating a significant gap in the global energy supply. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/business/24OIL.html?pagewanted=print&position
What’s Happening, Iraq: Depleted Uranium
Old issue, still no coverage here. But, the British government is releasing a warning to its military about the dangers of depleted uranium weapons. It’s reported here by the Traprock Peace Center.
Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, manager of the Oncology Center in Basrah, Iraq, has exposed the health effects of wars on Iraq. He has presented the results of cancer studies in Iraq at the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg and the recent Japan Peace Conference, Naha, Okinawa January 29 - February 1, 2004.
He reveals that cancer mortality has increased 19 fold since Gulf War I in Basra, and the occurrence of unusual phenomena, such as familial clusterings of cancers, double and triple cancers in one patient, and cancers usually associated with elderly patients occurring in the young. Rates of cancer and radiation activity have both shown sharp increases since Gulf War I, when about 340 tons of uranium munitions were expended in Iraq, much of this in the Basrah area. (The US refuses to disclose how much tonnage of uranium weapons it used I Iraq during Gulf War II. Estimates have ranged from over 100 tons up to 2000 tons.) http://www.traprockpeace.org/jawad_al-ali_iraq.html
Economic Indicator: The public is not confident
The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index, which had improved last month, weakened significantly in February. The Index now stands at 87.3 (1985=100), down from 96.4 in January. The Expectations Index fell to 96.8 from 107.8. The Present Situation Index declined to 73.1 from 79.4. “Consumers began the year on a high note, but their optimism has quickly given way to caution,” says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center. “Consumers remain disheartened with current economic conditions, and at the core of their disenchantment is the labor market. While the current expansion has generated jobs over the past several months, the pace of creation remains too tepid to generate a sustainable turnaround in consumers’ confidence.
http://www.conference-board.org/economics/consumerConfidence.cfm
What’s Happening, Iraq: False Intelligence
So, the Pentagon is still paying millions to the Iraqi National Congress even though it’s been reported that the Iraqi defectors “exaggerated what they knew, fabricated tales or were coached by others on what to say.” In other words, Ahmad Chalabi and crew sold a war (remember the wild inflammatory tales in 1991 as to alleged atrocities in Kuwait), duping the ‘please dupe me’ Wolfowitz and crew. Chalabi himself doesn’t mind echoing the Administration as to the past lies, that “what was said then doesn’t matter.”
One of the Knight Ridder reports (Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott)
Officials: U.S. still paying millions to group that provided false Iraqi intelligence
The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war.
The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are classified.
The continuing support for the INC comes amid seven separate investigations into pre-war intelligence that Iraq was hiding illicit weapons and had links to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. A probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee is now examining the INC's role. http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/8010308.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Rod Paige:
We know that he cooked the books in Houston, selling “progress” in the Texas schools. Now he terms public school teachers to be terrorists. Should not the Education chief be ousted?
-R
