Friday, April 16, 2004
Bush and Sharon policy:
The rest of the world has seen this as The Story of the week, not the Iraq tragedy, the 9/11 Commission, or Bush’s press conference. [Similarly, when I was overseas, foreign press seized on the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Yassin as a source of great anger in the Muslim world, but to many Americans, it’s just another “terrorist” who’s been eliminated.]
The Administration’s endorsement of Sharon’s ideas constitutes an overturning of an inveterate bi-partisan American policy, the “road map” and the Geneva proposal as it endorses annexation of part of the West Bank and rules out the right of return for Palestinians.
While the reflexive reaction for some Americans is to see this as supportive of Israel, it is only “pro-Sharon” as it rewards “new realities on the ground”, allowing Sharon to select settlements to keep as long as they can in some way be connected to “existing major Israeli population centers. It inflames the Middle East and reflects the neo-conservatives hold on Washington.
Sadly, Kerry rushed to praise the idea.
Dana Milbank and Mike Allen report:
President Bush's embrace yesterday of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to unilaterally disengage from the Palestinians carries potential political benefits for Bush but also potential risk for his foreign policy.
In declaring that Israel should be able to keep some of the occupied territories and block Palestinian refugees from settling in Israel, Bush followed a familiar pattern of finding common cause with Jews and increasingly pro-Israel Christian conservatives. That Bush's move was good politics was evidenced by Democratic rival John F. Kerry's quick move not to let Bush outflank him among pro-Israel voters.
"I think that could be a positive step," the Massachusetts senator said, approving of the Bush-Sharon action regarding both refugees and Israel's borders. "What's important obviously is the security of the state of Israel, and that's what the prime minister and the president, I think, are trying to address." http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=824b283bdd5e9bbce2b4bfb175fced9b&lat=1082067174&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW3RH0589DF5C74672B7593E048F35
What’s Happening, Iraq: WMDs: Soon to be Found?
As I was away for the first report, I’m late on this. It’s being ‘followed’ by Common Dreams.
On March 13 the Iranian news agency (Mehr) reported that U.S. forces had secretly “unloaded a large cargo of parts for constructing long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the southern ports of Iraq.” It was mentioned that some of these weapons were similar to those that we had given to Iraq in the late ‘80’s.
Now, “the movement of those weapons have been disclosed.”
An Iraqi source close to the Basra Governor’s Office told the MNA that new information shows that a large part of the WMD, which was secretly brought to southern and western Iraq over the past month, are in containers falsely labeled as containers of the Maeresk shipping company and some consignments bearing the labels of organizations such as the Red Cross or the USAID in order to disguise them as relief shipments.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that Iraqi officials including forces loyal to the Iraqi Governing Council stationed in southern Iraq have been forbidden from inspecting or supervising the transportation of these consignments. He went on to say that the occupation forces have ordered Iraqi officials to forward any questions on the issue to the coalition forces. Even the officials of the international relief organizations have informed the Iraqi officials that they would only accept responsibility for relief shipments which have been registered and managed by their organizations.
The Iraqi source also confirmed the report about suspicious trucks with fake Saudi and Jordanian license plates entering Iraq at night last week, stressing that the Saudi and Jordanian border guards did not attempt to inspect the trucks but simply delivered them to the U.S. and British forces stationed on Iraq’s borders. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=8145ed97c2337ccbb7464573f2ab557e&lat=1082115534&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2ecommondreams%2eorg%2fheadlines04%2f0413%2d02%2ehtm
What’s Happening, Iraq, II: Despite the 90 dead in April, 'We’re doing fine', say Rummy et al. An asterisk, from the AP and the Guardian: “
Some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded and radioactive materials are being taken out of the country, the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency reported… http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3981804,00.html
Postscript to Press Conference: Commentaries: Tom Shales in the W.Post:
When I say something, I mean it," George W. Bush said decisively near the end of last night's prime-time presidential news conference. Nobody called out, "When will you say something?" -- the White House press corps is too mannerly for that -- but some reporters, and some viewers, must have been thinking it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9997-2004Apr13.html
The Progressive’s editor, Matthew Rothschild:
Not because his second sentence was ungrammatical: "This has been tough weeks in that country."
Not because he pronounced "instigated" as "instikated" in his fourth sentence.
Not because he said Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of State.
Not because of his foolish comment that before 9/11 "we assumed oceans would protect us." (Ever since the Russians built their first ICBMs fifty years ago, the oceans haven't protected us.)
Not because he said of the August 6 briefing, "Frankly, I didn't think it was anything new"!
Not because he said that even if he had known beforehand that Iraq did not have WMD stockpiles, he still would have gone to war against Saddam Hussein.
Not because he had no coherent answer as to why Dick Cheney must hold his hand when he testifies to the 9/11 commission.
Not because he said that no one in his Administration had "any indication that bin Laden might hijack an airplane and run it into a building," when in fact, at the Genoa G-8 summit, there were precautions taken against incoming airplanes as missiles.
And not because he repeatedly refused to take a shred of personal responsibility for allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen on his watch.
No, his performance was scary because he plunged the United States deeper into a no-win war in Iraq.
"We will finish the job of the fallen," he said. http://www.progressive.org/webex04/wx0413a04.html
Richard Cohen in the Washington Post,
America's Ayatollah
The term of the moment in Washington is "the wall." This is the legal barrier that once separated the CIA and its investigators from the FBI and its investigators, and which may have contributed to the confusion that enabled the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A more interesting wall, however, was on view Tuesday evening in President Bush's prime-time news conference. It's the one between him and reality.
Never mind that even for Bush, this was a poor performance -- answers that resembled a frantic scavenger hunt for the right (or any) word or, too often, a thought. Never mind that he really had very little to say -- no exit plan for Iraq, no second thoughts about Sept. 11, no wonderment, even, at the apparent disappearance of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and how that might have happened. Like a kid who has been told otherwise, Bush persists in believing in his own version of Santa Claus. The weapons are there, somewhere -- in a North Pole of his mind.
What matters more is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: "We're changing the world." He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq and he used it in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson, that presidential personification of naive morality, shake his head in bemusement. In Bush's rhetoric, a war to rid Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction, a war to ensure that Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" did not appear over an American city, has mutated into an effort to reorder the world. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=e365c379f3183e2f9b55cdffbbc16639&lat=1082067174&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW3RH0589DF3E74672B7593E048F35
But, keep in mind this perspective:
Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard "Bush was heroically on message, relentlessly repetitive, but effective in his own way…His audience is outside the Beltway--the mass--and he does surprisingly well in appealing to it. How does he do it? By being plain spoken and amiable and down to earth."
9/11 Commission: One more time
Fred Kaplan (Slate) clarified how a pro would interpret the PDB:
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB—let alone the Moussaoui finding—should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title—"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"—was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican. http://slate.msn.com/id/2098861/
Then there’s the fact that the infamous August 6 PDB was not the only warning. From Dana Priest:
In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9642-2004Apr13.html
Ashcroft- one of the lying liars…
Laughable:
Before 9/11, "our number-one goal was the prevention of terrorist acts. It is our -- it certainly is our goal. And we began to shape the department and its efforts in that respect." – Attorney General John Ashcroft, 2/28/02
FACT:
"Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs... The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13541-2004Mar21?language=printer
Another Iran Contra figure gets a job.
Just as David Chase keeps putting actors from past mob pictures into the Sopranos, this Administration keeps bestowing jobs on notables from the wildly unlawful Iran-Contra episode. The latest is John Negroponte, likely to be the first U.S. Ambassador to the New Iraq. A veteran conservative ideologue, Negroponte was known for his role in funneling illegal arms to the Iranians (against the Iraqis!- let’s hope they forgive that one) and covert Latin American activities. The polite description of him in the NY Times: (Steven Weisman)
Mr. Negroponte is widely regarded as a cool-headed professional who has been involved in sensitive matters in the past. He is experienced in dealing with European and Arab diplomats and top officials at the United Nations, whose support is considered crucial for the stability of Iraq.
In the early 1980's, when he was ambassador to Honduras, it became a springboard and a refuge for the Nicaraguan contras as they fought the leftist Sandinista government.
When he was questioned as the nominee to become United Nations ambassador about whether he had deliberately turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Honduras to advance the Reagan administration's policies, he denied it.http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/14/politics/14ENVO.html
Environment
Paul Brown of the Guardian reports on a Blair aide’s assessment:
George Bush has had a "devastating impact" on global sustainable development and set the world back more than ten years, says Jonathon Porritt, the prime minister's senior adviser on the subject, today.
Writing in Guardian Society Mr Porritt, who is the chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, says it is hard to exaggerate the damage done to the planet by Mr Bush's drive for a "new world order".
On a whole series of issues including climate change, international aid, family planning, nuclear proliferation, trade and corporate responsibility, "staying true to a discredited model of extreme economic liberalism has set the world back a decade or more", says Mr Porritt. http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1191321,00.html
-R
The rest of the world has seen this as The Story of the week, not the Iraq tragedy, the 9/11 Commission, or Bush’s press conference. [Similarly, when I was overseas, foreign press seized on the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Yassin as a source of great anger in the Muslim world, but to many Americans, it’s just another “terrorist” who’s been eliminated.]
The Administration’s endorsement of Sharon’s ideas constitutes an overturning of an inveterate bi-partisan American policy, the “road map” and the Geneva proposal as it endorses annexation of part of the West Bank and rules out the right of return for Palestinians.
While the reflexive reaction for some Americans is to see this as supportive of Israel, it is only “pro-Sharon” as it rewards “new realities on the ground”, allowing Sharon to select settlements to keep as long as they can in some way be connected to “existing major Israeli population centers. It inflames the Middle East and reflects the neo-conservatives hold on Washington.
Sadly, Kerry rushed to praise the idea.
Dana Milbank and Mike Allen report:
President Bush's embrace yesterday of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to unilaterally disengage from the Palestinians carries potential political benefits for Bush but also potential risk for his foreign policy.
In declaring that Israel should be able to keep some of the occupied territories and block Palestinian refugees from settling in Israel, Bush followed a familiar pattern of finding common cause with Jews and increasingly pro-Israel Christian conservatives. That Bush's move was good politics was evidenced by Democratic rival John F. Kerry's quick move not to let Bush outflank him among pro-Israel voters.
"I think that could be a positive step," the Massachusetts senator said, approving of the Bush-Sharon action regarding both refugees and Israel's borders. "What's important obviously is the security of the state of Israel, and that's what the prime minister and the president, I think, are trying to address." http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=824b283bdd5e9bbce2b4bfb175fced9b&lat=1082067174&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW3RH0589DF5C74672B7593E048F35
What’s Happening, Iraq: WMDs: Soon to be Found?
As I was away for the first report, I’m late on this. It’s being ‘followed’ by Common Dreams.
On March 13 the Iranian news agency (Mehr) reported that U.S. forces had secretly “unloaded a large cargo of parts for constructing long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the southern ports of Iraq.” It was mentioned that some of these weapons were similar to those that we had given to Iraq in the late ‘80’s.
Now, “the movement of those weapons have been disclosed.”
An Iraqi source close to the Basra Governor’s Office told the MNA that new information shows that a large part of the WMD, which was secretly brought to southern and western Iraq over the past month, are in containers falsely labeled as containers of the Maeresk shipping company and some consignments bearing the labels of organizations such as the Red Cross or the USAID in order to disguise them as relief shipments.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that Iraqi officials including forces loyal to the Iraqi Governing Council stationed in southern Iraq have been forbidden from inspecting or supervising the transportation of these consignments. He went on to say that the occupation forces have ordered Iraqi officials to forward any questions on the issue to the coalition forces. Even the officials of the international relief organizations have informed the Iraqi officials that they would only accept responsibility for relief shipments which have been registered and managed by their organizations.
The Iraqi source also confirmed the report about suspicious trucks with fake Saudi and Jordanian license plates entering Iraq at night last week, stressing that the Saudi and Jordanian border guards did not attempt to inspect the trucks but simply delivered them to the U.S. and British forces stationed on Iraq’s borders. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=8145ed97c2337ccbb7464573f2ab557e&lat=1082115534&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2ecommondreams%2eorg%2fheadlines04%2f0413%2d02%2ehtm
What’s Happening, Iraq, II: Despite the 90 dead in April, 'We’re doing fine', say Rummy et al. An asterisk, from the AP and the Guardian: “
Some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded and radioactive materials are being taken out of the country, the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency reported… http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3981804,00.html
Postscript to Press Conference: Commentaries: Tom Shales in the W.Post:
When I say something, I mean it," George W. Bush said decisively near the end of last night's prime-time presidential news conference. Nobody called out, "When will you say something?" -- the White House press corps is too mannerly for that -- but some reporters, and some viewers, must have been thinking it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9997-2004Apr13.html
The Progressive’s editor, Matthew Rothschild:
Not because his second sentence was ungrammatical: "This has been tough weeks in that country."
Not because he pronounced "instigated" as "instikated" in his fourth sentence.
Not because he said Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of State.
Not because of his foolish comment that before 9/11 "we assumed oceans would protect us." (Ever since the Russians built their first ICBMs fifty years ago, the oceans haven't protected us.)
Not because he said of the August 6 briefing, "Frankly, I didn't think it was anything new"!
Not because he said that even if he had known beforehand that Iraq did not have WMD stockpiles, he still would have gone to war against Saddam Hussein.
Not because he had no coherent answer as to why Dick Cheney must hold his hand when he testifies to the 9/11 commission.
Not because he said that no one in his Administration had "any indication that bin Laden might hijack an airplane and run it into a building," when in fact, at the Genoa G-8 summit, there were precautions taken against incoming airplanes as missiles.
And not because he repeatedly refused to take a shred of personal responsibility for allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen on his watch.
No, his performance was scary because he plunged the United States deeper into a no-win war in Iraq.
"We will finish the job of the fallen," he said. http://www.progressive.org/webex04/wx0413a04.html
Richard Cohen in the Washington Post,
America's Ayatollah
The term of the moment in Washington is "the wall." This is the legal barrier that once separated the CIA and its investigators from the FBI and its investigators, and which may have contributed to the confusion that enabled the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A more interesting wall, however, was on view Tuesday evening in President Bush's prime-time news conference. It's the one between him and reality.
Never mind that even for Bush, this was a poor performance -- answers that resembled a frantic scavenger hunt for the right (or any) word or, too often, a thought. Never mind that he really had very little to say -- no exit plan for Iraq, no second thoughts about Sept. 11, no wonderment, even, at the apparent disappearance of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and how that might have happened. Like a kid who has been told otherwise, Bush persists in believing in his own version of Santa Claus. The weapons are there, somewhere -- in a North Pole of his mind.
What matters more is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: "We're changing the world." He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq and he used it in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson, that presidential personification of naive morality, shake his head in bemusement. In Bush's rhetoric, a war to rid Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction, a war to ensure that Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" did not appear over an American city, has mutated into an effort to reorder the world. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=e365c379f3183e2f9b55cdffbbc16639&lat=1082067174&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW3RH0589DF3E74672B7593E048F35
But, keep in mind this perspective:
Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard "Bush was heroically on message, relentlessly repetitive, but effective in his own way…His audience is outside the Beltway--the mass--and he does surprisingly well in appealing to it. How does he do it? By being plain spoken and amiable and down to earth."
9/11 Commission: One more time
Fred Kaplan (Slate) clarified how a pro would interpret the PDB:
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB—let alone the Moussaoui finding—should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title—"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"—was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican. http://slate.msn.com/id/2098861/
Then there’s the fact that the infamous August 6 PDB was not the only warning. From Dana Priest:
In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9642-2004Apr13.html
Ashcroft- one of the lying liars…
Laughable:
Before 9/11, "our number-one goal was the prevention of terrorist acts. It is our -- it certainly is our goal. And we began to shape the department and its efforts in that respect." – Attorney General John Ashcroft, 2/28/02
FACT:
"Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs... The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13541-2004Mar21?language=printer
Another Iran Contra figure gets a job.
Just as David Chase keeps putting actors from past mob pictures into the Sopranos, this Administration keeps bestowing jobs on notables from the wildly unlawful Iran-Contra episode. The latest is John Negroponte, likely to be the first U.S. Ambassador to the New Iraq. A veteran conservative ideologue, Negroponte was known for his role in funneling illegal arms to the Iranians (against the Iraqis!- let’s hope they forgive that one) and covert Latin American activities. The polite description of him in the NY Times: (Steven Weisman)
Mr. Negroponte is widely regarded as a cool-headed professional who has been involved in sensitive matters in the past. He is experienced in dealing with European and Arab diplomats and top officials at the United Nations, whose support is considered crucial for the stability of Iraq.
In the early 1980's, when he was ambassador to Honduras, it became a springboard and a refuge for the Nicaraguan contras as they fought the leftist Sandinista government.
When he was questioned as the nominee to become United Nations ambassador about whether he had deliberately turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Honduras to advance the Reagan administration's policies, he denied it.http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/14/politics/14ENVO.html
Environment
Paul Brown of the Guardian reports on a Blair aide’s assessment:
George Bush has had a "devastating impact" on global sustainable development and set the world back more than ten years, says Jonathon Porritt, the prime minister's senior adviser on the subject, today.
Writing in Guardian Society Mr Porritt, who is the chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, says it is hard to exaggerate the damage done to the planet by Mr Bush's drive for a "new world order".
On a whole series of issues including climate change, international aid, family planning, nuclear proliferation, trade and corporate responsibility, "staying true to a discredited model of extreme economic liberalism has set the world back a decade or more", says Mr Porritt. http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1191321,00.html
-R
