Sunday, May 09, 2004
The “Abuse” (oh, yes, and, the (25?) Deaths)
It Was Systemic, not just “a few” bad apples
(1) torture methods taught. David Leigh of The Guardian:
The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad…
The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.
"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1212197,00.html
(2) Can’t just Blame the Military Police. Baltimore Sun (Todd Richissin)
The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners.
But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally.
They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.
The beatings, the two soldiers said, were meted out with the full knowledge of intelligence interrogators, who let military police know which prisoners were cooperating with them and which were not.
Around November, with casualties among U.S. troops rising, Saddam Hussein still in hiding and solid intelligence becoming more urgent, Pappas issued an order that broadened acceptable interrogation methods.
"I think he was referring to any techniques on the A and B lists," the soldier said. "But there was kind of the third list, the unofficial list. Guys called that the 'made-up list.'"
________
The made-up list spawned a couple of other terms, the soldiers said: "going cowboy" and "wild, wild west."
"I don't know where they got this from, but the MPs would say it all the time," one of the soldiers said. "MI would drop off a guy who wasn't talking, and the MP would say, 'So looks like I'll be going cowboy on him' or 'Looks like he needs some wild, wild west.'"
The terms meant beatings, they said, and the military intelligence interrogators and private contractors did nothing to discourage them. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.guard09may09,0,2180279.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
Abuse as Familiar …What’s Practiced by the U.S. in the USA…and Afghanistan
From the NY Times (Fox Butterfield):
Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.
In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation…
The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html
And, from Seymour Hersh’s latest:
In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib … The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2
The Conditions Were Documented and Shared with the Administration LONG AGO.
We know this is one passive Administration; they don’t act when warned of terrorism and they couldn’t act on this, because they lacked the pictures! [And, they’re never “responsible”- not for 9/11, the WMD lies/”intelligence failure", the Occupation; We play the game, and desperately try to limit calls for accountability to no higher than Rumsfeld. Bush? Rare call for such comes from E.J. Dionne who notes,
But dumping Rumsfeld and Myers is not enough. Ultimately the buck stops with President Bush. No, I don't think for an instant that Bush knew anything about this. That's the problem. Reports of prisoner abuse have been around since the war in Afghanistan and the opening of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The president needs to explain why he wasn't more curious about what was happening, and whether his management style delegates so much authority that the White House could be caught so unprepared for this catastrophe. Are we dealing here with a culture of unaccountability? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6990-2004May6.html
The Red Cross complaints, a full year ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07RIGH.html
There was a pattern and a system," Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC's director of operations, said in Geneva. Some of the actions were "tantamount to torture," he said. The ICRC findings were "discussed at different moments between March and November 2003, either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions," Kraehenbuehl said. http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/05/07/red_cross_abuse/index.html
Other Groups Tried as well:
Other human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First, said this week that they had complained to the administration about reports of prisoner abuse and humiliation. Officials with the groups said they took personal appeals to L. Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation authority in Iraq, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, but that their appeals often seemed to fall on deaf ears. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07RIGH.html
Even Bremer was yelling:
Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall -- both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as "kicking and screaming" about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained. Bremer expressed these concerns to Rumsfeld. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6870-2004May6.html
Abu Ghraib- incredibly mismanaged- 'Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators'
Really! An interview of an intelligence officer who served at Guantanamo and than at Abu Ghraib as a contractor explains the “systematic failures.”
Julian Borger for the Guardian:
Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops, and incarcerated by under-qualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the notorious jail told the Guardian
"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home.
"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, 'the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him'," he said.
According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because the interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds. Interrogators "weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees; they were interested in 'breaking' tough targets", he said. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1211374,00.html
As Anthony Lewis pointed out last Friday, (and in the current NY Review of Books), when you set up a prison system and declare it is extralegal, beyond all legal oversight, are abuses/atrocities surprising?
But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago.
"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher," he wrote. "For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/opinion/07LEWI.html?ex=1399262400&en=cc74516c7c7b1681&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
Military Upset: ‘We’re losing the war’ (for the minds...)
Washington Post (Thomas Ricks)
Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq.
Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading and being voiced publicly for the first time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11227-2004May8?language=printer
Conservative Voices Summarize:
"This is a pure, media-generated story. I'm not saying it didn't happen or that the pictures aren't there, but this is being given more life than the Waco invasion got. It’s almost become an Oklahoma City-type thing.” –Rush Limbaugh
Now, certainly one thing I will say is that I believe, as, as a lot of folks on the, on the political right believe, that our military has been undermanned for many years, and it's very, very difficult to fight a war like this with a, a military that basically is, is Bill Clinton's military and a military that basically was formed during the days when we were all talking about the "war is peace" dividend. -Joel Himmelfarb, an editorial writer for the Washington Times on defense issueshttp://georgemustgo.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_georgemustgo_archive.html#108393822532937983:
Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria summarizes:
…we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its "advise and consent" are constitutionally mandated.
Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4933882/
Middle East
The Administration is retreating from its endorsement of Sharon’s unilateral territory seizure/give-back, in what the foreign press terms a “flip-flop”. Now there are sounds of ‘there must be negotiations’. Undoubtedly, they’re responding to the world’s reaction, especially the Middle East furor, as well as reading the meaning of Sharon’s own party rejecting the policy. And, there was the public rebuke of 50 former U.S. diplomats/ambassadors to countries in the Middle East who dispatched a public letter that harshly criticized Bush for supporting Sharon’s plan. . http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/07/1083911402222.html http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_5-5-2004_pg4_4 (Pakistan)
Election (Reprise): Kerry in Trouble? No.
Tom Grieve of Salon offers helpful perspective.
The Times painted an equally dour assessment of Clinton's prospects in a front-page piece in April 1992 headlined "Clinton Dogged by Voter Doubt." The Times said then that unnamed "political professionals in the Democratic Party" were troubled that Clinton hadn't made a better impression on the nation's voters. Nagourney's piece Sunday reported that "Democratic Party officials" have similar worries about Kerry.
But there's a key difference here: In April 1992, the New York Times/CBS News poll showed Clinton trailing President George H.W. Bush, 49 percent to 40 percent, among registered voters. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows Kerry and President George W. Bush in a statistical dead heat.
Clinton beat Bush 43 percent to 37 percent in November 1992. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/05/kerry/print.html
Massachusetts: Economy Improves. More Tax Cuts?
Romney is seeking to resume the tax cuts, making no move to restore any of the murderous cuts of the past years. Residents should bombard their legislators and the media with their insistence that we become a more humane Commonwealth.
One sensible voice- Charles Stein in Sunday’s Globe Business section
Romney's preference for tax cuts should be seen for what it is: a political choice, not an economic one. Like President Bush, whom he resembles more with each passing day (no to gay marriage; yes to the death penalty; yes to tax cuts), Romney apparently feels that a smaller government is a better government.
I'd like to suggest a different political choice. Massachusetts should use its growing tax receipts to restore the cuts it was forced to make during the fiscal crisis. The state's contribution to higher education fell 23 percent over the past three years. Public health spending fell 27 percent; spending on housing dropped 40 percent. State aid to local education declined modestly each of the past two years. Even so, the education cuts Massachusetts made were steeper than those made by any other state, according to a study by Reschovsky. Spending on healthcare has continued to rise, but a variety of medical programs have been squeezed.
If the recovery proves durable, Massachusetts can have the best of both worlds: It can adequately fund its services while keeping its tax rates at competitive levels. Critics warned Mayor Bloomberg that the sky would fall when he decided services were more important than lower taxes. The sky didn't fall in New York. It won't fall in Massachusetts, either. http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/05/09/its_time_to_restore_state_program_cuts/
-R
It Was Systemic, not just “a few” bad apples
(1) torture methods taught. David Leigh of The Guardian:
The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad…
The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.
"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1212197,00.html
(2) Can’t just Blame the Military Police. Baltimore Sun (Todd Richissin)
The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners.
But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally.
They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.
The beatings, the two soldiers said, were meted out with the full knowledge of intelligence interrogators, who let military police know which prisoners were cooperating with them and which were not.
Around November, with casualties among U.S. troops rising, Saddam Hussein still in hiding and solid intelligence becoming more urgent, Pappas issued an order that broadened acceptable interrogation methods.
"I think he was referring to any techniques on the A and B lists," the soldier said. "But there was kind of the third list, the unofficial list. Guys called that the 'made-up list.'"
________
The made-up list spawned a couple of other terms, the soldiers said: "going cowboy" and "wild, wild west."
"I don't know where they got this from, but the MPs would say it all the time," one of the soldiers said. "MI would drop off a guy who wasn't talking, and the MP would say, 'So looks like I'll be going cowboy on him' or 'Looks like he needs some wild, wild west.'"
The terms meant beatings, they said, and the military intelligence interrogators and private contractors did nothing to discourage them. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.guard09may09,0,2180279.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
Abuse as Familiar …What’s Practiced by the U.S. in the USA…and Afghanistan
From the NY Times (Fox Butterfield):
Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.
In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation…
The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html
And, from Seymour Hersh’s latest:
In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib … The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2
The Conditions Were Documented and Shared with the Administration LONG AGO.
We know this is one passive Administration; they don’t act when warned of terrorism and they couldn’t act on this, because they lacked the pictures! [And, they’re never “responsible”- not for 9/11, the WMD lies/”intelligence failure", the Occupation; We play the game, and desperately try to limit calls for accountability to no higher than Rumsfeld. Bush? Rare call for such comes from E.J. Dionne who notes,
But dumping Rumsfeld and Myers is not enough. Ultimately the buck stops with President Bush. No, I don't think for an instant that Bush knew anything about this. That's the problem. Reports of prisoner abuse have been around since the war in Afghanistan and the opening of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The president needs to explain why he wasn't more curious about what was happening, and whether his management style delegates so much authority that the White House could be caught so unprepared for this catastrophe. Are we dealing here with a culture of unaccountability? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6990-2004May6.html
The Red Cross complaints, a full year ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07RIGH.html
There was a pattern and a system," Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC's director of operations, said in Geneva. Some of the actions were "tantamount to torture," he said. The ICRC findings were "discussed at different moments between March and November 2003, either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions," Kraehenbuehl said. http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/05/07/red_cross_abuse/index.html
Other Groups Tried as well:
Other human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First, said this week that they had complained to the administration about reports of prisoner abuse and humiliation. Officials with the groups said they took personal appeals to L. Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation authority in Iraq, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, but that their appeals often seemed to fall on deaf ears. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07RIGH.html
Even Bremer was yelling:
Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall -- both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as "kicking and screaming" about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained. Bremer expressed these concerns to Rumsfeld. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6870-2004May6.html
Abu Ghraib- incredibly mismanaged- 'Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators'
Really! An interview of an intelligence officer who served at Guantanamo and than at Abu Ghraib as a contractor explains the “systematic failures.”
Julian Borger for the Guardian:
Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops, and incarcerated by under-qualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the notorious jail told the Guardian
"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home.
"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, 'the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him'," he said.
According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because the interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds. Interrogators "weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees; they were interested in 'breaking' tough targets", he said. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1211374,00.html
As Anthony Lewis pointed out last Friday, (and in the current NY Review of Books), when you set up a prison system and declare it is extralegal, beyond all legal oversight, are abuses/atrocities surprising?
But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago.
"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher," he wrote. "For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/opinion/07LEWI.html?ex=1399262400&en=cc74516c7c7b1681&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
Military Upset: ‘We’re losing the war’ (for the minds...)
Washington Post (Thomas Ricks)
Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq.
Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading and being voiced publicly for the first time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11227-2004May8?language=printer
Conservative Voices Summarize:
"This is a pure, media-generated story. I'm not saying it didn't happen or that the pictures aren't there, but this is being given more life than the Waco invasion got. It’s almost become an Oklahoma City-type thing.” –Rush Limbaugh
Now, certainly one thing I will say is that I believe, as, as a lot of folks on the, on the political right believe, that our military has been undermanned for many years, and it's very, very difficult to fight a war like this with a, a military that basically is, is Bill Clinton's military and a military that basically was formed during the days when we were all talking about the "war is peace" dividend. -Joel Himmelfarb, an editorial writer for the Washington Times on defense issueshttp://georgemustgo.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_georgemustgo_archive.html#108393822532937983:
Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria summarizes:
…we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its "advise and consent" are constitutionally mandated.
Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4933882/
Middle East
The Administration is retreating from its endorsement of Sharon’s unilateral territory seizure/give-back, in what the foreign press terms a “flip-flop”. Now there are sounds of ‘there must be negotiations’. Undoubtedly, they’re responding to the world’s reaction, especially the Middle East furor, as well as reading the meaning of Sharon’s own party rejecting the policy. And, there was the public rebuke of 50 former U.S. diplomats/ambassadors to countries in the Middle East who dispatched a public letter that harshly criticized Bush for supporting Sharon’s plan. . http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/07/1083911402222.html http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_5-5-2004_pg4_4 (Pakistan)
Election (Reprise): Kerry in Trouble? No.
Tom Grieve of Salon offers helpful perspective.
The Times painted an equally dour assessment of Clinton's prospects in a front-page piece in April 1992 headlined "Clinton Dogged by Voter Doubt." The Times said then that unnamed "political professionals in the Democratic Party" were troubled that Clinton hadn't made a better impression on the nation's voters. Nagourney's piece Sunday reported that "Democratic Party officials" have similar worries about Kerry.
But there's a key difference here: In April 1992, the New York Times/CBS News poll showed Clinton trailing President George H.W. Bush, 49 percent to 40 percent, among registered voters. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows Kerry and President George W. Bush in a statistical dead heat.
Clinton beat Bush 43 percent to 37 percent in November 1992. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/05/kerry/print.html
Massachusetts: Economy Improves. More Tax Cuts?
Romney is seeking to resume the tax cuts, making no move to restore any of the murderous cuts of the past years. Residents should bombard their legislators and the media with their insistence that we become a more humane Commonwealth.
One sensible voice- Charles Stein in Sunday’s Globe Business section
Romney's preference for tax cuts should be seen for what it is: a political choice, not an economic one. Like President Bush, whom he resembles more with each passing day (no to gay marriage; yes to the death penalty; yes to tax cuts), Romney apparently feels that a smaller government is a better government.
I'd like to suggest a different political choice. Massachusetts should use its growing tax receipts to restore the cuts it was forced to make during the fiscal crisis. The state's contribution to higher education fell 23 percent over the past three years. Public health spending fell 27 percent; spending on housing dropped 40 percent. State aid to local education declined modestly each of the past two years. Even so, the education cuts Massachusetts made were steeper than those made by any other state, according to a study by Reschovsky. Spending on healthcare has continued to rise, but a variety of medical programs have been squeezed.
If the recovery proves durable, Massachusetts can have the best of both worlds: It can adequately fund its services while keeping its tax rates at competitive levels. Critics warned Mayor Bloomberg that the sky would fall when he decided services were more important than lower taxes. The sky didn't fall in New York. It won't fall in Massachusetts, either. http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/05/09/its_time_to_restore_state_program_cuts/
-R
