Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Latest Terror Alert: More of the same?
Well, this one IS based on actual information. However, much of the info. antedates 9/11/01. NY police commissioner Ray Kelly says that the ‘casing out’ of these buildings was a “vulnerability analysis” that does not suggest any evidence of an imminent threat. So, we know that al-Qaeda cased out buildings during 2000-2001. That’s reason for an alert? Hmmmm.
Then again, if we wanted to pretend that it was a non-partisan effort, Tom Ridge again reminded us: "But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President's leadership in the war against terror.”
Thus it’s not surprising that some would wonder:
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35466-2004Aug2?language=printer
The Bushies have been Osama’s ‘dream come true.’ They have made even conservatives cynical about these alerts, they invaded an Arab country and tortured prisoners, let the Taliban re-emerge, let Osama escape at Tora Bora and first resisted ‘homeland security’ and then demonstrated incompetence in not providing even basic security for ports, chemical and nuclear plants, ETC. And this is the one category where Bush continues to outpoll Kerry.
Fiscal Policy: Why did Kerry and all the Democrats ignore the Bush deficit? Daniel Gross for slate.com:
The first is that the Democrats have swallowed the Republican line that the deterioration of the nation's balance sheet was more a matter of happenstance than human agency. The recession and stock bust sapped revenues and necessitated tax cuts while the war on terror required higher spending, thus rendering all those forecasts of surplus inoperative. But that's not how it went down. As Daniel Altman convincingly argues in his new book, Neoconomy, the administration's efforts to remake American fiscal policy have been just as radical and just as calculated as its efforts to remake foreign policy. The Neoconomists, led by the dour supply-sider Lawrence Lindsey and the more cheerful (and shameless) Glenn Hubbard, possessed of "a revolutionary mindset," used the forecasts of a surplus as an excuse to restructure the tax code. Their goal was to eliminate or sharply reduce taxes on savings and investing and instead finance government activities by taxing wages. So marginal tax rates were cut on the wealthy, the estate tax was slated for elimination, and taxes on dividends and capital gains were slashed. The result: hundreds of billions of dollars of the Social Security surplus spent, hundreds of billions in extra debt, subpar job growth, and structural deficits as far as the eye can see.
And they're not done yet. If the Neoconomists have their way, Altman concludes, "All your income from working would be taxed" while "none of your income from other forms of saving would be taxed." That's a huge relative advantage for those with enough assets to invest and live off of savings and a huge relative disadvantage for people who haven't yet made it. Two Americas, anyone? http://www.slate.com/id/2104561/
Voting Machine Concerns: Ronnie Dugger, Texas populist, founder of the Alliance for Democracy, in the August 14th Nation:
How They Could Steal the Election This Time
On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.
The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17].
The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger
FBI Whistle-blower blows her whistle:
This blog’s most startling news is from Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who’s been basically gagged by the FBI. She sent a letter to Tom Kean the 9/11 Commission co-chair which is quite a read. I provide a healthy excerpt.
Unfortunately, I find your report seriously flawed in its failure to address serious intelligence issues that I am aware of, which have been confirmed, and which as a witness to the commission, I made you aware of. Thus, I must assume that other serious issues that I am not aware of were in the same manner omitted from your report. These omissions cast doubt on the validity of your report and therefore on its conclusions and recommendations. Considering what is at stake, our national security, we are entitled to demand answers to unanswered questions, and to ask for clarification of issues that were ignored and/or omitted from the report. I, Sibel Edmonds, a concerned American Citizen, a former FBI translator, a whistleblower, a witness for a United States Congressional investigation, a witness and a plaintiff for the Department of Justice Inspector General investigation, and a witness for your own 9/11 Commission investigation, request your answers to, and your public acknowledgement of, the following questions and issues:
After the terrorist attacks of September 11 we, the translators at the FBI’s largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to terrorist activities so that the FBI could present the United States Congress with a record of ‘extensive backlog of untranslated documents’, and justify its request for budget and staff increases. While FBI agents from various field offices were desperately seeking leads and suspects, and completely depending on FBI HQ and its language units to provide them with needed translated information, hundreds of translators were being told by their administrative supervisors not to translate and to let the work pile up ( please refer to the CBS-60 Minutes transcript dated October 2002, and provided to your investigators in January-February 2004).
After almost three years the American people still do not know that thousands of lives can be jeopardized under the unspoken policy of ‘ protecting certain foreign business relations.’ The victims family members still do not realize that information and answers they have sought relentlessly for over two years has been blocked due to the unspoken decisions made and disguised under ‘ safeguarding certain diplomatic relations.’ Your report did not even attempt to address these unspoken practices, although, unlike me, you were not placed under any gag. Your hearings did not include questions regarding these unspoken and unwritten policies and practices. Despite your full awareness and understanding of certain criminal conduct that connects to certain terrorist related activities, committed by certain U.S. officials and high-level government employees, you have not proposed criminal investigations into this conduct, although under the laws of this country you are required to do so. How can budget increases address and resolve these problems, when some of them are caused by unspoken practices and unwritten policies? How can a new bureaucratic layer, “ Intelligence Czar”, in its cocoon removed from the action lines, override these unwritten policies and unspoken practices incompatible with our national security?
--------------
I am writing this letter in light of my direct experience within the FBI’s translation unit during the most crucial times after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in light of my first hand knowledge of certain problems and cases within the Bureau’s language units, and in light of what has already been established as facts. As you are fully aware, the facts, incidents, and problems cited in this letter are by NO means based upon personal opinion or un-verified allegations. As you are fully aware, these issues and incidents were found confirmed by a Senior Republican Senator, Charles Grassley, and a Senior Democrat Senator, Patrick Leahy. As you know, according to officials with direct knowledge of the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on my allegations, ‘ none of my allegations were disproved.’ As you are fully aware, even FBI officials ‘ confirmed all my allegations and denied none’ during their unclassified meetings with the Senate Judiciary staff over two years ago. However, neither your commission’s hearings, nor your commission’s five hundred sixty seven-page report, nor your recommendations include these serious issues, major incidents, and systemic problems. Your report’s coverage of FBI translation problems consists of a brief microscopic footnote (Footnote #25). Yet, your commission is geared to start aggressively pressuring our government to hastily implement your measures and recommendations based upon your incomplete and deficient report. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0408/S00012.htm
Trade: WTO Progress or usual messing over the disempowered?
Elizabeth Becker, NY Times:
By agreeing to the eventual elimination of billions of dollars of farm subsides early Sunday morning, the World Trade Organization began to make good on its insistence that wealthy nations end the dumping of subsidized food on the global market.
The framework agreement they reached, representing a midway point in talks to change world trade rules, also served as a reminder that multinational organizations can at times be effective. The accord came nearly a year after the spectacular failure of the previous effort in Cancún, Mexico, at a low point in international relations splintered by the Iraq war. Officials are hoping for a successful conclusion in 2006.
While there were no Champagne toasts here - exhausted delegates rushed to their cars, intent on a good night's sleep - there was a sense of a job well done. Supachai Panitchpakdi, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said this was a "truly historic" achievement.
But in this year of American elections and lingering trans-Atlantic friction, that message was muted by competing interpretations of what this framework agreement would mean for farmers in wealthier as well as poor countries.
For developing countries that had succeeded in transforming the seemingly dull issue of farm subsidies into an international cause célèbre complete with rock-star patronage, it was a moment of triumph. The global campaign - amplified by the World Bank, the United Nations and the charity Oxfam International - helped push representatives of the advanced economies to give in to pleas to cut back some of their $300 billion in annual subsidies and supports that have pushed down commodity prices, impoverished farmers in the developing world and prevented them from competing on the world market.
The European Union agreed unequivocally to eliminate its export subsidies, easily the most detested of all agricultural subsidies. The United States agreed to cut back its export credits, some of its cotton subsidies and to make a 20 percent reduction in some of its $19 billion in subsidies of corn, wheat, rice and soybeans the first year the rules go into effect.
"This is the beginning of the end of all subsidies," said Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister, who became a star of the negotiations. "Export subsidies are now gone, and trade-distorting domestic subsidies are on their way out." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02trade.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091527423-JXQQ7zVRncgybNwgdW2a1Q&pagewanted=print&position=
Dissenting Voices: Focus on the Global South and the Indian delegation asserting that small farmers will die, de-industrialization will occur in the developing countries, etc.
The trade liberalization framework presented to the WTO General Council today is a betrayal of the world’s poor, according to the Asian trade policy research NGO, Focus on the Global South.
Speaking in Geneva today, their senior trade analyst Aileen Kwa said that the current negotiations are being used by the rich industrialized countries – especially the US and the EU – to force open developing country markets and to hide their own massive agricultural subsidies.
"If the proposed framework is implemented, the inevitable result will be deindustrialization of the developing world and the end of small-scale farming," said Kwa. "Millions of workers will lose their jobs and millions of farmers will lose their livelihoods." http://www.focusweb.org/main/html/PrintArticle389.html
But the powerful National Farmers' Coalition (NFC) which represents 75 percent of India's farmers and has on board political leaders like the Communist Party of India (CPI)'s Atul Kumar Anjaan, thinks otherwise. ''India and other developing countries should understand that they have been had by the complex technical language which now actually allows the United States and the European Union to increase their domestic support (of agricultural products),'' said Devinder Sharma, a spokesman for the NFC. ''The exports of these countries can actually be dumped on others,'' said Devinder Sharma, spokesman for the NFC. http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=24900
Plame Investigation: 13 weeks till election day and still no grand jury announcement. Only that, according to Robin Wright in the Washington Post, Powell testified in July. So much (such as the 9/11 Report piece on the Administration) has been postponed. Why not this as well? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32773-2004Aug1.html
Bush Administration’s Nuclear Folly (cont.) They’re so accomplished at making the world more dangerous. I will not reference Bush, fundamentalism, Armageddon.
In a significant shift in U.S. policy, the Bush administration announced this week that it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty that would ban production of nuclear weapons materials.
For several years the United States and other nations have pursued the treaty, which would ban new production by any state of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons. At an arms-control meeting this week in Geneva, the Bush administration told other nations it still supported a treaty, but not verification.
Administration officials, who have showed skepticism in the past about the effectiveness of international weapons inspections, said they made the decision after concluding that such a system would cost too much, would require overly intrusive inspections and would not guarantee compliance with the treaty. They declined, however, to explain in detail how they believed U.S. security would be harmed by creating a plan to monitor the treaty.
Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The announcement, they said, also virtually kills a 10-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28806-2004Jul30?language=printer
More re Abu Ghraib- from Rolling Stone magazine (Osha Gray Davidson)
It has been months since the now-infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib revealed that American soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners -- yet the Bush administration has failed to get to the bottom of the abuses."There are some serious unanswered questions," says Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon is stalling on several investigations, and congressional inquiries have ground to a halt. The foot-dragging is astonishing, given that Congress has access to classified documents detailing the abuses outlined by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in his report on Abu Ghraib. Rolling Stone obtained those files in June and offers this report on their contents. -The Editors
The new classified military documents offer a chilling picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib -- including detailed reports that U.S. troops and translators sodomized and raped Iraqi prisoners. The secret files -- 106 "annexes" that the Defense Department withheld from the Taguba report last spring -- include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6388256&pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1091216021626&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.780
Nixon: Not just Watergate, not just Cambodia. Plotting Assassin!
Credit NPR with an unusual interview that discussed the retirement of columnist Jack Anderson. Richard Nixon had come to loathe Anderson and considered ways to neutralize him. This from Brian Naylor’s interview of author Mark Feldstein who is currently writing a book on Anderson.
Mr. FELDSTEIN: We don't know. Here's what we do know--and it's been really interesting. I've been going through the National Archives documents on this and the White House tapes. We do know that E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, two names that would become famous a few weeks later during the Watergate break-in when they were arrested as part of that, secretly met at The Hay-Adams Hotel in March of 1972, a block from the White House, and they discussed rubbing out Jack Anderson, and they discussed various ways they were going to kill him. First, they talked about putting LSD in his drink. The trouble was as Mormon and a teetotaler, he didn't drink alcohol. So that was out. So then they talked about making him crash in an automobile accident, but they would have to go to the CIA and use a special car for that. So finally G. Gordon Liddy volunteered to kill Anderson himself personally by knifing him, slitting his throat, and staging it as a mugging that would look like a Washington street crime. At the last minute, this assassination plot was aborted, and a few weeks later, the men were arrested in the Watergate break-in and never had a chance to put their plan into operation. http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3807442
-R
Well, this one IS based on actual information. However, much of the info. antedates 9/11/01. NY police commissioner Ray Kelly says that the ‘casing out’ of these buildings was a “vulnerability analysis” that does not suggest any evidence of an imminent threat. So, we know that al-Qaeda cased out buildings during 2000-2001. That’s reason for an alert? Hmmmm.
Then again, if we wanted to pretend that it was a non-partisan effort, Tom Ridge again reminded us: "But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President's leadership in the war against terror.”
Thus it’s not surprising that some would wonder:
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35466-2004Aug2?language=printer
The Bushies have been Osama’s ‘dream come true.’ They have made even conservatives cynical about these alerts, they invaded an Arab country and tortured prisoners, let the Taliban re-emerge, let Osama escape at Tora Bora and first resisted ‘homeland security’ and then demonstrated incompetence in not providing even basic security for ports, chemical and nuclear plants, ETC. And this is the one category where Bush continues to outpoll Kerry.
Fiscal Policy: Why did Kerry and all the Democrats ignore the Bush deficit? Daniel Gross for slate.com:
The first is that the Democrats have swallowed the Republican line that the deterioration of the nation's balance sheet was more a matter of happenstance than human agency. The recession and stock bust sapped revenues and necessitated tax cuts while the war on terror required higher spending, thus rendering all those forecasts of surplus inoperative. But that's not how it went down. As Daniel Altman convincingly argues in his new book, Neoconomy, the administration's efforts to remake American fiscal policy have been just as radical and just as calculated as its efforts to remake foreign policy. The Neoconomists, led by the dour supply-sider Lawrence Lindsey and the more cheerful (and shameless) Glenn Hubbard, possessed of "a revolutionary mindset," used the forecasts of a surplus as an excuse to restructure the tax code. Their goal was to eliminate or sharply reduce taxes on savings and investing and instead finance government activities by taxing wages. So marginal tax rates were cut on the wealthy, the estate tax was slated for elimination, and taxes on dividends and capital gains were slashed. The result: hundreds of billions of dollars of the Social Security surplus spent, hundreds of billions in extra debt, subpar job growth, and structural deficits as far as the eye can see.
And they're not done yet. If the Neoconomists have their way, Altman concludes, "All your income from working would be taxed" while "none of your income from other forms of saving would be taxed." That's a huge relative advantage for those with enough assets to invest and live off of savings and a huge relative disadvantage for people who haven't yet made it. Two Americas, anyone? http://www.slate.com/id/2104561/
Voting Machine Concerns: Ronnie Dugger, Texas populist, founder of the Alliance for Democracy, in the August 14th Nation:
How They Could Steal the Election This Time
On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.
The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17].
The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger
FBI Whistle-blower blows her whistle:
This blog’s most startling news is from Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who’s been basically gagged by the FBI. She sent a letter to Tom Kean the 9/11 Commission co-chair which is quite a read. I provide a healthy excerpt.
Unfortunately, I find your report seriously flawed in its failure to address serious intelligence issues that I am aware of, which have been confirmed, and which as a witness to the commission, I made you aware of. Thus, I must assume that other serious issues that I am not aware of were in the same manner omitted from your report. These omissions cast doubt on the validity of your report and therefore on its conclusions and recommendations. Considering what is at stake, our national security, we are entitled to demand answers to unanswered questions, and to ask for clarification of issues that were ignored and/or omitted from the report. I, Sibel Edmonds, a concerned American Citizen, a former FBI translator, a whistleblower, a witness for a United States Congressional investigation, a witness and a plaintiff for the Department of Justice Inspector General investigation, and a witness for your own 9/11 Commission investigation, request your answers to, and your public acknowledgement of, the following questions and issues:
After the terrorist attacks of September 11 we, the translators at the FBI’s largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to terrorist activities so that the FBI could present the United States Congress with a record of ‘extensive backlog of untranslated documents’, and justify its request for budget and staff increases. While FBI agents from various field offices were desperately seeking leads and suspects, and completely depending on FBI HQ and its language units to provide them with needed translated information, hundreds of translators were being told by their administrative supervisors not to translate and to let the work pile up ( please refer to the CBS-60 Minutes transcript dated October 2002, and provided to your investigators in January-February 2004).
After almost three years the American people still do not know that thousands of lives can be jeopardized under the unspoken policy of ‘ protecting certain foreign business relations.’ The victims family members still do not realize that information and answers they have sought relentlessly for over two years has been blocked due to the unspoken decisions made and disguised under ‘ safeguarding certain diplomatic relations.’ Your report did not even attempt to address these unspoken practices, although, unlike me, you were not placed under any gag. Your hearings did not include questions regarding these unspoken and unwritten policies and practices. Despite your full awareness and understanding of certain criminal conduct that connects to certain terrorist related activities, committed by certain U.S. officials and high-level government employees, you have not proposed criminal investigations into this conduct, although under the laws of this country you are required to do so. How can budget increases address and resolve these problems, when some of them are caused by unspoken practices and unwritten policies? How can a new bureaucratic layer, “ Intelligence Czar”, in its cocoon removed from the action lines, override these unwritten policies and unspoken practices incompatible with our national security?
--------------
I am writing this letter in light of my direct experience within the FBI’s translation unit during the most crucial times after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in light of my first hand knowledge of certain problems and cases within the Bureau’s language units, and in light of what has already been established as facts. As you are fully aware, the facts, incidents, and problems cited in this letter are by NO means based upon personal opinion or un-verified allegations. As you are fully aware, these issues and incidents were found confirmed by a Senior Republican Senator, Charles Grassley, and a Senior Democrat Senator, Patrick Leahy. As you know, according to officials with direct knowledge of the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on my allegations, ‘ none of my allegations were disproved.’ As you are fully aware, even FBI officials ‘ confirmed all my allegations and denied none’ during their unclassified meetings with the Senate Judiciary staff over two years ago. However, neither your commission’s hearings, nor your commission’s five hundred sixty seven-page report, nor your recommendations include these serious issues, major incidents, and systemic problems. Your report’s coverage of FBI translation problems consists of a brief microscopic footnote (Footnote #25). Yet, your commission is geared to start aggressively pressuring our government to hastily implement your measures and recommendations based upon your incomplete and deficient report. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0408/S00012.htm
Trade: WTO Progress or usual messing over the disempowered?
Elizabeth Becker, NY Times:
By agreeing to the eventual elimination of billions of dollars of farm subsides early Sunday morning, the World Trade Organization began to make good on its insistence that wealthy nations end the dumping of subsidized food on the global market.
The framework agreement they reached, representing a midway point in talks to change world trade rules, also served as a reminder that multinational organizations can at times be effective. The accord came nearly a year after the spectacular failure of the previous effort in Cancún, Mexico, at a low point in international relations splintered by the Iraq war. Officials are hoping for a successful conclusion in 2006.
While there were no Champagne toasts here - exhausted delegates rushed to their cars, intent on a good night's sleep - there was a sense of a job well done. Supachai Panitchpakdi, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said this was a "truly historic" achievement.
But in this year of American elections and lingering trans-Atlantic friction, that message was muted by competing interpretations of what this framework agreement would mean for farmers in wealthier as well as poor countries.
For developing countries that had succeeded in transforming the seemingly dull issue of farm subsidies into an international cause célèbre complete with rock-star patronage, it was a moment of triumph. The global campaign - amplified by the World Bank, the United Nations and the charity Oxfam International - helped push representatives of the advanced economies to give in to pleas to cut back some of their $300 billion in annual subsidies and supports that have pushed down commodity prices, impoverished farmers in the developing world and prevented them from competing on the world market.
The European Union agreed unequivocally to eliminate its export subsidies, easily the most detested of all agricultural subsidies. The United States agreed to cut back its export credits, some of its cotton subsidies and to make a 20 percent reduction in some of its $19 billion in subsidies of corn, wheat, rice and soybeans the first year the rules go into effect.
"This is the beginning of the end of all subsidies," said Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister, who became a star of the negotiations. "Export subsidies are now gone, and trade-distorting domestic subsidies are on their way out." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02trade.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091527423-JXQQ7zVRncgybNwgdW2a1Q&pagewanted=print&position=
Dissenting Voices: Focus on the Global South and the Indian delegation asserting that small farmers will die, de-industrialization will occur in the developing countries, etc.
The trade liberalization framework presented to the WTO General Council today is a betrayal of the world’s poor, according to the Asian trade policy research NGO, Focus on the Global South.
Speaking in Geneva today, their senior trade analyst Aileen Kwa said that the current negotiations are being used by the rich industrialized countries – especially the US and the EU – to force open developing country markets and to hide their own massive agricultural subsidies.
"If the proposed framework is implemented, the inevitable result will be deindustrialization of the developing world and the end of small-scale farming," said Kwa. "Millions of workers will lose their jobs and millions of farmers will lose their livelihoods." http://www.focusweb.org/main/html/PrintArticle389.html
But the powerful National Farmers' Coalition (NFC) which represents 75 percent of India's farmers and has on board political leaders like the Communist Party of India (CPI)'s Atul Kumar Anjaan, thinks otherwise. ''India and other developing countries should understand that they have been had by the complex technical language which now actually allows the United States and the European Union to increase their domestic support (of agricultural products),'' said Devinder Sharma, a spokesman for the NFC. ''The exports of these countries can actually be dumped on others,'' said Devinder Sharma, spokesman for the NFC. http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=24900
Plame Investigation: 13 weeks till election day and still no grand jury announcement. Only that, according to Robin Wright in the Washington Post, Powell testified in July. So much (such as the 9/11 Report piece on the Administration) has been postponed. Why not this as well? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32773-2004Aug1.html
Bush Administration’s Nuclear Folly (cont.) They’re so accomplished at making the world more dangerous. I will not reference Bush, fundamentalism, Armageddon.
In a significant shift in U.S. policy, the Bush administration announced this week that it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty that would ban production of nuclear weapons materials.
For several years the United States and other nations have pursued the treaty, which would ban new production by any state of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons. At an arms-control meeting this week in Geneva, the Bush administration told other nations it still supported a treaty, but not verification.
Administration officials, who have showed skepticism in the past about the effectiveness of international weapons inspections, said they made the decision after concluding that such a system would cost too much, would require overly intrusive inspections and would not guarantee compliance with the treaty. They declined, however, to explain in detail how they believed U.S. security would be harmed by creating a plan to monitor the treaty.
Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The announcement, they said, also virtually kills a 10-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28806-2004Jul30?language=printer
More re Abu Ghraib- from Rolling Stone magazine (Osha Gray Davidson)
It has been months since the now-infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib revealed that American soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners -- yet the Bush administration has failed to get to the bottom of the abuses."There are some serious unanswered questions," says Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon is stalling on several investigations, and congressional inquiries have ground to a halt. The foot-dragging is astonishing, given that Congress has access to classified documents detailing the abuses outlined by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in his report on Abu Ghraib. Rolling Stone obtained those files in June and offers this report on their contents. -The Editors
The new classified military documents offer a chilling picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib -- including detailed reports that U.S. troops and translators sodomized and raped Iraqi prisoners. The secret files -- 106 "annexes" that the Defense Department withheld from the Taguba report last spring -- include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6388256&pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1091216021626&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.780
Nixon: Not just Watergate, not just Cambodia. Plotting Assassin!
Credit NPR with an unusual interview that discussed the retirement of columnist Jack Anderson. Richard Nixon had come to loathe Anderson and considered ways to neutralize him. This from Brian Naylor’s interview of author Mark Feldstein who is currently writing a book on Anderson.
Mr. FELDSTEIN: We don't know. Here's what we do know--and it's been really interesting. I've been going through the National Archives documents on this and the White House tapes. We do know that E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, two names that would become famous a few weeks later during the Watergate break-in when they were arrested as part of that, secretly met at The Hay-Adams Hotel in March of 1972, a block from the White House, and they discussed rubbing out Jack Anderson, and they discussed various ways they were going to kill him. First, they talked about putting LSD in his drink. The trouble was as Mormon and a teetotaler, he didn't drink alcohol. So that was out. So then they talked about making him crash in an automobile accident, but they would have to go to the CIA and use a special car for that. So finally G. Gordon Liddy volunteered to kill Anderson himself personally by knifing him, slitting his throat, and staging it as a mugging that would look like a Washington street crime. At the last minute, this assassination plot was aborted, and a few weeks later, the men were arrested in the Watergate break-in and never had a chance to put their plan into operation. http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3807442
-R
