Friday, May 21, 2004
American Health Care?
Its hospitals gleam. Waiting-lists are non-existent. Doctors still make home visits. Life expectancy is two years longer than average for the western world.
No, French. More:
....For the patient, the French health system is still a joy. Same-day appointments can be made easily; if one doctor's advice displeases, you can consult another, a habit known as nomadisme médical. Individual hospital rooms are the norm. Specialists can be consulted without referral. And while the patient pays up front, almost all the money is reimbursed, either through the public insurance system or a top-up private policy.
For family doctors too, liberty prevails. They are self-employed, can set up a practice where they like, prescribe what they like, and are paid per consultation. As the health ministry's own diagnosis put it recently: “The French system offers more freedom than any other in the world.” http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2670654 (subscriber service)
Moderate Repubs Make a Stand
Sign of the Times: Senators McCain, Snowe, Chafee and Collins refused to go along with making the tax cuts permanent. McCain sounded off about “fat cats” in the GOP and noted, "I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility…Apparently, those days are long gone for some of those in our party." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21budget.html
Iraq as appealing employer
The Washington Post’s (and American Prospect’s) Harold Meyerson:
A remarkable story in the May 17 Post profiled a number of low-wage, non-union truck drivers, machine operators, cooks and the like who are going to work for Halliburton's KBR and other such firms in Iraq. In most cases, the workers profiled had the gravest misgivings about going over, but decided in the end to go because their families needed the health insurance or the money to buy a decent house.
This puts a whole new light on what many of us have considered one of America's gravest problems. At first glance, the fact that one-quarter of the U.S. workforce makes no more than $8.70 an hour (as one recent Russell Sage study concluded), or that 44 million Americans have no health coverage, is proof positive of a dysfunctional political economy.
But it turns out to be plenty functional after all. Who would run the risk of meeting the fate of the four contract security workers in Fallujah if they could make decent wages and cover their families' medical expenses by doing the same job here at home? Wilsonianism abroad -- belligerent but on the cheap -- meets social Darwinism at home: Clearly, this is one instance where Bush's foreign policy and domestic policy work well together. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=742acd6d4286f9274d69d5430c34eca4&lat=1084981696&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW4RH0585CD60DEBA439543FDE827B
What’s happening, Iraq: Doom and Gloom from the Military
Minimally covered here, but expansively so in the Guardian:
"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss," General Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of US central command, told the Senate foreign relations committee. Larry Diamond, an analyst at the conservative Hoover Institution, said: "I think it's clear that the United States now faces a perilous situation in Iraq.
"We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of Iraqis for security and post-war reconstruction.
"There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw - quagmire." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1220792,00.html
Snappy Thinking at the DOD:
As they are running out of troops, they’ve had to put on their thinking caps.
The Defense Department, strapped for troops for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, has proposed to Congress that it tap the Internal Revenue Service to locate out-of-touch reservists.
The unusual measure, which the Pentagon said has been examined by lawyers, would allow the IRS to pass on addresses for tens of thousands of former military members who still face recall into the active duty.
The proposal has largely escaped attention amid all the other crises of government, and it is likely to face opposition from privacy rights activists who see information held by the IRS as inviolate. http://www.military.com/Content/Printer_Friendly_Version/1,11491,,00.html?str_filename=FL%5Firs%5F051804&passfile=FL%5Firs%5F051804&page_url=%2FNewsContent%2F0%2C13319%2CFL%5Firs%5F051804%2C00%2Ehtml
Chalabi Exits:
Our jettisoning of convicted-of-embezzlement, former darling-of-the-Pentagon Ahmed Chalabi points up how Chalabi doesn’t know his U.S. history. When someone is no longer of use, he becomes a non-person or an enemy. Just ask Manuel Noreiga and Saddam. Robin Wright’s piece in Friday’s Washington Post notes the reduced status:
"The vast majority of reports of his proximity to and influence on administration policy have been greatly exaggerated," said a senior administration official involved in Iraq policy who knows Chalabi. "The reality is that he was among a wide variety of Iraqi figures who made the case to an array of American officials over a period of time for the liberation of the Iraqi people." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43775-2004May20.html
Iraqis have noted that Chalabi was targeted not for providing bad intelligence but because he "had been clear on rejecting incomplete sovereignty ... and against having the security portfolio remain in the hands of those who have proved their failure." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221084,00.html
The Administration then floated the word “spy”, claiming that Chalabi had passed “sensitive information” to Iran. Perhaps, like American teachers, he’s also a “terrorist.” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/20/iraq/main618637.shtml
So much for our investment: From March, 2000 through this past September, Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress had received $33 million from the State Department. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5210888
Abuse: There was NO System
The Wall Street Journal (Eric Jaffe):
Three top generals told Congress that the U.S. military had no formal system in place for handling reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross that documented widespread abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he never saw a harshly worded November report on abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, even though it reached two of his top aides that same month. The three generals also struggled to give the committee definitive answers when asked who was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison system at the time some abuses were committed and what rules were in place for conducting coercive interrogations. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108497337838215718,00.html
More Problems For Bush: Evangelicals Bailing Out Next?This Reuters report (Nigel Hunt) notes that the Iraq War has weakened the Bush-Evangelical bond.
Concern among evangelical Christians over the course of the war in Iraq is opening a crack in their strong bond with President Bush and the Republican Party, political analysts who track this powerful voting group said.
But they caution there are doubts over whether John Kerry can lure evangelicals into the Democratic camp in November's presidential election.
"I know there are a lot of evangelicals who are disillusioned with the war and worried about a lot of things, the Woodward book, the Clarke book ... (and) how we got into this thing," said Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., referring to recent books on the al Qaeda threat and the Iraqi war and occupation.
Compounding that is the growing scandal about prisoner abuses by U.S. troops in Iraq.
Evangelical Christians are still expected to vote overwhelmingly for Bush, but the erosion of support could reduce their turnout on election day, a potentially ominous development for the incumbent president. http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=5179780
Iraq Poll: Instead of Kerry-Bush…
The Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies polled all of Iraq’s main regions. It found that more than ½ wanted the U.S. troops out; 83% viewed the ‘coalition forces’ as occupiers; and a stunning 68% expressed mild or strong support of Muqtada al Sadr, the Shia cleric who is mocked here as a lightweight criminal. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3E8363A1-EC9E-4D48-A94B-EF95E2CFB0F9.htm
Palestinians-Israelis: Still Worse
Israel pushed deeper into the Rafah refugee camp on Thursday, undeterred by the international outcry after at least eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli tank fire as they demonstrated against the military operation. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5004007/
Medicare Fraud: But, it didn’t violate Federal Law
Recall those phony ads put out by the Republicans that praised the Medicare drug program. The GAO investigated, condemned, but ruled, ‘no laws broken.’
The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.
The agency said the videos were a form of "covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/politics/20medicare.html?ex=1400385600&en=0d350efce643e111&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
-R
Its hospitals gleam. Waiting-lists are non-existent. Doctors still make home visits. Life expectancy is two years longer than average for the western world.
No, French. More:
....For the patient, the French health system is still a joy. Same-day appointments can be made easily; if one doctor's advice displeases, you can consult another, a habit known as nomadisme médical. Individual hospital rooms are the norm. Specialists can be consulted without referral. And while the patient pays up front, almost all the money is reimbursed, either through the public insurance system or a top-up private policy.
For family doctors too, liberty prevails. They are self-employed, can set up a practice where they like, prescribe what they like, and are paid per consultation. As the health ministry's own diagnosis put it recently: “The French system offers more freedom than any other in the world.” http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2670654 (subscriber service)
Moderate Repubs Make a Stand
Sign of the Times: Senators McCain, Snowe, Chafee and Collins refused to go along with making the tax cuts permanent. McCain sounded off about “fat cats” in the GOP and noted, "I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility…Apparently, those days are long gone for some of those in our party." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21budget.html
Iraq as appealing employer
The Washington Post’s (and American Prospect’s) Harold Meyerson:
A remarkable story in the May 17 Post profiled a number of low-wage, non-union truck drivers, machine operators, cooks and the like who are going to work for Halliburton's KBR and other such firms in Iraq. In most cases, the workers profiled had the gravest misgivings about going over, but decided in the end to go because their families needed the health insurance or the money to buy a decent house.
This puts a whole new light on what many of us have considered one of America's gravest problems. At first glance, the fact that one-quarter of the U.S. workforce makes no more than $8.70 an hour (as one recent Russell Sage study concluded), or that 44 million Americans have no health coverage, is proof positive of a dysfunctional political economy.
But it turns out to be plenty functional after all. Who would run the risk of meeting the fate of the four contract security workers in Fallujah if they could make decent wages and cover their families' medical expenses by doing the same job here at home? Wilsonianism abroad -- belligerent but on the cheap -- meets social Darwinism at home: Clearly, this is one instance where Bush's foreign policy and domestic policy work well together. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=742acd6d4286f9274d69d5430c34eca4&lat=1084981696&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW4RH0585CD60DEBA439543FDE827B
What’s happening, Iraq: Doom and Gloom from the Military
Minimally covered here, but expansively so in the Guardian:
"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss," General Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of US central command, told the Senate foreign relations committee. Larry Diamond, an analyst at the conservative Hoover Institution, said: "I think it's clear that the United States now faces a perilous situation in Iraq.
"We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of Iraqis for security and post-war reconstruction.
"There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw - quagmire." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1220792,00.html
Snappy Thinking at the DOD:
As they are running out of troops, they’ve had to put on their thinking caps.
The Defense Department, strapped for troops for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, has proposed to Congress that it tap the Internal Revenue Service to locate out-of-touch reservists.
The unusual measure, which the Pentagon said has been examined by lawyers, would allow the IRS to pass on addresses for tens of thousands of former military members who still face recall into the active duty.
The proposal has largely escaped attention amid all the other crises of government, and it is likely to face opposition from privacy rights activists who see information held by the IRS as inviolate. http://www.military.com/Content/Printer_Friendly_Version/1,11491,,00.html?str_filename=FL%5Firs%5F051804&passfile=FL%5Firs%5F051804&page_url=%2FNewsContent%2F0%2C13319%2CFL%5Firs%5F051804%2C00%2Ehtml
Chalabi Exits:
Our jettisoning of convicted-of-embezzlement, former darling-of-the-Pentagon Ahmed Chalabi points up how Chalabi doesn’t know his U.S. history. When someone is no longer of use, he becomes a non-person or an enemy. Just ask Manuel Noreiga and Saddam. Robin Wright’s piece in Friday’s Washington Post notes the reduced status:
"The vast majority of reports of his proximity to and influence on administration policy have been greatly exaggerated," said a senior administration official involved in Iraq policy who knows Chalabi. "The reality is that he was among a wide variety of Iraqi figures who made the case to an array of American officials over a period of time for the liberation of the Iraqi people." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43775-2004May20.html
Iraqis have noted that Chalabi was targeted not for providing bad intelligence but because he "had been clear on rejecting incomplete sovereignty ... and against having the security portfolio remain in the hands of those who have proved their failure." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221084,00.html
The Administration then floated the word “spy”, claiming that Chalabi had passed “sensitive information” to Iran. Perhaps, like American teachers, he’s also a “terrorist.” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/20/iraq/main618637.shtml
So much for our investment: From March, 2000 through this past September, Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress had received $33 million from the State Department. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5210888
Abuse: There was NO System
The Wall Street Journal (Eric Jaffe):
Three top generals told Congress that the U.S. military had no formal system in place for handling reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross that documented widespread abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he never saw a harshly worded November report on abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, even though it reached two of his top aides that same month. The three generals also struggled to give the committee definitive answers when asked who was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison system at the time some abuses were committed and what rules were in place for conducting coercive interrogations. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108497337838215718,00.html
More Problems For Bush: Evangelicals Bailing Out Next?This Reuters report (Nigel Hunt) notes that the Iraq War has weakened the Bush-Evangelical bond.
Concern among evangelical Christians over the course of the war in Iraq is opening a crack in their strong bond with President Bush and the Republican Party, political analysts who track this powerful voting group said.
But they caution there are doubts over whether John Kerry can lure evangelicals into the Democratic camp in November's presidential election.
"I know there are a lot of evangelicals who are disillusioned with the war and worried about a lot of things, the Woodward book, the Clarke book ... (and) how we got into this thing," said Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., referring to recent books on the al Qaeda threat and the Iraqi war and occupation.
Compounding that is the growing scandal about prisoner abuses by U.S. troops in Iraq.
Evangelical Christians are still expected to vote overwhelmingly for Bush, but the erosion of support could reduce their turnout on election day, a potentially ominous development for the incumbent president. http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=5179780
Iraq Poll: Instead of Kerry-Bush…
The Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies polled all of Iraq’s main regions. It found that more than ½ wanted the U.S. troops out; 83% viewed the ‘coalition forces’ as occupiers; and a stunning 68% expressed mild or strong support of Muqtada al Sadr, the Shia cleric who is mocked here as a lightweight criminal. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3E8363A1-EC9E-4D48-A94B-EF95E2CFB0F9.htm
Palestinians-Israelis: Still Worse
Israel pushed deeper into the Rafah refugee camp on Thursday, undeterred by the international outcry after at least eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli tank fire as they demonstrated against the military operation. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5004007/
Medicare Fraud: But, it didn’t violate Federal Law
Recall those phony ads put out by the Republicans that praised the Medicare drug program. The GAO investigated, condemned, but ruled, ‘no laws broken.’
The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.
The agency said the videos were a form of "covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/politics/20medicare.html?ex=1400385600&en=0d350efce643e111&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
-R
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
"the level of incompetence here is so staggering here, and yet there's this gap between how astonishingly incompetent...and we can go over particulars in the last year if you want to... how astonishingly incompetent they've been and the perception is still of them as solid citizens...
The only way you can sort of start to let the public know is to say no. They don't know what they're doing. They're clowns." – Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, on The O’Franken Factor, Air America assessing the Administration
Media Wake-Up CallA good sign: Numerous reports as to newspapers finally realizing that they’ve long given the Administration a free pass and had generally given up their investigative function. The prototypical quote from one such media person who admires the Seymour Hersh series in The New Yorker, "We're having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!". So, it wasn’t surprising that a front-page story in today’s NY Times notes:
White House Trumpets Programs It Tried To Cut
Like many of its predecessors, the Bush White House has used the machinery of government to promote the re-election of the president by awarding federal grants to strategically important states. But in a twist this election season, many administration officials are taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply.
For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/politics/campaign/19GRAN.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: We’re out of troops, now moving 10% of those deployed in Korea a training battalion from Louisiana and are calling u 30,000 inactive reservists. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-worums183807608may18,0,3658673.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines Iraqi journalists have complained about their being abused. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/international/middleeast/19REUT.html
Iraq Invasion and Occupation: The Upshot
Robin Wright is a thoughtful columnist for the Washington Post.
Over the past quarter-century, I've covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I've never been scared until now.
The stakes in Iraq -- for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor -- are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America's credibility in the world, even among close allies. The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive The Pictures. And the costs are not merely the billions from the U.S. Treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.
The stakes are instead how the final phase of the Modern Era plays out.
That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the Enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Islamic world -- ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life. The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change…
The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us. Their jihad -- or struggle, as the word is accurately translated -- has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.
Yet I am scared because the foundation for the region's democratic transformation has steadily eroded over the past year. Whether the U.S.-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq's borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the Modern Era's final phase.
The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross's recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were "deprived of their liberty" -- by the world champion of democracy -- "were arrested by mistake." Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28339-2004May14?language=printer
Fred Kaplan in Slate summarizes the culpability of those at the top:
Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.
That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial. http://slate.msn.com/id/2100683/
Army, CIA want torture truths exposed
The UPI’s Martin Sieff notes that those who matter are increasingly distancing themselves from the Administration and moving closer to wanting truth.
Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040518-064124-9605r
The LA Times’ Tracy Wilkinson and Alissa J. Rubin look at the myth that ‘only a few’ perpetrated the abuse. They note that hundreds, if not thousands followed orders and beat and brutalized more than 40,000 Iraqis who were held for months, though, as the Red Cross noted, up to 90% were there by mistake.
As much of the world focuses on Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, dozens of detainees and their families, along with scathing reports from international human rights groups, describe mistreatment at detention centers under U.S. control from Basra and Umm al Qasr in the south to Tikrit and Mosul in northern Iraq.
Even as the White House continues to argue that photographed abuse at Abu Ghraib was an isolated case, interviews with detainees and human rights reports demonstrate that abuse in various forms was system-wide. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-abuse18may18,1,4789041.story?coll=la-home-headlines
June 30 B.S.
The much-cited June 30 deadline for the “hand-over of power” (to whom?) has always been absurd, and a hoax. The Wall Street Journal’s Yochi J. Dreazen and Christopher Cooper explain.
As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.
In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108439973419309908,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Bushies: No Matter What, It’s Our Oil
If anyone still thinks we weren’t interested in their oil…
As the occupation of Iraq dissolves further into bloody chaos, the colonial overseers in Baghdad are keeping their eyes fixed on what is really important: Iraq's money and how to keep it. Whatever apology for a "sovereign" Iraqi government is permitted to take office after June 30 -- and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi admits in private that he "has to do" whatever the Americans tell him to do -- the United States is making sure that the Iraqis do not get their hands on their country's oil revenues.
We are talking about big money here: Iraq's oil exports are slated to top $16 billion this year alone. U.N. Security Resolution 1483, rammed through by the United States a year ago, gives total control of the money from oil sales -- currently the only source of revenue in Iraq -- to the occupying power, i.e., the United States. The actual repository for the money is an entity called the Development Fund for Iraq, which in effect functions as a private piggy bank for Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. The DFI is directed by a Program Review Board of 11 members, just one of whom is Iraqi.
In case anyone should be moved to challenge this massive looting exercise in the courts, President Bush followed up the May 2003 resolution with Executive Order 13303, which forbids any legal challenge to the development fund or any actions by the United States affecting Iraq's oil industry. Since then, the Iraqi oil ministry, famously secured by the U.S. military during post-invasion riots and looting, has been kept under the close supervision of a senior U.S. advisor, former ExxonMobil executive Gary Vogler. http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/05/17/oil/index_np.html
WMD:
The desperate Administration might try to make something of the sarin shell discovered in Iraq on Tuesday. But, lo, even David Kay has noted its antiquity (it’s probably from the Iraq-Iran war) and adds, “It’s doesn’t strike me as a big deal.” http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040517/D82KIMH00.html
Low-Keying it at the Olympics.
It’s no time to flaunt your americanismo.
American athletes have been warned not to wave the U.S. flag during their medal celebrations at this summer's Olympic Games in Athens, for fear of provoking crowd hostility and harming the country's already-battered public image.
The spectacle of victorious athletes grabbing a national flag and parading it around the stadium is a familiar part of international sporting competition, but U.S. Olympic officials have ordered their 550-strong team to exercise restraint and avoid any jingoistic behavior. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040516-121028-9603r.htm
Palestinians-Israelis
Tamer Ziara for The Independent reports on the latest:
Israeli helicopters pounded the refugee camp of Rafah in the Gaza strip with missiles and machine gun fire today, killing at least 12 Palestinians as troops searched houses in the largest Israeli offensive in Gaza in years.
The death toll was expected to rise, with doctors saying they knew of two more bodies they were unable to collect because of heavy shooting.
Trapped residents said they huddled in the innermost rooms of their homes as bullets rained outside. Others tried to flee to safer ground. At least 34 Palestinians were wounded, including eight who were in critical condition.
Israel says it is targeting the Rafah refugee camp, on the border with Egypt, to destroy arms-smuggling tunnels and hunt Palestinian militants. Security officials said earlier this week the army also plans to widen an Israeli patrol road between the camp and Egypt, which would entail demolishing rows of nearby houses.
Last week, Israel destroyed about 100 houses near the patrol road, making more than 1,000 Palestinians homeless and drawing worldwide condemnation, including rare criticism from the United States. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=522411
Move-On: Bold John Kerry (sic)
Move-On has been terrific, though this overstatement should be retracted.
Throughout his life, John Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and guarantee truth-telling in government. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more from us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope and progress. http://by16fd.bay16.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/getmsg?msg=MSG1084829799.3&start=1928166&len=10672&imgsafe=n&curmbox=F000000001&a=703fc391345f33adb7fc5c53384502fc
Wither Bill Moyers’ NOW:
Latest from Current, the Public TV trade paper reports: “…
PBS announced…its plans to retool Now with Bill Moyers as a half-hour series, during the Public Television Programmers' Association Conference in Atlanta last month. PBS has said Now, which will lose Moyers as host when he retires after the elections, will be followed by Tucker Carlson's new half-hour series, Unfiltered, developed with CPB and PBS support to counterbalance Moyers politically….
Another program with a right-ward edge may also join PBS’s expanded public affairs lineup. CPB is discussing a new series from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which is edited by Paul Gigot, a former pundit on PBS's NewsHour. “ http://www.current.org/
-R
The only way you can sort of start to let the public know is to say no. They don't know what they're doing. They're clowns." – Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, on The O’Franken Factor, Air America assessing the Administration
Media Wake-Up CallA good sign: Numerous reports as to newspapers finally realizing that they’ve long given the Administration a free pass and had generally given up their investigative function. The prototypical quote from one such media person who admires the Seymour Hersh series in The New Yorker, "We're having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!". So, it wasn’t surprising that a front-page story in today’s NY Times notes:
White House Trumpets Programs It Tried To Cut
Like many of its predecessors, the Bush White House has used the machinery of government to promote the re-election of the president by awarding federal grants to strategically important states. But in a twist this election season, many administration officials are taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply.
For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/politics/campaign/19GRAN.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: We’re out of troops, now moving 10% of those deployed in Korea a training battalion from Louisiana and are calling u 30,000 inactive reservists. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-worums183807608may18,0,3658673.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines Iraqi journalists have complained about their being abused. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/international/middleeast/19REUT.html
Iraq Invasion and Occupation: The Upshot
Robin Wright is a thoughtful columnist for the Washington Post.
Over the past quarter-century, I've covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I've never been scared until now.
The stakes in Iraq -- for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor -- are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America's credibility in the world, even among close allies. The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive The Pictures. And the costs are not merely the billions from the U.S. Treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.
The stakes are instead how the final phase of the Modern Era plays out.
That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the Enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Islamic world -- ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life. The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change…
The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us. Their jihad -- or struggle, as the word is accurately translated -- has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.
Yet I am scared because the foundation for the region's democratic transformation has steadily eroded over the past year. Whether the U.S.-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq's borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the Modern Era's final phase.
The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross's recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were "deprived of their liberty" -- by the world champion of democracy -- "were arrested by mistake." Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28339-2004May14?language=printer
Fred Kaplan in Slate summarizes the culpability of those at the top:
Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.
That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial. http://slate.msn.com/id/2100683/
Army, CIA want torture truths exposed
The UPI’s Martin Sieff notes that those who matter are increasingly distancing themselves from the Administration and moving closer to wanting truth.
Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040518-064124-9605r
The LA Times’ Tracy Wilkinson and Alissa J. Rubin look at the myth that ‘only a few’ perpetrated the abuse. They note that hundreds, if not thousands followed orders and beat and brutalized more than 40,000 Iraqis who were held for months, though, as the Red Cross noted, up to 90% were there by mistake.
As much of the world focuses on Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, dozens of detainees and their families, along with scathing reports from international human rights groups, describe mistreatment at detention centers under U.S. control from Basra and Umm al Qasr in the south to Tikrit and Mosul in northern Iraq.
Even as the White House continues to argue that photographed abuse at Abu Ghraib was an isolated case, interviews with detainees and human rights reports demonstrate that abuse in various forms was system-wide. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-abuse18may18,1,4789041.story?coll=la-home-headlines
June 30 B.S.
The much-cited June 30 deadline for the “hand-over of power” (to whom?) has always been absurd, and a hoax. The Wall Street Journal’s Yochi J. Dreazen and Christopher Cooper explain.
As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.
In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108439973419309908,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Bushies: No Matter What, It’s Our Oil
If anyone still thinks we weren’t interested in their oil…
As the occupation of Iraq dissolves further into bloody chaos, the colonial overseers in Baghdad are keeping their eyes fixed on what is really important: Iraq's money and how to keep it. Whatever apology for a "sovereign" Iraqi government is permitted to take office after June 30 -- and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi admits in private that he "has to do" whatever the Americans tell him to do -- the United States is making sure that the Iraqis do not get their hands on their country's oil revenues.
We are talking about big money here: Iraq's oil exports are slated to top $16 billion this year alone. U.N. Security Resolution 1483, rammed through by the United States a year ago, gives total control of the money from oil sales -- currently the only source of revenue in Iraq -- to the occupying power, i.e., the United States. The actual repository for the money is an entity called the Development Fund for Iraq, which in effect functions as a private piggy bank for Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. The DFI is directed by a Program Review Board of 11 members, just one of whom is Iraqi.
In case anyone should be moved to challenge this massive looting exercise in the courts, President Bush followed up the May 2003 resolution with Executive Order 13303, which forbids any legal challenge to the development fund or any actions by the United States affecting Iraq's oil industry. Since then, the Iraqi oil ministry, famously secured by the U.S. military during post-invasion riots and looting, has been kept under the close supervision of a senior U.S. advisor, former ExxonMobil executive Gary Vogler. http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/05/17/oil/index_np.html
WMD:
The desperate Administration might try to make something of the sarin shell discovered in Iraq on Tuesday. But, lo, even David Kay has noted its antiquity (it’s probably from the Iraq-Iran war) and adds, “It’s doesn’t strike me as a big deal.” http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040517/D82KIMH00.html
Low-Keying it at the Olympics.
It’s no time to flaunt your americanismo.
American athletes have been warned not to wave the U.S. flag during their medal celebrations at this summer's Olympic Games in Athens, for fear of provoking crowd hostility and harming the country's already-battered public image.
The spectacle of victorious athletes grabbing a national flag and parading it around the stadium is a familiar part of international sporting competition, but U.S. Olympic officials have ordered their 550-strong team to exercise restraint and avoid any jingoistic behavior. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040516-121028-9603r.htm
Palestinians-Israelis
Tamer Ziara for The Independent reports on the latest:
Israeli helicopters pounded the refugee camp of Rafah in the Gaza strip with missiles and machine gun fire today, killing at least 12 Palestinians as troops searched houses in the largest Israeli offensive in Gaza in years.
The death toll was expected to rise, with doctors saying they knew of two more bodies they were unable to collect because of heavy shooting.
Trapped residents said they huddled in the innermost rooms of their homes as bullets rained outside. Others tried to flee to safer ground. At least 34 Palestinians were wounded, including eight who were in critical condition.
Israel says it is targeting the Rafah refugee camp, on the border with Egypt, to destroy arms-smuggling tunnels and hunt Palestinian militants. Security officials said earlier this week the army also plans to widen an Israeli patrol road between the camp and Egypt, which would entail demolishing rows of nearby houses.
Last week, Israel destroyed about 100 houses near the patrol road, making more than 1,000 Palestinians homeless and drawing worldwide condemnation, including rare criticism from the United States. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=522411
Move-On: Bold John Kerry (sic)
Move-On has been terrific, though this overstatement should be retracted.
Throughout his life, John Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and guarantee truth-telling in government. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more from us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope and progress. http://by16fd.bay16.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/getmsg?msg=MSG1084829799.3&start=1928166&len=10672&imgsafe=n&curmbox=F000000001&a=703fc391345f33adb7fc5c53384502fc
Wither Bill Moyers’ NOW:
Latest from Current, the Public TV trade paper reports: “…
PBS announced…its plans to retool Now with Bill Moyers as a half-hour series, during the Public Television Programmers' Association Conference in Atlanta last month. PBS has said Now, which will lose Moyers as host when he retires after the elections, will be followed by Tucker Carlson's new half-hour series, Unfiltered, developed with CPB and PBS support to counterbalance Moyers politically….
Another program with a right-ward edge may also join PBS’s expanded public affairs lineup. CPB is discussing a new series from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which is edited by Paul Gigot, a former pundit on PBS's NewsHour. “ http://www.current.org/
-R
Monday, May 17, 2004
Noteworthy Day in Massachusetts: Gay and lesbian Couples Flock to City Halls
On the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board of Education ruling, “all deliberate speed” has been abandoned.
Against a backdrop of whoops and cheers and a party that spilled onto the streets, gay and lesbian couples here began filling out applications for marriage licenses at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, when Massachusetts became the first state in the country to allow them to marry. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/national/17GAYS.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: Accepting the Reality The head of the Governing Council is killed by a bomb, Condi says the abuse issue hasn’t undermined our moral authority, and the Red Cross freshly cites violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Democracy, or Theocracy?
The United States signaled its readiness to put up with an Islamic theocracy in future sovereign Iraq, with Secretary of State Colin Powell saying the US administration "will have to accept" any government created as a result of free and fair elections there.
The remark, made in an interview with NBC television, marked a policy reversal for the administration of President George W. Bush, which up to now had vowed to fight tooth and nail any attempt by Iraqi Shiite leaders to follow in the footsteps of their brethren in Iran. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/85209/1/.html
Abuse: Seymour Hersh (cont.)
Newest article from Hersh in the New Yorker. He continues to look at accountability.
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror…
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
Not Just Seymour Hersh: Newsweek weighs in (John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff):
"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians ... In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last —week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture." http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4989481/
The Pentagon said that Hersh’s account was “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture”, but didn’t actually deny the truthfulness of the article. http://www.dod.mil/releases/2004/nr20040515-0793.html
Business Week (Bruce Nussbaum) sounds off:
"The fiercest anti-American backlash in history may well be under way. The policy of unilateral preemption and its inept execution has, in the end, made the U.S. less secure." http://businessweek.feedroom.com/iframeset.jsp?ord=807048
Vanderbilt’s Senior Class Day speaker, Condi:
Condi plays the race card. Not everyone liked it.
Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that terrorists today are driven by the same hatred that inspired Klansmen to bomb a church in 1963 in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala.
Some Vanderbilt students and faculty had signed a petition to protest Rice's selection for an award. The petition said the award amounted to a university endorsement of Rice's role in the war in Iraq and described her as a "person who repeatedly misrepresented the truth to tragic effect."
Constance Gee, a professor and wife of Chancellor Gordon Gee, was among 200 people who signed the petition against Rice receiving the Chancellor's Medal.
Before Rice's speech, about 40 protesters gathered in the drizzle, some holding signs such as "Vandy Does Not Support Liars." http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&u=/ap/20040513/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/condoleezza_rice_vanderbilt_1&printer=1 doing
William Pfaff: The International Herald Tribune writer is consistently on the mark.
Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration displayed hostility toward international law and treaty obligations that it considered as limits on U.S. national sovereignty or as obstacles to American national interest.
In the Afghanistan war it summarily shipped prisoners outside of the country, notably to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without serious examination of their cases, and in disregard of Geneva norms concerning prisoners taken in war.
While the administration's disregard for international, military and constitutional law was widely acknowledged at the time, there was little protest in the American press, and no effective challenge from Democratic Party leaders. There is a bipartisan responsibility for what has happened.
Some Afghan and other "war against terror" prisoners were transferred to third countries. Reporters were informed - with a smile and a wink - that this was because they could be tortured there. Again there was negligible reaction in U.S. press and political circles.
In Afghanistan, and subsequently in Iraq, an obvious reason for the involvement of civilian "contract employees" in intelligence and interrogations has been that they are not subject to military discipline, and responsibility for them and what they do can be "plausibly denied" by U.S. officials.
All this is consistent with an attitude toward violence characteristic of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who have for years insisted that history is made through violence, and that in the national cause a governing elite has the right to mislead the public in order to achieve goals that the leaders alone are in a position to understand. http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=519400&owner=(TMSI)&date=20040513144504 .
Michael Moore’s Movie Debuts
The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Company deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.
But this film, Fehrenheit 9/11, which is scheduled to make its debut today at the Cannes International Film Festival, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on American television. And the muckracking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on President Bush's tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/movies/17MOOR.html?adxnnl=1&8hpib=&adxnnlx=1084794959-mfiJ/PHHo4ad2dHbYUUWrg&pagewanted=print&position=
-R
On the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board of Education ruling, “all deliberate speed” has been abandoned.
Against a backdrop of whoops and cheers and a party that spilled onto the streets, gay and lesbian couples here began filling out applications for marriage licenses at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, when Massachusetts became the first state in the country to allow them to marry. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/national/17GAYS.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: Accepting the Reality The head of the Governing Council is killed by a bomb, Condi says the abuse issue hasn’t undermined our moral authority, and the Red Cross freshly cites violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Democracy, or Theocracy?
The United States signaled its readiness to put up with an Islamic theocracy in future sovereign Iraq, with Secretary of State Colin Powell saying the US administration "will have to accept" any government created as a result of free and fair elections there.
The remark, made in an interview with NBC television, marked a policy reversal for the administration of President George W. Bush, which up to now had vowed to fight tooth and nail any attempt by Iraqi Shiite leaders to follow in the footsteps of their brethren in Iran. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/85209/1/.html
Abuse: Seymour Hersh (cont.)
Newest article from Hersh in the New Yorker. He continues to look at accountability.
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror…
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
Not Just Seymour Hersh: Newsweek weighs in (John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff):
"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians ... In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last —week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture." http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4989481/
The Pentagon said that Hersh’s account was “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture”, but didn’t actually deny the truthfulness of the article. http://www.dod.mil/releases/2004/nr20040515-0793.html
Business Week (Bruce Nussbaum) sounds off:
"The fiercest anti-American backlash in history may well be under way. The policy of unilateral preemption and its inept execution has, in the end, made the U.S. less secure." http://businessweek.feedroom.com/iframeset.jsp?ord=807048
Vanderbilt’s Senior Class Day speaker, Condi:
Condi plays the race card. Not everyone liked it.
Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that terrorists today are driven by the same hatred that inspired Klansmen to bomb a church in 1963 in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala.
Some Vanderbilt students and faculty had signed a petition to protest Rice's selection for an award. The petition said the award amounted to a university endorsement of Rice's role in the war in Iraq and described her as a "person who repeatedly misrepresented the truth to tragic effect."
Constance Gee, a professor and wife of Chancellor Gordon Gee, was among 200 people who signed the petition against Rice receiving the Chancellor's Medal.
Before Rice's speech, about 40 protesters gathered in the drizzle, some holding signs such as "Vandy Does Not Support Liars." http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&u=/ap/20040513/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/condoleezza_rice_vanderbilt_1&printer=1 doing
William Pfaff: The International Herald Tribune writer is consistently on the mark.
Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration displayed hostility toward international law and treaty obligations that it considered as limits on U.S. national sovereignty or as obstacles to American national interest.
In the Afghanistan war it summarily shipped prisoners outside of the country, notably to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without serious examination of their cases, and in disregard of Geneva norms concerning prisoners taken in war.
While the administration's disregard for international, military and constitutional law was widely acknowledged at the time, there was little protest in the American press, and no effective challenge from Democratic Party leaders. There is a bipartisan responsibility for what has happened.
Some Afghan and other "war against terror" prisoners were transferred to third countries. Reporters were informed - with a smile and a wink - that this was because they could be tortured there. Again there was negligible reaction in U.S. press and political circles.
In Afghanistan, and subsequently in Iraq, an obvious reason for the involvement of civilian "contract employees" in intelligence and interrogations has been that they are not subject to military discipline, and responsibility for them and what they do can be "plausibly denied" by U.S. officials.
All this is consistent with an attitude toward violence characteristic of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who have for years insisted that history is made through violence, and that in the national cause a governing elite has the right to mislead the public in order to achieve goals that the leaders alone are in a position to understand. http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=519400&owner=(TMSI)&date=20040513144504 .
Michael Moore’s Movie Debuts
The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Company deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.
But this film, Fehrenheit 9/11, which is scheduled to make its debut today at the Cannes International Film Festival, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on American television. And the muckracking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on President Bush's tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/movies/17MOOR.html?adxnnl=1&8hpib=&adxnnlx=1084794959-mfiJ/PHHo4ad2dHbYUUWrg&pagewanted=print&position=
-R
