Thursday, January 13, 2005
"I don't see how you can be president... without a relationship with the Lord."-- Bush, in an interview with the Washington Times
"The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties." – Teddy K, today. [Good speech]
Seymour Hersh's expose on "preëmptive manhunting" comparing the US Special Forces Task Force 121 to the Vietnam era Phoenix Program, including the training in North Carolina.
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031215fa_fact
How Far Gone We Are- Ya Can’t Keep Up
With so many transgressions by our ruling clique, most of us retain some level of disbelief. Aside from the dishonesty (Swift Boat Liars), voter suppression (Florida and Ohio), corruption (Tom Delay), and, of course, propaganda (see Meyerson, below) we’ve got the breaking of law.
The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Thursday that the Bush administration violated federal law by producing and distributing television news segments about the effects of drug use among young people.
The accountability office said the videos "constitute covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, which were distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They were broadcast by nearly 300 television stations and reached 22 million households, the office said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/national/07drug.html
Nearby in the Times, it was- as always- calming to read letters to the editor that spoke to some of it, this time about the hubbub about CBS’s “scandal”. For example Charley Hoerr of New Paltz, NY asked:
What an interesting contrast of professional values. CBS messes up and heads roll. The Bush administration messes up and medals are awarded.
To me, this suggests that the one organization is serious enough about its mission to self-correct, while the other is so besotted with power that no self-correction is deemed necessary.
Which approach inspires more confidence? Which presents the more viable model of institutional behavior? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/opinion/l12cbs.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fLetters
That Comparison. It’s been ‘politically incorrect’, but terribly tempting. Having long been grabbed by first-hand accounts of 1930’s Germany, I’ll let someone else (Ted Rall) do the comparing.
A new documentary, "Hitler's Hit Parade," runs 76 minutes without narration. Comprised entirely of archival footage, the film prompts its reviewers to remark upon Hannah Arendt's famous observation about the banality of evil. German troops subjugated Europe and shoved millions of people into ovens; German civilians went to the movies, attended concerts, and gossiped about their neighbors. People lived mundane, normal lives while their government carried out unspeakable monstrosities. Sound familiar?
As Congress prepared to rubberstamp the nomination of torture aficionado Alberto Gonzales as the nation's chief prosecutor, the Washington Post broke news that would have torn a saner nation apart. The Bush Administration, the paper reported January 2, is no longer planning to keep hundreds of Muslim prisoners currently rotting away in U.S. concentration camps at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram merely "indefinitely." The Defense Department and CIA are now planning "a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions" for these innocents.
We're locking them up forever. Without due process.
Before gangsters like Alberto Gonzales seduced us into abandoning our values, a person was considered innocent before being proven guilty. Now we're locking people away because "the government does not have enough evidence to charge [them] in courts." And everyone, including Democrats, is OK with this. http://www.independent-media.tv/itemprint.cfm?fmedia_id=10271&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported
Clarity: U.S. Does Support Torture. Gonzales’ misleading testimony could give one the impression that it’s not officially sanctioned. However…
At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.
The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.
The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.
But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.
In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/politics/13intel.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
Harold Meyerson: re Administration and phony crises
Some presidents make the history books by managing crises. Lincoln had Fort Sumter, Roosevelt had the Depression and Pearl Harbor, and Kennedy had the missiles in Cuba. George W. Bush, of course, had Sept. 11, and for a while thereafter -- through the overthrow of the Taliban -- he earned his page in history, too.
But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2304-2005Jan11.html
Air America in Vermont:
A southern Vermont-based radio station will trade in the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts for the liberal commentary of Air America next week.WKVT-AM 1490 in Brattleboro will replace four of its weekday syndicated conservative talk shows on Jan. 17 with programs from the fledgling liberal radio network Air America, which launched in March.The station will be the second in Vermont to broadcast Air America programs, which include shows hosted by comedian Al Franken and actress Jeanne Garofalo.The Brattleboro area is highly liberal in its political beliefs and the Air America shows will be a better fit for the station's listeners than the conservative programs hosted by Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, said WKVT program director Peter Case."We're calling this a right-to-left switch," he said. "For many years, our programming leaned to the right, but Brattleboro is a very liberal area and our lineup had to reflect that."Added to WKVT's lineup Monday will be "Unfiltered," hosted by Rachel Maddow, Lizz Winstead and Chuck D; the "Al Franken Show;" the "Randi Rhodes Show;" and the "Majority Report," hosted by Garofalo and Sam Seider. http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050112/NEWS/501120363/1003
Missionaries out of control:
A Virginia-based missionary group said this week that it has airlifted 300 "tsunami orphans" from the Muslim province of Banda Aceh to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, where it plans to raise them in a Christian children's home.
The missionary group, WorldHelp, is one of dozens of Christian, Muslim and Jewish charities providing humanitarian relief to victims of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean, taking more than 150,000 lives.
Most of the religious charities do not attach any conditions to their aid, and many of the larger ones -- such as WorldVision, Catholic Relief Services and Church World Service -- have policies against proselytizing. But a few of the smaller groups have been raising money among evangelical Christians by presenting the tsunami emergency effort as a rare opportunity to make converts in hard-to-reach areas. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5018-2005Jan12.html
Marines in South Asia…happily
A contingent of about 1400 marines along with all their vehicles, equipment and helicopters are now actively employed in the Aceh region of Sumatra.
Despite bearing witness to the wholesale carnage and destruction, it was noted that the morale among the American marines was very high - not because they were able to help out the unfortunate survivors, but because they are no longer en route to Iraq, their original destination.
In fact, it seems somewhat ironic that this particular US taskforce includes the powerful aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. It was aboard this very same warship on 1 May 2003 that US President George Bush triumphantly proclaimed "mission accomplished" and announced an "end to all major combat operations in Iraq".
Unfortunately for the Bush administration the Iraqi resistance did not subscribe to this directive issued by the US commander in chief. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/546F50AD-6FBD-41D3-910B-2530E3F1896F.htm
Trade Deficit: Just numbers…? Or, frightful omen…?
The United States trade deficit soared to a new high of $60.3 billion in November, the Commerce Department reported today. The figure breaks all previous monthly records and confounds predictions that the deficit would diminish now that the dollar has weakened and the price of oil has eased.
Instead the trade gap has now reached the size of the Grand Canyon, in the words of one analyst, and is putting increased pressure on the dollar to drop even further, pressure that could continue unabated. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/business/12cnd-trade.html?hp&ex=1105592400&en=b324eb4a4227918c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
-R
"The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties." – Teddy K, today. [Good speech]
Seymour Hersh's expose on "preëmptive manhunting" comparing the US Special Forces Task Force 121 to the Vietnam era Phoenix Program, including the training in North Carolina.
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031215fa_fact
How Far Gone We Are- Ya Can’t Keep Up
With so many transgressions by our ruling clique, most of us retain some level of disbelief. Aside from the dishonesty (Swift Boat Liars), voter suppression (Florida and Ohio), corruption (Tom Delay), and, of course, propaganda (see Meyerson, below) we’ve got the breaking of law.
The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Thursday that the Bush administration violated federal law by producing and distributing television news segments about the effects of drug use among young people.
The accountability office said the videos "constitute covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, which were distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They were broadcast by nearly 300 television stations and reached 22 million households, the office said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/national/07drug.html
Nearby in the Times, it was- as always- calming to read letters to the editor that spoke to some of it, this time about the hubbub about CBS’s “scandal”. For example Charley Hoerr of New Paltz, NY asked:
What an interesting contrast of professional values. CBS messes up and heads roll. The Bush administration messes up and medals are awarded.
To me, this suggests that the one organization is serious enough about its mission to self-correct, while the other is so besotted with power that no self-correction is deemed necessary.
Which approach inspires more confidence? Which presents the more viable model of institutional behavior? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/opinion/l12cbs.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fLetters
That Comparison. It’s been ‘politically incorrect’, but terribly tempting. Having long been grabbed by first-hand accounts of 1930’s Germany, I’ll let someone else (Ted Rall) do the comparing.
A new documentary, "Hitler's Hit Parade," runs 76 minutes without narration. Comprised entirely of archival footage, the film prompts its reviewers to remark upon Hannah Arendt's famous observation about the banality of evil. German troops subjugated Europe and shoved millions of people into ovens; German civilians went to the movies, attended concerts, and gossiped about their neighbors. People lived mundane, normal lives while their government carried out unspeakable monstrosities. Sound familiar?
As Congress prepared to rubberstamp the nomination of torture aficionado Alberto Gonzales as the nation's chief prosecutor, the Washington Post broke news that would have torn a saner nation apart. The Bush Administration, the paper reported January 2, is no longer planning to keep hundreds of Muslim prisoners currently rotting away in U.S. concentration camps at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram merely "indefinitely." The Defense Department and CIA are now planning "a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions" for these innocents.
We're locking them up forever. Without due process.
Before gangsters like Alberto Gonzales seduced us into abandoning our values, a person was considered innocent before being proven guilty. Now we're locking people away because "the government does not have enough evidence to charge [them] in courts." And everyone, including Democrats, is OK with this. http://www.independent-media.tv/itemprint.cfm?fmedia_id=10271&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported
Clarity: U.S. Does Support Torture. Gonzales’ misleading testimony could give one the impression that it’s not officially sanctioned. However…
At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.
The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.
The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.
But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.
In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/politics/13intel.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
Harold Meyerson: re Administration and phony crises
Some presidents make the history books by managing crises. Lincoln had Fort Sumter, Roosevelt had the Depression and Pearl Harbor, and Kennedy had the missiles in Cuba. George W. Bush, of course, had Sept. 11, and for a while thereafter -- through the overthrow of the Taliban -- he earned his page in history, too.
But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2304-2005Jan11.html
Air America in Vermont:
A southern Vermont-based radio station will trade in the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts for the liberal commentary of Air America next week.WKVT-AM 1490 in Brattleboro will replace four of its weekday syndicated conservative talk shows on Jan. 17 with programs from the fledgling liberal radio network Air America, which launched in March.The station will be the second in Vermont to broadcast Air America programs, which include shows hosted by comedian Al Franken and actress Jeanne Garofalo.The Brattleboro area is highly liberal in its political beliefs and the Air America shows will be a better fit for the station's listeners than the conservative programs hosted by Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, said WKVT program director Peter Case."We're calling this a right-to-left switch," he said. "For many years, our programming leaned to the right, but Brattleboro is a very liberal area and our lineup had to reflect that."Added to WKVT's lineup Monday will be "Unfiltered," hosted by Rachel Maddow, Lizz Winstead and Chuck D; the "Al Franken Show;" the "Randi Rhodes Show;" and the "Majority Report," hosted by Garofalo and Sam Seider. http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050112/NEWS/501120363/1003
Missionaries out of control:
A Virginia-based missionary group said this week that it has airlifted 300 "tsunami orphans" from the Muslim province of Banda Aceh to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, where it plans to raise them in a Christian children's home.
The missionary group, WorldHelp, is one of dozens of Christian, Muslim and Jewish charities providing humanitarian relief to victims of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean, taking more than 150,000 lives.
Most of the religious charities do not attach any conditions to their aid, and many of the larger ones -- such as WorldVision, Catholic Relief Services and Church World Service -- have policies against proselytizing. But a few of the smaller groups have been raising money among evangelical Christians by presenting the tsunami emergency effort as a rare opportunity to make converts in hard-to-reach areas. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5018-2005Jan12.html
Marines in South Asia…happily
A contingent of about 1400 marines along with all their vehicles, equipment and helicopters are now actively employed in the Aceh region of Sumatra.
Despite bearing witness to the wholesale carnage and destruction, it was noted that the morale among the American marines was very high - not because they were able to help out the unfortunate survivors, but because they are no longer en route to Iraq, their original destination.
In fact, it seems somewhat ironic that this particular US taskforce includes the powerful aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. It was aboard this very same warship on 1 May 2003 that US President George Bush triumphantly proclaimed "mission accomplished" and announced an "end to all major combat operations in Iraq".
Unfortunately for the Bush administration the Iraqi resistance did not subscribe to this directive issued by the US commander in chief. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/546F50AD-6FBD-41D3-910B-2530E3F1896F.htm
Trade Deficit: Just numbers…? Or, frightful omen…?
The United States trade deficit soared to a new high of $60.3 billion in November, the Commerce Department reported today. The figure breaks all previous monthly records and confounds predictions that the deficit would diminish now that the dollar has weakened and the price of oil has eased.
Instead the trade gap has now reached the size of the Grand Canyon, in the words of one analyst, and is putting increased pressure on the dollar to drop even further, pressure that could continue unabated. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/business/12cnd-trade.html?hp&ex=1105592400&en=b324eb4a4227918c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
-R
