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"Those who are willing to give up freedom for a little safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Theodore Roosevelt
digg links, for the techie:
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| ....Dennis Miller's Defense: Ethics Don't Apply to Him |
| 01.29.04 (4:51 pm) [edit] |
January 26, 2004
In response to FAIR activists and other critics pointing out the extraordinary conflict of interest posed by the new Dennis Miller talkshow on CNBC, Miller and the network have put forth a variety of contradictory excuses.
As FAIR pointed out in a January 23 Action Alert, the Dennis Miller show employs a consulting producer, Mike Murphy, who at the same time continues to work as a consultant and fundraiser for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Murphy, who has been nicknamed "the Merchant of Mud" for his expertise in negative advertising (Toronto Star, 4/5/00), is a leader of two committees set up to promote Schwarzenegger's policies and raise money for his political activities. Murphy's client is scheduled to be the featured guest on the show's debut tonight.
Though from all descriptions, the show is intended to focus heavily on news and politics, Miller has suggested that rules against journalistic conflicts of interest don't apply to him. "I don't have the vaguest pretension to journalistic ethics, I'm a comedian," he told the Hollywood Reporter (1/26/04), saying that his show would be "entertainment" rather than "a font of pristine journalistic ethics." He suggested at a news conference, in fact, that he's actively hostile to the idea of such ethics: "I'm a comedian," he told reporters on January 23 (Dallas Morning News, 1/24/04). "Mike's my friend and a very funny writer. I'm sorry if it's violated anybody's bullshit sense of journalistic ethics."
On the other hand, AP reported (1/25/04) that Miller indicated that "he's not making a comedy show." "I don't want it to be a screaming shriekfest," the news service quoted Miller. "I want it to be a pretty reasoned discourse." CNBC, of course, is not Comedy Central, but a cable news channel specializing in business reporting.
Before it was revealed that Murphy was still a working political consultant, CNBC dismissed the idea that his past affiliations with politicians posed a conflict of interest because, as Television Week reported (1/12/04), "Miller has made clear that his show, however political, will not be partisan."
In subsequent comments, however, Miller has made that far from clear. He told AP (1/25/04) that he would not make jokes at the expense of George W. Bush. "I like him," Miller said. "I'm going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends."
In the same article, the network put out a new version of its dismissal of the concept of conflict of interest: "CNBC points out that Murphy is one of several staff members, and that Miller is looking forward to having guests with varied views." The guests that have been announced so far for the first week have all been prominent Republicans: Schwarzenegger, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Sen. John McCain. Mike Murphy managed McCain's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
Credited with getting his client (as well as his former client) booked on the show (Washington Post, 1/19/04), Murphy is influencing decisions at the network in a way that could conceivably be viewed as an "in-kind" contribution to the governor's lobbying and re-election campaigns.
AP also quoted CNBC president Pamela Thomas-Graham as saying of Miller: "He's part of a lineup. He's not the only person in the lineup"--though he is, in fact, the only person in the lineup with a show that focuses on the host's opinions about national politics. AP said that Thomas-Graham said "she expects [former tennis star] John McEnroe, whose own talk show will immediately follow Miller's starting this spring, to have different views." It's unclear, despite his years in the public eye, what McEnroe's views are; "I'm not sure there are a lot of people who should care about my opinions but I'm interested to interview people in the political spectrum," he told the Newcastle Journal (1/16/04).
Given Miller's thumbing of his nose at journalistic ethics, and CNBC's disingenuous defenses of the show, it appears that the Hollywood Reporter was being accurate when it noted: "CNBC won't care what Miller does as long as his 9 p.m. show brings the network a modicum of visibility in primetime."
------------------------- ------------------------- -------------
ACTION:
You can express your opinion on Dennis Miller's professed lack of journalistic ethics to:
CONTACT:
CNBC
2200 Fletcher Avenue
Fort Lee, NJ 07024
Phone: 201-585-2622
info@CNBC.com
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone.
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| .....WTF CBS??!!?? |
| 01.28.04 (3:03 pm) [edit] |
During this year's Super Bowl, you'll see ads sponsored by beer companies, tobacco companies, and the Bush White House. But you won't see the winning ad in MoveOn.org Voter Fund's Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest. CBS refuses to air it. This is not a partisan issue. It's critical that our media institutions be fair and open to all speakers. CBS is setting a dangerous precedent, and unless we speak up, the pattern may continue.
AD: http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/...
HTML Petition: http://www.moveon.org/cbs/
An AD regarding this: http://www.moveon.org/cbs/NYT...
Yea...Democracy is dead. Not that it was all that alive in our media anyways but for god sakes. NO president or presidential office should be alllowed to stop stories, regardless of content. Hell, Rush Limbaugh is still on the airwaves.
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| .....Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional |
| 01.26.04 (6:10 pm) [edit] |
By LINDA DEUTSCH, AP Special Correspondent
LOS ANGELES - For the first time, a federal judge has declared unconstitutional a section of the USA Patriot Act that bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations.
In a ruling handed down late Friday and made available Monday, U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins said the ban is impermissibly vague in its wording.
The U.S. Justice Department (news - web sites) is reviewing the ruling, spokesman Mark Corallo said in a statement from Washington.
Corallo called the Patriot Act — the federal anti-terrorism statute passed in the aftermath of Sept. 11 — "an essential tool in the war on terror" and asserted that the portion at issue in the ruling was only a modest amendment to a pre-existing anti-terrorism law.
David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who argued the case on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project, declared the ruling "a victory for everyone who believes the war on terrorism ought to be fought consistent with constitutional principles."
"It Is the first federal court decision declaring any part of the Patriot Act unconstitutional," he said.
The case before the court involved five groups and two U.S. citizens seeking to provide support for lawful, nonviolent activities on behalf of Kurdish refugees in Turkey.
The Humanitarian Law Project said the plaintiffs were threatened with 15 years in prison if they advised groups on seeking a peaceful resolution of the Kurds' campaign for self-determination in Turkey.
The judge's ruling said the law, as written, does not differentiate between impermissible advice on violence and encouraging the use of peaceful, nonviolent means to achieve goals.
"The USA Patriot Act places no limitation on the type of expert advice and assistance which is prohibited and instead bans the provision of all expert advice and assistance regardless of its nature," the judge said.
The ruling specified that the plaintiffs seek to provide support to "the lawful, nonviolent activities" of the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, an advocate group for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. Both groups are on a list issued by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 1997 of "foreign terrorist organizations."
In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tiger rebels have been engaged in a two-decade civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people. Turkey's military has been battling Kurdish rebels seeking autonomy since 1984, a fight that has left some 37,000 people dead.
Under the Patriot Act, the U.S. prohibition on providing "material support" or "resources" to terrorist groups was expanded to include "expert advice or assistance."
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| ...Infiltration of files seen as extensive |
| 01.23.04 (3:16 pm) [edit] |
by Charlie Savage, Boston Globe [US]
January 22nd 2004
Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.
Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.
Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.
Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.
Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.
"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."
As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.
Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.
The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.
Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.
"They had an obligation to tell each of the people whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it was an accident -- that that was going on so those people could protect themselves," said one Senate staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just beyond the pale."
But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.
And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."
After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."
Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he said was being placed on leave and who sources said has since resigned, although he had apparently already announced plans to return to school later this year.
Officials familiar with the investigation identified that person as a legislative staff assistant whose name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill directory. The staff member's home number has been disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.
Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary staff may have been involved." Many news reports have subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda, who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff communications.
Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand and said he did not distribute the memos to the media. He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official business will be a central issue in any criminal case that could result. Unauthorized access of such material could be punishable by up to a year in prison -- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate non-disclosure rule.
The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/ 2004" title="http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/ 2004" target="_blank"http://www.boston.com/news/na...
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| ....What’s Bush Hiding From 9/11 Commission? |
| 01.23.04 (1:34 am) [edit] |
by Joe Conason, New York Observer [US]
January 21st, 2004
In an election year, a Republican President seeking his second term can be expected to propose more tax cuts and, in this era of right-wing profligacy, considerably more spending as well. Informed critics calculate the costs of George W. Bush’s latest proposals in the trillions of dollars—a vague yet substantial sum that will come due sometime during what budgetary jargon denotes as "the out years," meaning long after Mr. Bush has departed the White House.
Excessive spending and tax breaks always elicit more applause than controversies over the global "Axis of Evil," Niger’s phantom yellowcake and Iraq’s weapons of mass disappearance. So do such perennially popular topics as improved health care, the protection of heterosexual marriage and, in the immortal words of the President’s father, jobs, jobs, jobs. Estimates of future deficits depend on whether the President actually tries to send astronauts to live on Mars and the moon, or abandons that vision in deference to disapproving poll numbers. In short, bread and maybe circuses.
What Mr. Bush understandably chose not to highlight, however, is his administration’s continuing determination to undermine, restrict and censor the investigation of the most significant event of his Presidency: the attacks on New York and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001.
The President is fortunate that until now, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has received far less attention than controversies over the design for a World Trade Center memorial. At every step, from his opposition to its creation, to his abortive appointment of Henry Kissinger as its chair, to his refusal to provide it with adequate funding and cooperation, Mr. Bush has treated the commission and its essential work with contempt.
In the latest development, the President’s aides refused additional time for the 9/11 commission to complete its report. Although the original deadline in the enabling legislation is May 27, the commissioners recently asked for a few more months to ensure that their product will be "thorough and credible."
Earlier this month, Thomas Kean—the former New Jersey governor who has chaired the commission since Mr. Kissinger recused himself—explained why the commission needs more time. As the genial Republican told The New York Times, he is only permitted to read the most important classified documents concerning 9/11 in a little closet known as a "sensitive compartmented information facility" (or SCIF). He cannot photocopy the documents, and if he takes notes about them, he must leave the notes in the SCIF when he leaves.
Other recent statements by Mr. Kean, which he subsequently modified, suggest that the White House has ample reason to worry about what the commission’s report will say. In December, he told CBS News that he believes the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented—and that incompetent officials were at fault for the failure to uncover and frustrate the plot.
Following the creation and staffing of the commission, many months passed before the administration agreed to let Mr. Kean look at any of those crucial documents. The commission still has hundreds of interviews to conduct, and millions of pages to examine, before its members begin to draft their conclusions.
But the President’s political advisers, concerned about the political impact of the commission’s report, are unsympathetic to its requests for additional time—and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who would have to approve an extension, is perfectly obedient to his masters in the White House. According to Newsweek, the administration offered Mr. Kean a choice: Either keep to the May deadline, or postpone release of the report until December, when its findings cannot affect the election.
Mr. Bush doesn’t want his re-election subject to any informed judgment about the disaster that reshaped the nation and his Presidency. But why should such crucial facts be withheld from the voters? What does the President fear?
Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Kean provided a clue to the answers in his Times interview. Asked whether he thinks the disaster "did not have to happen," he replied, "Yes, there is a good chance that 9/11 could have been prevented by any number of people along the way. Everybody pretty well agrees our intelligence agencies were not set up to deal with domestic terrorism …. They were not ready for an internal attack." Then, asked whether "anyone in the Bush administration [had] any idea that an attack was being planned," he replied: "That is why we are looking at the internal papers. I can’t talk about what’s classified. [The] President’s daily briefings are classified. If I told you what was in them, I would go to jail."
But the commission’s final report may well indicate what the President was told in his daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, when he was sunning himself in Crawford, Tex.—as well as the many warnings he and his associates were given by the previous administration. That kind of information could send him back to Crawford for a permanent vacation.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0121-11.htm" title="http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0121-11.htm" target="_blank"http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ,,,How three threats interlock : A mission for moderates |
| 01.21.04 (4:20 pm) [edit] |
by Amin Saikal, International Herald Tribune [FR]
December 29th, 2003
CANBERRA: Three minority extremist groups - the militant fundamentalist Islamists exemplified at the far edge by Al Qaeda, certain activist elements among America's reborn Christians and neoconservatives, and the most inflexible hard-line Zionists from Israel - have emerged as dangerously destabilizing actors in world politics. Working perversely to reinforce each other's ideological excesses, they have managed to drown out mainstream voices from all sides. Each has the aim of changing the world according to its own individual vision.
If these extremists are not marginalized, they could succeed in creating a world order with devastating consequences for generations to come. Al Qaeda and its radical Islamist supporters, believing in Islam as an assertive ideology of political and social transformation, want a re-Islamization of the Muslim world according to their vision and their social and political preferences. The alternative that they offer is widely regarded as regressive and repressive even by most Muslims, let alone the West. Violence against innocent civilians can neither be justified in Islam nor find approval among a majority of Muslims. Yet many Muslims have come to identify with the anti-American and anti-Israeli stance of the radicals because they have grown intolerant of America's globalist policies.
Muslims have been angered by U.S. support for dictatorial regimes in Muslim countries, including at one point Saddam Hussein's, and by its backing of Israel as a force occupying Palestinian lands and Islam's third holiest place, East Jerusalem. The U.S.-$ led occupation of Iraq, seen by many in the Middle East as imperial behavior harmful to the Iraqi people, has certainly not eased these feelings. On another side are groups of internationalist activists among American fundamentalist Christians and neoconservatives who have found it opportune since Sept. 11, 2001, to pursue their agendas more aggressively. They wish to reshape the Middle East and defiant political Islam according to their ideological and geopolitical preferences.
The extremists of these groups seek to "civilize" or "democratize" the Arab world in particular, and the Muslim world in general, in their own images, and they have particular influence through key appointees in the Bush administration. The fact that democracy can neither be imposed nor be expected to mushroom overnight does not appear to resonate with them. (The agenda of some fundamentalist Christians, who promote Jewish dominance of the Palestinian lands as leading the world closer to the prophesied Judgment Day, is a variant that might be dismissed as a hysterical fringe element if it were not connected to a powerful voting bloc supporting President George W. Bush.)
The efforts of the neoconservatives dovetail all too effectively with the aims of the radical Zionists who push for more and more Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. Because of Israel's proportional voting system, these radicals exercise disproportionate power within Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government. Although a majority of the Israelis still support the creation of an independent Palestinian state based on the principle of land for peace, the electoral system leaves them hostage to the minority of extremists in their midst. The activities of these three extremist minorities feed on one another: actions by each are seized on by others to justify their own extremism. With considerable help, intended or not, from one another, these three groups have now positioned themselves to determine the future of world order and, for that matter, humanity. Prime Minister Tony Blair recently declared that Iraq would define the future of relations between the West and the Muslim world. This is also precisely what Osama Bin Laden and his leadership associates have said from the Islamic side. It is important that these minorities not be allowed to have such an influence. It is necessary for the mainstream from all sides to return to the center stage to chart the direction of world politics before it is too late.
It takes a few to make war but many to make peace. In pursuit of peace, not only should Al Qaeda and its associates be marginalized, but the radical international agendas of some reborn Christians, neoconservatives and hard-line Zionists should be completely discredited. Doing away with one and not the others is not an option for our future.
Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University.
http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=122985&owner=" title="http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=122985&owner=" target="_blank"http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch....
(IHT)&date=20031229134211
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| ...A Single Conscience v. the State |
| 01.20.04 (4:52 pm) [edit] |
By Bob Herbert, New York Times [US]
January 19th, 2004
Katharine Gun has a much better grasp of the true spirit of democracy than Tony Blair. So, naturally, it's Katharine Gun who's being punished.
Ms. Gun, 29, was working at Britain's top-secret Government Communications Headquarters last year when she learned of an American plan to spy on at least a half-dozen U.N. delegations as part of the U.S. effort to win Security Council support for an invasion of Iraq.
The plans, which included e-mail surveillance and taps on home and office telephones, was outlined in a highly classified National Security Agency memo. The agency, which was seeking British assistance in the project, was interested in "the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals."
Countries specifically targeted were Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The primary goal was a Security Council resolution that would give the U.S. and Britain the go-ahead for the war.
Ms. Gun felt passionately that an invasion of Iraq was wrong — morally wrong and illegal. In a move that deeply embarrassed the American and British governments, the memo was leaked to The London Observer.
Which landed Ms. Gun in huge trouble. She has not denied that she was involved in the leak.
There is no equivalent in Britain to America's First Amendment protections. Individuals like Ms. Gun are at the mercy of the Official Secrets Act, which can result in severe — in some cases, draconian — penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of information by intelligence or security agency employees.
Ms. Gun was fired from her job as a translator and arrested for violating the act. If convicted, she will face up to two years in prison.
We are not talking about a big-time criminal here. We are not talking about someone who would undermine the democratic principles that George W. Bush and Tony Blair babble about so incessantly, and self-righteously, even as they are trampling on them. Ms. Gun is someone who believes deeply in those principles and was willing to take a courageous step in support of her beliefs.
She hoped that her actions would help save lives. She thought at the time that if the Security Council did not vote in favor of an invasion, the United States and Britain might not launch the war. In a statement last November she said she felt that leaking the memo was "necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed."
"I have only ever followed my conscience," she said.
In 1971, in what the historian William Manchester described as "perhaps the most extraordinary leak of classified documents in the history of governments," Daniel Ellsberg turned over to The New York Times a huge study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon administration tried to destroy Mr. Ellsberg. He was viciously harassed. His psychiatrist's office was burglarized. And he was charged with treason, theft and conspiracy.
The prosecution was not successful. The charges were thrown out due to government misconduct. In an interview last week, Mr. Ellsberg, who was with the Defense Department and the Rand Corporation in the 1960's and 70's, told me he wished he had blown the whistle much earlier on the deceptions and lies and other forms of official misconduct related to Vietnam.
He is lending his name to a campaign in support of Ms. Gun. She took a principled stand, he said, early enough to have a chance at altering events.
"What I've been saying since a year ago last October," said Mr. Ellsberg, "was that I hoped that people who knew that we were being lied into a wrongful war would do what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965. And that was to go to Congress and the press with documents. Current documents. Don't do what I did. Don't wait years until the bombs are falling and then put out history."
Ms. Gun is being allowed by British courts to plead an unusual "defense of necessity." She has said that her disclosures were justified because they revealed "serious wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. government," and because she was sincerely trying to prevent the "wide-scale death and casualties" that would result from a war that was "illegal."
She's due in court today for a pretrial hearing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/opinion/19 HERB.html" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/opinion/19 HERB.html" target="_blank"http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
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| ...Surreal moments serving a mythological president |
| 01.19.04 (2:42 pm) [edit] |
by Marian Wilkinson, Sydney Morning Herald [AU]
January 15th, 2004
The weekend after September 11, George Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, sat in a leather armchair at Camp David, the presidential retreat, devouring a pile of intelligence documents on al-Qaeda handed out by the CIA boss, George Tenet.
A two-day crisis meeting of Mr Bush's senior advisers had finally wound up. The President had gone to bed.
Across the room, the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was singing hymns, accompanied on the piano by the Christian fundamentalist Attorney-General, John Ashcroft.
Leafing through the CIA documents, Mr O'Neill was astonished to read plans for covert assassinations around the globe designed to remove opponents of the US Government. The plans had virtually no civilian checks and balances.
"What I was thinking is, 'I hope the President really reads this carefully', Mr O'Neill said. "It's kind of his job. You can't forfeit this much responsibility to unelected individuals. But I knew he wouldn't."
Mr O'Neill's account of that famous cabinet meeting is just one of many surreal episodes he recalls from his two-year tenure as Mr Bush's top economic official in The Price of Loyalty, the controversial new book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Ron Suskind. But there are many similar moments in the 328-page book on Mr O'Neill published on Tuesday with the subtitle: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill.
Mr O'Neill's story, backed up by thousands of pages of documents, is the first inside account by a top Bush Administration official to strip away the carefully crafted mythology surrounding Mr Bush as a "can-do" president. It reveals what many long suspected, that Mr Bush is often disengaged from policy debates, lacks intellectual rigour, runs on gut instinct and is heavily influenced by conservative ideological advisers.
Describing the book as "sour grapes", the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has denied that he telephoned Mr O'Neill after hearing about plans for the book in an effort to persuade his former colleague and long-time friend not to do it.
While Mr O'Neill's revelations are dismissed by White House officials as the revenge of a sacked cabinet officer, at least some of his tales and anecdotes have a ring of truth to them. Like the President describing his love of "comfort food" - homemade chicken noodle soup and sandwiches on freshly baked bread. When Mrs O'Neill politely asked what comfort food his mother, Barbara Bush, cooked, George Bush replied bluntly: "You got to be kiddin'. My mother never cooked. The woman had frostbite on her fingers. Everything [was] right out of the freezer."
On the eve of the book's release, Mr O'Neill said he did not believe the White House would punish him "for telling the truth" and he was "too old and too rich" to be threatened. Sure. But after a barrage of attacks from the White House and having become the target of a Treasury investigation into whether he leaked classified documents to Suskind, Mr O'Neill has been backpedalling.
He told NBC's Today program he regretted having described the President as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people". He also agreed with Mr Rumsfeld that Mr Bush's policy from day one that Saddam Hussein should be removed had indeed also been Bill Clinton's policy.
But on whether that policy justified a war, Mr O'Neill insisted that he never saw "concrete evidence" that Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction before the war.
"That also doesn't make a point that we shouldn't have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not making that case," Mr O'Neill said.
"I'm making a really clear case that I know the difference between evidence and what is illusion and assertion and the rest. That's my point."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/14/10 73877904634.html" title="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/14/10 73877904634.html" target="_blank"http://www.smh.com.au/article...
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| ...Airports to Allow Two Tries at Detectors |
| 01.15.04 (11:55 am) [edit] |
Man, that's really big of them. I'm more likely to die from an airlines/pilot/air traffic controllers fuck up than a terrorist...but, here's the story.
WASHINGTON - Fewer air travelers will have to take off their shoes and get their carry-on bags searched at security checkpoints under a new screening policy at airports around the country.
The Transportation Security Administration is giving people who set off metal detectors on their first pass through the metal detectors a second chance, after they've removed the coins or keys they think caused the alarm.
Before, setting off the metal detector meant a secondary search, which involves removing shoes and getting wanded while screeners search carry-on luggage.
Now, those who make it through the metal detectors a second time — and who haven't been flagged for extra screening — can go right on to their gate.
The change, which took effect Dec. 27, can save time and shorten lines, Yolanda Clark, TSA spokeswoman, said Thursday.
"When you go through secondary screening, you've lengthened the time you've spent by three minutes," Clark said.
One reason for the change was that people who travel infrequently weren't used to the new metal detectors that have replaced the older, less sensitive machines in use on Sept. 11, 2001, said Clark.
Typically, passengers unfamiliar with the new machines would think a penny or a sneaker wouldn't set off the alarm, only to find out that they were wrong.
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| ...FOREWARNING SEPT 11, 2001 |
| 01.14.04 (5:48 pm) [edit] |
The following is a brief summary of facts, (with references)
indicating the extent to which the U.S. Administration and
intelligence services were aware of the Sept. 11th attacks
before they occurred. To examine the evidence in greater detail,
follow the links to sources at the bottom of this page.
1) 1994. FBI videotaped an informant being recruited as a suicide bomber by two men, one of whom was linked to Osama bin Laden.
(Los Angeles Times 5-27-2002)
2) 1995. Project Bojinka: plans were uncovered by Philippine authorities, [of terrorists seeking] to crash hijacked plane into CIA headquarters.
(Gomez and Solomon 3-5-2002; see also Baker et al. 10-23-2001; Fainaru and Grimaldi 9-23-2001; Ressa 9-18-2001; Martin 1-16-2002; Grigg 3-11-2002; Shelon 5-18-2002; Hersh and Isikoff 5-27-2002; Public Information Center 5-2002)
3) 1996-2001. The FBI investigating suspected terrorists enrolled in U.S. flight schools.
(cited in Fairnaru and Grimaldi 9-23-2001; Martin 1-16-2002; Shelon 5-18-2002)
4) May 18, 1998. FBI memo observed that an ‘unusually’ large number of Middle Eastern men were attending flight schools.
(Washington Post 5-30-2002)
5) Oct. 24-26, 2000 - Pentagon officials carry out a "detailed" emergency drill based upon the crashing of a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon.
[Ref: www.copvcia.com/ Source: The Mirror, May 24, 2002]
6) Early 2001. Court proceedings revealed that al Qaeda operatives were training in American flight schools.
(USA vs. Usama bin Laden et al.; Foden 9-13-2001; Martin 1-16-2002)
7) January 2001 - The Bush Administration orders the FBI and intelligence agencies to "back off" investigations involving the bin Laden family, including two of Osama bin Laden's relatives (Abdullah and Omar) who were living in Falls Church, Va. -- right next to CIA headquarters. This followed previous orders dating back to 1996 that frustrated efforts to investigate the bin Laden family.
[Ref: www.copvcia.com/ Source: BBC Newsnight, Correspondent Gregg Palast, Nov. 7, 2001]
8) Summer, 2001. Jordon’s General Intelligence Division (GID) warned Washington of an attack planned on the U.S. mainland using aircraft.
John Cooley (5-21-2002) (also Bubnov 5-24-2002)
9) June 6, 2001. German intelligence warned both the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.
(Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on September 13).
10)July 26 2001. The ‘threat assessment.’ CBS News reported that Attorney General John Ashcroft was no longer using commercial airliners to travel - even for personal business - because of a “threat assessment” issued by the FBI.
(CBS News 7-26-2001)
11) Summer 2001. Former chief investigative counsel David Schippers warned U.S. Justice Department that FBI believed terrorists were planning to attack lower Manhattan.
(www.infowars.com, see book, "War on Freedom")
12) July 2001 - The G8 summit at Genoa, Italy is surrounded by anti-aircraft guns, and local airspace is closed off after Italian and Egyptian officials (including President Hosni Mubarak) warn American intelligence that airliners stuffed with explosives might be used to attack President Bush.
[Ref: www.copvcia.com/ Source: Los Angeles Times, Sept. 27, 2001]
13) July 10 2001. FBI agent Kenneth Williams in Arizona sends a memo warning that men with suspected ties to terrorist groups were training in Arizona flight schools, mentioning Osama bin Laden by name and speculating that his organization may be attempting to infiltrate the U.S. aviation industry with pilots, security guards, and maintenance workers.
(Solomon 5-3-2002; Risen 5-4-2002; Johnston 5-15-2002; Hersh and Isikoff 5-27-2002; Johnston and van Natta 5-21-2002; Cornwell 5-25-2002; Lumkin 5-25-2002)
14) August, 2001. Israel warned U.S. about "imminent" large-scale attacks on the U.S. mainland.
(Jacobson and Wastell 9-16-2001; Davis 9-17-2001; Stafford 9-13-2001; Serrano and Thor-Dahlburg 9-20-2001; Martin 1-5-2002; Martin 1-16-2002)
15) August 6 2001. Memo. President George Bush receives an intelligence briefing, titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.” that warned that "bin Laden may attempt to " hijack airplanes."
(Eggen and Woodward 5-18-2002; CBS News 5-16-2002; Boncombe 5-19-2002).
16) August 2001. FBI warned by a flight instructor in Oklahoma that an Arab student he was training, (Zacarias Moussaoui) could be a terrorist. The FBI responded to the lead only after receiving repeated calls from the instructor. He was arrested, but not intensely investigated until after 9-11, at which point it was discovered that he would have taken part in the 9-11 hijackings had he not been arrested.
(Eggen 1-2-2002; Barnett et al. 9-30-2001; Martin 1-5-2002; Martin 5-27-2002).....
Personal notes written by a Minneapolis agent had speculated that perhaps Moussaoui was planning to “fly something into the World Trade Center.
(cited in Isikoff 5-20-2002; see also Johnston 5-15-2002; Cloud, Fields, and Power 5-20-2002).
Investigators were denied a warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer hard drive.
(Rowley 5-21-2002)
17) August/September 2001 - According to a detailed 13-page memo written by Minneapolis FBI legal officer Colleen Rowley, FBI headquarters ignores urgent, direct warnings from French intelligence services about pending attacks. In addition, a single Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) in Washington expends extra effort to thwart the field office's investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, in one case rewriting Rowley's affidavit for a search warrant to search Moussaoui's laptop. Rowley's memo uses terms like "deliberately sabotage," "block," "integrity," "omitted," "downplayed," "glossed over," "mis-characterize," "improper political reasons, "deliberately thwarting," "deliberately further undercut," "suppressed," and "not completely honest."
[Ref: www.copvcia.com/ Source: Associated Press, May 21, 2002]
18) September 1, 2001. “Russian President Vladimir Putin orders Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government ‘in the strongest possible terms’ of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings.
[Ref: Ruppert 11-2-2001; 4-22-2002 based on MS-NBC interview with Putin, September 15.]
19) May 28, 2002 " Tyrone Powers, a former.... FBI special agent announced on NYC’s urban contemporary radio station 98.7 KISS FM... that he had credible evidence strongly suggesting the Bush administration did in fact allow the September 11th attacks to further a hidden agenda.
Dr. Powers says that the administration miscalculated, though, and "didn’t believe that [an attack] would be on this scale."
"The Bush administration relied strongly on these pathologies when it deliberately ignored warnings from stand up agents in Federal law enforcement and other intelligence agencies and allowed what they only thought was going to be the 'high jacking' of a single airliner."
20) August 22, 2002: U.S. government officials admit that a "Top US Intelligence Agency was to simulate plane crash into gov't bldg. on September 11, 2001..... in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.
------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----------
Primary sources:
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/" title="http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/" target="_blank"http://www.cooperativeresearc... -factsheets
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/timeline/AAadvanceinf o.html" title="http://www.unansweredquestions.org/timeline/AAadvanceinf o.html" target="_blank"http://www.unansweredquestion...
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/timeline/AAexactday.html" title="http://www.unansweredquestions.org/timeline/AAexactday.html" target="_blank"http://www.unansweredquestion...
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_11_02_luc y.html" title="http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_11_02_luc y.html" target="_blank"http://www.fromthewilderness....
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| ...White House seeks control on health, safety |
| 01.13.04 (6:19 pm) [edit] |
by Andrew Schneider, St. Louis Post-Dispatch [US]
January 11th, 2004
The Office of Management and Budget wants to have the final say on releasing emergency declarations to the public.
WASHINGTON - Under a new proposal, the White House would decide what and when the public would be told about an outbreak of mad cow disease, an anthrax release, a nuclear plant accident or any other crisis.
The White House Office of Management and Budget is trying to gain final control over release of emergency declarations from the federal agencies responsible for public health, safety and the environment.
The OMB also wants to manage scientific and technical evaluations - known as peer reviews - of all major government rules, plans, proposed regulations and pronouncements.
Currently, each federal agency controls its emergency notifications and peer review of its projects.
But the OMB says peer review policies in various agencies vary dramatically. And a senior OMB official says his office has been ordered by Congress to take "a greater role in evaluating what the agencies do."
On Friday, a nonpartisan group of 20 former top agency officials sent a letter to the OMB asking the White House watchdog agency to withdraw its proposal, saying it "could damage the federal system for protecting public health and the environment."
One of the signers, David Michaels, said: "It goes beyond just having the White House involved in picking industry favorites to evaluate government science. Under this proposal, the carefully crafted process used by the government to notify the public of an imminent danger is going to first have to be signed off by someone weighing the political hazards."
Michaels, a former assistant secretary for environment, safety and health at the Department of Energy, is now a research professor at George Washington University's School of Public Health. He added: "OMB is not a science agency. The ramifications of it attempting to insert itself into a time-proven system of having the most knowledgeable scientists available evaluate proposed policy or regulations is a disaster in the making."
In addition to Michaels, the letter is signed by two former Environmental Protection Agency administrators, a former secretary of labor, two former heads of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a former assistant labor secretary in charge of mine safety and health, and 13 other former senior officials of both political parties.
The letter, obtained by the Post-Dispatch, referred to a Nov. 18 conference sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences on the OMB's plan.
"Speaker after speaker warned that implementation of this proposal would lead to increased costs and delays in disseminating information to the public and in promulgating health, safety, environmental and other regulations, while potentially damaging the existing system of peer review," the letter said.
Forging a final plan
John Graham, administrator of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said the just-concluded public comment period has been constructive.
"We will be using these comments to prepare a final peer review policy that is as objective and workable as possible," Graham said.
Federal agencies have until Thursday to submit comments on what they think about having their authority stripped.
There is wide concern among those in the science offices at the EPA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration that their agencies' responses will be based more on political realities than on the genuine merits of the OMB's proposal.
Even those critical of the OMB's plan agree with the need for peer review. The practice, which has been accepted for decades, demands that before scientific, medical or technical findings can be determined to be effective and safe for use or published in professional journals, they must be evaluated for merit by other specialists in the same field.
Industry has not been shy about denouncing government's system of peer review as unfair, especially when regulators determined that their pharmaceutical product, chemical or process must be tightly controlled because of possible danger to the public or environment. And the White House has been equally open about its desire to reduce the regulatory burden on industry.
Graham said revising peer review "is a major priority for this administration."
The OMB was created in 1970 to evaluate all agency budget, policy, legislative, regulatory and management issues on behalf of the president.
Question of neutrality
Many in the scientific community worry that the OMB's selection process for reviewers will taint impartiality.
"The proposed peer review selection criteria would severely and unnecessarily restrict an agency's access to the most qualified expertise," said Dr. Jordan Cohen, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges.
In lengthy comments to the OMB, Cohen and a co-signer, Robert Wells, president of the 60,000-member Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, also questioned the OMB's proposed involvement in screening emergency public health announcements.
They offered examples of recent events from one agency - the Food and Drug Administration - where a delay caused by the OMB could have been dangerous. Among them:
An emergency termination of a clinical trial of anti-arrhythmic drugs "that was not beneficial, but in fact dangerous."
An announcement that hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women was causing adverse effects.
Last October's halting of a clinical trial of a cancer drug to reduce the rate of breast cancer recurrence.
"We see no public benefit from mandating an additional layer of OMB interposition, peer review and public comments that, at best, would have delayed these announcements for untold months," said the comments from the groups, which represent more than 100 medical and scientific societies.
Michael Taylor, former deputy commissioner at the FDA under the first Bush administration, warned that the OMB's involvement in the dissemination of information on "imminent health hazards" is dangerous.
Taylor cited the severe November hepatitis outbreak from contaminated green onions at a Mexican fast food restaurant near Pittsburgh.
"OMB's proposal says it gets to weigh in on any agency statement that would have a significant impact on an industry. Any FDA warning or recall would have that nationwide impact. So should the FDA commissioner have to go to John Graham for permission to warn people about the possible danger from tainted green onions?" Taylor asked.
"That's what the plan calls for, and it's not just FDA, it's all agencies involved with health and safety."
"Speed is often essential," Taylor said. "If you discover that a heart valve is defective and killing people and can't issue a recall until the White House has weighed in on the issue, people could die."
Peer review issue
Graham is aware of the controversy.
"We understand that concerns have been raised about how the proposed (plan) addresses emergencies," said the administrator, who added that his department's view on the issue will be explained in a final version of the plan.
The OMB's actions are needed, according to a senior OMB official, because "federal agencies have inconsistent peer review policies."
Some, like the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Department of Agriculture, have no formal peer review policy. But others such as the EPA and FDA have detailed policies for the mandatory evaluations, he said.
"Even agencies that have peer review polices have not been found to implement them consistently," the official said.
The National Resources Defense Council calls the OMB's effort a blatant end run to "achieve what could not be achieved through the intense campaigns to lobby to Congress to weaken pollution and safety standards." So said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the 1 million-member environmental organization.
"The integrity of the science used to support regulatory decisions would be compromised, perhaps beyond repair," Sass said.
But the OMB says it has been ordered by Congress to take a greater role in evaluating what the agencies do.
"Congress, in the Information Quality Law, required OMB to engage in oversight of the information quality activities of federal agencies," the senior OMB official said. "Peer review is one of the critical activities agencies use to assure quality control of information during pre-dissemination review."
Emergency declarations
The OMB's attempt to take control of the release of emergency information surprises even its critics.
There were headlines across the country when the EPA's inspector general confirmed that the White House's Council on Environmental Quality had forced downplaying of actual hazards from the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. And the OMB was faulted in congressional hearings for preventing the EPA from declaring a public health emergency regarding asbestos contamination in Libby, Mont.
"Incredibly, OMB's response to this widespread criticism about political interference in public health decisions is to come right out and explicitly propose to take authority over release of emergency information away from health, safety and environmental officials and transfer it into the hands" of John Graham, said Winifred De Palma, regulatory affairs counsel for Public Citizen.
The consumer advocacy organization was founded by Ralph Nader in 1971.
"OMB has no statutory or other express legal authority to impose this type of control on the agencies," De Palma said. "If the plan is implemented, it will mean that political considerations, and not public health, will be the administration's primary concern in the deciding whether to release health and safety information to the public in emergency situations."
Lauded by industry
In public statements on its proposal, the OMB did not cite specific cases where the existing peer review didn't work.
The agency referred reporters to the comments of the American Chemical Council, which listed six examples where it said EPA's peer review of certain chemicals were flawed. For example, it criticized a 2000 EPA evaluation specifying hazards of diisononyl phthalate, a plasticiser used in soft vinyl children's products.
The EPA evaluation "ignored the primate data indicating that the effects seen at high doses in rodents do not occur in primates," the council wrote.
Since his confirmation, Graham, who has a doctorate from Harvard, has been a target for criticism from Public Citizen and other interest groups worried about his strong ties to industry.
Before joining the Bush administration, Graham headed the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Its research, funded mostly by corporations, is often widely praised by industry and denounced by some public interest groups. Graham has written or edited books on the problems of government peer review.
Two of Graham's own studies on the safety of cell phones and driving and the value of automotive air bags for children are called scientific whitewash by some critics and praised as an unbiased evaluation by those in the automotive and cell phone industry.
"Although peer review does take time and hard work, it ultimately strengthens public health and environmental protection by better ensuring that rules will have the intended effect and are legally sound," said Graham, explaining the value of the proposal.
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories .nsf" title="http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories .nsf" target="_blank"http://www.stltoday.com/stlto...
/News/189564E117AF5855862 56E17007E600A?
OpenDocument&Headline=Whi te+House+seeks+
control+on+health,+safety
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| ...Report: Pentagon Auditors Altered Files |
| 01.11.04 (7:51 pm) [edit] |
by Larry Margasak, Associated Press [US]
January 10th, 2004
WASHINGTON - Pentagon auditors spent 1,139 hours altering their own files in order to pass an internal review, say investigators who found that the accounting sleuths engaged in just the kind of wasteful activity they are supposed to expose.
When the auditors in the New York City office learned well in advance which files a review team would check, they spent the equivalent of more than 47 days doctoring the papers and updating records from several audits, the Defense Department's inspector general concluded. Administrative staff, audit supervisors and other employees also participated in the scheme.
The fabrication at the Defense Contract Audit Agency "certainly violates the spirit and intent" of government auditing standards and rules on ethical conduct, according to the inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press.
The fabrication was discovered in 2001, but the report on it was not disclosed until Tuesday.
The defense agency, which audits government contracts, is the same one that recently reported that Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, may have overcharged the Army as much as $61 million for gasoline in Iraq.
The audit agency ran up some charges of its own when its auditors worked on altering the records.
The task of rewriting the files was so daunting that auditors came in from other offices to help make the changes, costing taxpayers more than $1,600 in travel expenses.
The agency "is supposed to be the watchdog for defense contracts," said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a constant critic of government waste. "Altering audit work papers could undermine the accuracy of the Pentagons cost reports. Falsifying official reports is a crime, and those involved must be held accountable."
To stop any fabrications in the future, the review teams only give 48 hours advance notice of the files they want to inspect. The advance time under the old policy was much longer.
Discipline was proposed for the manger who directed the alterations, but was never imposed because the official resigned, the report said.
Daniel Tucciarone, executive officer of the audit agency, said a second senior management official who "had not been forthcoming and acted inappropriately to conceal information" was punished.
Tucciarone told the AP that the agency took "appropriate disciplinary action in all cases" but added that federal privacy law prevented him from releasing such information about individual employees.
The revisions were so pervasive that the work continued even after the review team arrived to inspect the auditors' files. The New York branch manager directed a senior auditor to delete electronic backup files of original documents, the inspector general said.
The report said agency employees believed that "upgrading" the working papers was a normal and acceptable practice and that they did not try to hide what they were doing.
The inspector general uncovered the file deletions following a tip to a fraud, waste and abuse hot line.
This is not the first time that Pentagon anti-waste investigators were found to have altered documents.
The AP reported in 2001 that the inspector general's office itself destroyed documents and replaced them with fakes to avoid embarrassment in a review of its work.
___
On the Net:
Defense Contract Audit Agency http://www.dcaa.mil/
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid= 542&u=" title="http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid= 542&u=" target="_blank"http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm...
/ap/20040111/ap_on_go_ca_ st_pe/watchdog_fraud_2
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| ...Saddam Ouster Planned Early '01? |
| 01.11.04 (5:55 pm) [edit] |
CBS News [US]
January 10th, 2004
The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."
O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries, and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.
In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.
CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White House sees it, O'Neill's remarks are those of a disgruntled former official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O'Neill that the U.S. advocated Saddam's ouster.
In fact, a senior administration official tells CBS News it would have been irresponsible not to plan for Saddam's eventual removal.
As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says the official calls that "laughable." Suggesting that O'Neill doesn't know what he's talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O'Neill had enough problems in his own area of expertise, so, "Why should anyone believe he has a credible understanding of foreign policy?"
Another senior administration official told CBS News Saturday, "No one ever listened to the crazy things he said before, why should we start now?"
Separately, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan added Saturday, "We appreciate his service. While we're not in the business of book reviews, it appears the world according to Mr O'Neill is more about justifying his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we're achieving on behalf on the American people.
"The president is going to continue to be forward-looking and focus on building on the results we've achieved on the economy and efforts to make the world safer and a better place."
According to CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron in Baghdad, "The Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group of former exiles, says it's not surprised by O'Neill's remarks. Spokesman Entifadh Qanbar tells CBS News that the Bush administration opened official channels to the Iraqi opposition soon after coming to power, and discussed how to remove Saddam. The group opened an office in Washington shortly afterwards."
Suskind also writes about a White House meeting in which he says the president seems to be wavering about going forward with his second round of tax cuts. "Haven't we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle," Suskind says the president uttered, according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting he says he obtained from someone at the meeting.
O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
O'Neill also is quoted saying in the book that President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
Also, as saying the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."
"It's revealing," said Stahl on The Early Show Friday. "I would say it's an unflattering portrait of the White House and of the president -- and specifically, about how they make decisions."
A lack of dialogue, according to O'Neill, was the norm in cabinet meetings he attended. And it was similar in one-on-one meetings, says O'Neill. Of his first such meeting with the president, O'Neill says, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on...I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening...It was mostly a monologue."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60 minutes" title="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60 minutes" target="_blank"http://www.cbsnews.com/storie...
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| ....Secretary O’Neill’s Iraq Charges |
| 01.11.04 (5:53 pm) [edit] |
by John Kerry
January 9th, 2004
For Immediate Release
Des Moines, Iowa -
“These are very serious charges by a former high ranking Administration official. We already knew the Administration failed to focus on the threat from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda. We already knew the Administration broke every promise they made to work through the U.N., use the resolution to enforce inspections, build a coalition, and plan for peace.
But Secretary O’Neill’s revelations would mean the Administration never intended to even try to keep those promises. It would mean they were dead-set on going to war alone since almost the day they took office and deliberately lied to the American people, Congress, and the world. It would mean that for purely ideological reasons they planned on putting American troops in a shooting gallery occupying an Arab country almost alone. The White House needs to answer these charges truthfully because they threaten to shatter their already damaged credibility as never before.”
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| ...tell me something I didn't already know, please! |
| 01.11.04 (8:47 am) [edit] |
The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS News' 60 Minutes.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."
O'Neill, who served nearly two years in Bush's Cabinet, was asked to resign by the White House in December 2002 over differences he had with the president's tax cuts. O'Neill was the main source for "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill," by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind.
The CBS report is scheduled to be broadcast Sunday night; the book is to be released Tuesday by publisher Simon & Schuster.
Suskind said O'Neill and other White House insiders gave him documents showing that in early 2001 the administration was already considering the use of force to oust Saddam, as well as planning for the aftermath.
"There are memos," Suskind told the network. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
Suskind cited a Pentagon document titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which, he said, outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from ... 30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq."
In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting asked why Iraq should be invaded.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" O'Neill said.
Suskind also described a White House meeting in which he said Bush seemed to waver about going forward with a second round of tax cuts.
"Haven't we already given money to rich people... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" Suskind says Bush asked, according to what CBS called a "nearly verbatim" transcript of an economic team meeting Suskind said he obtained from someone at the meeting.
O'Neill also said in the book that President Bush "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people" during Cabinet meetings.
One-on-one meetings were no different, O'Neill told the network.
Describing his first such meeting with Bush, O'Neill said, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on. ... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan brushed off O'Neill's criticism.
"We appreciate his service, but we are not in the business of doing book reviews," he told reporters. "It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people. The president will continue to be forward-looking, focusing on building upon the results we are achieving to strengthen the economy and making the world a safer and better place."
A senior administration official, who asked not to be named, expressed bewilderment at O'Neill's comments on the alleged war plans.
"The treasury secretary is not in the position to have access to that kind of information, where he can make observations of that nature," the official said. "This is a head-scratcher."
Even before the interview is broadcast, the topic became grist for election-year politics.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who is the early front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, issued a statement in response.
"I've always said the president had failed to make the case to go to war with Iraq," Dean said. "My Democratic opponents reached a different conclusion, and in the process, they failed to ask the difficult questions. Now, after the fact, we are learning new information about the true circumstances of the Bush administration's push for war, this time, by one of his former Cabinet secretaries.
"The country deserves to know -- and the president needs to answer -- why the American people were presented with misleading or manufactured intelligence as to why going to war with Iraq was necessary."
Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts also issued a statement. In 2002, Kerry voted to support a resolution giving Bush authority to wage war against Iraq if it didn't dismantle its presumed illegal weapons program.
"These are very serious charges. It would mean [Bush administration officials] were dead-set on going to war alone since almost the day they took office and deliberately lied to the American people, Congress, and the world," Kerry said. "It would mean that for purely ideological reasons they planned on putting American troops in a shooting gallery, occupying an Arab country almost alone. The White House needs to answer these charges truthfully because they threaten to shatter [its] already damaged credibility as never before."
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| ....Selective Outrage: Ignoring Real Anti-Semitism in Favor of Pimping the Holocaust |
| 01.09.04 (2:57 pm) [edit] |
This week right-wing media figureheads such as Matt Drudge, Abraham Foxman and Michael Medved, and publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post stooped to all new lows as they joined forces with the Republican party (RNC) to slander MoveOn.org and their 'Bush in 30 seconds' contest. Cynically, they used the holocaust and anti-semitism as a tool to slander the entire Democratic party—and the left in general—and to try to distract people from the perfectly legitimate reasons for one to make a comparison between the Bush regime and the Hitler regime.
Here's some quick background: MoveOn.org, a private organization founded by two silicon valley entrepreneurs, was given several million dollars recently by financier George Soros who was forced to flee Hungary to escape the Nazis as a child. Soros commented in an interview with the Washington Post regarding his donation to MoveOn:
"When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans."
The Post continued "It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening")". Out of thousands of entries sent in by random web viewers unaffiliated with MoveOn itself, 2 submissions made comparisons between Bush's use of the infamous pre-emptive war docrine and the Third Reich's use of the very same doctrine. After World War II, the doctrine of pre-emptive war was determined to be a war crime at the subsequent Nuremberg tribunals.
The RNC went into full Walter Winchell red-baiting slander mode and enlisted their right-wing Jewish minions to do most of the actual dirty work. Ed Gillespie, of the RNC falsely accused the activist website of "sponsoring" the two ads in question. Pundits Matt Drudge, Abraham Foxman of the ADL and Michael Medved—among others—helped distort and twist the situation around to further the Republicans agenda. The tactics they used were incredibly cynical and manipulative and in a manner that in my opinion displays a total risregard for the lessons of the Holocaust.
The RNC, overlooking the disclaimer on every MoveOn commercial ("The viewpoints and opinions expressed in this ad are not necessarily endorsed by MoveOn.org Voter Fund, MoveOn.org, or the Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest.") put out press releases and pushed the angle that MoveOn stood behind the message of two submissions and that so did the Democratic party by extension. ADL's Foxman put out a press release that said his organization was "deeply troubled that MoveOn.org had allowed an outrageous and highly offensive political ad that directly compared President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler to be posted on its Web site."
Matt Drudge's muck-raking scandal sheet Drudge Report treated this RNC propaganda push as if it was huge news, even breaking out his rarely used flashing police light graphic, which he normally reserves for only the biggest, most explosive stories - political resignations, massive terror attacks, etc. But this is total hypocrisy—The MoveOn organization had removed the two commercials the minute there were complaints. The copies of the ads DrudgeReport.com had linked to were on the RNC website! So the Republican party is equally guilty of hosting the commercials and—in fact—the majority of people who have seen them undoubtedly got them from the RNC website. Why isn't Abe Foxman "deeply troubled" that the Republican party allowed the commercials to be posted to its site? If Matt Drudge is so offended that these commercials were posted on the web then why did he link to them at the RNC site? The fact that Drudge knew there were copies of the commercials hidden somewhere on the RNC site strongly suggests that they were the ones who passed the story on to him. Otherwise how would he know how to find them ?
Where was Abe Foxman's righteous indignation when Rush Limbaugh was calling women who dared to stand up for their rights "feminazis?" Where was the RNC's outrage every time Neil Boortz, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter referred to Senator Clinton as "Hitlery?"
Where was Abe Foxman when Ariel Sharon was rolling out the red carpet for the head of the Italian far-right wing National Alliance party, Gianfranco Fini ? Italy's National Alliance party is the legal heir to Mussolini's Fascist party - the same fascist party that was allied with Hitler and send thousands of Italian Jews to their deaths in the camps.
Why is it OK with Abe Foxman that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger toasted his friend and former Nazi party member Kurt Waldheim at his wedding to Maria Shriver, and that Schwarzenegger to this day refuses to condemn Waldheim for his Nazi past? Shouldn't he have been drawing attention to these facts during the recall election? It makes me wonder just who or what Foxman is working for.
On January 5 Ralph Peters' New York Post column—likening Howard Dean to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and Dean followers to Nazi Brownshirts and the Gestapo got no comment from any right wing media pundits. How come? Isn't that horribly offensive? The Wall Street Journal demanded an apology from MoveOn, but made no mention of the New York Post article. As of 5:00pm EST Wednesday, a Google News search returned more than 100 stories on the MoveOn.org fiasco, with the bulk of coverage casting a negative light on MoveOn.org. A similar search on Peters' Dean-Nazi comparison returns only one story—The New York Post column itself.
And forget about getting the RNC to comment on Grover Norquist comparing the estate tax to the Holocaust.
An article from the Free Press details the Bush families actual connections to the rise of the Nazi party:
Because legal action was taken, Bush's deeds have been a matter of public record since 1942. They were widely covered in newspapers and electronic media at the time. The history is readily accessible. But right-wing Bush fanatics continue to deny those ties existed. In a nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talk host Michael Medved recently claimed that Prescott Bush's bank's ties to the Nazis had not been established.
Why is Michael Medved covering for Bush's family dealings with the Nazi regime?
Washington Post editor Bob Woodward's book about Bush's war-making apparatus says that Bush's master political strategist, Karl Rove, was said to have compared the post-9/11 display at the World Series in Yankee Stadium to a Nazi rally. The Republicans see the resemblance that was pointed out in the MoveOn commercials too, only they revel in it.
Forgive me for saying so but the Republicans, the growing legion of Jewish Uncle Tom-like RNC minions and most of all the ADL don't seem to have as much (if any) interest in defending Jews or the victims of the Holocaust or in preventing real anti-semitism as they do in using the Holocaust to further their right-wing political agenda of pre-emptive war.
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| ....dead and taking hits...WTF? |
| 01.07.04 (1:51 pm) [edit] |
ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AP) -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton apologized for joking that Mahatma Gandhi used to run a gas station in St. Louis, saying it was "a lame attempt at humor."
:evil:
Idiot. Who makes humours political jokes about Gandhi? Is she mad or is it just me?
She wishes she were half what he was.
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| ....is nothing sacred? |
| 01.06.04 (5:36 pm) [edit] |
Scientists are bowled over by the spectacular quality of images the Spirit rover has sent from Mars, showing gray rocks peppering a Martian lake bed awash in its natural hues of red, pink and orange. "I think my reaction has been one of [b][u]shock and awe[/u][/b]," said team member Jim Bell.
-CNN :roll:
I suppose that's called ass-kissing, eh?
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| ....Ridge: Fingerprinting program is first of many safety steps |
| 01.05.04 (7:23 pm) [edit] |
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Monday was the first day of a new U.S. anti-terrorism program aimed at fingerprinting and photographing most foreign air and sea travelers arriving in the United States.
CNN's Soledad O'Brien spoke with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who was overseeing the operation at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
O'BRIEN: The US-VISIT program essentially is fingerprinting and then photographing some of the foreign visitors who enter the nation's airports, also, the seaports, as well. Then you take those, that information and compare it with terror watch lists. But there are some loopholes and I want to start by talking about some of those loopholes this morning.
First, 500 million border crossings into the United States every year. US-VISIT really will only focus on a fraction, 24 million.
Isn't that fraction way too small to really make a difference?
RIDGE: Well, first of all, I think you need to accept the notion that US-VISIT is a first significant step, really just the first significant step in a series of steps that we're going to take in order to keep our borders open, but our country more secure.
By October of this year, everybody coming across our borders is going to have to have a machine-readable passport with some other form of biometric identification.
So you're right with regard to the number of people that will be affected by the system today, but the number will grow and grow in the months and years ahead.
O'BRIEN: Another loophole, the US-VISIT tracks arrivals, but not departures. And to some degree, isn't departures half the problem?
RIDGE: Well, we have begun today a couple of pilot programs to determine the kinds of technology we want to use to gather departure information.
We've set up a kiosk at the Baltimore-Washington Airport. We've got another pilot program at a seaport down in Miami. So, again, it's the first step in a process. We are going to capture departure information, biometric information. We just want to see what's the best location in the airport and what's the best technology to capture the information.
O'BRIEN: Twenty-eight countries are exempted. Why not check everyone? Why exempt some people?
RIDGE: Well, for the time being, we just, as a matter of principle, we're going after those countries where they need visas and we're working with our consular affairs offices, because they are beginning to take photographs and finger scans, as well.
But these visa waiver countries that you referred to, they're going to be required to have these machine-readable passports with biometric identifiers by October of this year.
So, again, it's a series of things we're going to do. We want to welcome people who want to visit and to study and to work in the United States. But we also want to have an accurate record of when they arrive and when they depart. And there are several things we'll be doing in the months and years ahead to complete that record.
O'BRIEN: In the last several weeks, you've had two flights from Air France canceled. You've had two British Airways flights canceled. An Aero Mexico flight was turned around and sent back.
Do you think that this is highly unusual or do you think this is the new normal and we're going to see something like this and passengers can expect to see something like this from now on?
RIDGE: I think when you have very specific information relative to a flight and the kind of information we had, the credibility associated with it, that is the last resort. And we erred on the side of caution, not unlike a pilot who chooses not to take off because their warning light says they've got a mechanical difficulty or not unlike the airline that said we're not flying because the storm is so bad.
So whether it's a mechanical problem, whether it's a weather related problem or a potential terrorist problem, public safety comes first. And I think we will probably see more and more of this in the future. As long as the intelligence pushes us in that direction.
O'BRIEN: So there were specific threats. Because there were some reports that said that the British Airways pilots balked at having an armed air marshal on board and that's the reason those flights were canceled. Is that not accurate?
RIDGE: Well, I think that the officials in the British government and even the French government have validated the intelligence reporting both by what they've said and what they've done in canceling those flights.
I do think the British airline pilots have mixed opinions as to whether or not they want armed air marshals. We obviously in this country think it's another layer of defense and down the road, hopefully, more countries will join us in that belief, that adding another layer of defense in addition to hardening the cockpit doors and intensive baggage screening. But on occasion, on targeted flights, putting air marshals is just another way of adding additional security to these passengers.
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| ...CIA plans new secret police to fight Iraq terrorism |
| 01.05.04 (3:40 pm) [edit] |
by Julian Coman, The Telegraph [UK]
January 4th, 2004
Nine months after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime and his feared mukhabarat (intelligence) operatives, Iraq is to get a secret police force again - courtesy of Washington.
The Bush administration is to fund the new agency in the latest initiative to root out Ba'athist regime loyalists behind the continuing insurgency in parts of Iraq.
The force will cost up to $3 billion (£1.8 billion) over the next three years in money allocated from the same part of the federal budget that finances the Central Intelligence Agency.
Its ranks are to be drawn from Iraqi exile groups, Kurdish and Shi'ite forces - in addition to former mukhabarat agents who are now working for the Americans. CIA officers in Baghdad are expected to play a leading role in directing their operations.
A former United States intelligence officer familiar with the plan said: "If successfully set up, the group would work in tandem with American forces but would have its own structure and relative independence. It could be expected to be fairly ruthless in dealing with the remnants of Saddam."
The secret police will be the latest security force created by the US and its Iraqi political allies in an attempt to quell the insurgency.
Although officially banned by the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), militia groups are already patrolling cities and towns in many areas of Iraq against the backdrop of an increasing number of extra-judicial killings of prominent former Ba'athists.
The Pentagon and CIA hope to organise the various and sometimes competing groups into a single force with the local knowledge, the motivation and the authority to hunt down pro-Saddam resistance fighters. According to officials in Washington, the new agency could eventually number 10,000. Initially at least, salaries will be paid by the CIA, which has 275 officers on the ground in Iraq.
Former CIA officials compare the operation to the Phoenix programme in Vietnam, which was launched in 1967. That programme sought to destroy the civilian infrastructure supporting the Vietcong through assassinations and abductions secretly authorised by Washington.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counter-terrorism, said: "They're clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam." He said that small units of US special forces would work with their Iraqi counterparts, including former senior Iraqi intelligence agents, on covert operations.
The force is intended to take on a crucial role for Washington in post-Saddam Iraq. The Pentagon and CIA have told the White House that the organisation will allow America to maintain control over the direction of the country as sovereignty is handed over to the Iraqi people during the course of this year.
John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets at the Washington-based Global Security organisation, told The Telegraph: "The money for this has been buried in the 'other procurements' section of the Air Force budget. The CIA is funded out of that category.
"The creation of a well-functioning local secret police, that in effect is a branch of the CIA, is part of the general handover strategy. If you are in control of the secret police in a country then you don't really have to worry too much about who the local council appoints to collect the garbage."
In the short term, CIA officials expect that the very existence of a strongly pro-American security force will terrify civilians who are currently supporting the insurgency into refusing assistance and aid to Ba'athist rebels. Despite the capture of Saddam last month, attacks on US personnel and Iraqis co-operating with them have continued into the New Year.
The scheme is believed to have been heavily backed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, a key advocate of the war to oust Saddam. After deciding in November to accelerate the handover of political power to a sovereign Iraqi authority, Mr Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials are anxious that Iraq should not fall under radical Islamist control or degenerate into civil war.
"The presence of a powerful secret police, loyal to the Americans, will mean that the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the US wants to set," said Mr Pike. "To begin with, the new Iraqi government will reign but not rule."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/0 4/wirq04.xml" title="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/0 4/wirq04.xml" target="_blank"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...
Note: In the short term, CIA officials expect that the very existence of a strongly pro-American security force will terrify civilians who are currently supporting the insurgency
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| ....Don't Tread on Me : Act Now to Save the Constitution |
| 01.02.04 (11:22 pm) [edit] |
by Brian J. Foley, CounterPunch [US]
December 27th, 2003
Earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the risk of another terrorist attack is "high." Nuclear power plants, skyscrapers, chemical plants, oil refineries, dams, bridges, seaports, airliners, trains, buses and bridges could be targets. Yet the most vulnerable victim of any future terrorist attack may be our Constitution.
Such is not mere speculation by conspiracy theorists but comes straight from recently retired U.S. Army General Tommy Franks, who field marshaled the U.S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. In a lengthy interview in this month's Cigar Aficionado, Franks painted a picture of what he called "the worst thing that can happen in our country": a terrorist attack with WMD, a "massive casualty-producing event somewhere in the western world -- it may be in the United States of America -- that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass-casualty-producing event. Which, in fact, then begins to potentially unravel the fabric of our Constitution." As a result, Franks said, "the western world, the free world, lo! ses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."
General Franks' view is chilling. When people so close to President Bush start discussing the death of the Constitution, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Our Constitution is supposed to be inviolate, a necessity, not a luxury. Democracy is not a mere "experiment," especially one that should be halted by a terrorist attack.
Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine that, after another attack, the Constitution will be impugned by right wing politicians and pundits as a "Bill of Rights for terrorists and traitors." The argument that we can't afford, say, free speech or the right to counsel when cells of apocalyptic terrorists lurk in the shadows, could appeal to a shell-shocked public. People will demand action. Granting the government broader police powers, and the "sacrifice" of freedom that such a grant entails, could seem like an almost pietistic response: we must give something up to get what we want; we have too long had too much wealth, too many freedoms.
It's so easy to imagine such a response because it already happened, after September 11. The Bush Administration's attack on the Constitution, the USA PATRIOT ACT, was rubberstamped by Congress. Many members had not even read it, but all feared appearing, as Attorney General Ashcroft warned, to "aid the terrorists." That Congress could give into such rhetoric shows the power of the fear that gripped the U.S.
It's doubtful, in any case, that unraveling our Constitution can protect us from terrorists. As we now know, the 9/11 attacks could have been thwarted with information the government had at that time. And it's hard to see how detaining Jose Padilla, the alleged "dirty bomber," without letting him talk to lawyers or challenge evidence against him, makes us any safer than if the Bush Administration respected his legal rights. Moreover, terrorism seems to thrive in countries that are not free -- think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Russia. Taking freedom away from Americans could even spur some of them to respond violently.
Imagine giving up our freedom for security, but getting no security? That's not even a trade-off -- it's wholesale surrender. Without these freedoms, We the People won't be able to participate in or question what our government is -- or isn't -- doing to protect us. As we saw with the invasion of Iraq -- which appears to have done nothing to prevent terrorism but actually may have increased the risk (as the current "Code Orange" may reflect) -- it's easy for our leaders to lose focus.
What can we do? Given the speed with which the USA PATRIOT ACT was enacted after September 11, 2001, waiting until after an attack to protect our Constitutional rights will be too late. We must mobilize now to:
- Popularize the idea that the Bush Administration has a duty to protect us from future terrorist attacks. If an attack occurs, Americans should stand ready to blame, in part, where appropriate, this Administration -- not the Constitution.
- Post the Constitution on websites and publish it in newspapers -- to be plastered on cars, front doors, office cubicles. Pile copies in stores and restaurants. Leave it in hotel rooms, like the Gideon's Bible. Distribute little flags of the Constitution for car antennae. Hand out t-shirts. Make the Constitution as ubiquitous as the flag became after 9/11.
- Campaign for the idea that "What Makes America Great is Our Constitution." MoveOn, Common Cause, the ACLU and others could build on the work they have been doing and start this educational campaign, which might include short explanations of each Constitutional freedom. Few Americans have ever read this wonderful document.
- Repeal the USA PATRIOT ACT. Already, based on citizen initiatives, three states (Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont) and more than 100 cities, towns and counties, have rebelled, voting not to enforce the Act within their borders. We should take another step and declare all of our towns, cities, counties and states "Constitution Zones."
- Make protecting our Constitution an issue in all 2004 political campaigns. Demand that candidates pledge to uphold it. Indeed, remind all government officials that, upon taking office, they pledged to protect and uphold the Constitution. Make clear that we won't let officials tread on our cherished freedoms.
- Plan now to march boldly for civil and human rights after any terrorist attack. It's always easy for governments to silence and detain a few dissenters. We need to make rounding up freedom-loving Americans harder than herding cats.
Unfortunately, protecting against terrorist attacks is beyond the control of most of us. Protecting our Constitution, however, is a job for us all.
Brian J. Foley is a professor at Touro Law Center in Huntington, NY. He can be reached at: BrianF@tourolaw.edu.
http://www.counterpunch.com/foley12272003.html" title="http://www.counterpunch.com/foley12272003.html" target="_blank"http://www.counterpunch.com/f...
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QUOTE:
Stupidity has a bad habit of getting its way. --"The Day After"
QUOTE: Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
– A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"
QUOTE: War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.
– General Omar Bradley
I hope....that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats...
– Benjamin Franklin
"There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly."-- Klaatu, The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951.
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