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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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| .....Bush allies illegally helping Nader in Oregon |
| 06.30.04 (4:23 pm) [edit] |
Wednesday, June 30, 2004 Posted: 8:19 PM EDT (0019 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Efforts by two conservative groups to help President Bush by getting independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader on the ballot in the key battleground state of Oregon prompted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission Wednesday by a liberal watchdog group.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said phone banks encouraging Bush supporters to attend a Nader nominating convention last Saturday amounted to an illegal in-kind contribution to the Nader campaign by the Oregon Family Council and Oregon Citizens for a Sound Economy.
Bush's re-election campaign and the Oregon Republican Party were also named in the complaint for allegedly participating in the effort. The complaint alleges the groups worked together to promote Nader and siphon potential votes away from Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said the two groups, though non-profit, are still considered corporations, "and corporations are strictly prohibited from making contributions to political campaigns."
While the Bush campaign had no immediate comment, Nader spokesman Kevin Zeese called the allegations "absolute nonsense."
"We didn't work with any Republican groups or any corporations or non-profits trying to get people to come to our event," Zeese said. "We reached out to our constituency and got our people out there."
To get on the ballot, the Nader campaign has to get the signatures of 1,000 registered voters in one day or submit 15,000 signatures statewide. On Saturday, Nader supporters held a convention in Portland to try to get the necessary signatures.
While more than 1,100 people attended, the signatures are still being verified, so it is unclear if the effort was successful.
Whether Nader gets on the ballot in Oregon could be critical in deciding which candidate carries the state and its seven electoral votes. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore beat Bush by less than 7,000 votes in the state.
Published polls show Bush running neck-and-neck with Kerry, with Nader drawing 3 percent to 5 percent of the vote.
The Oregon Family Council is a conservative Christian group that opposes same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Oregon Citizens for a Sound Economy is the state chapter of a national anti-tax group headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
Both groups openly admit they urged supporters to show up at the Nader event.
"We called about 1,000 folks in the Portland area and said this would be an opportunity to show up to provide clarity in the presidential debate," said Matt Kibbe, president of CSE, who denied the the calls were coordinated with either the Bush or the Nader campaigns.
Kibbe said Nader "forces John Kerry to explain where he is on things.''
In its complaint, CREW also charged that the state GOP encouraged the Oregon Family Council to make the phone calls, which it said amounted to "illegally conspiring" with an outside group to evade a ban on state parties using soft money to send out public communications.
"What the Oregon Republican Party could not do directly, it could not do indirectly," the complaint said.
CREW also cited comments by Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt that campaign volunteers, though not paid staffers, may have made phone calls from the campaign's office. The costs of those calls, including the preparation of phone lists and scripts, should have been reported to the FEC as an in-kind contribution from the Bush campaign to Nader, which would be illegal if it amounted to more than $5,000, the complaint said.
Sloan also told CNN that she is convinced the phone banks were coordinated between the Bush campaign, the Oregon GOP and the two groups, saying "it can't be a coincidence ... that they're all making the same phone calls at the same time." However, she said it is unclear whether the Nader campaign was involved.
"If Ralph Nader gets on the ballot, he would pull thousands of liberal votes that would otherwise go to Kerry and perhaps cause President Bush to lose the election," read one script for the phone campaign, which CREW cited in its complaint.
CREW has previously filed complaints against both the Nader and Bush campaigns, alleging illegal assistance from tax-exempt corporations. Zeese, noting that the group has never moved against a Democrat, called it a partisan organization, and he accused Democrats of trying to interfere with the Nader signature drive.
Democrats have been trying to persuade Nader supporters not to back his independent bid this year, arguing that it will help Bush by dividing the liberal vote in closely fought states.
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| ......FBI opens new computer crime lab |
| 06.30.04 (9:20 am) [edit] |
By DIANE SCARPONI
Associated Press Writer
June 29, 2004, 3:20 PM EDT
NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- The FBI opened a new lab Tuesday dedicated to detecting computer-related crimes and training federal, state and local police to catch Internet pedophiles, frauds and thieves.
It is the second such lab the FBI has opened in the United States, and it will serve one of 50 computer crime task forces that have been set up around the country to increase cooperation among law enforcement agencies.
The FBI has made computer crimes a top priority, just behind terrorism-related work, because computers are used in such a wide variety of crimes today, said Keith Lourdeau, deputy assistant director of the FBI's cyber crime division in Washington.
In Connecticut alone, computers lately have figured in all kinds of cases, from the death of 12-year-old Christina Long at the hands of a man she met online, to the public corruption of former state treasurer Paul Silvester.
Computer crimes also are committed across state lines and national borders, Lourdeau said. An e-mail scam ring can just as easily operate out of Cambodia as Connecticut.
"Criminals are very savvy. They're always looking for an advantage. The Internet provides them an anonymity they never had," said Connecticut U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor.
The lab was built in the FBI's New Haven headquarters with about $300,000 of federal funds. The FBI will use existing staff to run training seminars and to do forensic tests on computers.
The training lab has 27 terminals, with black computers and black high-backed desk chairs, to teach law enforcement agents about computer crimes such as identity theft, fraud, harassment, intellectual property theft and crimes against children. Officers will learn about how to collect and analyze evidence from computers in a uniform way that will best preserve evidence.
The FBI also has a new computer forensics lab, where agents can take apart machines and examine hard drives for ghosts of deleted files. Such files were used last summer to convict a Boston investment firm of corruption charges for its dealings with Silvester.
The lab also has an area where police and federal agents can work undercover to investigate and catch pedophiles who are seeking to lure children in Internet chat rooms.
The FBI's lab serves members of the state computer crimes task force, which includes federal agents, state police and prosecutors, and police from Glastonbury, New Britain, Milford, New Haven and Windsor. Other police agencies are invited to join, said Mike Wolf, the FBI agent in charge of Connecticut.
"This is a small state. It's not an option, but a necessity, that we work together," Wolf said.
The FBI's budget also includes money for computers to be continually upgraded as technology changes.
The first such computer lab was set up in Chicago, and several more are planned around the country, Lourdeau said.
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| .....Since 9/11, Federal Spending Under Bush Increases at Fastest Rate in 30 Years |
| 06.26.04 (6:20 pm) [edit] |
Since 2001, even with record low inflation, U.S. federal spending has increased by a massive 28.8% (19.7% in real dollars)—with non-defense discretionary growth of 35.7% (25.3% in real dollars)—the highest rate of federal government growth since the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. This increase has resulted in the largest budget deficits in U.S. history, over $520 billion in fiscal year 2004 alone. Furthermore, the projected spending for 2005 is a conservative estimate, since it doesn’t include at least $50 billion for the ongoing cost of the Iraq occupation.
As predicted by Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs, author of such key books as Crisis and Leviathan and the new Against Leviathan, this explosion of government power would only have been possible in the aftermath of 9/11. Times of crisis present the easiest opportunities for politicians to take advantage of a frightened American public.
President George W. Bush is now on his way to becoming the first full-term president since John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) to not veto a single bill. The result is a congress that has been completely unconstrained in satiating its appetite for pork and corporate welfare. In response, likely Democratic Party challenger John Kerry has maligned alleged spending cuts and called for even higher taxes and spending. The consequence is that we now have two parties competing to see which can grow government profligacy faster.
From the massive increases in agricultural subsidies in the farm bill of 2002, to the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement of 2003; from the 47% increase in the defense budget, to the 80% increase in education spending, George W. Bush has demonstrated that “limited government” is not part of his political vocabulary.
Pat Rose
prose@independent.org
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| .....CIA knew al-Qaida agents heading to U.S. |
| 06.20.04 (6:18 pm) [edit] |
By Thom J. Rose and Shaun Waterman
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Washington, DC, Jun. 17 (UPI) -- Although the CIA learned in June 2001 that al-Qaida "had been preparing operatives to go to the United States" to carry out an attack, that information was not included in a briefing about terror threats given to President Bush Aug. 6, the Sept. 11 Commission said Wednesday.
The alleged mastermind of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has told his U.S. interrogators "he was widely known within al-Qaida to be planning some sort of operation against the United States," according to an interim report published by the commission staff on the first day of its 12th and final public hearing.
"Many were even aware he had been preparing operatives to go to the United States, as reported by a CIA source in June 2001," the report goes on.
The fact that the CIA had this information was first revealed by the joint congressional inquiry in July of last year, but this is the first time that officials have been questioned about why it was not included in a Presidential Daily Briefing about al-Qaida's determination to strike inside the United States, despite the fact that Mohammed was one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.
The interim report -- the most complete account to date of the painstaking and prolonged planning for the Sept. 11 attacks -- paints a picture of the plot and its executors as far more contingent, flexible and fractious than previously believed.
Commission officials say the picture they have assembled -- based on the latest results of a massive, continuing investigation -- calls into question the popular image of the hijackers as a skillful, disciplined team moving seamlessly toward zero hour. Indeed, their report reveals that the form the plot eventually took, not to mention its final success, was far from certain -- even at the last moment.
The plotters argued among themselves about dates and targets; one of the hijackers appeared to be getting cold feet just weeks before the attacks; and Mohammed Atta, the ringleader who piloted American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Center, nearly missed his flight because of an as-yet unexplained detour to Portland, Maine, the night of Sept. 10.
Commission staff were permitted to submit lists of questions that were put to Mohammed and other al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody, a commission official who requested anonymity told United Press International.
The official said that the questions were asked by interrogators as time allowed, given that "questioning about current threats has to take priority" over the kind of "historical information" the commission is largely interested in. "The replies came back as a narrative," rather than as a transcript of question and answer, the official explained.
The official said that investigators are cautious about accepting Mohammed's claims at face value unless they can be corroborated. FBI supervisory special agent James Fitzgerald summed up his attitude as "distrust, then verify."
Nonetheless, Mohammed's information -- some of which investigators are still trying to corroborate -- is at the heart of the report's revelations.
Mohammed has told interrogators that initial plans for the attacks included 10 hijackings, some on the West Coast. These planes were to be crashed into additional targets including "CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants and the tallest buildings in California and Washington state."
The centerpiece of the original plan was a plane Mohammed would have piloted himself. "Rather than crashing the plane into a target, he would have killed every adult male passenger, contacted the media from the air and landed the aircraft at a U.S. airport," the report said. "He says he then would have made a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all of the women and children passengers."
Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden rejected Mohammed's plan as too difficult to carry out, the staff statement said, adding that the al-Qaida leader also eventually rejected a plan to carry out hijackings in Southeast Asia simultaneously with those in the United States.
Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, another plotter in U.S. custody, have also described how, during the summer of 2001, one of the hijack pilots, Ziad al Jarrah, appeared to be getting cold feet and -- feeling "isolated and excluded from decision making" -- quarreled with Atta.
The report also outlines disagreements between Mohammed and bin Laden, who was "a hands-on commander very much involved in the details of the plot ... a bit of a micro-manager," according to Fitzgerald. Not only did he scale down Mohammed's original plan, but he tried on several occasions to push up the date of the attacks. He was rebuffed by Mohammed, who said the plot was not ready.
The targets of the attacks were also a source of disagreement among the hijackers. Choosing a target in Washington was especially contentious, with both the Capitol and the White House championed by some. The statement said that as late as two days before the attacks the hijackers appeared unsure which of the two they would target -- although they had earlier moved the attacks back to a date when Congress would be in session.
But it is the news that many in the jihadi community were apparently aware of a plot to attack the United States that is likely to stir the greatest controversy, re-igniting as it does the vexed question of who, if anyone, in the U.S. intelligence community knew what and when about the coming attacks.
During the summer of 2001 bin Laden "made several remarks hinting at an upcoming attack, which spawned rumors throughout the jihadist community worldwide," the report states.
In one speech he made at al-Farouq camp in Afghanistan, the report says, he "specifically urged trainees to pray for the success of an upcoming attack involving 20 martyrs."
Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste told UPI after the hearing that the revelations show "the discipline that we have imagined (the plotters) to have -- their ability to keep information about their plans strictly compartmentalized and closely held -- was not so tight."
The CIA had been hearing "from time to time ... rumbling from the (Afghan terrorist training) camps that something's going to happen in the United States," a CIA official identified as Rudolph Rousseau acknowledged under their questioning.
He said these reports -- and the more specific one that Mohammed had been preparing to send operatives to the United States -- had been "incorporated into the general threat concerns that we had during that summer."
But although he said these reports were disseminated to what he called "a pretty robust list" of other agencies -- including the FBI's national security and counter-terrorism divisions, the Secret Service, and the Treasury and State departments -- they were not included in the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing the CIA prepared for President Bush, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the United States."
The commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also confirmed yet again that Iraq played no role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The panel also said it had uncovered no evidence of an April 2001 meeting in Prague between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent -- a meeting that has been repeatedly referred to by Vice President Dick Cheney and others who are determined to implicate Iraq in the Sept. 11 attacks. The report states that Atta was confirmed to be in the United States a day or so on either side of the alleged meeting and that his cell phone was used repeatedly in Florida on the day he was supposedly in Prague.
"We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States," the report concluded.
It also found no evidence that the Sept. 11 plot was funded by any government.
On the question of support for al-Qaida more broadly, the commission found "no convincing evidence" that any government -- with the exception of the Taliban in Afghanistan -- supported al-Qaida and "no persuasive evidence" that they funded themselves by drug or diamond smuggling.
The statement said bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, asking for space for training camps and help getting weapons, but was rebuffed.
The report said bin Laden sponsored anti-Saddam fighters in northern Iraq until Sudan -- where bin Laden was staying at the time -- urged him to halt the operation.
But the statement reveals that al-Qaida likely did cooperate with Hezbollah in the 1996 bomb attack on the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. citizens and injured 372 others.
Conventional wisdom has long dictated that al-Qaida, a Sunni Muslim group, would not collaborate with Hezbollah, the Shiite terror group behind the Khobar Towers bombing.
"Later intelligence, however, showed far greater potential for collaboration between Hezbollah and al-Qaida than many had previously thought," the report said. It concluded, "We have seen strong but indirect evidence that (Osama bin Laden's) organization did in fact play some as-yet unknown role in the Khobar attack."
Some 3,000 people died Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida operatives hijacked four U.S. jetliners. Two of the planes were crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing the 110-story buildings to collapse. A third plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington. The fourth jet crashed in rural western Pennsylvania, apparently after passengers tried to retake control of the aircraft.
The commission's Thursday meeting, its last, will focus on the crisis-management measures that were implemented following the strikes. The commission will take testimony from military leaders including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers and from current and former Federal Aviation Administration officials.
The commission is set to issue a final report on the attacks and the U.S. response July 26.
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| ......Bono breaches Irish smoking ban |
| 06.18.04 (6:06 am) [edit] |
DIG THE LANGUAGE USED IN THIS POS ARTICLE:
DUBLIN, Republic of Ireland (Reuters) -- Rock and roll ain't what it used to be. U2 frontman Bono has apologized -- for having a cigarette.
The breach of Ireland's new smoking ban was committed last week during a night out with Californian rockers The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The singer, real name Paul Hewson, was spotted lighting up during a late-night bash in the plush Tea Room restaurant of the Clarence Hotel, which he and fellow U2 mates own.
"It was the wee small hours. I was in the company of people from out of town who didn't know about the ban and for a moment nor did I," newspapers quoted Bono as saying on Friday.
"I was quickly reminded by the staff and a few friends. I apologized then and I apologize now."
Ireland became the first country in the world to outlaw smoking in the workplace when it introduced the ban earlier this year. The government has hailed it as a resounding success with most people -- the odd rock star aside -- complying.
Friday, June 18, 2004 Posted: 7:55 AM EDT (1155 GMT)
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Who is for Reuters to call Bono "the odd rock star?"
Also...you OWN the hotel but can't smoke in it. Interesting. So when will governments finally tell us we [and I don't and have never smoked] can't smoke in our homes and cars? Hummmm.....
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| .....Spying in America: How the Pentagon is Overcoming Privacy Laws to Spy At Home |
| 06.17.04 (2:26 am) [edit] |
A new provision buried in an intelligence appropriations bill moving through Congress would exempt Pentagon agencies from the Privacy Act, vastly expanding their ability to gather intelligence inside the United States, including recruiting citizens as informants. [Includes transcript]
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We spend the rest of the hour taking a look at government spy operations here in the United States.
In the 1970s, army intelligence agents were caught spying on antiwar protesters and Congress passed the Privacy Act, which requires officials seeking information to disclose who they are and what they want the information for.
Now, a provision buried in an intelligence appropriations bill moving through Congress would exempt Pentagon agencies from the Privacy Act, vastly expanding their ability to conduct domestic spy operations.
But recent events show how domestic military intelligence gathering can lead to a government assault on free speech.
In February, Army intelligence officers visited the University of Texas law school days after a student-organized conference on Islamic Law and Women's Rights. The agents questioned participants and demanded a non-existent roster of attendees. The Army later apologized for acting outside its jurisdiction, but under the new intelligence provision, such investigations may become more common. The intelligence bill is scheduled to go before the House Intelligence Committee tomorrow.
Michael Isikoff, investigative correspondent for Newsweek who first reported this story in this week's issue.
Sahar Aziz, Student at University of Texas Law School and organizer of a conference on Islamic Law and Women's Rights held in February 2004, which was visited by an Army intelligence officer, prompting an apology from the Army for operating outside their jurisdiction.
Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security Studies.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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AMY GOODMAN: We're joined on the phone by Kate Martin, Center for National Securities Study. The student at the University of Texas Law School who organized The Islamic Law and Women's Rights conference, Sahar Aziz and Michael Isikoff, who first reported this story in this week's issue of "Newsweek" magazine. We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Michael, why don't you give us an overlay of exactly what this bill is and the provision that not a lot of people know about.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, it is not entirely clear because, like so much that the intelligence committees do, this was done behind closed doors, in closed session. No public hearings, no public debate. And apparently not much questioning of the Pentagon about why they wanted this provision in. But if you take a look at it, and you take a look at the report that the senate intelligence committee has since made public about the provision, it does raise a lot of questions. So, what it does, is lists this restriction of The Privacy Act so that Pentagon Intelligence agencies, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the Separate Service Agency -- Intelligence branches, the Army intelligence, Navy intelligence, can question U.S. citizens, U.S. persons, greencard holder, anybody who is residing in the United States, without identifying who they are and what the Pentagon says it need this is provision for, is so it can recruit sources inside the United States to help the War on Terrorism. Now the main explanation given by D.I.A., and I talked to some of their officials quite a bit about this a week so ago is, they want to be able to question Americans who are traveling abroad, businessmen, college students, who are going into countries where they have a hard time getting access to, where there might be large u.s. Troop concentrations. But when you probe a little deeper beyond that, you find that there are others in the pentagon who have been interested in this provision as well. Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary For Intelligence, signed off on it. There is this new northern command created by Secretary Rumsfeld two years ago In Colorado Springs, whose assignment is home land defense. They want to -- they're interested in this provision as well and the broad rubric of force protection, which is what military intelligence is assigned to do, would allow it, according to pentagon officials, to conduct intelligence gathering on any suspected terrorist plot to a u.s. Military base or U.S. military contractor. That's a pretty broad mandate in which this provision can be used and it does raise questions, then, certainly about how it will be used.
AMY GOODMAN: Why don't you tell us what happened this past February at your student conference, University of Texas?
SAHAR AZIA: Well, it was actually quite an unexpected event after the fact. The conference was very successful. It was very well attended by Muslims and Non-Muslims, by students and non-students and, you know, we ended the conference feeling very proud of ourselves and having complete add successful one and were congratulated by numerous people. And then a week later suddenly special agent from the Army Intelligence shows up out of nowhere and roamed the campus looking for this nonexistent roster and a video tape of the conference and in order to get that he was asking for me because everyone kept telling him well, she was the one that organized the conference n. The process made many people intimidated and just shocked. I was very shocked because there was nothing at the conference that would have made one even believe that something like this would happen. So, it was definitely a major chill on free speech and on academic freedom. I was very concerned that if something like this happens in the future, at another conference, will anyone show up because people will be scared that they're spied on and won't feel comfortable to speak freely about issues that is are very important because we're very heavily involved and we need to understand the culture and the religion and, you know, the people, etc., of the region.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you end up soliciting an apology from them?
SAHAR AZIA: Well, we held a press conference a few days after he came to campus and made it very clear, you know, through the media that we were not pleased with what happened. We questioned whether they had jurisdiction and we were very concerned about the chilling of academic freedom, etc. And through our press conference, we encouraged actually the journalists to do investigative research and challenged the Army Intelligence and The Intelligence Community to explain, you know, why this happened. Because they didn't have any legal papers, you know, warranting their right to this information. And at the same time there was no one in uniform there. We didn't know that anyone from the intelligence community was at the conference. So, that was the way -- that was our indirect way of asking for an explanation. We were pleased that they gave us an apology. We didn't expect one, to be honest. But at least they did admit that they were out of their jurisdiction and I think the public suddenly realized there were a lot of things going on that they didn't realize was happening about, you know, with regards to domestic surveillance and how they were being impacted, especially Non-Muslims. I think some people think it's not me. It is just this group, this subculture that I don't know anything about that I don't really care about. But it's really expanded. Not to say that that's justified. But even just anyone who associates now with this topic or with this, you know, these people or this group is now, guilty by association based on nothing, you know, based on just wanting to learn.
AMY GOODMAN: Sahar Aziz is a student at University Of Texas Law School that organized the women and Islamic Law Conference this past February. Kate Martin, Director For National Security Studies. Can you give us the history of domestic spying and how this fits in?
KATE MARTIN: Well, this is very troubling because it looks like it's a resurgence of something that we thought had ended. You know, everybody knows or most people know about the history of the C.I.A. And the F.B.I. Spying for the Anti-Vietnam War Movements and on the Civil Rights Movement and on a lot of other groups, including up in through the 1980's perform basically what happened is government agents used undercover agents to go into groups and, in many cases, act as agents provocateurs to encourage illegal acts by the groups, to make the people in the groups feel par noise with lots of justification and turn on each other and then they wrote it all down in files. So, we had this phenomenon of literally hundreds of thousands of files being created on Americans and on their First Amendment protective political activities. There were reforms in the 1970's and 19 90's that were intended to end that -- 80's that were intended to end that and make sure that the agencies doing surveillance inside the U.S. Concentrate on criminal activities and one of the ways that was done was to say the C.I.A. and the defense department have no business spying on Americans. Another way that was done was to say we're going to have public guidelines on how the F.B.I. conducts surveillance. And so while there are a lot of problems with those guidelines, we at least know here's what the F.B.I. is supposed to be doing, for example, when it uses undercover agents. What this -- what's being proposed here is an elimination of one of the key prohibitions that prevented or the defense department from undertaking the kind of surveillance that was just described at the University Of Texas. If this bill were to pass, the next time they show up, they can pretend to be somebody else, like a student from another university organizing a conference, ask for the roster of everyone who attended the conference and then put it in their data bank. Where it will sit forever and then be -- they can data mine it, etc. And no one will even know. You know, this is all part of -- and this is the way it happened the first time is that, you know, they've always had -- the Defense Department's always had military bases, of course, in the U.S. And if the mission of protecting those bases. But now they have this new mission of, quote, "homeland defense". And we really need a lot more public discussion about what that means to have the military inside the u.s. Concentrating on counterterrorism. Because we don't have -- while we have terrible attacks, it is hard to think how the military plays a role in finding the next al-Qaeda terrorist inside the u.s. And instead of having any public explanation from the military about how they might do that, they might have this stealth effort to allow themselves to on an undercover basis both collect information from Americans about themselves and about their neighbors and friends.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Isikoff, you write about this in this week's "Newsweek" about recruiting citizens to spy on each other. There was a collective revulsion against the total information awareness program in the pentagon and ultimately John Poindexter was forced out. How much of this is a continuation of this and what exactly is laid out there?
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, it is hard to say. As I said before, this was sort of done, you know, in closed session, no public hearings, no explanations. From the republic explanations by the Pentagon. One thing that strikes me about this is you have the 9/11 commission wrapping up its work. It's got its public hearings this week and recommendations next month. One of the principle issues they've been grappling is should we create a domestic intelligence agency, i.e.m.a.-5 in Great Britain and the argument made against that in the debate what are the Civil Liberties implications of creating a is separate agency whose responsibility would be intelligence gathering inside the united states and surveillance. That has been a public debate and there's been a lot written about it. Yeah, here you have the pentagon essentially making a move to sort of do the same thing without anybody paying any attention to it. And, you know, if that happens, what kind of oversight would there be, what precisely would be the mission? None of these questions have been asked today.
AMY GOODMAN: Where does the bill go from here?
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: It has been passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is coming up, a similar vote is coming up before the house intelligence committee tomorrow. And then it will have to be thrashed out in conference and passed by both houses. But it will be interesting to see first if the house intelligence committee will do this debate, take this up in public session and, secondly, if they will be asking anymore questions than the senators did and, you know, what I'm told, almost no questions were asked
AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, we have to leave it there. MICHAEL ISIKOFF, investigative correspondent for "Newsweek," Sahar Aziz, student at the University Of Texas Law School, and Kate Martin for the Center For International Securities Program.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004
Democracy Now Transcript
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| .......9/11 panel sees no link between Iraq, al-Qaida |
| 06.16.04 (2:57 pm) [edit] |
MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 6:48 p.m. ET June 16, 2004WASHINGTON - The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday that Osama bin Laden met with a top Iraqi official in 1994 but found “no credible evidence” of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida in attacks against the United States.
In a report based on research and interviews by the commission staff, the panel said that bin Laden made overtures to toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for assistance, as he did with leaders in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere as he sought to build an Islamic army.
The report said that bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam at the urging of allies in Sudan eager to protect their own ties to Iraq, even though the al-Qaida leader had previously provided support for “anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan.”
Bin Laden ceased that support in the early 1990s, opening the way for a meeting between the al-Qaida leader and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in 1994 in Sudan, the report said. At the meeting, bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps in Iraq as well as Iraqi assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded, the staff report said.
No ‘collaborative relationship’ seen
It said that reports of subsequent contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan “do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship,” and added that two unidentified senior bin Laden associates "have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq."
The report, the 15th released by the commission staff, concluded, “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States.”
Fred Fielding, a Republican member of the commission, prodded witnesses about their conclusion, citing a 1998 indictment of bin Laden that alleged links with the then-Iraqi leader.
But U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald of Illinois said that while such claims were contained in the original indictment, they were dropped when later charges were filed.
The panel's findings were released two days after Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that Saddam had "long-established ties" with al-Qaida.
Bush says al-Zarqawi ‘best evidence’
President Bush defended the statement in a news conference Tuesday, saying the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is accused of trying to disrupt the transfer of sovereignty as well as last month's decapitation of American Nicholas Berg, provides "the best evidence of connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida."
In making the case for war in Iraq, Bush administration officials frequently cited what they said were Saddam's decade-long contacts with al-Qaida operatives. They stopped short of claiming that Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but critics say Bush officials left that impression with the American public.
The White House had no immediate comment on the report's conclusion, but it drew a fresh attack on Bush from Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.
"The administration misled America and the administration reached too far," the Massachusetts Democrat told Michigan NPR in an interview.
Meeting between hijacker, Iraqi agent discounted
In a second staff report released Wednesday, the commission staff said that Mohamed Atta, the pilot of one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center and leader of the 19 hijackers, never met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic. That purported meeting also has been cited as evidence of a possible al-Qaida connection to Iraq.
“We do not believe that such a meeting occurred,” the report said.
The release of the reports came as the 10-member commission opened its final public hearing on the attacks. The hearing, being held Wednesday and Thursday, will cover the Sept. 11 plot and the emergency response by the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. air defenses. Commissioners say they will delve into the actions of the nation’s top leaders during critical moments of the attacks.
The panel intends to issue a final report in July on the hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000, destroyed the World Trade Centers in New York and damaged the Pentagon outside Washington. A fourth plane commandeered by terrorists crashed in the countryside in Pennsylvania.
At the final public hearing, the commission was planning to focus on the nation’s air defense, details of the plot and confusion and miscommunication among agencies during the attacks, hindering a response.
How al-Qaida became ‘fast-acting, poisonous’
“We’re going to talk about the evolution of al-Qaida and how they moved from one type of organization in the late 1980s to a more fast-acting, poisonous organization in the 1990s, more spread out and dispersed,” said Timothy Roemer, a Democratic commissioner and former representative from Indiana.
“We’ll be looking at the timeline as to whether or not we had an opportunity to deflect any of the airliners, and how decisions were made by the highest people in government,” he said.
In its report, the commission staff pieced together information on the development of bin Laden’s network, from the far-flung training camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere, to funding from “well-placed financial facilitators and diversions of funds from Islamic charities.”
Reports that bin Laden had a huge personal fortune to finance acts of terror are overstated, the report said.
The description of the training camp operations contained elements of faint, grudging praise.
“A worldwide jihad needed terrorists who could bomb embassies or hijack airliners, but it also needed foot soldiers for the Taliban in its war against the Northern Alliance, and guerrillas who could shoot down Russian helicopters in Chechnya or ambush Indian units in Kashmir,” it said.
According to one unnamed senior al-Qaida associate, various ideas were floated by mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the commission said. The options included taking over a launcher and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear missile at the United States, mounting mustard gas or cyanide attacks against Jewish areas in Iraq or releasing poison gas into the air conditioning system of a targeted building.
“Last but not least, hijacking an aircraft and crashing it into an airport or nearby city,” it said.
The commission also reiterated an oft-repeated warning by the Bush administration, saying al-Qaida remains poised to attack the United States in a devastating chemical, biological or "dirty bomb" attack.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the terror group has become much more dispersed, with less funding following the arrests or deaths of key financiers. But the group has learned to operate on much smaller sums than the estimated $30 million spent annually prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the report said.
Al-Qaida still ‘actively striving to attack’ U.S.
"Al-Qaida is actively striving to attack the United States and inflict mass casualties," the report said. The report noted in particular the group's "ambitious" biological weapons program and efforts in 1994 to purchase uranium.
“Al-Qaida and other extremist groups will likely continue to exploit leaks of national security information in the media, open-source information on techniques such as mixing explosives, and advances in electronics," it said.
In the report, the commission points to a series of attacks on the United States or its allies as early as 1992 that U.S. intelligence would determine by the late 1990s were linked to bin Laden or his terrorist group.
They included a December 1992 explosion outside two hotels in Aden, Yemen; the October 1993 killing of 18 U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia; a November 1995 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and the June 1995 explosion at the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden's ties to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a failed plot to blow up commercial aircraft in 1994 in Manila, Philippines, are unclear, but they offered significant warning signs that Islamic terrorists were intent on demolishing American symbols and inflicting mass casualties, the panel said.
"What is clear is that these plots were major benchmarks in the evolving Islamist threat to the United States and foreshadowed later attacks that were indisputably carried out by al Qaida under bin Laden's direction," the report stated.
Among those called testify Wednesday were field agents from the FBI and CIA, as well as Patrick Fitzgerald, a former attorney in New York who prosecuted alleged terrorists in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
German prosecutor cancels at last minute
Missing from Wednesday’s schedule is German prosecutor Matthias Krauss, who canceled at the last minute. Krauss, who investigated the al-Qaida cell in Hamburg, Germany, had been expected to highlight problems with U.S. intelligence-sharing. The reason for his cancellation was not immediately clear.
On Thursday, the panel will hear from Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as officials from the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. They will discuss whether a military response could have limited the Sept. 11 destruction by shooting down the airliners.
Officials have acknowledged the fighters did not get airborne as quickly as possible. NORAD and FAA officials say that since Sept. 11 they have established new chains of communication and increased the number of warplanes on alert.
The commission, facing a July 26 deadline for a final report, is winding down its 1½-year investigation after interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, including President Bush, and reviewing more than 2 million documents.
Communication gaps, missteps detailed
Several commissioners have told the Associated Press that drafts of the final report detail the many communication gaps and missteps by FBI and intelligence officials in detecting the plot. But they said the drafts refrain from placing blame on individuals in the Bush and Clinton administrations to avoid charges of partisanship.
That troubles some relatives of Sept. 11 victims, still seeking closure nearly three years after the attacks. They sent a letter to commissioners this week asking for tough questioning and accountability in the final hearing, saying the truth should come before politics.
“We’re going in with our hearts in our mouths,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband, Alan, was killed in the World Trade Center collapse. “You pray. You know it’s going to be emotional. We just hope on top of the emotion, we don’t leave frustrated again.”
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| ......Media Revolt: A Manifesto |
| 06.15.04 (12:58 am) [edit] |
Journalism is kind of like the weather. We all like to complain about it, but none of us ever do anything about it.
Oh, many of us point out the problems. Some of us are even very good at it. But at what point does our criticism finally coalesce into action?
As a longtime journalist and sometime editor, I love to read the Daily Howler almost daily. There really is no one on the Web as good at eviscerating bad reporting as Bob Somerby. His Webzine is a big regular stop in my daily rounds.
But lately, he's been even more on-point than usual, which is saying something. In one of his recent pieces, Somerby pointed with a kind of savage finality to the bottom line of the media's flagrant frivolousness and demeaning of the national discourse: It puts us all at serious risk.
What does Dowd have on her mind today? George Bush can't answer questions about 9/11. And John Kerry doesn't make his own sandwiches!
Of course, inanity has been this corps' stock-in-trade over at least the last dozen years. When you read your paper each day, you read the work of a vacuous press which is happy to display its Millionaire Pundit Values -- a press corps addicted to trivia and inanity. While Osama plotted in the summer of 2001, they rubbed their thighs about Chandra Levy. Meanwhile, they've turned your elections into trivia festivals, built around earth tones, Love Story, dog pills, blow-jobs. Now we're handed our current fare. What is the headline on Dowd's piece? "Guns and Peanut Butter," it says.
Somerby displays an unusual amount of passion in this piece. In fact, it might even seem a little over the top, except for two things: 1) he's exactly right, and 2) what he's saying should indeed make us all very, very angry.
While they clowned about Gary Condit, Osama's men were tooling those planes. And now, as they clown about peanut butter, Osama's men are still at work. And what will happen to your country because Wilgoren and Dowd set the tone? Let us finally tell you your future: Osama's men will come with a bomb (see below), and they'll destroy an American city. American society will end on that day. And when it does, you can think of Wilgoren and Dowd -- and you can think of the "letters editor" who laughed in your face with that letter today. They've made a joke of your discourse for years -- while your enemies hunt for a bomb. There is little chance those enemies won't succeed, because screaming idiots -- screaming idiots -- have long been in charge of your discourse.
9/11 should have driven that home. In the wake of the disaster, the media -- newspapers, TV, radio, the Internet -- needed to do some serious soul searching about its own role in the disaster. And it should have begun reforming its practices, particularly in the way it covers both international news and domestic politics.
Nothing. Nada. Zippo.
No, we're still indulging our audiences with "reality programs" that are nothing if not exercises in surreallity. There remain only a handful of mainstream media outlets performing serious journalism with any consistency, and none of them have sway with the Kewl Kids of the Beltway.
We still treat our national politics like a combination sporting event and gossipfest. We're still demeaning the national discourse with a steady diet of propaganda/spin souffle served up on a platter of triviality, with a side of slander.
In the process, we keep the public (a large portion of it willingly) in the dark about the very real politics and policies that directly affect their security and well-being, both here and now and for the long haul.
How do we fight the war on terror? (Other than buying an SUV and being a good consumer and keeping your head down and voting Republican, that is.) Well, have you heard anything in the way of serious national dialogue about this point? I haven't, not to any great extent, and for a simple reason: The media have declined to facilitate that discussion.
They have instead defaulted to Position A: Whatever course of action George W. Bush takes is a priori good, and done for sound reasons. Neither, for that matter, is his competence ever seriously questioned.
The reality, as I've been discussing, is that Bush's "war on terror" is an incomprehensible exercise in increasing the likelihood that high radicalized, highly motivated terrorists will again strike on American soil. A serious war on terror would begin from a recognition of the nature of the threat, with a considered response that's both flexible and comprehensive. Bush's Iraq war is none of these.
And the American public will never hear this from its mainstream media, especially not the dysfunctional, inbred family that is the Beltway press corps.
I mentioned awhile back that I went to hear Charles Pierce give the keynote address at this year's National Writers Workshop in Seattle (and, since I was one of the speakers, wound up having the pleasure of hanging out with Charles for much of the day).
What Pierce had to say was important, especially for those of us in the journalism business. He extolled the virtues of what we do as writers -- but also applied a razor knife to the current milieu and exposed just where we are going wrong.
I kept some sketchy notes from the talk, but another blogger named Bailey the Dog took better notes than mine and reported back on the upshot of Pierce's talk:
Someone in the audience did ask what I thought was a pretty decent question of Pierce -- he wondered what four topics the media covers most ineffectively. (Why limit it to four, I wondered?) At any rate, Pierce responded that journalists summarily do the worst job with:
1.) The poor.
2.) Politics (in that we rarely know the real person campaigning, what they're saying to the public and how what they're saying effects us.)
3.) Real life (in terms of long form stories)
4.) International affairs. (I think this probably goes without saying, but as examples Pierce notes that events such as 9/11 and war in the Balkans routinely surprise the American public but if we were remotely clued into the world, they probably would not.)
Pierce emphasized the second point, especially noting that the press really fails to report on policy and its effect on people in their real lives. It makes campaigns into horse races and scarcely gives the public any sense of the policies that candidates represent and how they will work out in the real world.
It's not just the press: It's the entire political class that has fallen into this degraded form of discourse, from pundits to pollsters to operatives to the politicians themselves. This was driven home to me by a post from Rhetorica that excerpted a Frank Luntz discussion on MSNBC (Chris Matthews' Hardball was the occasion) describing a recent encounter with a "focus group" of voters:
His opening question: "Regardless of who you're voting for, what characteristic do you want in a Democratic nominee?" After several people responded, Luntz said (with my clarifying remarks):
We'll [the press] talk about personalities for the Democrats and you [the panel] all keep bringing it back to policy. That's an interesting dynamic. Up until now, people [who?] were looking for, as you used, bold leadership, honesty, a vision for the future. [Luntz turns to the camera] And yet they're all talking policy. [To the panel] Is that where the Democratic nominee is going to go, rather than focusing on attributes, they're going to focus on policy?
Luntz continues to mention, with a sense of wonder, the panel's interest in policy. Matthews and his guests ignore it. Here is Luntz's concluding remark that Matthews cuts off to return to his guests:
I asked them to talk about candidates, talk about attributes and they kept coming back to issues. That says to me that there's no Democrat out there that's really captured the hearts and mind of the public as an alternative to George Bush. It is early, but there's no one out there that's got a clear...
In other words, the panel's interest in policy, the day-to-day stuff of governance that affects peoples' lives, is proof that no candidate has a convincing presidential image. And the logic in that would be what? I would say this is proof that, at the moment, no image created by the campaigns or the press has completely usurped their abilities to comprehend their own political interests.
The obvious aspect of this discussion is the way the entire framing of the debate -- as a question of "character" as opposed to such boring details as policy -- heavily favors the party that relies more on imagery and jingoism, wrapping itself in the flag and pounding its chest about moral superiority: in other words, conservatives.
But even beyond the bias is the way this framing really corrupts and trivializes the national debate, so that we find ourselves constantly arguing about the "morality" or "character" of politicians, an issue that is by nature a product of spin and propagandizing. This has never been more clear than in the current election, when the "character" of a pampered fraternity party boy who couldn't be bothered to serve out his term in the National Guard and who went on to fail miserably at every business venture he touched is successfully depicted as that of a sincere and patriotic regular guy, while that of a three-time Purple Heart winner who voluntarily left Yale to serve in Vietnam, and whose ensuing three decades of public service have been a model of principle and consistency, is somehow depicted as belonging to a spineless elitist.
If the press were properly reporting on this election, the public would have a clearer picture of how John Kerry's economic, environmental and education policies would affect their lives differently than those purveyed by the Bush administration. It would understand the significant differences in their approaches to national security, and it would be far clearer just who in fact has more serious and credible credentials when it comes to the "war on terror" and keeping the nation safe, particularly when it comes to matters of basic competence and knowledge. These are issues that affect us in concrete ways.
But the press doesn't deal with those issues. Instead, we get peanut butter.
After hearing Pierce, and especially after reading Somerby's recent outburst, it became clear that many of us have a firm grasp on the nature and dimensions of the problem. But very few of us do much of anything about it. And the truth is that this is not like the weather -- the behavior of the media is something we actually can do something about.
But we have to get organized. And after years of wandering in the wilderness, I believe that 2004 is the year to make it happen -- if for no other reason than that the stakes are so high.
The main reason, though, is that I think the tools for serious change are finally within our reach. And the chief tool is the Internet, the blogosphere in particular.
For too long, the public has been forced to rely on the mass media as the means for obtaining and disseminating information. This was not a serious problem for most of our history. Though the means for spreading information had to go through the traditional filter of the media gateways (particularly editors and reporters), the system in fact worked generally well, as long as a measure of independence was present within the press itself.
As the conglomeration and consolidation of the mass media has proceeded apace through the past two decades unchecked, that independence has largely vanished or become effectively strangled, and with it a responsible treatment of the public interest by the nation's press. The traditional media filters have instead become bottlenecks, preventing information that is in fact vital for the public well-being from ever reaching them -- oftentimes for reasons that are trivial and puerile, not to mention geared toward the manipulation of the media in the service of corporate powers and their agenda.
The blogosphere is a direct result of those bottlenecks. Information is now flowing around them through the networks of dissemination that blogs have become.
Blogs represent, in fact, the real democratization of journalism, which traditionally has always been about the work of keeping the public duly and properly informed. Stories and vital facts now no longer need go through the New York Times and NBC News in order to gain wide distribution. Blogs can effectively reach as many people as several large city dailies combined. And the network of their combined efforts represents a massive shift of data around the traditional media filters.
Blogs can also be terrific means for organizing, particularly for putting together a concerted response to political and media atrocities. One need only survey the ability of blogs to affect real-world politics -- their role in bringing about the fall of Trent Lott was just a start -- to understand that their power can readily extend to reshaping the media, since they represent in themselves a kind of citizens' solution to needed reforms in the media.
To bring that about, two things are needed: 1) A recognition that this power exists, and 2) Organizing in a thoughtful and effective fashion to wield it.
It seems to me that a manifesto -- a definitive statement of revolt against the media status quo and an outline of the purposes and strategies of that revolt -- is what's needed.
So I've written one. I wouldn't want to presume to speak on behalf of the entire blogosphere, nor for those who perceive the need for media reform and are working to enact it. But it's clear to me that we need a manifesto of some kind -- which means we need a starting point. Here is mine.
I'm hoping the following Manifesto, if nothing else, gets the discussion going. I'm hoping to get plenty of feedback, both from other bloggers and readers. Consider it a kind of first draft. As the discussion comes in, I'll shore up its weaknesses, remove obvious flaws, add overlooked points of significance. I see it as a semi-democratic project that draws input from all around -- though of course it will ultimately be filtered through my own sensibilities. Perhaps someone else will come up with an even more effective and concise manifesto. The idea here is simply to lay the groundwork. In the end, I hope to have a document that others will feel comfortable co-signing. I'll then collect the signatures and attach them to the bottom of the Manifesto.
Without further adieu, here's my stab at moving from simple critique of the media to the much harder work of actually doing something about it. Feel free to join in.
The Media Revolt Manifesto
1. The well-being of American democracy ultimately depends on a well-informed electorate. As such, the role of the media in keeping the public properly informed is not merely vital, it is sacred.
2. Over the past 20 years, American media have been in a state of serious decline insofar is it lives up to the responsibilities of this role:
-- Conglomeration and the increasing grip of monolithic corporatism has reduced the diversity of voices and viewpoints that are available to the public at all levels, from small local papers to major networks.
-- The rising dominance of television journalism has replaced serious journalism geared toward the public interest and policy with infotainment journalism that regards the value of stories almost solely for their ability to garner viewers through titillation, scandal-mongering and gore, while the perverse and demeaning cult of celebrity is elevated to the highest echelons.
-- The demise of the Fairness Doctrine has ensured that the public airwaves, controlled by a handful of conservatives given free rein to institute a hierarchy or self-interested propaganda, are now entirely the domain of right-wing ideologues who view defamation as entertainment and factuality and fairness as ratings death.
-- As a result of all these changes, reportage that remained vital to the public interest even though it may not have garnered strong bottom-line results -- especially investigative journalism, policy analysis, and international news -- became relegated to afterthought status.
3. The nature of these declines produced a string of travesties in the past decade and more:
-- The first major terrorist attack on American soil -- the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 169 people -- was treated as the idiosyncratic act of a small handful of mentally unstable actors, rather than as the arrival of the most serious threat to confront America since World War II: asymmetrical terrorist attacks that cannot be linked to foreign states and which cannot be dealt with through military action.
-- The continuing appearance of similar attempts to perpetrate equally horrific domestic terrorist attacks, mostly by right-wing extremists, in the five years ensuing Oklahoma City was utterly ignored by media outlets, largely because of the success of law enforcement in stopping such attacks in their tracks through an effective combination of law enforcement and intelligence.
-- The grotesque pursuit of pseudo-scandals regarding President Clinton's private life -- from Whitewater to "Travelgate" to Monica Lewinsky -- became the centerpiece of national coverage of his presidency, eclipsing any rational discussion of his administration's policy initiatives as well as those of the post-1994 Republican Congress. This pursuit finally culminated in charade of Clinton's impeachment for allegedly perjuring himself in testimony over a civil suit that should never have been allowed in the first place, while in the meantime the clearly Machiavellian and unethical behavior of his pursuers went almost utterly unreported.
-- The media fetish for Clinton's private life buried the seriousness of the growing assymetrical terrorist threat, embodied in the treatment of Clinton's attacks on Al Qaeda terrorist camps in 1998 as mere "wagging the dog" attempts to divert public attention from the Lewinsky scandal. At a time when Clinton was attempting to raise public awareness of the terrorist threat -- both domestically and abroad -- his pleas fell on the media's deaf ears because they had "other priorities."
-- The 2000 presidential campaign between Al Gore and George W. Bush became focused on trivial personality traits -- particularly Gore's supposed "embellishments" (such as the false "invented the Internet" meme) and Bush's supposed "straight shooter" qualities -- all of which were pure concoctions of partisan spin that favored the corporatist agenda of media ownership. The resulting extraordinary bias culminated in the Florida vote debacle in which Republicans were allowed to present pure falsehoods (such as the notion that machine counts were "more accurate" than hand counts) as fact, while Gore's legitimate efforts to challenge the counts under the established framework were depicted as illegitimate; and in the end, an extraordinarily corrupt and partisan Supreme Court ruling that overwhelmed Gore's popular-vote victory and placed Bush in the White House was treated as simply politics as usual, instead of the gross breach of democratic values that it was. It also placed in the White House a man manifestly incapable of comprehending the nature and gravity of the looming terrorist threat.
4. This degradation of the media, and its concomitant failure to keep Americans adequately informed, culminated in the attacks on American soil by Al Qaeda terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, in which more than 3,000 people were killed in New York City and Washington, D.C. The media, to no one's great surprise, have never even begun to confront their own culpability in this disaster; and similarly they have failed to point out the fairly obvious culpability of the asleep-at-the-wheel president on whose watch it occurred. (Meanwhile, of course, Bill Clinton's role in the attacks has been aired ad nauseam.)
5. When George W. Bush sidetracked the resulting "war on terror" into an invasion of Iraq -- a nation that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks -- by waving evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the public's face and suggesting that any dissent was akin to treason, the media utterly failed in its responsibility to examine the claims seriously and to treat them skeptically. Instead, it became a virtual propaganda arm for the White House, and savagely turned on any person (see, e.g., Scott Ritter, who was smeared as a pedophile) who dared play the role of skeptic. Protesters were summarily dismissed as loony "Bush haters."
6. Coverage of the 2004 election has already begun to resemble the travesty of 2000, focusing on trivial (and mostly concocted) personality traits: Howard Dean is grotesquely portrayed as a maniacal and out-of-control Howard Bealesque loose cannon; John Edwards as a callow pretty boy; Wesley Clark as an egotistical martinet; and Dennis Kucinich as a whiny, limp-wristed socialist. Once he became the de facto nominee, the "French-like" John Kerry was given both barrels of this treatment, as his status as a war hero came under fire without any grounds whatsoever, while other reports focused on his being served peanut-butter sandwiches by a personal assistant. Meanwhile, patrician fraternity brother George W. Bush is depicted as a man of the people, clearing brush on his Texas ranch. Matters of substantive policy that actually affect voters' lives -- the administration's floundering in Iraq; an economic policy that deprived over 2 million Americans of employment and destroyed the nation's job-creation capacity; an environmental policy that ensured more polluted air and water and diminished wildlife, as well as the more rapid approach of global warming; an energy policy that ensured $2-a-gallon-and-worse gasoline and increasing dependence on oil; an agricultural policy that dooms forever the small family farm -- have not even crossed the media's radar.
7. Americans have had enough. Like Howard Beale, they're mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. Unlike Beale, however, their revolt against the media Powers That Be will be neither manic nor futile. It will be organized, rational, factually sound, unintimidated and, in the end, constructive rather than destructive. It will be founded on certain basic principles:
-- The bastardization of modern mass media into a propaganda outlet for narrow conservative corporate interests, in violation of its historic (and constitutional) role as guardian of the public weal, will be opposed at every turn. The driving forces behind this corruption are the conglomeration and deregulation of the media, and the concomitant suppression of dissenting voices; the vanity and naked self-interest of the press corps, embodied in their open embrace of spin as fact; the willingness of the public to embrace "lowest common denominator" reporting that, instead of making them informed participants in democracy, treats them to the illusion of news as entertainment.
-- Its chief bylaw will be an insistence on traditional journalistic values: factual correctness, fairness and balance, a healthy skepticism of the reigning "official story," conventional wisdom, and the claims of critics and defenders alike. It will seek a return to the nation's newsrooms of the kind of investigative and consumer-oriented journalism that has been the first victim of the bottom-line orientation of corporate media ownership, as well as the kind of newsroom oversight in the form of truly independent ombudsmen that once ensured that someone was watching the watchdogs on behalf of the public.
-- It will embrace the principles of American democracy, particularly openness of debate and the open dissemination of information. It will never embrace or even suggest the suppression of conservative views; instead, it will be predicated on confronting bad speech with more speech. All we will demand is the equal consideration and dissemination of other viewpoints as well.
-- The degradation of the national discourse into trivialities and prurient speculation will be the focus of the revolt. When reporters insist on covering politics as a horse race, replacing serious analysis of policy and its effects on the real life of citizens with gossip columns and talking points, and especially when they engage in fraudulent journalism that twists and conceals the truth, they will be exposed for the untrustworthy miscreants they are. When corporate owners adopt de facto policies -- from gutting serious journalism in newsrooms, to a bias in hiring and promotion, to the outright suppression of dissent -- which slant the reporting that fills our newspaper columns and the public airwaves, they will be brought to bay by public pressure to respect the public's right to (and need for) informative, factual and balanced journalism. When the public is carelessly and selfishly gulled by entertainment propaganda posing as journalism, we will combat their languor by working hard to disseminate facts and logic through the many means now available to us in the computer age.
8. This revolt will be organized strategically around two realities: 1) Previous tactics in the efforts to reform the nation's media have largely failed or faltered (see, e.g., the "public journalism" movement), though their occasional successes and certain principles are well worth noting and preserving. 2) Though this is a revolution against an evolved status quo, the spirit it represents beckons to a return to civic-minded journalism that enshrines the diversity of voices in American media; it is, in fact, more traditionalist in orientation than radical. What is radical -- and unacceptable -- is the current state of journalism as a wholly owned subsidiary and propaganda arm of narrow corporate interests.
-- It will generally eschew boycotts of the media themselves. Such an attempt is not only unlikely to have any discernible effect (media companies are notorious for targeting "key demographics" anyway), it's self-defeating, since it's impossible to be informed enough to act as a media watchdog without being a consumer of their goods as well.
-- It will nonetheless apply pressure against media companies -- economic pressure through boycotts, and rhetorical pressure through letter-writing and publicity campaigns -- through two key venues: advertisers and the media conglomerates' non-media enterprises.
-- The businesses whose advertising dollars underwrite so much of this misbehavior can be especially sensitive to having their names associated with volatile issues that inflame public anger. Even mass letter-writing campaigns to these companies can have the desired effect; and if necessary, an outright boycott may be wielded.
-- Likewise, business boycotts of the larger media conglomerates under whose auspices the corruption of the press has occurred may be useful or even necessary, particularly if the misbehavior is egregious enough or actually occurs at the larger corporate level. Disney, for example, fully deserves a boycott for its outrageous corporate decision to prevent its Miramax subsidiary from distributing Roger Moore's anti-Bush film, Fahrenheit 911.
-- These campaigns will be focused especially on two key problems: the decline of journalistic standards for both factual straightness and depth of coverage, and the perversion of the national debate by focusing on trivialities and "character" issues in the place of serious policy matters.
-- The revolution also will demand certain legislative and structural changes that will break up the monoculturalization of the media and return it to its former diversity and openness. Foremost among these is the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. The demise (during the Reagan administration) of this regulatory protection against the partisan abuse of the public airwaves proved to be the cornerstone of the rise of the modern conservative domination of radio, particularly in the realm of the propagandist talk shows which too many Americans use as a substitute for serious information sources. The fears of the original critics of ending the doctrine -- that station owners would see the change as carte blanche for handing over the airwaves to a monochromatic ideology (in this case, conservatism) that only recently has begun to show cracks in the facade -- have manifested themselves all too clearly.
-- Along the same lines, but even more importantly, is the need to return many of the rules limiting the breadth of media ownership that were eliminated during the "deregulation" of the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, and whose few remnants now remain under attack by the Bush-appointed FCC chairman. The vertical and horizontal integration of the nation's mass media is having the same destructive effect as the similar integration of the nation's food industry, ranging all the way from small-town papers devoured and gutted by chains to cable-TV and network news becoming increasingly dominated by a travesty of the journalistic ethos twisted into a perverse culture of celebrity whose broad effect is to numb and paralyze the populace. Our means of informing the public have been winnowed down to a handful of large corporations who continue to demonstrate an utter disregard for anything beyond their own narrow interests. And those interests in recent years have come to clearly include keeping the public in relative ignorance by keeping them focused on trivialities and phony non-issues.
-- In the long run, this will require structural changes -- both in FCC and other regulatory policy, as well as in the tax and investment infrastructures -- that both require and encourage the breakup of media conglomerates. At the same time, it will be important to encourage (also through tax and investment infrastructures, as well as various small-business initiatives) the revitalization of small local ownership of the nation's media, along with the diversification of national-media outlets, ranging from the creation of viable newswire services beyond the current Asssociated Press monopoly to the divestment of national news networks from their dominance of cable TV.
-- This must be a nonpartisan revolution, though of course the immediate beneficiaries will be progressives, liberals and centrists, since all have faced a relentless assault from the conservative movement over the past decade regarding their voice within the mainstream media. (The entire purpose of the "liberal media" myth was to cast any idea or policy that fell outside the conservative party line as the product of a corrupt "liberalism.") Nonetheless, there are also conservatives of good will who recognize that the current cabal controlling both the government and media represent nothing particularly to do with genuine conservative values and almost entirely to do with the Manichean acquisition and manipulation of power. All Americans of every political stripe stand to benefit from these reforms, especially since their abuse in this decade can become a two-edged sword in another generation. No one, liberal or conservative alike, benefits from a constricted media that is only good for transmitting propaganda and lacks the diversity that is essential to informing a democracy.
9. The Internet -- and in particular, blogs -- will be the cornerstone of the strategy this media revolution will follow, though of course all means are important participants. Indeed, the reforms are intended to reach every facet of American mass media: newspapers large and small, television, film, radio, books, and of course the Internet.
For that matter, blogs themselves are odd creatures in that, except for the handful who actually engage in original reporting themselves, they are almost entirely dependent on other media forms, particularly print and Internet journalism. But part of what makes them unique is that they synthesize and contain information from all these other sources.
Blogs are, above all, uniquely democratic in nature. Anyone can blog. Supposedly serious "name" journalists ultimately have no more real value in the blogosphere than pseudonymous gym teachers who reveal a knack for being in touch with the larger populace. The value of what you write about, and how well you do it, is all that finally counts.
Blogs are also uniquely self-correcting in a way that eludes most other media; if false information is disseminated, it doesn't take long before it's eviscerated by other bloggers. This function, indeed, forms the backbone of its larger role as a media watchdog; just as blogs will "out" bad blogging, they also have been shown to expose false reporting, as well as malicious behavior on the part of both politicians and the press that might otherwise be buried in the "mainstream."
Because the blogosphere is still more or less in its infancy, it remains somewhat indistinct in shape, though a larger architecture is already beginning to emerge. There are inherent flaws, not the least of which is that a consistent blogger ethos seems not to have emerged fully but has remained formative; at some point, a sense of journalistic ethics ought to take root in the name of establishing credibility.
Nonetheless, blogs can and should play the role of central clearing-house for information in the Media Revolt. As the general public realizes that blogs can provide them with vital information they're not getting anywhere else, the audience will build. This includes the whole gamut of information: the factual news about the world, as well as reports on who's misbehaving or committing political atrocities or simply being incompetent; analysis of this information that would be suppressed in mainstream reports; information about planned actions to protest misbehavior; and action and funds needed to enact the needed legislative and structural reforms.
Blogs, in other words, can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.
Blogs will not and cannot do the job alone, of course. The whole purpose of the revolt is to foster an environment in which mainstream journalists, from the lowly ink-stained wretch to the well-coiffed network anchor, are both allowed and positively encouraged to provide truthful and meaningful journalism that provides vital information to the public and does it responsibly and thoroughly. So that will mean recognizing and positively celebrating when superior journalism does its job well; such reporters and truth-tellers should be lauded, promoted, and in the end well remunerated for their work. It will mean channeling the marketplace to reward organizations that do their job well, too.
Finally, the Media Revolt will tap the energy of the citizenry through traditional means as well: Letter-writing campaigns, voting with our pocketbooks, organizing politics and funds on the ground -- without which, in fact, anything that occurs on the Web may prove meaningless. The idea is to turn from simply critiquing the media to taking concrete action.
10. There should be no naivete about the nature of what we are up against. This is a revolt against a national discourse that has degraded into a puerile swamp of innuendo, smear, and dishonest reportage. Anyone participating must be prepared to have the worst of this kind of tactic used ruthlessly against them. And yet because of that, the revolt must at every turn repudiate such tactics and refuse ever to engage them: there must be no groundless insinuation or nakedly false "facts." When they natter about "character" or "likeability," we should talk plainly about policy and what happens in the real world. Smears (that is, fact-free attacks on a public figure's personal character) should not be answered with counter-smears. It's fair (if a concession to diversionary tactics) to fight back with facts, but never fair to resort to twisting or omitting: that's what they do. Cutting corners just to score political points is a Pyrrhic victory. If this is a revolt about integrity, then it will fail if it does not emody integrity itself.
Questions about our opponents' characters, of course, will remain an issue as long as they insist on framing the debate that way, and as long as they keep providing factual reasons to remain dubious. But defeating them should never be predicated on attacking their characters; it should be founded on their disastrous and incompetent stewardship of both the national media and the government itself.
Undertaking this task means hard work. But it has become clear to us as citizens, in an age when fear and terror rule our body politic, that what is at stake here is the soul of democracy itself. To save it, no labor should seem too great.
Friday, May 07, 2004
by: David Neiwert
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| .....Is "Under God" Unconstitutional? |
| 06.14.04 (1:42 pm) [edit] |
From a news story:
"To give the parent of such a child a sort of 'heckler's veto' over a patriotic ceremony willingly participated in by other students, simply because the Pledge of Allegiance contains the descriptive phrase 'under God,' is an unwarranted extension of the establishment clause, an extension which would have the unfortunate effect of prohibiting a commendable patriotic observance," Rehnquist wrote.
so...since "other people" are doing it and you don't want to and think it's not a separation of church and state.... you're a "heckler" and "unpatriotic"? Sound's like fuckin Bush and his administration. Sad to see that our Supreme Court can't separate his dick from their asses ....scary times we live in folks.
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| ......Commentary: Terror reality and rhetoric [Or...Be Aware, Not Stupid] |
| 06.13.04 (5:01 am) [edit] |
From: The Washington Times
By Christian Bourge
UPI Congressional and Policy Correspondent
Washington, DC, Jun. 11 (UPI) -- Claims by President Bush, and embraced by many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, that the United States is winning the war on terror have been shot down by news that the number of terrorist incidents and victims increased sharply in 2003, an important fact buried in today's major newspapers.
The U.S. State Department announced in April that terrorism was on the decline last year, but the agency acknowledged Thursday that the achievement -- touted by the Bush campaign and administration as a sign that the White House policies were, in the words of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, "prevailing" over the evildoers of the world -- was wrong.
The original report said that terrorist attacks declined to 190 last year, the lowest level in 34 years and down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001, a 45-percent drop since Bush's first year in office.
The agency is not reportedly working to determine what the actual figures are but has said the increase would be marked.
While the numbers are not likely to be as high as 2001, such information should be kept in mind in the face of prognostications from the president and his allies in Congress that the war on terror is being won.
The United States may have won some battles and managed to disrupt plots and global funding for al-Qaida with 10 leading financiers of the group captured or killed in the last two years according to the CIA, but when the number of attacks increases -- even if they are not in the United States -- it means the opposite of this claim is arguably true.
The war is not being won, but is ongoing and could even be interpreted in the short term as going in the favor of terrorists.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday that the earlier findings were based on inaccurate facts, while Secretary of State Colin Powell denied that the errors were part of an effort to build up the Bush administration.
The original figures were challenged by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., who is proving to be a continuous thorn in the side of the Bush White House on several high-profile policy issues.
For his part, Waxman has said he accepts Powell's explanation that the mistakes were the result of changes in the way the data were collected, despite earlier claiming that the details were manipulated for political gain.
But just how is Powell's claim possible unless the State Department personnel overseeing the project are complete idiots? This is something I am not willing to believe given that I know some pretty smart people at the agency.
Numbers are numbers in terms of these things. Either the attacks went up or they did not.
It is not like such things are open to interpretation, unless Bush administration officials are playing with the definition of what constitutes a terrorist attack or death.
A factoid that has become the mantra of congressional Republicans and Bush administration officials that they are likely to repeat in the face of this news is that more than two-thirds of al-Qaida's most senior leadership, 25 people by some accounts, have been either captured or killed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Bush first made the claim that "nearly two-thirds" of the Islamic terrorist group's known leaders had been captured or killed in his State of the Union address in January.
But a close look at this claim closely shows that it is, at best, disingenuous.
Most important is that the al-Qaida leaders killed were those in charge of the terrorist group following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Anyone who has seen the movie "The Siege," rentals of which increased following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, knows that terror groups are multi-headed beasts in the modern world.
Terrorism experts generally believe that individual cells implement their plots with limited connections to the main group.
The cell that executed the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington is believed to have been part of several years of planning, with individual cells having little to no connection to one another and as little connection to al-Qaida leadership as possible.
In addition, the modern terrorist group can replace key figures with new people as needed, so while key al-Qaida figures may have been captured or killed, attacks can continue.
Need proof? Well, attacks attributed to al-Qaida-connected terrorists continue around the world, including most recently in Saudi Arabia and, most spectacularly, the March 11 train bombings in Madrid.
While an estimated 4,000 people have been arrested on terrorism-related charges worldwide, the attacks continue, with connections to al-Qaida made for many of them by government officials.
Look at Afghanistan. Despite the toppling of the Taliban government and much of the al-Qaida support structure, both groups continue to operate and kill U.S. and other interests.
Another factor is the thousands of "mini-Osamas" theory held by many terrorist experts, which holds that the war on terrorism, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq to a potentially larger extent, is breeding new recruits to the Islamist terrorist cause.
Such recruits would typically fall into the "loose independent cell" category.
Does this all mean the war on terrorism has been a total failure? Obviously not, since there have been no attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11.
But it remains unclear whether this is the result of U.S. policy or simply that no attacks have been attempted -- and the attacks continue overseas on foreign as well as U.S. targets.
If used properly, the news of faulty Bush administration boasts could be a boost to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who is trailing Bush on the issue of national security.
A top foreign-policy claim of the Bush administration is that the president's counter-terrorism policies since Sept. 11 have been successful.
Pollsters across the ideological spectrum believe that security will be an important issue for the U.S. electorate this fall, particularly among the all-important swing voters still making up their minds in the closely divided race for the presidency.
According to a poll released by the centrist New Democratic Network, when asked whether they thought Kerry or Bush would do a better job "protecting America for a terrorist attack," 59 percent of swing voters among the 1,515 likely voters polled said that Bush would do a better job, compared to the 27 percent who believed Kerry would.
Among all voters, 53 percent said Bush would do a better job, while 35 percent favored Kerry.
Those are strong numbers for Bush that Democratic strategist acknowledge cannot be sustained if the issue is a top one for voters in November.
They are also the worst in an extremely important part of the electorate, in that 913 of the respondents were in battleground states.
It is possible that Kerry could make gains in these areas with proper use of this information.
But the real importance of the news is not the potential political gains of a candidate highly unlikely to make any greater gains than Bush has in this war against an unseen, asymmetrical -- and some argue misunderstood -- threat.
The reality is that the American public needs to recognize that while they should not to be extremely fearful of a possible attack, they are statistically more likely to be killed in a car accident than be killed in a terrorist attack in the United States -- the political rhetoric is spouted by politicians to calm their fears.
More often than not its intent is to disguise the facts about situation in which they have little real expertise.
Yes, terrorism is now said to be up, but that does not mean that you should be afraid, even if your congressman saying policies are having their intended effect doesn't mean they are.
Facts, not interpretation of them, are important, that's the lesson. Actuaries have jobs for a reason.
And if you live in Peoria, Ill., please don't expect the local high rise to come crumbling down in an attack by al-Qaida.
Be aware, not stupid.
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| .....Bush says he doesn't recall seeing memo on conditions of torture |
| 06.11.04 (6:28 pm) [edit] |
SEA ISLAND, Ga. (AP) - Addressing advice the White House got suggesting torture might be allowed for some terrorist interrogations, President Bush said Friday he ordered U.S. officials to act consistent with law and international treaties.
"What I authorized was staying within U.S. law," Bush said at the conclusion of the G-8 summit meeting here. The president said he doesn't recall seeing Justice Department advice about the conditions for such torture.
Asked repeatedly about it, Bush sidestepped a question about whether he thought torture was immoral, saying that his instructions were "to adhere to law. ... We're a nation of law" and "you might look at those laws."
The direction he provided was to "conform to U.S. law" and to act consistent with international treaty obligations, Bush said.
Administration officials say confidential Justice Department memos criticized by Democrats as laying the legal foundation for Iraqi prisoner abuses were aimed mainly at showing that international treaties banning torture do not apply to al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners.
Ashcroft refused earlier this week to release those memos to members of Congress.
The department's lawyers concluded that Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are not protected by the Geneva Conventions because they do not satisfy four main conditions of the treaty itself.
These include requirements to obey the laws of war, wear insignia recognizable from a distance and operate under the command of a responsible individual.
©2004 Associated Press.
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| ........Country Music Radio Full of Pro-War Songs |
| 06.10.04 (2:29 am) [edit] |
AP
Wednesday, June 9, 2004
By JOHN GEROME, Associated Press Writer
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Country music artists are hardly united in their support of the war in Iraq — but you'd never know it from listening to the radio.
While Toby Keith, Darryl Worley and Charlie Daniels have scored hits with patriotic, war-themed songs, others such as Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Nanci Griffith released anti-war, or at least questioning, songs that went nowhere.
"Country radio does enough research that they understand listeners are supportive of the military in Iraq and just don't want to get involved with those songs," said John Hart, president of Nashville-based Bullseye Marketing Research.
"I work with 32 stations, and I have not seen one test any of these anti-war songs."
But the patriotic tunes that were everywhere at the beginning of the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have slowed. John Michael Montgomery's touching "Letters from Home" is the only current chart hit with a war theme, and it is neither an angry call to arms nor a love letter to America.
Hart believes the flag-waving songs reached a saturation point. He also says the continuing hostilities in Iraq and recent prison abuse scandal may have tempered the enthusiasm expressed early in the conflict.
"I think right now the labels and radio feel they have come to a line in the sand where they need to slow down," Hart said. "And the artists are hesitant to release anything right now that they think might be overkill."
Patriotism is a strong undercurrent to this week's Country Music Association Music Festival, which runs Thursday through Sunday in Nashville.
In addition to donating tickets to soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, CMA will also hold a reunion of entertainers who performed for troops in Iraq last December. Guests at the Friday event include Worley, whose "Have You Forgotten" remains a conservative rallying cry, as well as liberal comedian and author Al Franken and "JAG" actress Karri Turner.
Franken said the backlash against the Dixie Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized President Bush on a London stage last year had "a chilling effect on what people felt they could or couldn't say" in country music.
"And that's too bad," Franken said. "I think people should be free to express their politics."
Worley, too, cited the Dixie Chicks' incident.
"They made a pretty strong statement about the president, and we haven't heard much of them on country radio either. There is a silent majority in this country, and it is a whole lot stronger than people might think."
Country artists are regarded as more conservative than those in other genres, but there are exceptions. Alt-country icons Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash and Lucinda Williams lent their names to a petition by the protest group Musicians United to Win Without War. Respected songwriters Rodney Crowell and The Mavericks' Raul Malo have been frank about their opposition to the president. A new group called the Music Row Democrats formed this year to give a political voice to country songwriters, musicians, producers and record executives.
Still, the few country songs that have express reservations about Iraq have failed to click.
Worley believes some of that has to do with the artists releasing them, noting that veteran singers such as Nelson and Haggard have had trouble cracking the charts with any kind of song in recent years.
But market researcher Hart thinks it is more than that. He says an anti-war song by a hot contemporary artist would fizzle as well because of the conservative tilt of country audiences.
"I've been in country music since 1972, and I think every conflict is that way," said Hart, a Vietnam veteran. "Every time we bomb somebody it's 'Hell yeah!' Let's kick their ... ' That's where country music is coming from."
Singer Kenny Rogers, whose group The First Edition had one of the most poignant hits of the Vietnam era with "Ruby," a dark tale about a crippled Vietnam veteran whose woman is cheating on him, says the political climate today is much different than in the 1960s and '70s.
"People are afraid to write about it, and people are afraid to play it," Rogers said. "Everybody is so afraid now to be politically correct.
"I don't know of a successful song that has said 'We need to stop this,'" he said. "But I do think if one were written well and had an honest thought process behind it and was not strictly politically driven, radio would play it."
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| .....U.S. Will Revise Data on Terror |
| 06.09.04 (4:22 pm) [edit] |
By Josh Meyer Times Staff Writer
LA Times
Wed., June 9, 2004
WASHINGTON — The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration.
When the most recent "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was issued April 29, senior Bush administration officials immediately hailed it as objective proof that they were winning the war on terrorism. The report is considered the authoritative yardstick of the prevalence of terrorist activity around the world.
"Indeed, you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against global terrorism, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a celebratory rollout of the report.
But on Tuesday, State Department officials said they underreported the number of terrorist attacks in the tally for 2003, and added that they expected to release an updated version soon.
Several U.S. officials and terrorism experts familiar with that revision effort said the new report will show that the number of significant terrorist incidents increased last year, perhaps to its highest level in 20 years.
"It will change the numbers," said one State Department official who declined to comment further or be identified by name. "The incidents will go up, but I don't know by how many."
Among the original report's highlights: The annual number of terrorist attacks had dropped to its lowest level in 34 years, declining by 45% since 2001. Overall, fewer people were being killed, injured and kidnapped, and the U.S.-led global coalition had taken the fight to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with great success.
Minor terrorism events — typically those in which nobody dies — had almost disappeared, declining by more than 90% from 231 incidents in 2001 to 21 in 2003, the report said.
The annual reports were first ordered up by Congress two decades ago as the U.S. government's reference tool on terrorist activity, trends and groups.
Since then, administration officials and Congress have come to rely heavily on the "Patterns" report in formulating counter-terrorism policies and strategies.
In recent years, the report has been translated into five languages so that U.S. allies around the world can scrutinize the hundreds of pages of data, which are based on U.S. and allied intelligence information.
On Tuesday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) applauded the State Department for deciding to reissue the report, a step he requested in a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell three weeks ago. But Waxman said the Bush administration so far had refused to address his allegation that it manipulated the terrorism data to claim victory in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.
"This manipulation may serve the Administration's political interests," Waxman wrote in his May 17 letter to Powell, "but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report."
Several State Department officials vehemently denied their report was swayed by politics. "That's not the way we do things here," said one senior official.
Another senior official characterized the errors as clerical, and blamed them mostly on the fact responsibility for the report recently shifted from the CIA to the administration's new Terrorist Threat Integration Center.
Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, told Powell that the number of significant terrorist attacks since 2001 hasn't declined as the department claimed, but risen by more than 35%. And he cited an analysis by two independent experts who used figures provided by the State Department report in concluding that significant attacks actually had reached a 20-year high in 2003.
For example, the State Department report listed 190 terrorist attacks in 2003, including 169 "significant" ones. But Waxman said a review showed the report stopped counting terrorist incidents on Nov. 11, leaving out several major attacks, including bombings of two synagogues, a bank and the British Consulate in Turkey that killed 62 and injured more than 700.
Waxman said a State Department official blamed the Nov. 11 cutoff on a printing deadline.
Waxman said the steep overall decline in terrorism claimed by the State Department was based mostly on a 90% drop in "nonsignificant" attacks in two years, without providing any detail as to how or why such a decrease occurred.
Waxman asked Powell to provide by June 1 details on international terrorist attacks dating back to 1995, an explanation of procedures used in defining terrorist acts and information on whether political appointees played a role in writing or editing the report. He said he hadn't heard back.
Internationally, he added, "it feeds into the notion that the U.S. is just not a credible voice on important issues of terrorism."
A just-issued Congressional Research Service report has concluded that the statistical errors are just the latest in a series of problems that the "Patterns" report has faced in recent years.
The congressional study said that the State Department report — despite the perception of its objectivity — was unduly influenced by political and economic considerations.
Also, it said the department had failed to take into account the shift from state sponsorship of terrorism to Al Qaeda's use of a far-flung network of affiliates and cells. Though some might question the findings, the congressional report noted that the State Department appeared to be using outdated criteria to determine what constituted a terrorist incident.
For instance, the many deadly attacks on coalition forces in Iraq were not included in the "Patterns" report because they did not meet the State Department's long-standing criteria of targeting civilians or soldiers not on duty.
Potentially dozens of other terrorist strikes were left out because they were not "international" in scope, including attacks by local Al Qaeda affiliates against targets within their own countries.
Taken together, such problems warrant a wholesale reassessment of the report and its mission, preferably by an independent government agency such as the National Academy of Sciences, according to the congressional study's author, Raphael Perl.
"Arguably, the report has been on autopilot and has not kept up with the times," Perl said in a telephone interview.
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| .....Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture |
| 06.08.04 (1:19 pm) [edit] |
Published on Monday, June 7, 2004 by the Wall Street Journal
Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture
Security or Legal Factors Could Trump Restrictions, Memo to Rumsfeld Argued
by Jess Bravin
Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren't getting enough information from prisoners.
The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. In a March 6, 2003, draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, passages were deleted as was an attachment listing specific interrogation techniques and whether Mr. Rumsfeld himself or other officials must grant permission before they could be used. The complete draft document was classified "secret" by Mr. Rumsfeld and scheduled for declassification in 2013.
The draft report, which exceeds 100 pages, deals with a range of legal issues related to interrogations, offering definitions of the degree of pain or psychological manipulation that could be considered lawful. But at its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than "obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens," normal strictures on torture might not apply.
The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."
According to Bush administration officials, the report was compiled by a working group appointed by the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II. Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker headed the group, which comprised top civilian and uniformed lawyers from each military branch and consulted with the Justice Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies. It isn't known if President Bush has ever seen the report.
A Pentagon official said some military lawyers involved objected to some of the proposed interrogation methods as "different than what our people had been trained to do under the Geneva Conventions," but those lawyers ultimately signed on to the final report in April 2003, shortly after the war in Iraq began. The Journal hasn't seen the full final report, but people familiar with it say there were few substantial changes in legal analysis between the draft and final versions.
A military lawyer who helped prepare the report said that political appointees heading the working group sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture -- to assert "presidential power at its absolute apex," the lawyer said. Although career military lawyers were uncomfortable with that conclusion, the military lawyer said they focused their efforts on reining in the more extreme interrogation methods, rather than challenging the constitutional powers that administration lawyers were saying President Bush could claim.
The Pentagon disclosed last month that the working group had been assembled to review interrogation policies after intelligence officials in Guantanamo reported frustration in extracting information from prisoners. At a news conference last week, Gen. James T. Hill, who oversees the offshore prison at Guantanamo as head of the U.S. Southern Command, said the working group sought to identify "what is legal and consistent with not only Geneva [but] ... what is right for our soldiers." He said Guantanamo is "a professional, humane detention and interrogation operation ... bounded by law and guided by the American spirit."
Gen. Hill said Mr. Rumsfeld gave him the final set of approved interrogation techniques on April 16, 2003. Four of the methods require the defense secretary's approval, he said, and those methods had been used on two prisoners. He said interrogators had stopped short of using all the methods lawyers had approved. It remains unclear what actions U.S. officials took as a result of the legal advice.
Critics who have seen the draft report said it undercuts the administration's claims that it recognized a duty to treat prisoners humanely. The "claim that the president's commander-in-chief power includes the authority to use torture should be unheard of in this day and age," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York advocacy group that has filed lawsuits against U.S. detention policies. "Can one imagine the reaction if those on trial for atrocities in the former Yugoslavia had tried this defense?"
Following scattered reports last year of harsh interrogation techniques used by the U.S. overseas, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asking for clarification. The response came in June 2003 from Mr. Haynes, who wrote that the U.S. was obliged to conduct interrogations "consistent with" the 1994 international Convention Against Torture and the federal Torture Statute enacted to implement the convention outside the U.S.
The U.S. "does not permit, tolerate or condone any such torture by its employees under any circumstances," Mr. Haynes wrote. The U.S. also followed its legal duty, required by the torture convention, "to prevent other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture," he wrote.
The U.S. position is that domestic criminal laws and the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments already met the Convention Against Torture's requirements within U.S. territory.
The Convention Against Torture was proposed in 1984 by the United Nations General Assembly and was ratified by the U.S. in 1994. It states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture," and that orders from superiors "may not be invoked as a justification of torture."
That prohibition was reaffirmed after the Sept. 11 attacks by the U.N. panel that oversees the treaty, the Committee Against Torture, and the March 2003 report acknowledged that "other nations and international bodies may take a more restrictive view" of permissible interrogation methods than did the Bush administration.
The report then offers a series of legal justifications for limiting or disregarding antitorture laws and proposed legal defenses that government officials could use if they were accused of torture.
A military official who helped prepare the report said it came after frustrated Guantanamo interrogators had begun trying unorthodox methods on recalcitrant prisoners. "We'd been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them" so officials concluded "we need to have a less-cramped view of what torture is and is not."
The official said, "People were trying like hell how to ratchet up the pressure," and used techniques that ranged from drawing on prisoners' bodies and placing women's underwear on prisoners heads -- a practice that later reappeared in the Abu Ghraib prison -- to telling subjects, "I'm on the line with somebody in Yemen and he's in a room with your family and a grenade that's going to pop unless you talk."
Senior officers at Guantanamo requested a "rethinking of the whole approach to defending your country when you have an enemy that does not follow the rules," the official said. Rather than license torture, this official said that the report helped rein in more "assertive" approaches.
Methods now used at Guantanamo include limiting prisoners' food, denying them clothing, subjecting them to body-cavity searches, depriving them of sleep for as much as 96 hours and shackling them in so-called stress positions, a military-intelligence official said. Although the interrogators consider the methods to be humiliating and unpleasant, they don't view them as torture, the official said.
The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attempt torture, defined as any act intended to "inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the victim dies.
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority," the report asserted. (The parenthetical comment is in the original document.) The Justice Department "concluded that it could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president's constitutional power," the report said. Citing confidential Justice Department opinions drafted after Sept. 11, 2001, the report advised that the executive branch of the government had "sweeping" powers to act as it sees fit because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress."
The lawyers concluded that the Torture Statute applied to Afghanistan but not Guantanamo, because the latter lies within the "special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and accordingly is within the United States" when applying a law that regulates only government conduct abroad.
Administration lawyers also concluded that the Alien Tort Claims Act, a 1789 statute that allows noncitizens to sue in U.S. courts for violations of international law, couldn't be invoked against the U.S. government unless it consents, and that the 1992 Torture Victims Protection Act allowed suits only against foreign officials for torture or "extrajudicial killing" and "does not apply to the conduct of U.S. agents acting under the color of law."
The Bush administration has argued before the Supreme Court that foreigners held at Guantanamo have no constitutional rights and can't challenge their detention in court. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on that question by month's end.
For Afghanistan and other foreign locations where the Torture Statute applies, the March 2003 report offers a narrow definition of torture and then lays out defenses that government officials could use should they be charged with committing torture, such as mistakenly relying in good faith on the advice of lawyers or experts that their actions were permissible. "Good faith may be a complete defense" to a torture charge, the report advised.
"The infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture," the report advises. Such suffering must be "severe," the lawyers advise, and they rely on a dictionary definition to suggest it "must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure."
The law says torture can be caused by administering or threatening to administer "mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the sense of personality." The Bush lawyers advised, though, that it "does not preclude any and all use of drugs" and "disruption of the senses or personality alone is insufficient" to be illegal. For involuntarily administered drugs or other psychological methods, the "acts must penetrate to the core of an individual's ability to perceive the world around him," the lawyers found.
Gen. Hill said last week that the military didn't use injections or chemicals on prisoners.
After defining torture and other prohibited acts, the memo presents "legal doctrines ... that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful." Foremost, the lawyers rely on the "commander-in-chief authority," concluding that "without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority" to wage war. Moreover, "any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president," the lawyers advised.
Likewise, the lawyers found that "constitutional principles" make it impossible to "punish officials for aiding the president in exercising his exclusive constitutional authorities" and neither Congress nor the courts could "require or implement the prosecution of such an individual."
To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."
The report advised that government officials could argue that "necessity" justified the use of torture. "Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law," the lawyers wrote, citing a standard legal text, "Substantive Criminal Law" by Wayne LaFave and Austin W. Scott. "In particular, the necessity defense can justify the intentional killing of one person ... so long as the harm avoided is greater."
In addition, the report advised that torture or homicide could be justified as "self-defense," should an official "honestly believe" it was necessary to head off an imminent attack on the U.S. The self-defense doctrine generally has been asserted by individuals fending off assaults, and in 1890, the Supreme Court upheld a U.S. deputy marshal's right to shoot an assailant of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field as involving both self-defense and defense of the nation. Citing Justice Department opinions, the report concluded that "if a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate criminal prohibition," he could be justified "in doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network."
Mr. LaFave, a law professor at the University of Illinois, said he was unaware that the Pentagon used his textbook in preparing its legal analysis. He agreed, however, that in some cases necessity could be a defense to torture charges. "Here's a guy who knows with certainty where there's a bomb that will blow New York City to smithereens. Should we torture him? Seems to me that's an easy one," Mr. LaFave said. But he said necessity couldn't be a blanket justification for torturing prisoners because of a general fear that "the nation is in danger."
For members of the military, the report suggested that officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders "may be inferred to be lawful" and are "disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate." Examining the "superior orders" defense at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the Vietnam War prosecution of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley for the My Lai massacre and the current U.N. war-crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the report concluded it could be asserted by "U.S. armed forces personnel engaged in exceptional interrogations except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."
The report seemed "designed to find the legal loopholes that will permit the use of torture against detainees," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, an international-law professor at the Ohio State University who has seen the report. "CIA operatives will think they are covered because they are not going to face liability."
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| ....Déjà Violence |
| 06.07.04 (3:36 pm) [edit] |
For all the hooha over the horror of U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners, the fact is such torture has been the rule, not the exception. Indeed, this scandal features a cast of characters who were in power the last time the U.S. sanctioned torture.
Take Donald Rumsfeld. In 1983, he didn’t let a few gassed Kurds get in the way of maintaining good relations with Saddam Hussein. Seymour Hersh convincingly reports in the New Yorker that Rumsfeld authorized expanding the “black” program used to interrogate Taliban “enemy combatants” in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib’s “prisoners of war” in Iraq.
And who could forget John Negroponte? Between 1981 and 1985, he was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. As ambassador, Negroponte filed reports with the State Department that gave the impression that the Honduran military supported human rights. At the same time, he was overseeing the construction of El Aguacate airbase, which was used as a U.S. training camp for the Nicaraguan Contras and as a torture center for Battalion 316, a Honduran army intelligence unit. The Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that Battalion 316, which was trained and supported by the CIA, used “shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.” In August 2001, a mass grave was unearthed at El Aguacate containing 185 corpses, including two Americans.
Negroponte will become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in July. Judging by his record, he is the man for the job.
The use of torture by the Honduran army under U.S. guidance was not an aberration but a matter of policy. Until 1992, the last year of Dick Cheney’s stint as Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Army used CIA-prepared torture manuals to train foreign military officers both at the School of the Americas and on-site in Latin America. One of these, the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual—1983, had these tips:
For centuries “questioners” have employed various methods of inducing physical weaknesses: prolonged constraint; prolonged exertion; extremes of heat, cold or moisture; and deprivation of food or sleep. … Subject is completely stripped and told to take a shower. Blindfold remains in place while showering and guard watches throughout. Subject is given a thorough medical examination, including all body cavities. … Throughout his detention, subject must be convinced that his ‘questioner’ controls his ultimate destiny, and that his absolute cooperation is necessary for survival. … The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. For example, the threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. ... A threat should be delivered coldly, not shouted in anger. … If a subject refuses to comply once a threat has been made, it must be carried out. The torture situation is an external conflict, a conflict between the subject and his tormentor.
The CIA’s training manual does caution, “The routine use of torture lowers the moral caliber of the organization that uses it and corrupts those that rely on it.” Look no further than the Bush administration.
This manual, along with others, was supposedly withdrawn from circulation and destroyed in 1992. However, their expertise apparently made its way to Iraq. For example, another CIA manual, advised that in order to forcibly recruit spies, “the counterintelligence agent could cause the arrest of the employee’s parents, imprison the employee, or give him a beating as part of the placement plan.”
The situation in Iraq is different than in Central America in the ’80s. For one thing, the United States’ crusade against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua used a privately-funded proxy army, the Contras. As the Iran-Contra scandal proved, such off-the-books arrangements can get politically messy. Indeed, were it not for pardons by President George H.W. Bush, some Reagan administration officials and current Bush administration officials would have done time.
To avoid such embarrassments, the Pentagon now uses legal, if secret, contracts to outsource work to bona fide corporations. This outsourcing of military contracts mushroomed during the first Bush administration as a policy initiative of then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who would later go on to make millions working for the same companies he provided contracts to, such as Halliburton.
Like the privately-funded Contras in the ’80s, today publicly funded yet legally unaccountable corporations do the dirty work: corporations operating under secret government contracts, like CACI, two of whose employees have been implicated in the torture at Abu Ghraib; corporations, like the one, as yet unnamed, whose interrogator is being investigated by the Justice Department for possible murder; and corporations like DynCorp.
In the late ’90s, DynCorp employees who worked for the U.N.’s international police force in Bosnia were involved in gun running, rape and sex trafficking. The DynCorp site supervisor, for example, videotaped himself raping two young women, while another employee bought an underage girl as a sex slave for $700 and kept her in his apartment. Two DynCorp employees who reported these crimes to the company were summarily fired. The guilty sex offenders also were fired but never charged with a crime. The company is currently under a 10-year contract with the State Department to hire 1,000 law enforcement officers to train the Iraqi police and run the Iraqi prison system.
There are no laws in place that regulate the overseas behavior of the employees of Pentagon contractors. In an interview with “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, P.W. Singer, author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry put it this way:
We have a senior military leadership and a senior political leadership that’s in denial. … When Secretary Rumsfeld talks about military outsourcing, the examples that he uses are things like mowing lawns at military bases or answering phones. … The reality is that contractors are out there doing everything from logistics to training up local forces to actually fighting in battles in Iraq to doing interrogations, and we have to deal with this broader system. Right now, it’s unregulated and there are not the laws in place to deal with what happens when it goes bad.
And the scandal will continue to unfold. Al-Watan, a Saudi daily, has quoted a European intelligence service report as saying that “worse and uglier violations” have taken place at other prisons in Iraq, such as the systematic rape of women, the sodomy of men and the use of electric shock against the Iraqi prisoners.
Which brings to mind Rumsfeld’s response to the looting of Baghdad after the fall of Saddam: “Stuff happens.” Of course some stuff didn’t happen, like the destruction of the Iraqi national oil ministry, which was guarded from the get-go. In other words, what happens or doesn’t happen is a matter of policy—not fate.
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| ......US expert slams WMD 'delusions' |
| 06.06.04 (2:38 pm) [edit] |
Weapons of mass destruction do not exist in Iraq and it is "delusional" to think they will be found, says former chief US weapons inspector David Kay.
Mr Kay told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that British and American leaders should simply apologise and admit that they were wrong.
He said Saddam Hussein had intended to reconstitute his weapons programme at some point and had acted illegally.
However, there were no actual WMD stockpiles, he said.
Mr Kay led the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until he stepped down as head of the Iraq Survey Group in January.
He said at the time that he did not believe there had been large-scale production of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991.
'No stockpiles'
In his latest comments, Mr Kay referred to the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, by name.
"Anyone out there holding - as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said - the prospect that, in fact, the Iraq Survey Group is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction, are really delusional," he said.
"There is nothing there. There is a programme there. There was an intention of Saddam Hussein at some point to reconstitute it.
"There were clearly illegal activities, clear violations of UN Security Council resolutions. We have accumulated that evidence and really have accumulated that evidence to a considerable degree four months ago.
"There are not actual stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction."
Mr Kay repeated his previous assertions that the US-led coalition had been mistaken in its assumption that Saddam Hussein had possessed the banned weapons.
"We simply got it wrong," he said. "Iraq was a dangerous country, Saddam was an evil man and we are better off without him and all of that. But we were wrong in our estimation."
BBC News
Saturday, 5 June, 2004, 10:25 GMT 11:25 UK
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| .....Leak Probe Appears To Be in Active Phase |
| 06.06.04 (2:37 pm) [edit] |
By Susan Schmidt and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A05
Vice President Cheney's recent interview with representatives of a special prosecutor looking into the leak of a covert CIA officer's name is the latest suggestion that the grand jury probe is in a highly active phase.
News of the Cheney interview, confirmed yesterday by a government official who was briefed on it and who refused to be identified publicly, comes on the heels of last week's disclosure that President Bush has lined up a private attorney in case special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald seeks to question him about the public disclosure last summer of the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame. The grand jury investigation, now in its sixth month, has for the most part been conducted in extraordinary secrecy because it involves a national security matter.
In recent weeks, however, prosecutors have subpoenaed at least two reporters and sought to interview others in an effort to learn whether Plame's identity was intentionally disclosed by administration officials who sought to cast doubt on the credibility of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
In 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger to investigate claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium there. The agency asked Wilson to make the trip after Cheney asked for more information about the Niger claims. Wilson, a critic of the Iraq war, publicly charged a year ago that the administration had exaggerated Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Last July, syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that two administration officials told him Wilson was selected for the mission by his wife, Plame, a CIA specialist on weapons of mass destruction. Disclosure of a covert officer's name is a criminal act if it is done intentionally by someone authorized to have the information.
Lawyers representing witnesses in the case said the latest flurry of witness interview requests could signal that prosecutors are about to bring the investigation to a close. Several lawyers said they expect Fitzgerald would want to talk to Bush and Cheney no matter how his investigation comes out in the end.
"It was inevitable he would talk to both of them," one lawyer said. He, like other lawyers in the case, asked not to be quoted by name.
The White House declined to comment on Cheney's interview with prosecutors, which was first reported Friday night by the New York Times, or to say when it occurred. Cheney's office referred inquiries to Fitzgerald's office, which has declined to comment on any aspect of the investigation. Cheney's attorney, Terrence O'Donnell, did not return phone calls for comment.
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| ......Beware of 'Credible Intelligence' |
| 06.03.04 (3:36 pm) [edit] |
by Ray McGovern
Last Wednesday it was Attorney General John Ashcroft – joined Friday by me-too Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge – claiming that "credible intelligence from multiple sources indicates that al-Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the United States" between now and the November election.
If "credible intelligence" sounds to you like protesting too much, there is ample reason to be skeptical. Overshadowing Ashcroft's dramatic warning that al-Qaeda planned to "hit the United States hard" was the headline-grabbing, specific claim that "an al-Qaeda spokesman announced that 90 per cent of the arrangements for an attack on the United States were complete."
Had Ashcroft thought to check this out with the CIA – or even NBC – he would have learned that the "al-Qaeda spokesman" was actually "Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades" – a fact later conceded with some embarrassment by the FBI. According to a senior US intelligence official, this "group" may consist of no more than one person with a fax machine. The "Brigades" have nonetheless claimed responsibility for the power blackout in the Northeast last year, a power outage in London, and the March 11 train bombings in Madrid. NBC news analyst Roger Cressey, a former deputy to counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, notes, "The only thing they haven't claimed credit for recently is the cicada invasion of Washington."
What's Going On?
"Intelligence" is being conjured up once again to serve the political purposes of the Bush administration. Merely recall the litany of spurious claims against Iraq, all said to have been based on "solid sources," that Secretary of State Colin Powell dwelled on in his UN speech of February 5, 2003.
But what purposes are served in the current political context? Fanning further fear of terror is the only remaining ploy to boost the president's sinking poll numbers. The struggle against terrorism is the issue on which George W. Bush still gets relatively good marks. Small wonder that he used "terror/terrorist/terrori sm" no less than nineteen times in his speech at the Army War College on May 24. But is that all that is afoot here?
I believe there may be considerably more. With only five months before the election, the president's men are getting desperate. Iraq is going from bad to worse and the prospect of substantial improvement before November is virtually nil. Worse still, revelations of the past few weeks strongly suggest that the president, Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, et al. have deeply personal incentive to make four more years for Bush a sure thing.
The Nettle of the Geneva Conventions
Put yourself in their position. Addressing whether or not Washington should honor the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War, the president's chief legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, warned him in a memorandum of January 25, 2002 that U.S. law – the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18 U.S.C. 2441) – prohibits "war crimes" defined to include any grave breach of the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War. Gonzales made it clear that this prohibition applies to U.S. officials and noted that punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty.
Gonzales advised the president that, in the opinion of Ashcroft's Justice Department, the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al-Qaeda and that the president had the authority to determine that they also do not apply to the Taliban. (This would not be the first time that forces branded "terrorists" were declared exempt from the Geneva Conventions. In World War II when armed, uniformed Allied troops landed behind German lines, Hitler ordered them to be executed for "terrorist activities," as Professor Frederick Sweet noted in a recent article in Intervention magazine.)
Gonzales described Ashcroft's opinion as "definitive," but added that the State Department had expressed "a different view." Buried in the legalese is thinly disguised nervousness that others, too, might have a different view. Under the "positives," Gonzales notes:
"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
The president's lawyer concluded that a determination by President Bush that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the Taliban "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441)."
"A reasonable basis in law?" "Substantially reduces" the threat of prosecution? If I were President Bush I would not find these phrases altogether reassuring. And neither, one would assume, does Attorney General Ashcroft.
And if this were not worrisome enough, Gonzales adds an eerily prophetic statement in listing the "negatives:"
"A determination that the Geneva Convention does not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries."
Then there was Abu Graib.
There is nothing in the Geneva Conventions that gives anyone the right to make a unilateral decision to exempt opposing forces. And the Conventions hold the "Detaining Power" – not individual soldiers – responsible for maltreatment of detainees.
From the catbird seat of the "sole remaining superpower," however, the Bush administration has shown considerable disdain for international law. On occasion it has stretched it well beyond the breaking point – as in claiming that the invasion of Iraq was authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1441. Section 2441 of the War Crimes Act of 1996 is different. This is U.S. law, in which the strictures of the Geneva Conventions are embedded.
Nightmares
For the Bush administration, the nightmare is losing the November election – a prospect believed to be unlikely until just recently. For many of us citizens, the nightmare is the president and his associates resorting to extra-legal measures to ensure that there is no "regime change" in Washington for four more years. Logic and human nature would suggest that possible liability to prosecution under the War Crimes Act is among the more weighty factors they take into account.
Bush administration leaders may even look on the prospect of a terrorist event in the US in the coming months as a possible opportunity as well as a risk. I do not suggest they would be perverse enough to allow one to happen, or – still less – to orchestrate one. But there is ample reason to believe that they would take full political advantage of a terrorist attack – or even just the threat of one. Ashcroft's remarks last week might be regarded as the opening salvo in a campaign to condition the country for this.
No less a figure than Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the war on Iraq, went so far as to predict publicly last November that if terrorists attacked the U.S. with "weapons of mass destruction," the Constitution would probably be discarded in favor of a military form of government.
But, you say, that would mean a constitutional crisis without parallel in the history of our country. Perhaps. But was there not a good warm-up in the fall of 2002? Did we not then experience a constitutional crisis when Congress was duped into ceding to the president its constitutional power to declare war? And it was all accomplished by spreading the myth that Saddam Hussein was close to exploding a "mushroom cloud" over us – a myth based on a known forgery alleging that Iraq was acquiring uranium from Africa.
In a recent op-ed in a newspaper in Maine, Charles Cutter posed the key question for the next five months. Cutter asked:
"How far would they go? With blood on their hands and God on their side, what actions would Bush & Co. consider too extreme – when the goal is to extend their control over the financial and military power of the American presidency?"
An elevated threat level justifying martial law and postponement of the election? No doubt such suggestions will seem too alarmist to those trusting that there is a moral line, somewhere, that the president and his senior advisers would not cross. I regret very much to say that their behavior over the past three years leaves me doubtful that there is such a line. If my doubts are justified, the sooner we all come to grips with this parlous situation the better.
Meanwhile, don't be taken in by "credible intelligence."
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years—from the John F. Kennedy administration to that of George H. W. Bush. This article was initially posted on TomPaine.com
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| .....Bush consults lawyer |
| 06.02.04 (3:38 pm) [edit] |
June 03, 2004
The Australian
US President George W. Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said.
There was no indication that Mr Bush is a target of the leak investigation, but the president has decided that in the event he needs an attorney's advice, "he would retain him," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.
The lawyer is Jim Sharp, Ms Buchan said, confirming a report by CBS News.
"The president has said that everyone should cooperate in this matter and that would include himself," the spokeswoman said.
She deflected questions about whether Mr Bush had been asked to appear before a grand jury in the case.
A federal grand jury in Washington is investigating who leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to the news media.
Ms Plame's name first surfaced last July in a column written by commentator Robert Novak, who said his information came from administration sources.
Mr Wilson has said he believes his wife's name was leaked because of his criticism of Bush administration claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, which Mr Wilson investigated for the CIA.
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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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