28-29 February 2004

Election influence on estimates?
CBO: Bigger Long - Run Deficit in Bush Plan
Reuters
New York Times, 28 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush's budget plans would improve the fiscal deficit in the next few years but send the shortfall soaring over the longer run, congressional analysts said on Friday. Democrats and even some in Bush's own Republican Party have criticized him for the growing deficits, which have become a thorny political issue for him before the Nov. 2 election. Bush inherited a budget surplus when he took office in January 2001. In a review of the president's budget, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Bush's policies would lead to a deficit of $356 billion in 2005, slightly better than the $363 billion deficit the CBO is forecasting without taking the president's budget proposals into account. From 2005 until 2014, the cumulative total of the deficit would balloon to $2.75 trillion, far worse than the $2.01 trillion the CBO is looking for under existing policies. ...Democrats say the cost of Bush's tax cuts will eat into future funding for Social Security and other social safety nets. Republican fiscal conservatives are also calling for spending restraint. The CBO is forecasting deficits for every year through 2014, the last year it looks at in this report. The congressional analysts also estimated the cost of making Bush's tax cuts permanent to be about $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years. Bush told Congress on Thursday he would settle for making permanent only those of his tax cuts set to expire next year, after fellow Republicans warned the rest might have to wait until after the election.

Question is...who's testing?
Electronic Vote Faces Big Test of Its Security
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
New York Times, 28 February 2004
EXCERPT: Millions of voters in 10 states will cast ballots on Tuesday in the single biggest test so far of new touchscreen voting machines that have been billed as one of the best answers to the Florida election debacle of 2000. But many computer security experts worry that the machines could allow democracy to be hacked. Here in Georgia, along with Maryland and California, an estimated six million people will be using machines from Diebold Election Systems, which has been the focus of the biggest controversy. Independent studies have found flaws in Diebold's system that researchers say might allow hackers or corrupt insiders to reprogram the touchscreens or computers that tally the votes, without leaving a trace. Without a paper record of every vote or some other way to verify voters' choices after the fact, these experts warn, elections may lose the public's trust. "People complain about hanging chads," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a co-author of the first study that found security flaws in the Diebold machines. "But if an electronic machine has malicious code in it, it's possible that all of the chads are hanging — and then you have to question every vote."

Bush's Hate Crimes Against Mother Nature
By Mark Morford
SFGate.com, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: Today's question: What do you get when more than 60 of the world's top scientists, 20 Nobel Laureates among them, get together and write one of the most scathing, damning reports in the history of modern science, aimed squarely at BushCo's thoroughly atrocious record of cover-ups and obfuscations and outright lies regarding the health of the planet? What do you get when those very scientists, a highly respected, nonpartisan group called the Union of Concerned Scientists, go on to claim that no other president in modern history has so openly misled the public or been so flagrantly disrespectful of scientific fact and mountains of irrefutable research, deliberately and systematically mutilating scientific data in the service of its rather brutal, pro-corporate, antienvironment agenda? If you answered, "Why, you get even more painful polyps of sadness and disgust on your soul due to the BushCo onslaught," consider yourself among the millions who are right now rather horrified and appalled and who are wondering just what sort of human -- not what sort of politician, mind you, not what sort of power broker, not what sort of failed Texas oilman corporate lackey -- but what sort of human being you have to be to enact such insidious ongoing planet-gouging legislation, smirking and shrugging all the way.
SEE ALSO: Park Service Continues to Push Creationist Theory at Grand Canyon (BushGreenWatch)
SEE ALSO: White House Jeopardizing U.S. Role in Global Toxics Treaty (BushGreenWatch)
SEE ALSO: Arianna Huffington: Code Red (TomPaine.com)

Kucinich: The Most Unreported Story of 2004
By Tim Wheeler
People's World Weekly, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: The most underreported story of the 2004 election is the never-give-up, never-give-in campaign of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) for president. With considerable grassroots support, the Ohio lawmaker has carried his message of world peace, jobs, equality and universal health care across the country. He has done it in the face of a near-total corporate media blackout. Kucinich, campaigning in California, launched the "Other America Tour" from the impoverished Sunnydale public housing complex in San Francisco. "I'm from the other America," he said, noting that he grew up poor and sometimes homeless in Cleveland, Ohio. An impressive 15 percent of Maine voters and 8 percent of Washington state voters came out for Kucinich in the Feb. 10 "mini-Super Tuesday" primaries. He also placed second in Hawaii's Feb. 24 primary.

Crusader-in-Chief
By Richard Blow
TomPaine.com, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: The 2004 election should be about some serious issues: national security, Iraq, the economy. But on all of those issues, President Bush is on the defensive. And so he is attempting to define the terms of the election differently. He's losing the argument over the Iraq war, so the president is starting a culture war. Like photoshopping John Kerry into pictures with Jane Fonda, it's a cynical move. Four years ago, Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative" who wanted to "unite rather than divide" the country. These days, apparently, division makes better politics than compassion.
SEE ALSO: Holy Matrimony! (Nation)
SEE ALSO: As Gay Marriage Dominates Headlines, Bush Cuts Off Aid for 760,000 Jobless (Nation)

Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
By Bob Fitrakis
Common Dreams, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent state officials, commute to their downtown Columbus offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called "Golden Finger," the safe route through the majority black inner-city near east side. The Broad Street BP station, just east of downtown, is the place where affluent suburbanites from Bexley can stop, gas up, get their coffee and New York Times. Those in need of cash visit BP's Diebold manufactured CashSource+ ATM machine which provides a paper receipt of the transaction to all customers upon request. Many of Taft's and President George W. Bush's major donors, like Diebold's current CEO Walden "Wally" O'Dell, reside in Columbus' northwest suburb Upper Arlington. O'Dell is on record stating that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President" this year. On September 26, 2003, he hosted an Ohio Republican Party fundraiser for Bush's re-election at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $1000 per couple, but O'Dell's fundraising letter urged those attending to "Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio Republican Party." According to the Columbus Dispatch: "Last year, O'Dell and his wife Patricia, campaigned for passage of two liquor options that made their portion of Tremont Road wet. On November 5, Upper Arlington residents narrowly passed measures that allowed fundraising parties to offer more than beer, even though his 10,800-square-foot home is a residence, a permit is required because alcohol is included in the price of fundraising tickets. O'Dell is also allowed to serve "beer, wine and mixed drinks" at Sunday fundraisers. O'Dell's fund-raising letter followed on the heels of a visit to President Bush's Crawford Texas ranch by "Pioneers and Rangers," the designation for people who had raised $100,000 or more for Bush's re-election. If Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote.
SEE ALSO: Creating an Open Electoral Process (Common Dreams)
SEE ALSO: How America's Right Bears the Longest Grudge (Common Dreams)

Budget Rule Change Would Make the Cost of Extending the Tax Cuts Disappear
by Robert Greenstein and Joel Friedman
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: The President’s 2005 budget includes a legislative proposal to change the budget rules so that the cost of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would be incorporated into the official budget “baseline.”  Under existing rules, the baseline is required to reflect current law and thus shows the tax cuts expiring.  As a result, official estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Treasury Department all show proposals to extend these tax cuts as having large costs.  If the Administration’s proposed change to the baseline rules is implemented, however, the official estimates would show proposals to make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent as having zero cost.

In Search of the President's Missing Years
By MIMI SWARTZ
New York Times, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: Each election cycle comes with a new set of "complete" documents relating to President Bush's time in the National Guard. ...Over the past few weeks, President Bush has responded to recurring questions about his National Guard service by saying that the subject is old and tiresome. According to Mr. Bush, reporters conducted a thorough investigation of his time in the Texas National Guard when he ran against Ann Richards for governor in 1994, and again when he ran against Al Gore in 2000. The complete Guard records, the president told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," were "scoured." This came as news to me, as I lived in and reported from Texas during those times and feel that questions about the story — Mr. Bush's life story — linger 10 years after his first political victory. Why they linger is a more complicated question, one that has as much to do with the press as it does with the president.
SEE ALSO: BushWhackedUSA AWOL Resource Page

The Trade Tightrope
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: You can't blame the Democrats for making the most of the Bush administration's message malfunction on trade and jobs. When the president's top economist suggests, even hypothetically, considering hamburger-flipping a form of manufacturing, it's a golden opportunity to accuse the White House of being out of touch with the concerns of working Americans. ("Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?" Representative John Dingell asks.) And the accusation sticks, because it's true. But the Democratic presidential candidates have to walk a tightrope. To exploit the administration's vulnerability, they must offer relief to threatened workers. But they also have to avoid falling into destructive protectionism. Let me spare you the usual economist's sermon on the virtues of free trade, except to say this: although old fallacies about international trade have been making a comeback lately (yes, Senator Charles Schumer, that means you), it is as true as ever that the U.S. economy would be poorer and less productive if we turned our back on world markets. Furthermore, if the United States were to turn protectionist, other countries would follow. The result would be a less hopeful, more dangerous world.

27 February 2004

Bush Lowers Bar for Congress on Extending Tax Cuts
By Adam Entous
Reuters, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush told Congress on Thursday he would settle for now for making permanent only those of his tax cuts set to expire next year, after fellow Republicans warned the rest may have to wait until after the November election.

Open Secret
Dick Cheney's dubious history and unprecedented role are hidden in plain view. Luckily, it's becoming an issue in the election.
Robert Kuttner
The American Prospect, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: Dick Cheney is the most powerful Vice President in US history. Indeed, there is fair amount of circumstantial evidence that Cheney, and not Bush, is the real power at the White House, and Bush the figurehead. The true role of the shadowy Cheney is finally becoming an issue in the election, and it deserves to be. This week in the National Review, Byron York warned that Cheney was vulnerable to Democratic attacks. And he deserves to be. A recent piece in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer lays out, in devastating detail, how Cheney, while CEO of Halliburton, created the blueprint for the shifting of much of the military's support role from the armed services to private contractors. The leading contractor, of course, is Halliburton. When Cheney became Vice- President, Halliburton was perfectly positioned to make out like a bandit. Chaney, whose prior career was in politics, became a very rich man as Halliburton's chief executive, earning $45 million in just five years, with $18 million still available in stock options. Cheney also went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret the meetings of the Bush energy task force, which included primarily private companies positioned to profit from public decisions. The press treated all this as newsworthy for a time, but then backed off. What is significant about Mayer's New Yorker piece is that it was pieced together mainly from the public record. Cheney's dubious history and unprecedented role are mostly hidden in plain view, just like Bush's. The press needs only to decide that it's a story.

Governors Ignore Rx Drug Warnings
By Al Swanson
United Press International, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: Two Midwest governors have pledged to keep state-sponsored prescription drug Web sites operating despite stern warnings from federal officials about re-importation of cheaper medicines from Canada.

You Won't Have Richard Perle to Kick Around Anymore
Nick Confessore
Tapped, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: (Richard Perle) ...resigned his seat on the Defense Policy Board, according to ABC News. In a statement letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Perle wrote:

We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated," Perle wrote. "I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the President at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign.

Come now, Dick. Why be coy? There are so many possible reasons why you became too much of a hot potato to keep on board.
--Was it your frequent public statements urging the elected heads of allied states to resign, because they disagreed with U.S. policy?
--Launching an investment company specializing in defense and homeland security, just two months after 9/11?
--Your op-ed for the Wall Street Journal advocating a boondoggle tanker deal that would have benefited Boeing Co., without disclosing that Boeing had committed to investing $20 million in said investment company?
--Your various gaffes, such as pointing out that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, while justified, was probably illegal under international law?
--Taking payments from Global Crossing to help it persuade the Pentagon and the FBI to allow a business with close ties to the Chinese government to acquire the now-disgraced telecommunications company -- while sitting on the Defense Policy Board?
--Providing a similar service to Loral Communications, under similar conditions?
--Sitting in on a classifed briefing on crises in North Korea and Iraq from the Defense Intelligence Agency -- provided in your capacity as a board member -- then turning around and delivering a briefing of your own to an investment seminar on ways to profit from possible conflicts with both countries?
--Your paid speaking gig at a fundraiser linked to Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian rebel group officially listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization?
--Your habit of demanding fees from newscasters in exchange for television interviews, possibly in violation of federal ethics guidelines?
--Your decision to invite Laurent Murawiec, a former disciple of Lyndon LaRouche who favors seizing Saudi Arabia's oil fields, to address the Defense Policy Board?
--Your connection to the growing -- and growing, and growing -- scandal over at Conrad Black's Hollinger International, where you served as a board member while Black "looted" (as one aggrieved investor described it) millions of dollars from the company till?

Rational Exuberance
Why Democrats on the Hill are feeling upbeat -- and what that means for the upcoming election.
By Terence Samuel
The American Prospect, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: There is a strange, rare political species quietly roaming the landscape these days. Long endangered and occasionally thought to be extinct, its sudden re-emergence is as startling as it is sublime, particularly on Capitol Hill, where it seemed to face a fate on par with what the dinosaurs endured.
Here, of course, I speak of the Hopeful Democrat.

Hastert Rejects White House Request--You Betcha'
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has hardened his opposition to extending the deadline for the independent commission studying the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, even as the panel's leaders pleaded yesterday for more time to complete their work. Hastert told Republican lawmakers in a meeting yesterday that he will not bring up any legislation to grant the commission extra time, said spokesman John Feehery. Hastert rejected a personal plea from White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. on the extension Monday, Feehery said. "He still doesn't feel the commission needs any extra time" and he believes that the panel "should complete its report as soon as possible," Feehery said, adding that a later deadline would make the commission "a political issue" during the presidential campaign. Hastert's stance casts serious doubt on the commission's efforts to secure a 60-day extension of its May 27 deadline. The panel contends it needs the additional time to produce a complete report and to avoid cutting back on public hearings.

White House's Limits Upset 9/11 Panel
Length of interviews, access restricted
Philip Shenon
NYT in San Francisco Chronicle, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have placed strict limits on the private interviews they will grant to the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying they will meet only with the panel's top two officials and that Bush will submit to only a single hour of questioning, panel members said Wednesday. The commission, which has 10 members and is bipartisan, said it also had been informed by the White House that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, had rejected its request that she testify in public about the intelligence reports she received before the attacks.

Rice Refuses Panel's Request to Testify Publicly About 9/11
By HOPE YEN
Associated Press, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: The federal commission reviewing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks expressed disappointment Wednesday with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's refusal to testify in public.

26 February 2004

The Gun Lobby's Bull's-Eye
New York Times, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT:  The Senate is on the verge of approving a new sop to the gun industry that is the latest sad example of what has become of the gun control debate. Many Americans have labored under the mistaken impression that this was a debate about the Constitution and public safety, about the balance between saving lives and assuring law-abiding gun owners and cultural conservatives that the Second Amendment is being protected. In fact, as the legislation before the Senate demonstrates, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress have long been focused simply on making it easier for gun manufacturers and gun dealers to turn a profit. A bipartisan majority is lining up behind a bill in the Senate that has nothing to do with gun owners' rights. The law would effectively grant reckless gun dealers and manufacturers an unreasonable immunity from civil suits by victimized families and local governments. The measure, already approved by the House, could scrap more than two dozen pending lawsuits, including those of families who suffered losses in the sniper shootings around Washington in 2002. Countless future suits would be denied standing. The bill would undermine fundamental principles of negligence law in shielding illicit gun traffickers. Supporters, echoing the National Rifle Association, argue that they are intent on blocking only "frivolous" suits, as if that were ever a problem to compare with the annual scourge of thousands of gunshot deaths. In fact, the bill would all but end damage liability for the gun industry — an extraordinary shelter never extended to the tobacco and alcohol industries in legislating controls over the harm their products cause. A woefully pliant Congress seems intent on protecting a small but lethal minority of shady dealers and the gun makers tolerant of them.

Greenspan Urges Social Security Cuts
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP in Salon, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan urged Congress on Wednesday to deal with the country's escalating budget deficit by cutting benefits for future Social Security retirees rather than raising taxes. In testimony before the House Budget Committee, Greenspan said the current deficit situation, with a projected record red ink of $521 billion this year, will worsen dramatically once the baby boom generation starts becoming eligible for Social Security benefits in just four years. He said the prospect of the retirement of 77 million baby boomers will radically change the mix of people working and paying into the Social Security retirement fund and those drawing benefits from the fund. "This dramatic demographic change is certain to place enormous demands on our nation's resources -- demands we will almost surely be unable to meet unless action is taken," Greenspan said. "For a variety of reasons, that action is better taken as soon as possible."

Putting Bias in the Constitution
New York Times, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: In his remarks yesterday, President Bush tried to create a sense of crisis. He talked of the highest Massachusetts court's recognition of gay marriage, San Francisco officials' decision to grant marriage licenses to gay couples and a New Mexico county's doing the same thing. He did not say the New Mexico attorney general found that gay marriages violate state law, the California attorney general is asking the California Supreme Court to review San Francisco's actions, and Massachusetts is considering amending its State Constitution to prohibit gay marriage. The president, who believes so strongly in states' rights in other contexts, should let the states do their jobs and work out their marriage laws before resorting to a constitutional amendment.
SEE ALSO: Bush's War Over Gay Marriage
The president finally caves to the Christian right and backs a constitutional amendment, the better to beat up John Kerry. But will his newly emboldened right-wing allies go too far?
By Tim Grieve
Salon, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: On the first day of his reelection campaign, George W. Bush attacked Sen. John Kerry as an equivocating wimp from Massachusetts. On the second day, the president announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would prevent "judges in Boston" from forcing gay marriage on Americans everywhere. With Super Tuesday still a few days away, the Bush-Kerry race has officially begun. And if Bush and White House strategist Karl Rove and their allies on the religious right have their way, gay marriage will be the ugly centerpiece of the coming campaign.

Playing pretend politics in Washington...
White House and Hastert Won't Extend 9/11 Panel
Reuters, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: In a blow to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has told the White House and fellow Republicans that he will not bring up legislation to extend its May 27 deadline, officials said on Wednesday. President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, personally had appealed to Speaker Dennis Hastert to reconsider, and the Illinois Republican met on Wednesday with Bush at the White House. But the speaker's spokesman, John Feehery, said Hastert told the White House and members of the House Republican conference that "it's a bad idea to extend the commission and ... that we're not going to bring any legislation up." The commission wants a 60-day extension through July 26 to complete its final report on the attacks. Despite initial objections, Bush backed the extension and the Senate is moving forward with legislation.

9/11 Panel Urges Rice to Testify Publicly
By Hope Yen
AP in Salon, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: The federal commission reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks expressed disappointment Wednesday with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice for refusing to testify in public. ``Although we have met privately with Dr. Rice, we believe the nation would be well-served by the contribution she can make to public understanding of the intelligence and policy issues being examined by the commission,'' the 10-member panel said in a statement. The bipartisan commission also urged President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to talk to the full commission instead of just the chairman and vice chairman. The commission plans meetings in March with Bush, Cheney, former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore to discuss what they knew before the 2001 attacks. Clinton and Gore have agreed to meet with the full panel but have not said whether they will testify publicly.

Aloha Dennis: Kucinich Challenges Kerry in Hawaii
By John Nichols
The Nation, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: Democratic frontrunner John Kerry coasted on Not-So-Super Tuesday, winning three more states as Idaho, Utah and Hawaii quietly picked delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Kerry had no trouble dispatching John Edwards, the North Carolina senator who is generally portrayed as the last serious threat to the Massachusetts senator's frontrunner status. Kerry beat Edwards by 33 points in Ohio, 32 points in Idaho and 25 points in Utah. In fact, the candidate who came closest to Kerry wasn't even Edwards. The candidate who gave the Democratic frontrunner the best run for his money on Tuesday was Dennis Kucinich, who won a respectable 26.1 percent of the vote in Hawaii to Kerry's 49.8 percent. While no one outside the Kucinich campaign is suggesting that the Ohio congressman's strong showing in Hawaii will put him on the road to the nomination -- or even to more second place finishes in the foreseeable future -- this was the best showing of the campaign so far for Kucinich.
SEE ALSO: Arizona Republicans Rail Against Bush's Attacks on Liberty (Guardian)

No excuse, sir!
Rapes Reported by Servicewomen in the Persian Gulf and Elsewhere
By ERIC SCHMITT
New York Times, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: The United States military is facing the gravest accusations of sexual misconduct in years, with dozens of servicewomen in the Persian Gulf area and elsewhere saying they were sexually assaulted or raped by fellow troops, lawmakers and victims advocates said on Wednesday. There have been 112 reports of sexual misconduct over roughly the past 18 months in the Central Command area of operations, which includes Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, military officials said on Wednesday. The Army has reported 86 incidents, the Navy 12, the Air Force 8 and the Marine Corps 6.

Another Mistake by Rod Paige
New York Times, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: Rod Paige, the education secretary, made a staggeringly stupid comment this week, comparing the nation's largest teachers' union to a "terrorist organization" because it opposes many elements of the two-year-old No Child Left Behind Act. This is the latest in a series of missteps by Mr. Paige. ...Mr. Paige's "terrorist" remark has finally exhausted his credibility and disqualified him as a spokesman for national education policy.

Ex-Senator Rejoins a Battle as He Campaigns for Kerry
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
New York Times, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: Mr.(Max) Cleland, a former Georgia senator who lost both legs and an arm in the Vietnam War, was hustling votes for Mr. Kerry, his fellow Vietnam veteran and the man he calls "my brother." Suddenly, a young man in blue jeans and a purple shirt burst into the conversation, spilling forth a tale of rage and suffering after the Persian Gulf war of 1991. ...Still bitter over what he regards as Republican attacks on his patriotism in the 2002 Senate race, Mr. Cleland is apparently on a mission, collecting what he calls a "band of brothers" along the way to help Senator Kerry of Massachusetts defeat President Bush. Now on the rebound from his loss to Saxby Chambliss, Mr. Cleland, 62, is emerging as a powerful symbol for both veterans and Democrats — and becoming nettlesome for Republicans, some of whom complain he is exploiting his war wounds for Mr. Kerry's benefit.

25 February 2004

Strange Bedfellows: Social Liberals and Political Conservatives Unite Against Marriage Amendment
By John Sonego
TomPaine.com, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: To summarize my four main points: First, a constitutional amendment is unnecessary because federal and state laws, combined with the present state of the relevant constitutional doctrines, already make court-ordered, nationwide same-sex marriage unlikely for the foreseeable future. Therefore, an amendment banning same-sex marriage is a solution in search of a problem. Second, a constitutional amendment defining marriage would be a radical intrusion on the nation's founding commitment to federalism in an area traditionally reserved to state regulation. Third, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage would be peculiarly anti-democratic, cutting short an ongoing national debate over what privileges and benefits, if any, ought to be conferred on same-sex couples, and preventing democratic processes from expanding individual rights. Fourth, the proposed FMA is constitutional overkill that reaches well beyond the stated concerns of its proponents. Whatever one thinks of same-sex marriage as a matter of policy, no person who cares about our Constitution should support this unnecessary, radical, unusually anti-democratic and overly broad departure from the nation's traditions and history.
SEE ALSO:
Constitutional Amendment Won't Save Marriage
With marriage in decline across the board, who benefits from preventing vows between consenting adults?
Cynthia Tucker
Universal Press Syndicate via Working for Change,
23 February 2004
EXCERPT: What is it about the prospect of allowing same-sex couples the right to pledge fidelity, loyalty and love to each other -- as heterosexuals do -- that threatens the foundations of the republic? For many religious conservatives, the issue is simple enough: Leviticus condemns homosexuality as an "abomination." But the guiding legal document of a pluralistic nation has no business recognizing one religious view over any other. Some denominations -- including my own, the United Church of Christ -- have no prohibition against same-sex marriages. (A literal reading of the Bible, by the way, poses many a conundrum. Leviticus also orders capital punishment for homosexuals and adulterers.) Many Americans view marriage only as an institution ordained by religion, but it is also recognized by civil authorities. While no church could ever be ordered to recognize or perform same-sex marriages, the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees full equality to all, should not block a courthouse marriage between two consenting adults.

Doonsberry Offers $10,000 Reward for Corroboration of Bush's Guard Duty
Details at http://www.doonesbury.com/

Kerry Says He Has President 'On the Run'
By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 2/24/2004
Boston Globe, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT:  Presidential candidate John F. Kerry yesterday declared that "George Bush is on the run" politically after weeks of Democratic attacks over job losses and the ballooning budget deficit and suggested that his candidacy has goaded the White House into ramping up the president's re-election effort earlier than expected. The Massachusetts senator, campaigning here with African-American politicians and college students before New York's primary next Tuesday, told reporters that he believed an upcoming wave of Bush campaign ads -- which may be broadcast before the Democratic nomination is clinched -- was a sign of Republican jitters. As he makes campaign stops in Ohio and Minnesota today, Kerry plans to launch a "nationwide jobs tour," highlighting unemployment. He also plans to broadcast a commercial in Ohio that reflects uncertainty about the economy. "I think George Bush is on the run, and I think he's on the run because he doesn't have a record to run on," the Democratic front-runner said during a news conference at York College in Queens, N.Y., after a town-hall forum on campus that drew more than 500 people. "Workers are feeling anxiety on a daily basis as to whether they're next to lose their job. I don't want Americans living with that kind of anxiety -- I don't think we have to."

The "Nader Calculus"
By Sarah Schweitzer
Boston Globe, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: Ralph Nader yesterday sought to tamp down bubbling criticism of his newly announced Independent presidential bid, which some Democrats have characterized as an ego-quest that will harm their chances of winning back the White House. "Relax, rejoice that you have another front carrying the ancient but unfulfilled pretensions and aspirations of the Democratic Party," Nader said in remarks addressed to leading Democrats at a press conference here yesterday, his first public foray as a candidate in 2004. "Do not deny millions of voters the opportunity to vote for this candidacy. Everyone should have a chance, everyone should argue on the merits, not on the money." Nader, 69, the consumer-rights advocate who many say contributed to President Bush's election in 2000 by siphoning votes from former vice president Al Gore, added that his quest for the nation's highest office this year would not help Republicans because Democrats would not vote for him in significant numbers. "The party that's out of power finds that its members come back into the fold. So this candidacy is not going to get many Democratic Party votes," Nader said. "On the other hand, the party that's in power is the party that we are going to focus on retiring, and conservatives and independents who are very upset with Bush's administration policies are left with two options: Vote for the Democrats, which is unlikely, or vote for an independent ticket."
...Nader seemed at once tickled to be back in front of cameras and reporters and dour as he contemplated the state of country. In his prepared comments, Nader offered a bleak assessment of the political process, painting it as beholden to corporate interests and casting the two major parties and the mainstream media as abettors of a corrupt system. "Our country has so many problems it doesn't deserve and so many solutions it doesn't apply," said Nader. Nader called President Bush "the giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being." But he criticized the Democrats as well. "The Democrats, because of their internal decay . . . have been very good at electing very bad Republicans," Nader said. "One might assume modestly that the Democratic Party needs some help. They need additional strategies . . . against a Bush regime that they're too cautious or too indentured to think of themselves." ...Despite the challenges, Nader said his campaign would target all 50 states, with hopes of playing more than a symbolic role. "Give serendipity a chance," he said, invoking the legacy of former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, an independent. "There's always a chance of a breakthrough with the blissful permission of the mass media through which you campaign."

Bush Assertion on Tax Cuts Is at Odds With IRS Data
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush defended his tax cuts [Monday] as economic fuel for the small-business sector in response to mounting criticism from Democratic presidential candidates that the cuts chiefly benefited the wealthiest Americans. But the president's contention that upper-income tax cuts primarily benefit entrepreneurs conflicts with some of the government's own data.

The White House vs. Science
Democracy Now!, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush Administration has come under heavy criticism for its policies in numerous areas: the assault on civil liberties under the Patriot Act and treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay leading the country to war and occupation under what is looking like increasingly false pretenses. The White House has also infiltrated academia as well, particularly in the field of science.
SEE ALSO: Leading Scientists Accuse Bush of Politicizing Science (DNow!)
SEE ALSO: When Science Was Thwarted Before (IHT)
SEE ALSO: Pentagon Report: Climate Change Could Result in Global Catastrophe (DNow!)
SEE ALSO: The New Scopes Trials (Nation)

Witness to the Betrayal
The 30 million working Americans who can't make ends meet aren't on the margins of our economy -- they are in the stagnating mainstream.
The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and Their Families
Beth Shulman
By Julian Brookes
Mother Jones, 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: The economy -- and President Bush's dismal record on job creation -- is shaping up as the defining issue in this year's elections. Witness John Edwards' surprisingly magnetic "Two Americas" theme, or John Kerry's dark talk of an economy hijacked by "special interests." This is no accident. The double impact of an economic downturn and disastrous Bush administration policies has swelled the ranks of America's working poor to include large numbers of white-collar middle-class Americans. But it bears noting that below the newly disadvantaged middle class is a vast population of Americans working in "low-wage" jobs; they work hard and play by the rules, and still can't provide for themselves and their families. Thirty million Americans - that's one in every four workers — live on poverty wages, which is to say they make $8.70 or less an hour. They don't exist at the margins of our economy, but in the mainstream; they are the nursing home staff, poultry processors, pharmacy assistants , call-center workers, janitors, child care workers, and guest room attendants that make the economy tick but are largely invisible. Most are women. Many are minorities or immigrants. And low wages are just the beginning of their problems. Their jobs are the least likely to offer health and retirement benefits, child-care, or sick leave; and the most likely to be part time, inflexible, and dangerous.
Beth Shulman, a lawyer and former vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, spent 3 years traveling around the United States talking to Americans who are struggling by on low wages. She presents her findings in "The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans." The book shows how the United States has neglected these workers, and how, despite the country's vast wealth, American workers have lower living standards than comparable workers in other industrialized countries. It concludes with a detailed call for policy reform to correct what stands as a national disgrace and a betrayal of America's founding notions of fairness and equity. Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" has said of Shulman's book, "The Betrayal of Work is the perfect accompaniment to Nicel and Dimed. I wish I'd written it myself!"
MotherJones.com spoke with Shulman about plight of low-wage workers and the political significance of the issue in this election year.

 AUDIO LINK
The Politics of Economic Forecasting
Diane Rehm Show
24 February 2004

Diane and her guests talk about how President Bush and the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are using employment projections and U.S. economic trends in their campaigns.
Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute
Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute
Jonathan Weisman, economic policy writer for "The Washington Post"

 AUDIO LINK
Roger Lowenstein: "Origins of the Crash" (The Penguin Press)
Diane Rehm Show
24 February 2004

A best-selling author and columnist for "SmartMoney" magazine, the "New York Times Magazine," and the "Wall Street Journal" examines what led to the boom and bust years of the 1990s.
Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing
Roger Lowenstein, Author of "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" and "When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management."

24 February 2004

Bush Pushes for Amendment to Ban Gay Marriage
AP, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush backed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage Tuesday, saying he wants to stop activist judges from changing the definition of the "most enduring human institution." Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural and moral roots, Bush said, urging Congress to approve such an amendment. "After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millenia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization," the president said. "Their action has created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."
SEE ALSO: Bush Makes it Official (365Gay.com)

Bush Speech Flat and Unimpassioned--Another Underwhelming Presidential Performance
GeorgeBush.com, 24 February 2004
Sarcasm and insincere smirk sets the tone of a "sure winner." You just got to love this speech writer and the presenter that brought it off.

 AUDIO LINK
"The Bazarist Thing"
NPR Morning Edition, 24 February 2004
Pentagon's Office of Special Plans Under Scrutiny
Senate investigators looking into pre-war intelligence failures are taking a closer look at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. Pentagon officials say the office was a policy-planning group. Critics say it was created to second-guess CIA intelligence on Iraq. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly reports.

Bush's Education Secretary Calls National Teachers' Union a 'Terrorist Organization'
AP, 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union a "terrorist organization" Monday, taking on the 2.7-million-member National Education Association early in the presidential election year. Paige's comments, made to the nation's governors at a private White House meeting, were denounced by union president Reg Weaver as well as prominent Democrats. The education secretary's words were "pathetic and they are not a laughing matter," said Weaver, whose union has said it plans to sue the Bush administration over lack of funding for demands included in the "No Child Left Behind" schools law.

C.I.A. Was Given Data on Hijacker Long Before 9/11
By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United States appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American and German officials say. The information — the earliest known signal that the United States received about any of the hijackers — has now become an important element of an independent commission's investigation into the events of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said Monday. It is considered particularly significant because it may have represented a missed opportunity for American officials to penetrate the Qaeda terror cell in Germany that was at the heart of the plot. And it came roughly 16 months before the hijacker showed up at flight schools in the United States.

Bush Volunteered for Nam? Hard to Swallow!
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: Just when you start debating how much or whether the president's military service record should be an issue in this campaign, you realize that the main reason it's an issue is that the president and his surrogates just won't stop lying about it. This morning Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot was interviewed by Juan Williams on NPR. When asked about the president's Air National Guard service he said, the president's and John Kerry's service "compare very favorably... He (i.e. the president) signed up for dangerous duty. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He wasn’t selected to go, but nonetheless served his country very well …"
He volunteered to go to Vietnam? Marc, no he didn't.
Does he think no one is listening? (For some reason Williams, made no effort to call him on it.) Let's set aside the fact that pulling strings to get into the Air National Guard in 1968 is, on its face, quite the opposite of volunteering to go to Vietnam. When the president signed up for the National Guard there was a check box asking whether he wanted to volunteer for overseas service. And he checked off "do not volunteer."

Bush's Gamble: White House Bets Voters' Fear of Terrorism Will Rule
By Natasha Hunter
TomPaine.com, 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush has got himself into a tight spot. Most presidents like to kick off a campaign year by launching a battery of popular domestic programs they can harken back to when the autumn competition heats up. Not so George W. When budget season rolled around this year, he found himself so tightly wedged between a rock and hard place that any choice posed a risk‹which has got Democrats drooling over the possibilities. The question is, can they make it pay off with the voters?
SEE ALSO: A Republican's Case Against Bush (ICH)
SEE ALSO: Republicans Who Support 'Anybody But Bush' (CHB)

AUDIO/VIDEO
Spoiler or Exposer of a Soiled System: Nader's Presidential Bid
Democracy Now!, 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: Longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader announced Sunday he is running for president as an independent. Nader ran on the Green Party ticket in 2000 and placed third, winning about 3 percent of the vote. At the time, he was accused by many Democrats as playing the role of the spoiler and giving George Bush the election. The reaction by many Democrats to his announcement to run this time around has been harsher. New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson said, "It's his personal vanity because he has no movement. Nobody's backing him. The Greens aren't backing him. His friends urge him not to do it. It's all about himself." Appearing on Meet the Press, Nader said, "Washington is still corporate-occupied territory, and the two parties are ferociously competing to see who's going to go to the White House and take orders from their corporate paymasters." Nader, who turns 70 years old this week is to lay out his campaign themes at a press conference today in Washington.
SEE ALSO: Run From Reality (TomPaine.com)
SEE ALSO: Nader's Tin Ear (TomPaine.com)
SEE ALSO: Eight Questions for Ralph Nader (ZNet)

Auto Mileage Standards Up in Smoke, Again
BushGreenWatch, 20 February 2004
EXCERPT: Sending a February Valentine to the auto industry, President Bush has extended for another four years a policy that enables carmakers to build less fuel-efficient vehicles while pretending to conserve oil. The auto manufacturers have been more than happy to exploit the loophole, much as they skirt CAFE standards (requiring a minimum number of miles per gallon) by pretending that gas-guzzling SUVs and minivans are light trucks.
SEE ALSO: Bush Delivers Valentine's Gifts to Big Business (BWUSA)
SEE ALSO: Blow for Boeing as Pentagon Cancels $38bn Contract (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: The Power Player: Who Is Backing the Energy Bill? (TP)

Lawyers, Guns and Mayors
By MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG, RICHARD M. DALEY, JAMES K. HAHN and SCOTT L. KING
New York Times, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: ...Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would undercut the ability of local governments to hold the gun industry accountable for its role in flooding our cities with guns. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act would shield irresponsible firearms manufacturers, wholesalers, dealers and trade associations from any form of civil liability in cases in which they recklessly or negligently supply firearms to criminals. The bill, which was approved by the House last April, is now being considered in the Senate. We do not advocate suing manufacturers in all instances when an incident involving a gun causes harm or injury. But shouldn't we be able to sue manufacturers and suppliers when they act with wanton disregard for the safety of our neighborhoods? By immunizing gun manufacturers against civil liability, the bill would remove much of their legal incentive to behave responsibly. It would encourage bad manufacturers to remain bad and good manufacturers to become lax. Most firearms dealers are responsible business people selling to law-abiding customers. But a small minority are not, and their unlawful actions are largely responsible for the gun violence on our cities' streets. According to federal data from 2000, 1.2 percent of dealers account for 57 percent of all guns recovered in criminal investigations. Many of these guns were illegal "straw purchases," a common street-gang tactic in which someone with a valid state firearms card buys large quantities of guns for resale to people with criminal records. And yet the gun industry refuses to police itself. Gun manufacturers and wholesalers know who the problem dealers are, because when guns are recovered at crime scenes, they receive firearms tracing reports that show them which dealers sell disproportionately to criminals.

State Dept. Excluded From Senate Intelligence Hearing
By Greg Miller
LA Times via Detroit News, 21 February 2004
EXCERPT: The U.S. State Department’s intelligence branch, whose skeptical prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs were more accurate than other agencies’ judgments, is being excluded from a panel that advises Congress each year on worldwide threats. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was not invited by Republican leaders to testify at the annual threat hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee being held Tuesday, even though the bureau has participated in the hearing every year since it began in the early 1990s, congressional and administration officials said. The move has puzzled some Democrats on Capitol Hill, who note that postwar findings in Iraq have vindicated many of the State Department’s calls. “At the very time when I&R seems to have been right and everyone else wrong, it’s at least unusual that this year for the first time they’re not invited,” said a congressional staffer.

23 February 2004

Bush Administration Altered Report About Racial Disparities in Health Care
By Robert Pear
New York Times, 22 February 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush administration says it improperly altered a report documenting large racial and ethnic disparities in health care, but it will soon publish the full, unexpurgated document. "There was a mistake made," Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, told Congress last week. "It's going to be rectified." Mr. Thompson said that "some individuals took it upon themselves" to make the report sound more positive than was justified by the data.... President Bush's budget would cut spending for the training of health professionals and would eliminate a $34 million program that recruits blacks and Hispanics for careers as doctors, nurses and pharmacists. On Wednesday, more than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement criticizing what they described as the misuse of science by the administration to bolster its policies on the environment, arms control and public health.
SEE ALSO: Scientists Claim Bush Bends Data (IHT)

Nader's Raid Upsets the Applecart
By Julian Borger
Guardian (UK), 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: Ralph Nader, the radical US activist whose 2000 presidential bid was accused by many Democrats of costing them the election and putting George Bush in the White House, declared yesterday that he would stand again this year. The announcement was denounced by Democratic officials, who called on opponents of the Bush administration to rally around their presidential nominee: depending on the remaining primary elections, John Kerry or John Edwards. But the Democrats also played down the significance of Mr Nader's threat, predicting that he would win far fewer than the nearly 2.9m votes (2.7% of the total) he took in the 2000 elections, which ended in a dead heat between Mr Bush and Al Gore. The tie was broken only by the supreme court ruling in Mr Bush's favour.
SEE ALSO: Profile of Ralph Nader: One-Man Awkward Squad (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: John Nichols: Will Nader Matter at All? (Nation)
SEE ALSO: They're Off, and It's Going to Be Dirty (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Dean's Support Threatened Washington's Power Brokers (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Ralph Nader Transcript on Meet the Press
(following Gov. Grope)
MSNBC, 22 February 2004
Courtesy of Cursor.org
EXCERPT:
MR. RUSSERT:  Before you go, I've got thousands of e-mails from people over the last several weeks talking about you and your potential candidacy and many of them come down to three letters, E-G-O, ego, this is all about Ralph.  He's going to be a spoiler because of his ego.  How do you respond?
MR. NADER:  A spoiler is a contemptuous term, as if anybody who dares to challenge the two-party system and corrupt politics and broken politics and corporate power is a spoiler.  Come again?  See, these people are well-meaning people who agree with us on many of the issues, but they're hostages to an antiquated Electoral College winner-take-all system that blocks all the way to excluding candidates from the debates, blocks any kind of voices, any kind of competition, and we've got to fight that.  You can't just fight that from the outside the way the Center for Voting and Democracy is.  You've got to fight it from the inside as well and that's what I'm trying to do and I hope millions of Americans will agree if they want fresh ideas, new ideas, solutions, but above all, if they want to become, in Jefferson's term, "participators" in our democratic society.
[And as noted by Cursor.org]
AP and Reuters articles fail to note Nader's apparent support for impeachment, which he said "shouldn't be a big deal... If there's any better definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in our Constitution, than misleading or fabricating the basis for going to war, as the press has documented ad infinitum, I don't know any cause of impeachment that's worse."

Bush program for creating jobs in manufacturing?
Fast-Food Factories?
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
New York Times, 20 February 2004
EXCERPT: Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles? That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy. The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered. In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy. Counting jobs at McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises alongside those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory proposal.

Think Again: Bush's Missing National Guard Years: No News is New News
by Eric Alterman
Center for American Progress, 19 February 2004
EXCERPT: See, in 2000, the fact that one of the major presidential candidates failed to take an Air Force physical as a young man, was stripped of his flying status, and there is little or no evidence to suggest his fulfilled his military obligation, that was deemed "irrelevant" by the same press corps sent into a frenzy investigating whether Al Gore served as the inspiration for Erich Segal's "Love Story. ...During the past four weeks since the issue finally resurfaced thanks to Michael Moore and Wesley Clark, we've learned few if any facts we didn't know in 2000. Back then media agreed it didn't matter. Now that we've got a president who deliberately misled the nation into war, will not admit that he was wrong about the threat presented by Iraq, and is no longer trusted by a majority of Americans to tell the truth, we find that "character" does indeed matter. Too bad the media can't make up their minds about just what it means.

The Bush Tax Increase
Center for American Progress, 20 February 2004
Download: DOC, RTF, PDF
EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION: President Bush said on 2/12/04 that "we cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." However, for the majority of Americans, the tax cuts meant very little. By next year, for instance, 88% of all Americans will receive $100 or less from the Administration's latest tax cuts. But even above and beyond this, the tax cuts and the deficits they have created have forced the Administration to raise fees and cut services for most Americans – which is an effective tax increase on average Americans. In many ways, the Administration's fiscal/budget policies are actually taking more money out of people's pockets.

Bush Budget Clearly Tailored for Election Year
Economic Policy Institute, week of 23 February
EXCERPT: The centerpiece of the Bush Administration's fiscal policy is a pledge to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009.  To make this a serious possibility, the budget would need a politically unappetizing combination of tax increases and spending cuts.  At the same time, election-year politics are driving many of the budget decisions.  The result is a pattern in the budget numbers where the appearance of increases is contradicted by the reality of the long-term budget averages.  In particular, the administration asks for immediate increases in politically sensitive spending, while at the same time reducing subsequent spending that undercuts its commitments for 2005.

Bush Shifts Campaign to More Aggressive Mode
By Steve Holland
Reuters via FindLaw.com, 21 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush's re-election team said on Sunday Bush is shifting his campaign into a more aggressive mode to take on critics after weeks of Democratic attacks that have contributed to slumping job approval ratings. The shift comes as many Republicans fret that Bush has been on the defensive all year over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a U.S. economic recovery that has failed to generate a lot of job growth in some November battleground states like Ohio and Michigan. The first move will be a new, more confrontational stump speech to be given by the president on Monday night to the Republican Governors Association. It will lay out many of the themes to be debated over the next eight months. ...The campaign on Monday will also call key television markets nationwide to begin buying advertising time for the first barrage of Bush ads. ...The ads will be the first television buys for the campaign that has so far raised a record $143.6 million and has about $104 million on hand. ...The Bush campaign will also dispatch surrogates to states where Democratic candidates are campaigning to respond directly to criticism.

The U.S. Prison State
by Marilyn Buck
The Monthly Review, February issue
EXCERPT: The United States is the world’s primary example of a country that deals with its social, economic, and cultural problems by incarceration. But this is its history. Prisons are the logical outcome of the country’s foundation on the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the “manifest destiny” of imperial settlerism—from sea to shining sea. Prison Nation is a recently-released anthology of essays on both the state of U.S. prisons and the U.S. prison state. ...The central theme of Prison Nation is the economic dynamic and roles of prisons in U.S. capitalism, that is, the prison-industrial complex. This anthology does an excellent job of analyzing and describing how the prison-industrial complex works as an integral part of U.S. capitalism by generating large profits for corporations. Essays and case studies detail how the incorporation of prisons into the system of capital accumulation was accomplished, both through changes in the criminal code and business law and the manipulation of public perceptions and fears. In “The Politics of Prison Labor,” Gordon Lafer explains the interplay of political expediency, taxes, and budgets: “When the economy goes into a recession, the supply of decently paid jobs will shrink...some numbers of [the laid-off and fired] will engage in nonviolent crimes...[and end up incarcerated]....It is important to note that this cycle is not the result of a conscious conspiracy among public officials...it is, rather, the natural result of each party pursuing its own rational interests under current conditions.” (Italics in original.)

28-29 February 2004

Bush-Powell Sanctioned Haiti Coup Now In Play
Under Pressure, Aristide Leaves, Thugs Run Amuck
By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN
New York Times, 29 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Jean-Bertrand Aristide left Haiti Sunday at dawn, resigning under intense pressure from the United States, according to Haitian and American officials. Mr. Aristide was Haiti's first democratically elected president in the island’s 200 years of independence. But his presidency crumbled as armed rebels seized Haiti’s north this month and Bush administration officials took an “Aristide must go” stance this weekend. The rebels, led by veterans of Haiti’s army, disbanded by Mr. Aristide, had threatened to attack the capital unless the president left power. Mr. Aristide flew from Haiti on a small jet that left Port-au-Prince at about 6:45 a.m, according to a United States official here, bound for the neighboring Dominican Republic. If Haiti’s constitution holds over the coming hours, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Boniface Alexandre, would be sworn in as the head of a transitional government until elections to be held in 2005. It remains to be seen if Mr. Alexandre will be acceptable to the armed rebels.

White House Continues to Distance Itself From Haiti's Leader
By DAVID STOUT
New York Times, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: The administration continued to distance itself today from the embattled president of Haiti, and three Democratic senators sharply criticized President Bush's approach to that country's troubles. Mr. Bush, when asked whether he thought President Jean-Bertrand Aristide should resign, replied that "the secretary of state has made some comments." Those comments by Secretary Colin L. Powell on Thursday were unmistakably tepid about Mr. Aristide, as Mr. Powell virtually invited the Haitian leader to consider stepping down for the good of his people. Mr. Bush, speaking at an appearance today with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, did nothing to dilute Mr. Powell's remarks. "We're interested in achieving a political settlement, and we're still working to that effect," Mr. Bush said. Mr. Bush said the United States and other countries had been planning for a multinational force to deliver aid to Haiti or help impose stability upon the nation "dependent upon a political settlement." Such contingency planning is not unusual in itself and does not necessarily signal that any military operation is imminent.

UN Weapons Inspector Blix Believes He Was Targeted by US/UK Bugs
Ewen MacAskill
Guardian, 28 February 2004
EXCERPT: The United Nations spying row widened yesterday when its former weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the Guardian he suspected both his UN office and his home in New York were bugged in the run-up to the Iraq war. In an exclusive interview, Mr Blix said he expected to be bugged by the Iraqis, but to be spied upon by the US was a different matter. He described such behaviour as "disgusting", adding: "It feels like an intrusion into your integrity in a situation when you are actually on the same side." He said he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his office and home, having a UN counter-surveillance team sweep both for bugs. "If you had something sensitive to talk about you would go out into the restaurant or out into the streets," he said.
SEE ALSO: Blair Offers No Denial to UN Spying Allegations (DNow!)

Bush Overturns Clinton's Ban on Use of Land Mines
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: The new policy, due to be announced today, represents a departure from the previous U.S. goal of banning all land mines designed to kill troops. That plan, established by President Bill Clinton, set a target of 2006 for giving up antipersonnel mines, depending on the success of Pentagon efforts to develop alternatives.... Bush's decision drew expressions of outrage and surprise from representatives of humanitarian organizations that have pressed for a more comprehensive U.S. ban on land mines. They say the danger to civilians and allied soldiers during and after a war outweighs the benefits of such weapons. They also dispute the contention that unexploded smart mines are safe, saying there isn't enough evidence to know. "We expected we wouldn't be pleased by the president's decision, but we hadn't expected a complete rejection of what has been U.S. policy for the past 10 years," said Steve Goose, who heads the arms division of Human Rights Watch. "It looks like a victory for those in the Pentagon who want to cling to outmoded weapons, and a failure of political leadership on the part of the White House. And it is stunningly at odds with what's happening in the rest of the world, where governments and armies are giving up these weapons."
SEE ALSO: The Exuberance of American Military Spending (Le Monde)
SEE ALSO: U.S. Reverses Land Mine Pledge, Draws Anger (Reuters in NYT)

Politics, Not Actions, Determine Who the US Labels 'Terrorist'
By John Feffer
TomPaine.com, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: People in the business of conflict resolution routinely intervene in bloody, horrific wars and, by talking to all sides involved, try to guide the actors toward a more peaceful conclusion. Sounds like noble work, right? Not always, according to the USA PATRIOT Act. It all depends on whether the peace professionals are talking with terrorists, and "terrorism" is very much in the eye of the (U.S.) beholder. The PATRIOT Act‹a sweeping assault on civil liberties approved just after September 11 by every U.S. Senator except Russ Feingold, D-Wis.‹includes a provision that criminalizes "expert advice and assistance" provided to terrorist organizations. As a result, anyone who provides advice on how to exit violent conflict to any of the 36 organizations on the State Department¹s terrorism list could be liable for criminal prosecution. So, for instance, the World Tamil Coordinating Committee of Jamaica, New York, is potentially breaking the law by trying to help negotiate a permanent peace agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the opposition Tamil Tigers.

The Rumsfeld-Bush Legal Black Hole: Powers Formerly Reserved Only for Kings
By Nat Hentoff
Village Voice, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: The authority to unilaterally keep a defendant locked up--conceivably for the rest of his or her life--used to be reserved solely for kings, who could ignore any part of the realm's legal system. This monarchical power--as I've indicated in reporting on the indefinite imprisonment, without charges, of American citizens Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla‹has been expanded by George W. Bush to include defendants at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court of the United States will decide, during the current term, whether the prisoners at Guantánamo have any recourse to our civilian courts to challenge the Bush-Rumsfeld power to keep them in a legal black hole. This hole is now so bottomless that even if some were to be convicted by an American military tribunal, they might never be released--no matter what their sentences were.

 AUDIO LINK
The Struggle for Iran
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 26 February 2004
Expert panel discusses the implications of political turmoil in Iran. Carnegie analysts Daniel Brumberg, Hadi Semati, and George Perkovich are also available to comment on the 25th anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Feb. 20 elections, and continued concern about its nuclear programs. Click here to listen to audio from the event.

27 February 2004

Selective Democracy: Bush Supports Thugs Over Elected Government
UN Calls Crisis Meeting on Haiti
ABC News On-line, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: The United Nations Security Council says it will hold an urgent meeting on the crisis in Haiti and has taken the country's political opposition to task for rejecting an international plan to stop the bloodshed. The 15-nation council will meet at the request of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), calling for the session "in light of the steadily deteriorating situation which affects peace and stability in the region". But no council action is expected, despite the fact that the United States and France are already engaged in talks on whether an international force should be dispatched to the country.
SEE ALSO: Haiti's Lawyer: US Is Arming Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries, Calls For UN Peacekeepers (Znet)
by Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill
Democracynow.org, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: The US lawyer representing the government of Haiti charged today that the US government is directly involved in a military coup attempt against the country's democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Ira Kurzban, the Miami-based attorney who has served as General Counsel to the Haitian government since 1991, said that the paramilitaries fighting to overthrow Aristide are being backed by Washington.
SEE ALSO: Haiti's Terrorists Got a Free Pass
GORDON BARTHOS
Toronto Star, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is on his knees begging the world to come to Haiti's aid before chaos and anarchy merge into massacre. ...In truth, Aristide should have had that help 10 days ago when a motley crew of 300 former death squad leaders, cashiered army officers and street thugs began terrorizing the country. ...They could have been stopped. And should have been. After all, U.S. President George Bush spared no rhetoric or energy rallying the world against the Al Qaeda killers who struck on 9/11. He defined the "war on terror" as a global moral crusade against the dark forces of anarchy. Spent $100 billion chasing Al Qaeda through Afghanistan and Iraq. But Bush's moral indignation and crusading zeal were nowhere in evidence as Haiti fell prey to terror.

US/UK Spying at the UN
Britain's Spying Shame
Fury at claims Britain spied on UN
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
Independent, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: Britain faced deep international embarrassment last night after the former cabinet minister Clare Short claimed that its security services spied on Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, in the run-up to last year's Iraq war. A furious Tony Blair condemned Ms Short as "deeply irresponsible" and accused her of threatening Britain's national security by attacking the security services. Last night she returned to the attack, claiming that the Prime Minister had stopped short of denying her claims because he knew that they were true.
SEE ALSO: Blunkett: Short Inquiry Not Ruled Out  (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Press Review: Short Shrift (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Bugging for Britain? (Guardian)

Shiite Leader Accepts U.N. Vote Timetable
Al-Sistani calls for Iraq elections by year end
Associated Press in MSNBC News, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: Iraq’s most prominent Shiite Muslim cleric on Thursday called for elections by the end of the year, signaling that he would accept an interim government but offering a strict time-frame after the United States hands over power. ...Al-Sistani said the “unelected government” that will take power June 30 must have a “limited and clear mandate” to remain in office “for a few months only.” ...Al-Sistani said Iraq was now facing political factionalism that he had “tried to overcome by calling for direct elections.”

UN Spying and Evasions of American Journalism
by Norman Solomon
Antiwar.com, 27 February 2004
EXCERPT: Few can doubt that some major British news outlets will thoroughly dig below the surface of Short's charges. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the journalistic evasion on the subject of U.N. spying has been so extreme that we can have no confidence in the mainstream media's inclination to adequately cover this new bombshell. For 51 weeks – from the day that the Observer newspaper in London broke the news about spying at the United Nations until the moment that British prosecutors dropped charges against Gun on Wednesday – major news outlets in the United States almost completely ignored the story. The Observer's expose, under the headline "Revealed: U.S. Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War," came 18 days before the invasion of Iraq began. By unveiling a top secret U.S. National Security Agency memo, the newspaper provided key information when it counted most: before the war started.

26 February 2004

US and UK Spy on UN Members and UN Staff
· UK spied on Annan, says ex-minister
· UN: espionage 'illegal'
· Blair: intelligence agencies acted lawfully
George Wright, Martin Nicholls and Matthew Tempest
Guardian, 26 February 2004
Read the full transcript of Clare Short's BBC interview
EXCERPT: Tony Blair today called his former cabinet minister Clare Short "totally irresponsible" for publicly claiming that British agents had spied on Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The issue dominated the prime minister's monthly press briefing. He told reporters that it was impossible for him to confirm or deny the allegation without compromising the work of the British security services. Mr Blair insisted that intelligence officers always acted within the bounds of national and international law.
SEE ALSO: How a US Bugging Operation Was Exposed by One Lone Whistleblower (Guardian)

British Spy Case Casts Doubts on Legality of Iraq War
Guardian (UK), 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: Dramatic new evidence pointing to serious doubts in the government about the legality of the war in Iraq was passed to government lawyers shortly before they abandoned the prosecution of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. The prosecution offered no evidence yesterday against Ms Gun, a former GCHQ employee, despite her admitting that she leaked information about an American spying operation at the UN in the run-up to the war. She said she acted to try to prevent Britain illegally invading Iraq. But the prosecution at the Old Bailey said there was no "realistic prospect" of convicting her. She was arrested nearly a year ago and charged eight months later under the Official Secrets Act. The leading prosecutor, Mark Ellison, said it would not be "appropriate" to go into the reasons for dropping the case.
SEE ALSO: Exclusive Interview With Katherine Gun (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: How Lone Whistleblower Exposed US Bugging Operation (Guardian)

Bring Me the Head of Osama bin Laden
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: The war in eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas in Pakistan is barely on, but the Pentagon's spinning machine is in high gear. Who will prevail: al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman "The Surgeon" al-Zawahiri, or Commando 121? The Pentagon's creative directors ruled that Commando 121, or Task Force 121, of General William Boykin - a self-described Islamophobe and a known Christian fanatic - was responsible for the capture of Saddam Hussein, when in fact the former dictator was arrested by Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitary) forces acting on a tip by one of his cousins and then sold to the Americans, according to Asia Times Online sources in the Sunni triangle. This week, without a blip in many a strategic radar screen, Commando 121 transferred from Iraq to Pakistan. On October 25 of last year, Asia Times Online reported that Boykin had been appointed in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It's snowing on Rumsfeld's parade. European intelligence sources tell Asia Times Online to expect the same scenario "Saddam" for the eventuality of the capture of bin Laden and Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Omar. Bin Laden will be "smoked out", probably on a tip by an Afghan tribal leader willing to make a cool US$25 million. And all credit will go to the secretive Commando 121, which is known to comprise navy Seals and commandos from the army's Delta Force.

And Now for Something Really Dangerous
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: Engaged in a post-Cold-War global arms-race-of-one, the Pentagon is the sole part of our government determinedly focused on planning for the distant future rather than making hay while the sun shines now. We're talking, of course, about people (or their predecessors) who, from the 1950s on, spent remarkable amounts of time, in Herman Kahn's phrase, "thinking the unthinkable." They are all-stars at war-gaming the nuclear destruction of the Earth or, more modestly, the deaths of hundreds of millions of us humans in various first, second, and third-strike scenarios. By the way, for those of you who think all this has ended, wake up and smell the fumes. In a post-Cold-War world where paths to nuclear abolition were never considered, nuclear-armed nations abound. Putin's Russia only recently conducted large-scale nuclear games with its aging nuclear arsenal. Based on possible first-strike scenarios, they actually test-fired ICBMs from submarines in two tests that went disastrously amiss (which may almost be more frightening than tests that go well).
SEE ALSO: Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark (Bruce Blair, CDI)

Guess Who's in the Driver's Seat? Not the US
By Larry Niksch
Asia Times, 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: Expressions of skepticism about US claims of a secret North Korean highly enriched uranium (HEU) program now come from Chinese, Russian and South Korean officials. North Korea is receiving cash (US$50 million in October) and increased fuel and food from China, economic aid from South Korea, and further economic aid from Russia. Even the Bush administration has offered North Korea "security assurances", which would be more concessionary than the nuclear-security guarantee offered in the 1994 Agreed Framework. North Korea's successes are the result of a negotiating strategy that plays on the psychological fears of the other parties coupled with a concerted propaganda strategy to advance Pyongyang's agenda.

Be all you can be...
IDF Takes a Chapter from "Bonnie and Clyde"
Israelis, in Raid on Arab Banks, Seize Reputed Terrorist Funds
By JAMES BENNET
New York Times, 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: Israeli forces raided Arab banks on Wednesday in Ramallah, on the West Bank, seizing millions of dollars representing hundreds of institutional and personal accounts that Israel said were financing Palestinian terrorism. It was by far the largest such seizure during more than three years of conflict. Witnesses said soldiers covered the banks' security cameras with black plastic bags and herded all the employees together before ordering workers with keys to open the vaults. ...In Washington, the State Department criticized the raid. "Some of these actions that were taken risk destabilizing the Palestinian banking system," said Richard A. Boucher, the department spokesman. "So we'd prefer to see Israeli coordination with the Palestinian financial authorities."
SEE ALSO:
Israeli Army Seizes Millions from Palestinian Banks
By Conal Urquhart
Guardian (UK), 26 February 2004
EXCERPT: Israeli forces seized up to £6m in currency from four banks in Ramallah yesterday, claiming the money was destined for Palestinian militants. Dozens of army vehicles arrived in the centre of the West Bank city, and troops confined bank staff to rooms while intelligence officials began searching records. The army had already arrested two bank computer systems managers the previous night to aid them in their search. Soldiers entered the banks and covered closed circuit television cameras with sacks before checking the identity of customers and allowing them to leave.

25 February 2004

 AUDIO LINK
Haiti: Looking for Answers
PRI's It's Your Call with Laura Flanders, 23 February 2004
With rebels claiming to control half of Haiti, and declaring that they'll march on Port-au-Prince in the next two weeks, where should American progressives stand on the crisis in Haiti? What's the truth about charges of corruption and thuggery under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Who's behind the opposition -- armed and unarmed -- in Haiti? And did the U.S. -- in spite of its recent peacemaking overtures -- play a role destabilizing Haiti under Aristide? Listen now.

AUDIO LINK
Iran
Diane Rehm Show
23 February 2004

Friday's parliamentary elections in Iran have been described as the last nail in the coffin of the reform movement. Others believe it's just one chapter in a story that will end in a free, democratic Iran. A panel talks about the elections and how they might affect Iran's relations with the rest of the world.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, former Middle East specialist for the CIA and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Ambassador Sam Lewis, former director of policy and planning for the State Department in the Clinton administration
M. Hadi Semati, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and professor of political science at the University of Tehran

Suicide Bombing in Iraq kills at Least 7
By Tarek al-Issawi, Associated Press, 2/24/2004
Boston Globe, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: A suicide bomber exploded a white Oldsmobile outside a police station in this northern city yesterday, killing at least seven policemen and wounding as many as 52 other people. It was the fifth suicide attack in Iraq this month. The bombing occurred as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Baghdad to check on the state of readiness of Iraq's security forces, which have born the brunt of the suicide strikes. US administrator L. Paul Bremer III told reporters after meeting with Rumsfeld that Iraq has seen "a real step up" by "professional terrorists from Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam in conducting suicide attacks." Kirkuk has also seen rising ethnic tensions as Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen compete for control of the city, located in one of the world's richest oil-producing regions, 180 miles north of Baghdad.

Rumsfeld Tries to Keep Pressure on Syria and Iran
By John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press
Boston Globe, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: Rumsfeld said Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran, should be pressured to interdict fighters trying to cross into Iraq. "Syria and Iran have not been helpful to the people of Iraq. Indeed, they've been unhelpful," Rumsfeld said. "They've allowed people to move from their countries to Iraq to engage in terrorist activities against the Iraqi people." Asked whether those countries' governments were condoning the infiltrators or simply not preventing them, Rumsfeld responded with a litany of criticisms of both countries. "We know that Iran has harbored Al Qaeda," he said, referring to senior operatives who crossed into Iran from Afghanistan more than a year ago, many of whom the Iranians said they captured and deported. "We know they've had people moving across the border. They're certainly aware of that; they have border patrols. We know that Syria has been a hospitable place for escaping Iraqis." "Let there be no doubt, the powers that be in Syria and Iran are not wishing the free Iraqi people well," Rumsfeld said. It was not the first time Rumsfeld has accused the two countries of actions that harm US interests in Iraq, although other US officials have said there is little sign of direct Syrian or Iranian meddling. Neither country has had a history of friendship with Iraq, especially under Hussein. A senior US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said last week the Americans believe that Iran has a presence in Iraq, but it is not threatening and is in line with what would be expected of a neighboring country. US officials do not see the Iranian presence as a threat to the development of democracy in Iraq, the official said. Iraq's majority population belongs to Islam's Shi'ite sect, the same as Iran's, but the Iranians are of Persian stock, not Arab like the Iraqis. The origins of those fighting the insurgency inside Iraq remain murky, particularly the extent of their relationship with the Al Qaeda network.

The Iraqi Monkey Crisis
By Mark Engler
TomPaine.com, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: I haven't watched Thirteen Days recently, but I think it's safe to say that if George W. Bush were president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we'd all be dead. In the fall of 2002, on the 40th anniversary of the crisis, President Bush tried to evoke John F. Kennedy to justify his impending attack on Iraq: "As President Kennedy said in October of 1962," Bush quoted with brazen disregard for irony, "the world community of nations [cannot] tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small." Of course, there's no real comparison between Saddam's scheming and the deployment of Soviet nukes a short swim from the Florida coast. But now that the Bush administration mentions it, there is a point to reflecting on the analogy. Not only does it demonstrate a disturbing level of delusion within the White House, it raises frightening questions about what would happen if Bush actually faced a serious threat.

Global Economy 'Must Adjust to Include Millions it Puts in Poverty'
By Charlotte Denny
Guardian (UK), 25 February 2004
EXCERPT: World leaders must address the "ethical vacuum" at the heart of globalisation or face the danger that the widening gap between rich and poor will lead to further conflict, political upheaval and war, the International Labour Organisation said yesterday. Its year-long commission on globalisation has concluded that the deep-seated and persistent imbalances in the workings of the global economy are unsustainable. Without fairer rules governing trade flows, immigration and labour standards, billions will continue to miss out on the rising global prosperity, prompting a fresh wave of international instability. "Global governance is in crisis," the report said. "We are at a critical juncture and we need urgently to rethink our current policies and institutions. The economy is becoming increasingly global, while social and political institutions remain largely local, national or regional."
SEE ALSO: Quagmire World (TomDispatch)
SEE ALSO: Consent of the Governed: The reign of corporations and the fight for democracy (Orion)
EXCERPT: Despite their enormous ramifications, most international trade agreements remain a mystery to the average American. At the core, they are simple. GATT and NAFTA cover the trade of physical goods between countries. They can be used to override any country's protection of the environment, for example, or of workers' rights, by defining relevant laws and regulations as illegal "barriers to trade." They provide for a "dispute resolution" process, but the process routinely determines such laws to be in violation of the agreements.

The Eleventh Hundred Days Quiz
The New Yorker, 23 February 2004
Paul Slansky's multiple-choice quiz on Bush's three most recent months in office.
EXCERPT: When a reporter suggested that the Bush Administration’s refusal to allow France, Germany, and Russia to bid on Iraq reconstruction projects might violate international law, what did George W. Bush say?
(a) “Haven’t you seen what I think of international law?”
(b) “Well, I guess they’ll just have to put me in international jail.” (c) “International law? I better call my lawyer; he didn’t bring that up to me.”
(d) “You know what violated international law? 9/11.”

24 February 2004

 AUDIO LINK
The Terrorist Threat to Democracy in Iraq
NPR's Day to Day, 24 February 2004
NPR's Alex Chadwick talks with journalist George Packer about how terrorism threatens the latest efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. Packer's latest article in The New Yorker looks at the ways terrorism is used as an instrument for political change.

Helping Haiti--Ten Years After
George Packer
New Yorker, 1 March issue
EXCERPT: Regardless of historical obligations and humanitarian concerns, it’s not a good precedent to allow an elected President to be toppled by armed gangs. But Aristide himself must be forced to share power before his term ends, in two years. Belatedly, an American team has been dispatched to Port-au-Prince, along with French, Canadian, and other negotiators, to try to broker a solution. By now, though, the violence has probably spread too far to be contained without more muscular intervention. The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, has made noises about sending peacekeepers under a United Nations mandate. A joint Franco-American action in Haiti could help remedy more than one foreign-policy disaster.

Pentagon Opens Criminal Inquiry of Halliburton Pricing
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
New York Times, 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: Pentagon officials said Monday night that they have opened a criminal fraud investigation of Halliburton, the giant Texas oil-services concern, in an inquiry that will examine "potential overpricing" of fuel taken into Iraq by one of the company's subcontractors. A Pentagon official said the investigation is focused on the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has drawn fire from critics in Congress since the disclosure in December that Pentagon auditors had found evidence that it had allowed a Kuwaiti subcontractor, Altanmia, to overcharge the government by at least $61 million for fuel shipped into Iraq from Kuwait.

Bush 'Wanted War' in 2002
By Julian Borger
Guardian (UK), 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: George Bush set the US on the path to war in Iraq with a formal order signed in February 2002, more than a year before the invasion, according to a book published yesterday. The revelation casts doubt on the public insistence by US and British officials throughout 2002 that no decision had been taken to go to war, pending negotiations at the United Nations. Rumsfeld's War is by Rowan Scarborough, the Pentagon correspondent for the conservative Washington Times newspaper, which is known for its contacts in the defence department's civilian leadership. "On February 16 2002, Bush signed a secret national security council directive establishing the goals and objectives for going to war with Iraq, according to classified documents I obtained," Mr Scarborough wrote, in an account of the "global war on terrorism" as seen from the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary.
SEE ALSO: Car Bomber Hits Iraqi Police Station (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Was it Worth It? Ask Those Who Know (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Amnesty Barred from Guantanamo Trials (Guardian)

Depleted Uranium: The Crime That Has No End
UN Observer, 20 February 2004
EXCERPT: The international dispatches about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq - replete with graphic details about overcrowded hospitals, U.S. cluster bomb shrapnel buried in the flesh of children, babies deformed by U.S. depleted uranium, farms and markets destroyed by U.S. bombs ­ do not make pleasant reading. The mounting evidence from the invasion of Iraq establishes what many Americans may not want to face: that the highest leaders of our land violated many international agreements relating to the rules of war. Unless we address the war crimes of the Bush administration - and the prima facie evidence is overwhelming - we betray our conscience, our country, and our own faith in democracy.
SEE ALSO: W.H.O. 'Suppressed' Study into Depleted Uranium in Iraq (ICH)
SEE ALSO: Effects of War on Iraq (TraprockPeace.org)

Democracy in Afghanistan, or Authoritatarian State in Construction?
By Meena Nanji
ZNet, 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: With Iraq an unmitigated disaster and a U.S election approaching in November 2004, U.S President George Bush desperately needs a success story in his foreign policy pursuits to justify the unleashing of the U.S's gargantuan military might against impoverished nations. What better way than to trumpet the triumph of 'democracy' - that sacrosanct term that opens the hearts of ordinary Americans eager to believe that their government is doing 'Right' in the world. With plans for Iraq's installation of 'democracy' proving far too popular with the 'wrong' kind of people for Washington's tastes, Afghanistan seems to be once again cast to serve the Bush administration's needs, this time by being paraded as the grateful - and successful - recipient of US-exported 'democracy'.

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Hits the Hague
By Ian Black
Guardian (UK), 24 February 2004
EXCERPT: Israel's case is that its 450-mile barrier is designed to prevent such atrocities, not to grab more Arab land. "Stop terror and the walls come down," declared the placards of its supporters in the designated demonstration area opposite the court. Inside the chamber, Nasser al-Qidwa, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, was disagreeing - Israel's wall would render it "practically impossible" to build a viable Palestinian state. "This wall is not about security," he said. "It is about entrenching the occupation and the de facto annexation of large areas of Palestinian land." Out on the cold pavement it was atrocity for atrocity.
SEE ALSO: Protests as Israel's Barrier is Challenged (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Chomsky: A Wall as a Weapon (ZNet)
ZNet, 23 February 2004
EXCERPT: It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else. Careful scrutiny is always in order. Israel's so-called security fence, which is the subject of hearings starting today at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is a case in point.

CIA Struggles to Spy in Iraq, Afghanistan
Security problems and short-term assignments hamstring the agency, sources say. Its Baghdad chief is again replaced and outposts are closed.
By Greg Miller and Bob Drogin, Times Staff Writers
LA Times, 20 February 2004
EXCERPT: Confronting problems on critical fronts, the CIA recently removed its top officer in Baghdad because of questions about his ability to lead the massive station there, and has closed a number of satellite bases in Afghanistan amid concerns about that country's deteriorating security situation, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The previously undisclosed moves underscore the problems affecting the agency's clandestine service at a time when it is confronting insurgencies and the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, current and former CIA officers say. They said a series of stumbles and operational constraints have hampered the agency's ability to penetrate the insurgency in Iraq, find Osama bin Laden and gain traction against terrorism in the Middle East. The CIA's Baghdad station has become the largest in agency history, eclipsing the size of its post in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, a U.S. official said. But sources said the agency has struggled to fill a number of key overseas posts. Many of those who do take sensitive overseas assignments are willing to serve only 30- to 90-day rotations, a revolving-door approach that has undercut the agency's ability to cultivate ties to warlords in Afghanistan or collect intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency, sources said. There is such a shortage of Arabic speakers and qualified case officers willing to take dangerous assignments that the agency has been forced to hire dozens — if not hundreds — of CIA retirees, and to lean heavily on translators, sources said. The agency has also had to use soldiers for tasks that CIA officers normally perform, sources said. Even without the personnel challenges, Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as so dangerous that it is difficult for agency officers to venture outside guarded districts and compounds without security details, making covert meetings with informants extremely difficult, sources said. CIA officials said Thursday that the agency had no shortage of eager volunteers for tough assignments, or any lack of resolve in the war on terrorism. But current and former officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agency was confronting one of the most difficult challenges in its history.

23 February 2004

Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us
By Mark Townsend and Paul Harris
Observer (UK), 22 February 2004
EXCERPT: Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents. 'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.' The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The Wall is Illegal, Now We Must Stop It
By Jamal Juma
ZNet, 22 February 2004
EXCERPT: The Apartheid Wall, which began being built in the Occupied West Bank in June 2002, is nearly one third complete. It snakes its way deep inside the West Bank, devouring fertile land into de facto Israeli controlled areas, encircling residential areas, ghettoizing and imprisoning the Palestinian population. That the Wall is a violation of international law is not new. Countless reports have come out from Palestinian and international sources discussing the extent to which the Wall is illegal, and the way in which such a crime manifests itself in the daily violation of individual and collective rights. The UN has stated clearly, in the General Assembly and in various reports of its related agencies, that the Wall is illegal and should be stopped and dismantled. But, no report is needed to highlight the atrocity that is taking place in the occupied territory. The 90,000 people that are already directly affected by the Wall's 140 km "first phase" are well aware that their entire lives have been shattered, that their incomes, dignity, children's future, and heritage were uprooted in a matter of weeks or months as bulldozers leveled their lands in order to confiscate and isolate them.
SEE ALSO: America is Complicit in Illegal Wall (Common Dreams)
SEE ALSO: Refusal is In the Air (ZNet)
SEE ALSO: Case Set Out Against Israeli Barrier (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: In the Shadow of Sharon's Wall (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: 'Europe Must Stifle Anti-Semitism' (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Suicide Bomber Kills Eight (Guardian)

Shiite Leader: Stop ‘Stalling’ on Elections
Member of council wants guarantees by the coalition
Associated Press, 22 February 2004
EXCERPT: A leading Shiite member of Iraq’s U.S.-appointed Governing Council on Sunday demanded no more “stalling” on arranging for elections for a new government. ...U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday the insurgents were trying to create strife among Iraqis as a means toward frustrating U.S. interests there, but it’s not working. ...Meanwhile, in an interview broadcast Sunday by Al-Jazeera television, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric and Governing Council member, said the U.S.-run coalition should have begun planning for elections months ago. Al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, wanted guarantees that “there’ll be no more stalling as was the case in the past.” ...Some key Shiite figures have signaled they might accept a limited delay in elections if the government that takes power from the coalition June 30 has only limited powers and will arrange a national vote as soon as possible. The Shiites fear an appointed government might try to postpone elections indefinitely to keep itself in power. ...The United States is keen to meet the June 30 deadline to deprive the Democrats of an election issue in the November U.S. presidential election. The transfer of power will mean a formal end to the U.S.-led occupation, even though U.S. and international troops will remain in Iraq. But Washington hopes that a new Iraqi government will take the steam out of the insurgency once Iraqis regain control of their own country.

Kurds Reject Key Parts of Proposed Iraq Constitution
Group demands far broader autonomy
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post via MSNBC, 21 February 2004
EXCERPT: Kurdish leaders are refusing to accept key provisions of an interim Iraqi constitution drafted by the Bush administration and instead are demanding far broader autonomy, including the right to control military forces in Kurdish areas and the freedom to reject laws passed by the national government, Kurdish officials said Friday. The position adopted by the Kurds, an ethnic group that accounts for about 20 percent of Iraq's predominantly Arab population, threatens to block approval of the interim constitution by Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council and deal another setback to the Bush administration's effort to create a sovereign transitional government. Arab leaders oppose almost all of the Kurds' demands, which would effectively preserve an autonomous Kurdish mini-state in northern Iraq with its own army, laws, tax system, judiciary and parliament.

C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times, 21 February 2004
Courtesy of Cursor.org
EXCERPT: The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons. The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials. Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as "high value and moderate value" in the weapons hunt. The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible. In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as "totally unacceptable." ...The acknowledgment by the agency came after more than a year of questions from Senator Levin. He said he believed that the Bush administration had withheld the information because it wanted to persuade the American people that the United Nations-led hunt for weapons in Iraq had run its full course before the war. [bwusa empahsis]

A Precarious Existence: The Fate of Billions?
by Fred Magdoff
The Monthly Review, February issue
EXCERPT: The Wretched of the Earth The number of people living a precarious existence has been increasing in many countries of the world, with hunger all too widespread. There are approximately 6 billion people in the world, with about half living in cities and half in rural areas. Between the poor living in cities and those in rural areas, a vast number of the world’s people live under very harsh conditions. It is estimated that that about half of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars per day, with most of those either chronically malnourished or continually concerned with where their next meal will come from. Many have no access to clean water (1 billion), electricity (2 billion), or sanitation (2.5 billion). Of the 3 billion inhabitants of cities, a recent United Nations report indicates that close to 1 billion live in slums—that number vastly expanded during the so-called boom years of the 1990s. It is estimated that over the next 50 years the number living in slums will increase by about 300 percent (The Challenge of Slums—Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, UN Human Settlements Program).

21-22 February 2004

Iraq Elections May Be Over 15 Months Away
AP via Yahoo!News, 21 February 2004
EXCERPT: Iraq's U.S. administrator said it could take up to 15 months to hold elections _ much longer than Shiites seem prepared to accept _ while an Iraqi was killed and four U.S. soldiers wounded Saturday in one of several scattered attacks. U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television station that the absence of election laws, voters lists and reliable census data were obstacles to a quick election. "These technical problems will take time to fix," he said in an interview with the station Friday that was broadcast Saturday. "The U.N. estimates somewhere between a year and 15 months." Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, demanded elections to choose a legislature before the planned June 30 transfer of power from the U.S.-led coalition to the Iraqis.

Al Qaeda Link To Iraq As Elusive as WMDs
By DOUGLAS JEHL
New York Times, 21 February 2004
EXCERPT: Since before the American invasion, Bush administration officials have portrayed Al Qaeda and Ansar as close associates and used the links as part of their justification for war against Saddam Hussein's government. The officials declined this week to say how American intelligence agencies had learned that members of Al Qaeda had rebuffed Mr. Zarqawi's proposal. One of his top lieutenants, Hassan Ghul, has been in American custody for several weeks. ...officials said, there are growing indications that the two groups are distinct and independent, and are embracing different tactics and agendas. A recent report by the State Department's intelligence branch emphasizes those differences, according to American officials who have read the classified document. "Even among Sunni Muslim extremists and committed terrorists, including Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, there can be extreme discrepancies about strategy and tactics," one senior official said. "This is not a world of homogeneous bad guys." Even if Mr. Zarqawi and Ansar are not working closely with Al Qaeda, they appear to be getting logistical support from outside Iraq, the American officials said. A recent report by one intelligence agency shows lines of support, including supplies, money and recruiting, that extend to Mr. Zarqawi's group from neighboring countries, including Iran, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Mr. Zarqawi himself has traveled in and out of Iraq from Iran, where he took refuge after the American invasion last March, and from Syria, two military officials said. In public reports and private statements, American intelligence officials have been careful to portray Mr. Zarqawi as an associate of Al Qaeda rather than as a member. But before the American invasion, Bush administration officials portrayed Mr. Zarqawi's presence in Iraq, which they said required the support of Mr. Hussein's government, as their best evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the United Nations Security Council last February. American intelligence officials continue to describe Ansar, which has many foreign members, as the most dangerous terrorist network operating in Iraq. By contrast, the evidence since the war began of operations inside Iraq by Al Qaeda has been limited and generally inconclusive, American officials say. American intelligence officers believe Qaeda leaders to be in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Bin Laden `Boxed In'??
Sunday Times (AU), 22 February 2004
EXCERPT: A British Sunday newspaper claims that Osama bin Laden has been found and is surrounded by US special forces in an area of land bordering northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Sunday Express, known for its sometimes colourful scoops, claims the al-Qaida leader has been "sighted" for the first time since 2001 and is being monitored by satellite. The paper claims bin Laden is in a mountainous area to the north of the Pakistani city of Quetta whose inhabitants are known bin Laden supporters. Bin Laden is also estimated to have 50 of his own bodyguards with him. The claim is attributed by the paper to "a well-placed intelligence source" in Washington who is quoted as saying: "He (bin Laden) is boxed in." The paper says the hostile terrain makes an all-out conventional military assault impossible. The plan to capture him would depend on a "grab-him-and-go" style operation. "US helicopters already sited on the Afghanistan border will swoop in to extricate him," the paper says. The report goes on to say bin Laden and his men "sleep in caves or out in the open. The area is swept by fierce snowstorms howling down from the 10,000-feet high mountain peaks. Donkeys are the only transport". The special forces are "absolutely confident" there is no escape for bin Laden. All are waiting for the order to go in and get him. "The timing of that order will ultimately depend on President Bush. Capturing bin Laden will certainly be a huge help for him as he gets ready for the election. It will be an even bigger bonus than getting Saddam." The report claims that bin Laden's movements in the area were continually monitored by a National Security Agency satellite geo-positioned over the "box" of land in which bin Laden is trapped.
SEE ALSO: Mystery Over New Hunt for Bin Laden
By Munir Ahmad in Islamabad
Independent, 22 February 2004
EXCERPT: Pakistan is to mount new operations on its border with Afghanistan aimed at cornering al-Qa'ida terrorists in an area where Osama bin Laden may be hiding, Pakistani military and intelligence sources said last night. News of the operation came as The Sunday Express in London claimed that bin Ladenand a small group of followers had been "boxed in" by US and British special forces in the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Citing "two senior American sources" - a senior Republican and an intelligence source - the newspaper said Bin Laden was within a 10 mile by 10 mile area being monitored by a US spy satellite.
SEE ALSO: History of the Hunt for bin Ladin
A secret hunt unravels in Afghanistan
Mission to capture or kill al-Qaida leader frustrated by near misses, political disputes
By Steve Coll
Washington Post via MSNBC, 22 February 2004
First of two articles.

Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush's Talking Points War
By Marc Cooper
Common Dreams, 20 February 2004
EXCERPT: After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when -- in the months leading up to the war in Iraq -- she felt she was being "propagandized" by her own bosses. With master's degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon. Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP's task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis. She would soon conclude that the OSP -- a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld -- was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a "neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon."

Iraq Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence
Explaining the Administration's Emphasis on the NEI
By RAY McGOVERN
CounterPunch, 19 February 2004
EXCERPT: Their focus on last fall's NIE, ''Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction'' (the very title got it wrong) seemed at first self-defeating. Then I realized that this focus serves to obscure the fact that the decision for war predated the estimate by several months. That decision was made, at the latest, by spring 2002. That there was no NIE before that decision speaks volumes. Clearly, those around the president who were bent on war with Iraq did not want an honest assessment of the dubious ''threat'' it posed. Indeed, honest intelligence had already infected both Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to the point that they had declared publicly in 2001 that Iraq had been contained and that it posed no threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. Sadly, given the well-known proclivities of Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Tenet shied away from serving up an estimate that conveyed how little the intelligence community knew about any residual threat from Iraq. Tenet managed to keep his head down until September 2002, when the White House asked Congress to give its blessing to war on Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee woke up to the bizarre fact that no NIE had been prepared and formally asked Tenet to produce one. By then, however, Cheney, in a major speech on Aug. 26, had set the terms of reference. Clearly, Tenet was instructed to provide an estimate with retroactive support for Cheney's alarming claims regarding Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction.'' Tenet picked his most trusted -- and malleable -- aide, Robert Walpole, to chair an NIE that left honest intelligence analysts holding their noses. That NIE became the centerpiece of an incredibly cynical campaign playing on the trauma of 9/11 to deceive our elected representatives into forfeiting to the president their constitutional prerogative to declare war.

US 'to Drop' Iraq Caucus Plan
By Roger Hardy
BBC, 18 February 2004
EXCERPT: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to report this week on the feasibility of holding early elections, but the US blueprint for complex regional caucuses may have already fallen by the wayside. Time and again, the Americans have had to change course in Iraq under the pressure of events. Now it looks as if they have quietly scrapped a crucial element of the plan they announced in the middle of November.
SEE ALSO: Iraqi, US Officials Debate Elections (Middle East Online)
SEE ALSO: US Expects Troops to Remain in Iraq for Years (AP)l

Tehranis Hope to Shock Bush with Big Poll Turnout
Reuters, 20 February 2004
EXCERPT: Grandmother Khadijeh Fatahi hopes President Bush will die of shock after seeing so many Iranians turn out for Friday's parliamentary election, a poll expected to return conservatives to power. The 67-year-old led a chorus of some 70 women, clad in the all-enveloping black chador, who punched the air and chanted "Death to America" after attending Friday prayers in central Tehran before voting. "I am voting to say death to America and death to Bush. This will show Bush any idea Iranians will not vote is nonsense," she said. "I hope he drops down dead when he hears this."

Israeli Suspected of Selling Nukes to India and Pakistan
AP, 20 February 2004
EXCERPT: An Israeli businessman accused of being a middleman in the nuclear black market worked to supply not only Pakistan but also its arch-rival India, court records indicate. South Africa-based Asher Karni faces felony charges of exporting nuclear bomb triggers to Pakistan. But court files in the case also include e-mail exchanges between Karni and an Indian businessman who was trying secretly to buy material for two Indian rocket factories.
SEE ALSO: Israel's Failing Wall (Nation)

Chalabi Stands by Faulty Intelligence that Toppled Saddam's Regime
By Jack Fairweather in Baghdad and Anton La Guardia
Telegraph, 19 February 2004
EXCERPT: An Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington said yesterday his information about Saddam Hussein's weapons, even if discredited, had achieved the aim of persuading America to topple the dictator. Ahmad Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by US intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr Chalabi for providing intelligence that turned out to be false or wild exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants." ...US officials at first found the information credible and the defector passed a lie-detector test. But in later interviews it became apparent that he was stretching the truth and had been "coached by the INC". He failed a second polygraph test and in May 2002, intelligence agencies were warned that the information was unreliable.But analysts missed the warning, and the mobile laboratory story remained firmly established in the catalogue of alleged Iraqi violations until months after the overthrow of Saddam. America claimed to have found two mobile laboratories, but the lorries in fact held equipment to make hydrogen for weather balloons. Last week, US State Department officials admitted that much of the first-hand testimony they had received was "shaky". "What the INC told us formed one part of the intelligence picture," a senior official in Baghdad said. "But what Chalabi told us we accepted in good faith. Now there is going to be a lot of question marks over his motives."

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