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31 May 2004
The President: Paying the Price...
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: Instead of reaching out to doubters, Bush derided them. On the
campaign trail in September 2002, he characterized Democratic members of
Congress who wanted a strong mandate from the United Nations -- exactly what
the administration is seeking now -- as evading responsibility. "It seems
like to me that if you're representing the United States," he said, "you
ought to be making a decision on what's best for the United States." Didn't
his opponents think that defending the interests of the United States was
exactly what they were doing? Bush continued: "If I were running for office,
I'm not sure how I'd explain to the American people -- say, 'Vote for me,
and, oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I'm going to wait for
somebody else to act.' " No wonder the country is so polarized. Behind the
president's plummeting poll numbers and public restlessness about the war is
an emerging truth about the administration's way of doing business. Iraq was
a preemptive war pursued by a president who governs by preemption. There is
a sad irony here, sad for Bush and for the country he leads. After the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush had the opportunity to transform himself
from the winner of a disputed election into a leader with unparalleled
political authority. If you are a Bush supporter, it's worth contemplating
the benefits of the road not taken.
From Bush, Unprecedented Campaign
Negativity
Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks
By Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post, 31 May 2004
EXCERPT: It was a typical week in the life of the Bush reelection machine.
Last Monday in Little Rock, Vice President Cheney said Democratic
presidential candidate John F. Kerry "has questioned whether the war on
terror is really a war at all" and said the senator from Massachusetts
"promised to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts within his first 100 days in
office." On Tuesday, President Bush's campaign began airing an ad saying
Kerry would scrap wiretaps that are needed to hunt terrorists. The same day,
the Bush campaign charged in a memo sent to reporters and through surrogates
that Kerry wants to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents. On Wednesday and
Thursday, as Kerry campaigned in Seattle, he was greeted by another Bush ad
alleging that Kerry now opposes education changes that he supported in 2001.
The charges were all tough, serious -- and wrong, or at least highly
misleading.
For Memorial Day/D-Day
By Mickey Z
ZNet, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: June 6, 2004 marks 60 years since the fabled Allied invasion known
as "D-Day." Lost amid the self-congratulatory orgy is the minor detail that
by the time of the D-Day invasion, the Soviets were engaging 80 percent of
the German Army on the Eastern Front. Oops... Alexander Cockburn has called
D-Day a "sideshow," explaining that WWII had already been won "by the
Russians at Stalingrad and then, a year before D-Day, at the Kursk Salient,
where 100 German divisions were mangled. Compared with those epic struggles,
D-Day was a skirmish...Hitler's generals knew the war was lost, and the task
was to keep the meeting point between the invading Russians and Western
armies as far east as possible." Of course, this doesn't fit the "good war"
myth (more than just a good war, NBC newsman Tom Brokaw has deemed WWII "the
greatest war the world has seen."), so it's down the memory hole. To borrow
from the World Bank protestors, I say 60 years is enough. Faced with a
perpetual war against evil and presidential election pitting one Yale war
criminal against another, the time has never been better to challenge the
"greatest generation" hype. The next time someone you know speaks of WWII in
hallowed tones, remind them that:
The U.S. fought that war against racism with a segregated army.
It fought that war to end atrocities by participating in the shooting of
surrendering soldiers, the starvation of POWs, the deliberate bombing of
civilians, wiping out hospitals, strafing lifeboats, and in the Pacific
boiling flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts.
FDR, the leader of this anti-racist, anti-atrocity force, signed Executive
Order 9066, interning over 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due
process...thus, in the name of taking on the architects of German prison
camps became the architect of American prison camps.
Before, during, and after the Good War, the American business class traded
with the enemy. Among the US corporations that invested in the Nazis were
Ford, GE, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, IBM, and GM (top man William Knudsen
called Nazi Germany "the miracle of the 20th century").
While the U.S. regularly turned away Jewish refugees to face certain death
in Europe, another group of refugees was welcomed with open arms after the
war: fleeing Nazi war criminals who were used to help create the CIA and
advance America's nuclear program.
Kerry Says Bush's Focus on Iraq Has Made
U.S. 'Less Safe'
By DAVID E. SANGER and JODI WILGOREN
New York Times, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: Issuing a new broadside against President Bush's national security
policy, Senator John Kerry said that Mr. Bush's "almost myopic" focus on
Iraq had made Americans "less safe" by giving North Korea and Iran the time
and opportunity to speed toward the construction of nuclear weapons.
...While he said that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was "in a worse neighborhood"
and thus posed the potential of destabilizing the Mideast, Mr. Kerry argued
that North Korea and Iran — and the loose nuclear material floating around
the former Soviet Union — posed the more direct and serious threat of
putting unconventional weapons into the hands of terror groups. Mr. Bush, he
argued, had relegated those problems to the back burner, adding that North
Korea "was a far more compelling threat in many ways, and it belonged at the
top of the agenda." "This administration is high on rhetoric and high on
ideology and low on actual strategic thinking and truth," he asserted. "This
administration has been almost myopic in its view on Iraq itself, to the
exclusion of those things that are necessary to in fact make the world
safer." ...Mr. Kerry will describe his proposals in detail on Tuesday and
will include a commitment to secure all the nuclear materials in the former
Soviet Union in the next four years, saying that at the pace Mr. Bush is
going "this work will take 13 years."
Critics Say Clean-Air Plan May Be a
Setback for Parks
By FELICITY BARRINGER
New York Times, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: Since April, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a
new regulatory strategy for improving park air. Two proposed rules are
central to the approach. One, involving the interstate drift of pollutants,
is part of a nationwide plan to reduce power plant emissions. The other,
called the haze rule, requiring states to regulate power plants and many
other sources of haze, is directed at improving air in national parks.
Environmentalists say the hitch is that power plants may gain a 14-year free
pass on complying with the engineering requirements called for in the haze
rule if they comply with the proposed interstate rule's directives on
reducing emissions. ...Environmentalists say the approach proposed by the
E.P.A. is a regulatory bait-and-switch. The 1977 law underlying the haze
rule aims to have park air pristine by 2064, and a Clinton-era version of
the regulation set up a decade-by-decade schedule for improvements. No park
was to be left in the haze. The new strategy, they argue, compromises that
basic goal by allowing trading of pollution credits and averaging of air
quality improvements among various parks.
Budget Chicanery
By David S. Broder
Washington Post, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: If you want to know how serious the Bush White House is about
something, it is often useful to watch the House of Representatives. The
president's spokesmen frequently pay lip service to goals that sound great.
Only by checking the actions of the loyalist leadership of the House can you
discern what President Bush really means. The president has said many times
that he has offered a budget that will cut the record deficit of this year
in half in the next five years. So one would think that in the House, where
his word is law, those marching orders would be carried forward. On the face
of it, Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle of Iowa claims to have done the
president one year better -- halving the ugly deficit in four years. Don't
believe it. The House budget is a document that makes ordinary Washington
budgetary "smoke and mirrors" look good. ...While the Republicans play these
games, the unaffordable tax cuts and the undisciplined spending roll on.
Schools Push Reading, Writing, Reform
Sciences Shelved in Effort to Boost Students to 'No Child'
Standards
By Linda Perlstein
Washington Post, 31 May 2004
EXCERPT: ...much of the science and social studies curricula has been
glossed over, or skipped entirely, because Zulma and other students must be
taught -- soon -- to read better. Those kinds of tradeoffs are being made
across the nation, primarily at public schools such as Highland that have
low test scores and large numbers of poor children. In recent years --
particularly since the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001 -- many
schools have shifted to a fervent focus on reading, writing and math,
bringing in program after program in search of what might help struggling
students.
29-30 May 2004
Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass
Distraction?
By DANIEL OKRENT
New York Times, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: ...my own reporting (I have spoken to nearly two dozen current and
former Times staff members whose work touched on W.M.D. coverage) has
convinced me that a dysfunctional system enabled some reporters operating
out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau
management. In some instances, reporters who raised substantive questions
about certain stories were not heeded. Worse, some with substantial
knowledge of the subject at hand seem not to have been given the chance to
express reservations. It is axiomatic in newsrooms that any given reporter's
story, tacked up on a dartboard, can be pierced by challenges from any
number of colleagues. But a commitment to scrutiny is a cardinal virtue.
When a particular story is consciously shielded from such challenges, it
suggests that it contains something that plausibly should be challenged.
Readers have asked why The Times waited so long to address the issues raised
in Wednesday's statement from the editors. I suspect that Keller and his key
associates may have been reluctant to open new wounds when scabs were still
raw on old ones, but I think their reticence made matters worse. It allowed
critics to form a powerful chorus; it subjected staff members under
criticism (including Miller) to unsubstantiated rumor and specious charges;
it kept some of the staff off balance and distracted. The editors' note to
readers will have served its apparent function only if it launches a new
round of examination and investigation. I don't mean further acts of
contrition or garment-rending, but a series of aggressively reported stories
detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led
virtually the entire world to believe Hussein had W.M.D. at his disposal. No
one can deny that this was a drama in which The Times played a role. On
Friday, May 21, a front-page article by David E. Sanger ("A
Seat of Honor Lost to Open Political Warfare") elegantly characterized
Chalabi as "a man who, in lunches with politicians, secret sessions with
intelligence chiefs and frequent conversations with reporters from Foggy
Bottom to London's Mayfair, worked furiously to plot Mr. Hussein's fall."
The words "from The Times, among other publications" would have fit nicely
after "reporters" in that sentence. The aggressive journalism that I long
for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect,
would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories,
but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign. In
1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote that The Times had missed the
real story of the Bolshevik Revolution because its writers and editors "were
nervously excited by exciting events." That could have been said about The
Times and the war in Iraq. The excitement's over; now the work begin.
How the New York Times Allowed
Itself to Get Burned by Chalabi and the White House
By James Moore
The Guardian (UK), 29 May 2004
EXCERPT: When the full history of the Iraq war is written, the most
scandalous chapter may be about how American journalists, in particular
those at the New York Times, allowed themselves to be so easily manipulated
by both Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile with his own virulently pro-war
agenda, and the Bush White House. Even before the latest suspicions that
Chalabi may have been sending US secrets to Iran, a reporter trying to
convince an editor that the smooth-talking exile was a credible source had a
difficult case to make. The former head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC)
was a convicted criminal. In exile, he was accused of embezzling millions
from his Petra Bank in Amman, Jordan. Chalabi left the country in the boot
of a car but was convicted in absentia and faces 22 years in prison if he
returns.
SEE ALSO:
To Tell the Truth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 28 May 2004
EXCERPT: Some news organizations, including The New York Times, are
currently engaged in self-criticism over the run-up to the Iraq war. They
are asking, as they should, why poorly documented claims of a dire threat
received prominent, uncritical coverage, while contrary evidence was either
ignored or played down. But it's not just Iraq, and it's not just The Times.
Many journalists seem to be having regrets about the broader context in
which Iraq coverage was embedded: a climate in which the press wasn't
willing to report negative information about George Bush. People who get
their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling
confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two
years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and
righteousness. But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a
straight story about why he took us to war in Iraq or how that war is going,
who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or
anyone else accountable. What happened? The answer, of course, is that the
straight shooter never existed. He was a fictitious character that the
press, for various reasons, presented as reality.
Keep Our Slaves Safe
By Reggie Rivers
Denver Post via Common Dreams, 28 May 2004
EXCERPT: Our military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United
States. At the moment, our slaves are stuck in a combat zone, getting killed
and maimed, and there's nothing they can do about it except hunker down and
pray. Yes, our slaves signed up of their own free will, but most of them
were as misled about their job as the rest of us were about weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. And I don't think "slave" is too strong a word to
describe someone who is not permitted to quit his job no matter how
dangerous it becomes or how much he hates it. For most of us, the 13th
Amendment abolished slavery and guaranteed that we have the right to
withhold our labor. It doesn't protect soldiers. Our armed forces recruiters
are quite adept at making military service appear beneficial (it mostly is)
and safe (it's not). The threat of war is minimized, because few rational
people actually want to fight. According to Chalmers Johnson, author of "The
Sorrows of Empire," almost half of our enlisted forces are between 17 and 24
years of age, and they were lured into military service with promises of
education, job training, escape from poverty, medical benefits and the
chance to operate some cool, high-tech equipment. Johnson wrote: "A real
deterrent to recruitment is the possibility that a new soldier will find
himself or herself in combat. Roughly four out of five young Americans who
enlist in our all-volunteer armed forces specifically choose non-combat jobs
... ."
Medicare Drug Card Lotto: The New
Bingo
By Joan Retsinas
Progressive Populist, May 2004
EXCERPT: Seniors everywhere: Let's play Medicare Drug Card Lotto. It's more
fun than bingo. Besides, you won't have time for bingo: Medicare Drug Card
Lotto will take hours and hours. The point of MDC Lotto is simple: Find the
card that works best for you. Each card is different -- different price ($30
is the ceiling), different drugs, different discounts on those drugs, at
different pharmacies. You must compare your pharmaceutical costs (for all
the drugs you take at this point in time) with each card, against the costs
you would pay without the cards, if you used another non-Medicare drug
discount card, or if you bought generic versions of the drugs -- though some
cards cover generics. There are more than 70 cards, so pay attention. To
enter the game, it helps to have a computer. Preferably one with a
high-speed DSL line, because you will be on it quite some time. The Medicare
Web site (www.medicare.gov) will lead you into the game. Be careful: If you
press the wrong keys, you'll learn about National Women's Check-up Day or
how to order a new Medicare card (not a MDC Lotto card, a regular Medicare
card) -- but nothing about the drug cards. Once into the game site, you get
all the specifics &endash; like the built-in federal protections against
scams. The site is designed to help you choose a card, though I got lost
somewhere between income and zip code -- and once I got back on track, my
AOL modem connection crashed. It truly is best to have a DSL line.
28 May 2004
US Incarceration Rate Leads the World
Report: 1 of Every 75 U.S. Men in Prison; Ashcroft Gloats; Abuse Abounds
By Connie Cass Associated Press, 28 May 2004
EXCERPT: America's inmate population grew by 2.9 percent last year, to
almost 2.1 million people, with one of every 75 men living in prison or
jail. The inmate population continued its rise despite a fall in the crime
rate and many states' efforts to reduce some sentences, especially for
low-level drug offenders. The report issued Thursday by the Justice
Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics attributes much of the increase to
get-tough policies enacted during the 1980s and '90s, such as mandatory drug
sentences, ``three-strikes-and-you're-out'' laws for repeat offenders, and
``truth-in-sentencing'' laws that restrict early releases. Whether that's
good or bad depends on who is asked. "The prison system just grows like a
weed in the yard,'' said Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the
Justice Policy Institute, which pushes for a more lenient system. Without
reforms, he said, prison populations will continue to grow ``almost as if
they are on autopilot, regardless of their high costs and disappointing
crime-control impact.'' But Attorney General John Ashcroft said the report
shows the success of efforts to take hard-core criminals off the streets.
"It is no accident that violent crime is at a 30-year low while prison
population is up,'' Ashcroft said. ``Violent and recidivist criminals are
getting tough sentences while law-abiding Americans are enjoying
unprecedented safety.''
SEE ALSO:
Islamic Group: Prison Conditions Inhumane for
Professor in Florida
(AP)
REVISITED:
Abu Ghraib in America: Prison Abuse Starts at Home
(CAP)
Bush's Health Care Scam
By Robert Kuttner
Boston Globe via Common Dreams, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: If the mess in Iraq and the high price of oil were not crowding out
other election year issues, health care would top the list. Premium costs
keep increasing, out-of-pocket charges keep being shifted onto consumers,
and the number of uninsured is at an all-time high. President Bush, speaking
Tuesday at a Youngstown, Ohio, community health center, promised to help
more uninsured Americans obtain affordable health care. But his key
proposals are dubious health policy, waste taxpayer dollars, and are
unlikely to increase coverage. They deserve more attention because they
epitomize Bush's utterly cynical approach to governing.
SEE ALSO:
Bush Cuts Children's Health While Rewarding HMOs
Daily Mislead, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: During today's trip to Tennessee 1, President Bush will hold a
photo-op at a children's hospital and then attend a $2,000-per-person
fundraiser at the home of a top health insurance executive 2. The two events
provide a perfect display of how the President has misled America on health
care policy: at the same time that he has tried to slash funding for
children's hospitals, his budget lavishes billions of dollars on health
insurance companies who fund his campaign.
Oil Money and a Smart Energy Policy Don't
Mix
By Arianna Huffington Arianna Online, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: Drivers, start your engines -- and empty your wallets! As we gear
up for the biggest driving weekend of the year, vacationers all across
America are coming face to face with the highest average gas prices in
history -- up 42 cents a gallon since 2001 -- and a bad case of "pump
panic," a new malady in which your heart rate instantly matches the price of
full-service high-test. Where I live, there are lots of folks palpitating at
325 beats a minute. At the same time car owners are having to consider
taking out a second mortgage in order to fill up their tanks, oil companies
are raking in record profits.
Voters Rights Coalition Fears Major Voting
Problems in 2004 Election
By Nora Achrati
Knight-Ridder, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: Problems that voters encountered in Florida and elsewhere in 2000
are likely to recur this fall unless Congress, states and voters fix them
quickly, a coalition of voters' rights groups warned Wednesday. The main
problems are:
* Confusing voter registration and identification requirements.
* Errors in purging lists of eligible voters.
* Misused and malfunctioning voting machines, including the infamous
punch-card machines.
* Inaccurate counting of ballots cast by voters who may be voting in the
wrong precincts.
These problems disenfranchised between 4 to 6 million voters in the 2000
presidential election, according to a Caltech-MIT study released in 2001.
The League of Women Voters and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an
alliance of civil rights organizations and labor groups, are joining forces
with other voter advocacy groups to push for solutions to as many voting
problems as possible before November's election. Significantly absent from
their list of voting ills, though, are problems created by electronic voting
machines, a widely debated concern. "There are other issues that can affect
more people than can be addressed right now," said League of Women Voters
President Kay Maxwell.
Kerry Outlines Foreign Policy, Attacking
Bush
By ROBIN TONER and DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: Senator John Kerry mounted a broad new attack on the Bush
administration's handling of national security on Thursday by accusing the
president of undermining "the legacy of generations of American leadership"
with a foreign policy that has abandoned the alliance-building of the
post-World War II era. ...He said that Mr. Bush, by making military
pre-emption the central doctrine of a new American foreign policy and
employing it too quickly in Iraq, had ignored Theodore Roosevelt's warning
that if a man "lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble."
"They looked to force before exhausting diplomacy," he said of the
administration's national security team. "They bullied when they should have
persuaded. They have gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole
team. They have hoped for the best when they should have prepared for the
worst. They have made America less safe than we should be in a dangerous
world." Mr. Kerry concluded, "In short, they have undermined the legacy of
generations of American leadership, and that is what we must restore, and
that is what I will restore."
An Overreaction?
Not everyone thought John Ashcroft’s warning was justified
Newsweek, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: Although the U.S. intelligence community says it has been concerned
for some time about the potential implications for the United States of the
Madrid bombings, some U.S. counterterrorism officials told NEWSWEEK they
were aware of no sudden surge in “chatter”—intercepts of terrorists
communications—or other indicators of a possible imminent attack. “We’re
always getting new threat information, but I wouldn’t point to a steep spike
in chatter” said one U.S. official. Another counterterrorism official added:
“What we’re seeing is a lot like what we’ve seen before.”
27 May 2004
State of Denial: Abugrabbed in Washington
By Tom Engelhardt
BushWhackedUSA, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: Why would anyone believe a thing officials of this administration
said about anything whatsoever based only on their own statements? After
all, they've just finished the loop-de-loop of whacking their own guy, Ahmed
Chalabi, the former "George Washington of Iraq," the man who was (as the
initial quote above indicated) "Muhammad" himself to the top figures in this
administration. Now he's cheese toast, along with every explanation or claim
launched before, during, or after the war. Put another way, here's part of
what the President had to say about the aftermath of the battle for Falluja:
"So we have pursued a different approach. We're making security a shared
responsibility in Fallujah. Coalition commanders have worked with local
leaders to create an all-Iraqi security force, which is now patrolling the
city." So what if we've left that city in the hands of the insurgents and
former members of Saddam's Republican Guards; so what if two American
soldiers have just been killed in an ambush outside the city. Reality? It's
been Abugrabbed.
Abu Ghraib in America: Prison Abuse Starts
at Home
By Elizabeth Alexander
Center for American Progress, 24 May 2004
EXCERPT: The seemingly endless stream of photos emerging from Abu Ghraib has
shocked the conscience of America and the world. Yet such depraved acts are
not confined to military prisons in Iraq. They are committed in prisons and
jails in our country every day, but receive scant press attention and
virtually no public scrutiny. Indeed, reports suggest that abuses in our
correctional system here at home were directly exported to our military in
Iraq. The U.S. Department of Justice sent to Iraq at least two former
American prison administrators who are accused of allowing grave abuses to
occur under their watch in the United States. Lane McCotter, who headed a
team that reopened Abu Ghraib after the American invasion, resigned as
director of the Utah Department of Corrections after a mentally ill prisoner
died when officers left him strapped to a restraint chair for 16 hours. John
J. Armstrong, now assistant director of American prison operations in Iraq,
was commissioner of Connecticut's prison system and the sole defendant in an
American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit representing Connecticut prisoners
shipped to a Virginia super-maximum prison. In the Virginia facility, prison
guards routinely punished prisoners for petty offenses like kicking cell
doors by strapping them into five-point restraints for up to 48 hours, while
binding their wrists and ankles to steel beds and having a strap tied across
their chests. One of the prisoners, who suffered from diabetes, died after
being restrained and repeatedly shocked with a stun gun. A second prisoner
committed suicide. These tragedies were a direct result of the lack of
oversight by officials like McCotter and Armstrong, and not surprisingly,
similar tragedies manifested themselves in Iraq as well. Such abusive prison
conditions, whether at home or abroad, usually stem from a combination of
inadequate supervision and misbehaving correctional staff. Most guards want
to do the right thing, however, currently accepted correctional standards
invite humiliating abuses to occur.
New York Times Admits to Beating the War
Drums
NYT, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: ...We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as
rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was
controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified
or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more
aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged or failed to
emerge. The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter,
but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on
information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on
"regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing
public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam
campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times
articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles.
He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a
paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut
off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these
exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of
the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that
they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many
news organizations -- in particular, this one. Some critics of our coverage
during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our
examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated.
Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and
pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into
the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their
strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims
about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that
called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases,
there was no follow-up at all.
SEE ALSO:
'The New York Times,' in Editors' Note, Finds Much to Fault in its Iraq WMD
Coverage
By Greg Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: After months of criticism of The New York Times' coverage of
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- mainly directed at star reporter
Judith Miller -- the paper's editors, in an extraordinary note to readers
this morning, finally tackled the subject, acknowledging it was "past time"
they do so. Following the sudden fall last week of Ahmad Chalabi, Miller's
most famous source, they probably had no choice. While it does not, in some
ways, go nearly far enough, and is buried on Page A10, this low-key but
scathing self-rebuke is nothing less than a primer on how not to do
journalism, particularly if you are an enormously influential newspaper with
a costly invasion of another nation at stake. Today's critique is, in its
own way, as devastating as last year's front-page corrective on Jayson
Blair, though not nearly as long. Nowhere in it, however, does the name of
Judith Miller appear. The editors claim that the "problematic articles
varied in authorship" and point out that while critics have "focused blame
on individual reporters ... the problem was more complicated." Yet, clearly,
even in the Times' own view, Miller was the main culprit, though they seem
reluctant, or ashamed, to say so. This is clear in analyzing today's
critique. The editors single out six articles as being especially
unfortunate, and Judith Miller had a hand in four of them: writing two on
her own, co-authoring the other two with Michael Gordon. The only two
non-Miller pieces were the earliest in the chronology, and they barely
receive mention.
SEE ALSO:
'N.Y. Times' Correction Causes Other Papers that Ran
Stories to Scramble for Explanation
Editor and Publisher, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: Many newspapers that have carried some or all of The New York
Times' stories on Iraq that were cited for flaws in a critical editor's note
Wednesday are scrambling to explain the paper's mea culpa to readers. Some
editors appear miffed that they ran correction big while Times put it on
Page A10.
SEE ALSO:
Fatal Error: Lies of The Times, Their Lies Took Lives
(Book excerpt from Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!)
Bottom-Line Pressures Now Hurting Coverage,
Say Journalists
Staff cuts and advertiser interventions increasingly
hamper news coverage.
By Bill Kovach, Tom Rosentiel and Amy Mitchell Pew
Research Center, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: While their worries are changing, the problems that journalists see
with their profession in many ways seem more intractable than they did a few
years ago. News people feel better about some elements of their work. But
they fear more than ever that the economic behavior of their companies is
eroding the quality of journalism. In particular, they think business
pressures are making the news they produce thinner and shallower. And they
report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of
the newsroom. These worries, in turn, seem to have widened the divide
between the people who cover the news and the business executives they work
for. The changes in attitude have come after a period in which news
companies, faced with declining audiences and pressure on revenues, have in
many cases made further cuts in newsgathering resources.
Gore Calls for Resignations of Top
Administration Officials
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: Al Gore delivered a blistering denunciation Wednesday of the Bush
administration's ``twisted values and atrocious policies'' in Iraq and
demanded the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA director George Tenet. Raising his
voice to a yell in a speech at New York University, Gore said: ``How dare
they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace! How dare they drag the good
name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's
torture prison!''
As Ashcroft Warns of Qaeda Attack, Some
Question Threat and Its Timing
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: ...some opponents of President Bush, including police and
firefighter union leaders aligned with Senator John Kerry, the expected
Democratic presidential candidate, said the timing of the announcement
appeared intended in part to distract attention from Mr. Bush's sagging poll
numbers and problems in Iraq. The administration did not raise the terrorist
threat advisory from its current level of elevated, or yellow, and the White
House said Mr. Bush would not alter his schedule because of security
concerns...."There's no real new intelligence, and a lot of this has been
out there already," said one administration official who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. "There really is no significant change that would
require us to change the alert level of the country."
AUDIO/VIDEO LINK
The New Pearl Harbor: A Debate On a New Book
that Alleges the Bush Administration was Behind the 9/11 Attacks
Democracy Now!, 26 May 2004
 EXCERPT:
In the nearly 3 years since the September 11th attacks, the US government's
official inquiry has come under increasing scrutiny, particularly from
families of the victims. At the public hearings of the 9/11 commission,
there have been multiple protests both inside and out. And the Bush
administration has refused to cooperate fully in the investigation. For
weeks, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice refused to appear before
the commission, eventually saying she would appear but not under oath. But
after public outcry, she ultimately testified. President Bush and Vice
President Cheney met with the commission members in a non-public,
closed-door meeting. They refused to give any sworn testimony, the meeting
was not recorded and the handwritten notes of commission members were
confiscated before they left the meeting. In recent days, members of the
9/11 commission have warned that the panel may fail to produce a unanimous
final report this summer. Meanwhile, several of the victims' family members
have refused to take any money from the US government's compensation
fund--people like Ellen Mariani, who was on this program last week. Her
husband Neil died on September 11th and she has rejected up to $1.8 million,
calling it hush money. There are a number of groups that have formed a
movement over the past 3 years called the 9-11 Truth Movement. They allege
that the official version of events on September 11 is filled with holes and
has left many unanswered questions. Their case is summarized in part in a
book by David Ray Griffin, a professor of Philosophy of Religion at the
Claremont School of Theology in California. The book is called The New
Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11.
Ruling Upholds Oregon Law Authorizing
Assisted Suicide - Ashcroft Rebuked
By ADAM LIPTAK
New York Times, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: A federal appeals court yesterday upheld the only law in the nation
authorizing doctors to help their terminally ill patients commit suicide.
The decision, by a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said the Justice Department
did not have the power to punish the doctors involved. The majority used
unusually pointed language to rebuke Attorney General John Ashcroft, saying
he had overstepped his authority in trying to block enforcement of the state
law, Oregon's Death With Dignity Act. "The attorney general's unilateral
attempt to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to
state lawmakers," Judge Richard C. Tallman wrote for the majority,
"interferes with the democratic debate about physician-assisted suicide and
far exceeds the scope of his authority under federal law."
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31 May 2004
Memorialize This...abuse not
withstanding
In Baghdad this week, (Brigadier General Mark) Kimmitt defended the
procedures used by American commanders there as being even more
rigorous than those required by international law. "There is a
review board that is set up that is done far more frequently than
required by the Geneva Conventions where a board takes a look at
that person's case," he said. "And after a period of time, when
those persons are deemed to no longer be a threat to the security of
the nation, then they are released."
--New
York Times, 30 May 2004 |
George's 'Safer World'
World faces new breed of
terrorists
By PAUL HAVEN and CHRIS TOMLINSON
The Associated Press , 31 May 2004
EXCERPT: From the dusty Sahara to the jungles of Indonesia and in the
cauldron of unrest that is US-occupied Iraq, a new generation of
terrorists is emerging to take the place of elders who have been killed,
captured or forced deep underground. Young, violent and energized by a
deep hatred for the United States, its Western allies and Muslim
governments seen as kowtowing to Washington’s will, the new class has
been writing a new history of terror in blood -- from Istanbul to Madrid
to Yanbu, Saudi Arabia.
SEE ALSO:
Terrorist Leaders: Getting to Know the New
Generation
(abs-cbnNews.com)
New Iraq Prime Minister was
Responsible for 45-Minute WMD Claim
By Patrick Cockburn
Independent (UK), 29 May 2004
EXCERPT: The choice of Iyad Allawi, closely linked to the CIA and
formerly to MI6, as the Prime Minister of Iraq from 30 June will make it
difficult for the US and Britain to persuade the rest of the world that
he is capable of leading an independent government. He is the person
through whom the controversial claim was channeled that Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes. ... Dr Allawi and
the INA returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam and set up offices in
Baghdad and in old Baath party offices throughout Iraq. There were few
signs that they had any popular support. During an uprising in the town
of Baiji, north of Baghdad, last year, crowds immediately set fire to
the INA office. Dr Allawi was head of the security committee of the
Iraqi Governing Council and was opposed to the dissolution of the army
by Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. He stepped down in protest as
head of the committee during the US assault on Fallujah. But his
reputation among Iraqis for working first with Saddam's intelligence
agents and then with MI6 and the CIA may make it impossible for them to
accept him as leader of an independent Iraq.
SEE ALSO:
A Worn Road
for U.N. Aide
By DEXTER FILKINS
New York Times, 31 May 2004
EXCERPT: On Sunday, the alliances shifted when Mr. Brahimi teamed
up with American officials in trying to choose an Iraqi president. That
seemed to provoke a backlash from members of the Governing Council, who
accused Mr. Brahimi and L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American
administrator here, of trying to dictate to the only representative body
in Iraq. "The Americans are trying to impose these decisions on us, and
we are trying to reject them," said Mahmood Othman, a council member who
has been critical of both Mr. Bremer and Mr. Brahimi. "And they talk
about sovereignty." As he promised, Mr. Brahimi roamed across the
country to talk with Iraqis about what the shape of their government
should be. At the time, he said he hoped to appoint a government of
technocrats — experts who stayed above the push-and-pull of politics.
Yet when he settled on a choice for prime minister — Hussein Shahristani,
a nuclear scientist and a Shiite — he ran into a wall of opposition from
the leaders of mainstream Shiite political parties, who wanted the job
for themselves. Instead of fashioning the kind of savvy compromise for
which he is known, Mr. Brahimi appears to have folded, acquiescing to
the desires of the Americans, who were promoting Dr. Alawi. While
American officials maintain that Dr. Alawi was Mr. Brahimi's choice,
people close to Mr. Brahimi say he reluctantly endorsed him only after
American officials aggressively recommended him. One person conversant
with the negotiations said Mr. Brahimi was presented with "a fait
accompli" after President Bush's envoy to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill,
"railroaded" the Governing Council into coalescing around him.
SEE ALSO:
Rumsfeld Says 'War on Terror' Just Beginning
(Reuters)
Bush's Trajectory of Failure
by Josh Marshall
Talking Point Memo, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: The most salient point to emerge from the president's recent
speech on Iraq was the new rationale he put forward for continuing to
support him and his policies: effective management of his own failures.
Consider the trajectory.
Originally, the case for war was built on claims about the Iraqi
regime's possession of weapons of mass destruction and its support for
terrorist groups like al qaida. To a lesser degree, but with increasing
force as these other rationales faded way, the case was made on the
basis of democratizing and liberalizing Iraq. As that prospect too has
become increasingly distant and improbable, President Bush has taken a
fundamentally different tack. His emphasis now is seldom on what good
might come of his Iraq policy but rather the dire consequences of its
unmitigated 'failure' or its premature abandonment. In other words, the
president now argues that he is best equipped to guard the country from
the full brunt of the consequences of his own misguided actions,
managerial incompetence and dishonesty. It has now become close to a
commonplace that John Kerry's policies differ little from President
Bush's. Where is the difference, we hear, since both candidates are for
an openness to greater troop deployment, a fuller role for the United
Nations and the country's traditional allies, and dropping support for
the exilic hucksters who helped scam the country in the first place.
This is a weak argument on several grounds. But the most glaring is that
what we see now isn't the president's policy. It's the president's
triage -- his team's ad hoc reaction to the collapse of his policy, the
rapid, near-total, but still incomplete and uncoordinated abandonment of
his policy.
Saudi Militants Singled Out
Westerners
By Owen Bowcott
The Guardian (UK), 31 May 2004
EXCERPT: In an act calculated to terrify and humiliate the expatriate
community which staffs much of Saudi Arabia's oil industry, the gunmen
tied the body of one of their foreign victims - thought to be that of Mr
Hamilton - to a car and dragged it through the streets. It was
eventually dumped beside a bridge. It was an identical ritual to that
inflicted on an American victim of an attack on a petrochemical site in
the Red Sea town of Yanbu earlier this month. The militants fled and
regrouped at the luxury Oasis Residential Resorts compound, a maze of
private villas, hotels and leisure centres inhabited mainly by
privileged foreign workers and secured behind high walls. The compound
even contains an ice-skating rink and grassy poolside beach. Employees
of Royal Dutch/Shell, Total and the Russian company Lukoil are among its
residents. In a series of raids on villas and private homes, the gunmen
began rounding up foreign hostages. According to Arab survivors, the
Islamists tried to separate out the non-Muslims.
Never Mind the Truth: Bush and
Blair Depend on Words to Change Reality
By Gary Younge
The Guardian (UK), 31 May 2004
EXCERPT: Seeing the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
testify before the 9/11 commission on CNN in April was a challenge in
eye-ear coordination. While she eloquently spelled out the Bush
administration's strategy for the war on terror, the tickertape of
rolling news spewed out grim news from the front across the bottom of
the screen. Your ears took in the official narrative: "We are in control
and shaping a positive future for the Middle East." Your eyes traced the
brutal reality: "This is a bloody mess and innocents are dying." At the
very moment when Rice said that the invasion had removed a source "of
violence and fear and instability in the world's most dangerous region",
the tape read: "Iraq's interim interior minister Nuril Al-Badran
announces his resignation; interior ministry is in charge of police
forces." At the point when she told the commission that invading Iraq
was one of "the only choices that can ensure the safety of our nation
for decades to come", the wire services reported: "Iraqis say air strike
killed dozens gathered for prayers." Politics has, to an extent, always
been about the triumph of symbols over substance and assertion over
actuality. But in the case of Iraq this trend seems to have reached its
apogee, as though statements by themselves can fashion reality by the
force of their own will and judgment. Declaration and proclamation have
become everything. The question of whether they bear any relation to the
world we actually live in seems like an unpleasant and occasionally
embarrassing intrusion. The motto of the day both in Downing Street and
the White House seems to be: "To say it is so is to make it so." These
people are rewriting history before the ink on the first draft is even
dry.
Tilting the Playing Field
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times, 30 May 2004 (revisited)
EXCERPT: ...As one who believed — and still does — in the possibility
and the importance of tilting the Arab-Muslim world from the wrong
directions detailed in the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Reports to the
right ones, I detest the politically driven failures of the Bush team in
Iraq. In a panic, the Bush team, having lost its exaggerated realist
rationale for the war — W.M.D. — has now gone to the other extreme and
offered us an exaggerated idealist rationale — that all Iraqis crave
freedom and democracy and we can deliver this transformation shortly, if
we just stick to it. We need to rebalance our policy. We still have a
chance to do in Iraq the only thing that was always the only thing
possible — tilt it in a better direction — so over a generation Iraqis
can transform and liberate themselves, if they want. What might an Iraq
tilted in the right direction look like? It would be more religious than
Turkey, more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria, more democratic
than Saudi Arabia and more stable than Afghanistan.
Where Does Iraq Stand Among U.S. Wars?
Total Casualties Compare to Spanish-American, Mexican and 1812
Conflicts
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post, 31 May 2004
EXCERPT: With more than 800 U.S. military personnel killed and more than
4,600 wounded, U.S. casualties in Iraq over the past 14 months now
compare to those of several of the smaller wars in the nation's history.
In total casualties -- that is, combined dead and wounded -- the U.S.
military now has suffered more in Iraq than in the Spanish-American War.
The wounded tally in Iraq -- but not the death total -- has surpassed
the figures for the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Some military
historians and other specialists are beginning to see the Iraq campaign
as at least as significant as those other conflicts in its impact on the
nation's politics and public opinion. "Iraq began as an intervention,
has now become a minor war and stands to become a medium war as time
passes," said Kalev Sepp, a former Special Forces officer who teaches
defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. "The Iraq war is a
genuine minor war in the American experience," said James Burk, a
military sociologist at Texas A&M University and one of the nation's
leading experts on the impact of military casualties on public opinion.
By that, Burk said, he meant that it has become "at least the equal of
the Mexican War and Spanish-American War in its capacity to make or
break political leaders and eventually to affect who Americans think
they are in the world." With the Iraq war still going on, it is
impossible to predict how historians and the rest of the American public
will ultimately regard it. Burk and others warn that if the pace of
casualties in Iraq keeps up, the war's impact on American life could
become more like that of the Vietnam War than of those earlier
conflicts. ...But several other experts said that in size and political
impact, the Iraq war now most resembles the U.S. anti-insurgency effort
in the Philippines that lasted from 1899 to 1902, with a total of 7,192
dead and wounded U.S. troops. "Conceptually, I would say that we are
closer to the Philippine Insurrection than any of those prior
conflicts," Hackemer said. "We are fighting an insurgency that has some
measure -- difficult to determine -- of popular support as we attempt to
install a government that fits our concept of 'representative' for the
Iraqi people." Indeed, the leading expert on the Philippines war said he
finds the U.S. military experience there strikingly similar to the U.S.
foray into Iraq. "Both the Philippine and Iraq wars were seen as
imperial conflicts and as radical departures from previous foreign
policy," said Texas A&M's Brian M. Linn. He ticked off several other
specific similarities.
29-30 May 2004
Scant Evidence Cited in Long Detention
of Iraqis
By DOUGLAS JEHL and KATE ZERNIKE
New York Times, 30 May 2004
EXCERPT: Hundreds of Iraqi prisoners were held in Abu Ghraib prison for
prolonged periods despite a lack of evidence that they posed a security
threat to American forces, according to an Army report completed last
fall. The unpublished report, by Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, reflects
what other senior Army officers have described as a deep concern among
some American officers and officials in Iraq over the refusal of top
American commanders in Baghdad to authorize the release of so-called
security prisoners. Some of those prisoners were held for interrogation
at Abu Ghraib in the cellblock that became the site of the worst abuses
at the prison. General Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, reported that
some Iraqis had been held for several months for nothing more than
expressing "displeasure or ill will" toward the American occupying
forces. The Nov. 5 report said the process for deciding which arrested
Iraqis posed security risks justifying imprisonment, and for deciding
when to release them, violated the Pentagon's own policies. It also said
the conditions in which they were held sometimes violated the Geneva
Conventions. General Ryder's report to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the
top American commander in Iraq,, was obtained by The New York Times. It
was based on a review of prisons in Iraq last summer and fall and made
no mention of abuses at Abu Ghraib. But it warned that the continuing
influx of prisoners being arrested as the American-led occupation forces
fought a persistent insurrection would strain the system set up to
review each case every six months, as required by international law.
Head of Organization Which Provided
False Intel About WMD Promotes Self to Prime Minister of Iraq
The Guardian (UK), 29 May 2004
EXCERPT: A British-educated neurosurgeon who spent 30 years in exile in
Britain, and who has close links with both the CIA and MI6, was named as
Iraq's new interim prime minister last night. Ayad Allawi, 58, the head of
the Iraqi National Accord (INA), emerged as Iraq's surprise new leader after
weeks of speculation and intrigue. Earlier this year the INA said it had
provided "in good faith" the raw intelligence from a single source that was
used to support the claim that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of
mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order. The INA said later it had
presumed that MI6 would verify the claim. Dr Allawi will head Iraq's new
caretaker government when the US-led coalition hands executive authority to
Iraqis on June 30.
SEE ALSO:
Confusion and Contradiction Surround Allawi's
Appointment #1
(TPM)
SEE ALSO:
Confusion and Contradiction Surround Allawi's
Appointment #2
(TPM)
SEE ALSO:
Confusion and Contradiction Surround Allawi's
Appointment #3 (TPM)
SEE ALSO:
Confusion and Contradiction Surround Allawi's
Appointment #4
(TPM)
SEE ALSO:
'Bush Man of Baghdad'
By WARREN HOGE and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
New York Times, 29 May 2004
EXCERPT: After turning to the United Nations to shore up its failing effort
to fashion a new government in Baghdad, the United States ended up Friday
with a choice for prime minister certain to be seen more as an American
candidate than one of the United Nations or the Iraqis themselves. The man
chosen to be prime minister, Iyad Alawi, is the secretary general of the
Iraqi National Accord, an exile group that has received funds from the
Central Intelligence Agency. His ties with the C.I.A., and his closeness to
the United States could become an issue in a country where public opinion
has grown almost universally hostile to the Americans. The announcement of
Dr. Alawi's selection appeared to surprise several at the United Nations.
"When we first heard the news today, we thought that the Iraqi Governing
Council had hijacked the process," said a senior United Nations official,
referring to the American-picked body that voted to recommend Dr. Alawi
earlier on Friday. ...Statements from the United Nations seemingly confirmed
the idea that Mr. Brahimi was merely bowing to the wishes of the others.
...In a telephone interview from Baghdad, Mr. Brahimi refused to discuss the
selection of Dr. Alawi. "I don't want to go back saying who is good and who
is bad," he said.But in a hint that the selection process had not gone
exactly as planned, Mr. Brahimi added, "You know, sometimes people think I
am a free agent out here, that I have a free hand to do whatever I want." He
noted that he had been asked to take on the job in a letter to Mr. Annan
from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and the Iraqi Governing
Council. ..."Let's see what the Iraqi street has to say about this name,"
Mr. Eckhard said.
Cuba Base Sent Its Interrogators to Iraqi
Prison
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ANDREA ELLIOTT
New York Times, 29 May 2004
EXCERPT: Interrogation experts from the American detention camp at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Iraq last fall and played a major role in
training American military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison there,
senior military officials said Friday. The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which
had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning
"enemy combatants," played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December,
the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking
place. Prisoners captured in Iraq, unlike those sent from Afghanistan to
Guantánamo, were to be protected by the Geneva Conventions. The teams were
sent to Iraq for 90-day tours at the urging of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller,
then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo. General Miller was sent
to Iraq last summer to recommend improvements in the intelligence gathering
and detention operations there, a defense official said. The involvement of
the Guantánamo teams has not previously been disclosed, and military
officials said it would be addressed in a major report on suspected abuses
by military intelligence specialists that is being completed by Maj. Gen.
George W. Fay. ...The involvement of the Guantánamo teams in Iraq marks the
second major instance in which interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib appear
to have been modeled on those in place earlier in Guantánamo or in
Afghanistan, at facilities where the United States had declared that the
Geneva Conventions did not apply.
Resembling an Islamic Mini-state,
Fallujah May be a Glimpse of Iraq's Future
By Hamza Hendawi
Canadian Press, 25 May 2004
EXCERPT: With U.S. marines gone and central government authority virtually
nonexistent, Fallujah resembles an Islamic mini-state - anyone caught
selling alcohol is flogged and paraded in the city. Men are encouraged to
grow beards and barbers are warned against giving "western" hair cuts.
"After all the blood that was shed, and the lives that were lost, we shall
only accept God's law in Fallujah," said cleric Abdul-Qader al-Aloussi,
offering a glimpse of what a future Iraq may look like as the U.S.-led
occupation draws to a close. "We must capitalize on our victory over the
Americans and implement Islamic sharia laws." The departure of the marines
under an agreement that ended the three-week siege last month has enabled
hardline Islamic leaders to assert their power in this once-restive city 50
kilometres west of Baghdad. Some were active in defending the city against
the marines and have profited by a perception - both here and elsewhere in
Iraq - that the mujahedeen, or Islamic holy warriors, defeated a superpower.
Conservative Allies Take Chalabi Case to
the White House
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
New York Times, 28 May 2004
EXCERPT: Influential outside advisers to the Bush administration who support
the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi are pressing the White House to stop
what one has called a "smear campaign" against Mr. Chalabi, whose Baghdad
home and offices were ransacked last week in an American-supported raid.
Last Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a small delegation
of them marched into the West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser, to complain about the administration's abrupt change of
heart about Mr. Chalabi and to register their concerns about the course of
the war in Iraq. The group included Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of
a Pentagon advisory group, and R. James Woolsey, director of central
intelligence under President Bill Clinton. ...The current views of Vice
President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, are not known.
Both strongly supported Mr. Chalabi before and during the war in Iraq. Last
Saturday, participants in the meeting with Ms. Rice and her deputy, Stephen
Hadley, said Ms. Rice told them she appreciated that they had made their
views known. But she gave no hint of her own opinion, participants said, and
made no concessions to their point of view. Newt Gingrich, the former
speaker of the House of Representatives, also attended the meeting. A larger
meeting later that day, with Mr. Hadley alone, included Danielle Pletka, a
vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a research institution
in Washington. In an interview, Ms. Pletka said that Mr. Chalabi had been
"shoddily" treated and that C.I.A. and State Department people had been
fighting "a rear guard" action against him.
Italian Authorities Brace for
Protests During Bush's Visit to Rome
AFP via Common Dreams, 28 May 2004
EXCERPT: The Italian authorities warned of "serious threats" to a smooth
visit by US President George W. Bush to Rome next week when groups plan to
stage mass demonstrations against US policy in Iraq. "Serious threats, which
worry us but do not frighten us, are emerging for ... Bush's visit," Pisanu
told the party congress of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's conservative
Forza Italia. "You have only to scan the Internet, let alone other signals,
to get an idea of how the threats to security and public order are piling
up," he said. An alliance of anti-globalization groups along with the Greens
and the Communists said earlier this month that they planned mass
demonstrations to greet Bush when he comes to Rome next Friday and Saturday
ahead of appearances in Paris and Normandy, France, for celebrations of the
60th anniversary of the June 6, 1994, D-Day landings. The center-left
opposition party has called on tens of thousands of pacifists to take to the
streets on June 4 in an authorized demonstration to protest US policies in
Iraq. The Iraq war is deeply unpopular in Italy, which in February 2003 saw
up to three million people take to the streets of Rome to protest the
impending US-led invasion.
28 May 2004
The Bush Orthodoxy is in Shreds
A series of investigations has shattered neocon self-belief
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian (UK), 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: At a conservative thinktank in downtown Washington, and across the
Potomac at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on
prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of
potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed
Chalabi classified information about the plans of the US government and
military? ... The espionage investigation into the neocons' relationship
with Chalabi is only one of the proliferating inquiries engulfing the Bush
administration. In his speech to the Army War College on May 24, Bush blamed
the Abu Ghraib torture scandal on "a few American troops". In other words,
there was no chain of command. But the orders to use the abusive techniques
came from the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. The trials and
investigations surrounding Abu Ghraib beg the question of whether it was an
extension of the far-flung gulag operating outside the Geneva conventions
that has been built after September 11. The fallout from the Chalabi affair
has also implicated the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times,
which published yesterday an apology for running numerous stories containing
disinformation that emanated from Chalabi and those in the Bush
administration funnelling his fabrications. The Washington Post, which
published editorials and several columnists trumpeting Chalabi's talking
points, has yet to acknowledge the extent to which it was deceived.
SEE ALSO:
The Fall of the Vulcans: Iraq May Spell the End of
an Evangelical Belief in American Power (Guardian)
Bush Needs a 12-Step Program
By William D. Hartung
TomPaine.com, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush's May 24th speech on his administration's five-step
plan for a transition to sovereignty and democracy in Iraq was highly
persuasive, if you happened to have spent the past year in a sound-proof
room, sealed off from even the faintest whiff of reality. The speech was the
first of six he will give on this subject between now and the June 30th date
for the handover of power to an Iraqi caretaker government of uncertain
composition and capabilities. For those of us who have been paying even
intermittent attention to the growing fiasco in Iraq, President Bush's
latest rhetorical offensive is far too little, far too late.
SEE ALSO:
Preventive Warriors: Noam Chomsky & Others Examine
the Bush's Administration's Doctrine of Preventive Strikes
(Democracy Now!)
SEE ALSO:
Cut-and-Paste Over: The Times' Coverage of Bush's
Speech (TAP)
SEE ALSO:
The Long Goodbye
President Bush offered a plan for staying in Iraq. Here are some
suggestions for getting out
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: First and foremost, we have to be perfectly clear that getting out
really is our goal. Until we make that case, neither the Iraqi people nor
the international community is going to trust our motives. That doesn’t mean
we should "cut and run." It means we should have honest intentions and be
honest about them. Now, you may think that’s what the president was saying,
but it’s not. The administration’s cherished goal has been, and remains, to
create "a stable, friendly, Israel-recognizing, [U.S. military]
base-tolerating and oil-producing ‘friend’ who will allow us to thumb our
nose at the rest of the region with impunity," says a former member of the
proconsular authority in Baghdad. You can add "democracy" as icing on the
cake, and from afar that recipe sounds mighty appetizing. But Iraqis just
haven’t bought into our vision for their country, which is precisely why
quite a few are fighting us, and why so many more are tolerating or
supporting them. President Bush paid lip service to the notion that "Iraqis
are a proud people who resent foreign control of their affairs, just as we
would." But it’s as if he didn’t hear his own words. He should think about
them more carefully. We all should. In that light, let’s go over the
president’s five-step program for Iraq, point by point.
Key Nations Propose Changes to Iraq
Resolution
EDITH M. LEDERER
ASSOCIATED PRESS, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: Four key nations proposed major changes yesterday to the
U.S.-British draft resolution on Iraq. The moves would give the new Iraqi
government the right to decide whether the multinational force remains in
the country, and limit its mandate to January, 2005, when elections are
scheduled to be held. A three-page proposal by China — which diplomats said
was supported by Russia, France and Germany — would give the interim
government that takes over on June 30 greater authority than the resolution
introduced to the United Nations Security Council on Monday by Britain and
the United States. The proposal, obtained by the Associated Press, was
submitted to council members yesterday afternoon. It would give the interim
government control of the Iraqi army and police force and require the
multinational force to "consult with the interim government in respect of
military actions except for self-defence." It would also determine "that the
interim government of Iraq shall exercise full sovereignty, in the
political, economic, security, judicial and diplomatic areas, including the
power to control and dispose all the natural and economic resources, sign
economic cooperation agreements and contracts, and enjoy judicial
independence and the power to administer prisons in Iraq.'' The U.S.-British
draft endorses the formation of a sovereign interim Iraqi government that
will "assume the responsibility and authority" for governing the country by
June 30, but doesn't spell out its powers.
Greater Urgency on Prison Interrogation
Led to Use of Untrained Workers
By DOUGLAS JEHL and KATE ZERNIKE
New York Times, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: The interrogation effort at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq took on such
urgency last fall that untrained personnel were pressed into service as
analysts and even interrogators, according to accounts spelled out in
documents and interviews. The pace accelerated last December, after the
capture of Saddam Hussein, which led to a near-doubling of the number of
two-person "Tiger Teams" assigned to an interrogation center at the prison,
which operated under the control of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez's top deputy
for intelligence. The accounts depict a high-pressure environment at the
prison, particularly within the interrogation center, where military
intelligence personnel exerted substantial influence over a cellblock where
most of the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently took place. In
interviews, some soldiers who served in military intelligence units at the
prison said the sense of urgency contributed to the loosened standards and
the abuses that followed. "When you let people take power in their own
hands, it's going to happen," said a soldier who served as a military
intelligence analyst at the prison. "There was no higher authority really."
The accounts are among the first from military intelligence personnel at the
prison, and they include acknowledgments by some of those soldiers that the
military intelligence units, as well as the military police, may have played
a role in the abuses. They were given in interviews with The New York Times,
or in statements to Army investigators that were obtained by The Times, by
people who served under the overall command of the 205th Military
Intelligence Brigade, a unit based in Germany under Col. Thomas M. Pappas,
the highest-ranking active-duty officer known to be under scrutiny in Army
investigations into the abuses.
Sign the Petition to Urge Bush to
Honor the Geneva Conventions
Veterans for Common Sense
 EXCERPT:
Memorial Day and the May 29th Dedication of the WWII Memorial offers the
President an opportunity to declare America's unequivocal support for the
Geneva Conventions and the framework of law that came about following World
War II. Join us in calling on President Bush to restore America's reputation
as a champion of international law, human rights and the high ideals for
which we stand. " We, the undersigned citizens of the United States, affirm
the international cooperation, universal humanitarian principles, and human
rights law that arose from the ashes of World War II, thanks to the
unprecedented national sacrifice and service of a generation of Americans.
We call upon President George W. Bush to honor that legacy by rededicating
our nation to the Geneva Conventions, the Charter of the United Nations, and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a framework of law that protects
the lives and dignity of civilians, prisoners of war, and wounded combatants
"including the Iraqi people and our men and women serving today in Iraq."
Developing World Demands More from
Wealthy Countries at Poverty Forum
Agence-France Press, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: Key leaders and policymakers from developing countries joined
forces to demand wealthy nations do more to help the poor, by reducing debt
and ending trade protectionism. Led by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the World Bank-backed Global
Conference on Scaling Up Poverty Reduction urged the developed world to
replace rhetoric with action. Wen cited the "unfair and irrational
international, political and economic order" for helping create widespread
poverty that affects large chunks of the developing world. "For various
reasons progress in poverty reduction around the world has fallen short of
our expectations," he said Wednesday. "Hunger, disease and dire poverty
continue to beset many developing countries, and fulfilling their targets of
poverty reduction and global development remains an uphill battle." He
called on the developed world to better respect developing countries and
offer whatever help they could to improve the lot of the poor, who number
nearly half the world's total population of more than six billion. "Given
the developing countries' disadvantaged position in international
globalisation, the developed countries should pay more attention to their
difficulties, provide more Overseas Development Aid to them, further relieve
their debt, accelerate technology transfer in their favour and roll back
trade protectionism," Wen added. With more than one billion people living at
the absolute poverty level -- defined by the United Nations as less than one
dollar a day -- the conference aims to find ways to alleviate poverty by
empowering the poor through sustained growth.
Bush, Sharon Lurching From Crisis to
Crisis
HAROON SIDDIQUI
Toronto Star, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: Events in Iraq and the Israeli-occupied territories show how George
W. Bush and Ariel Sharon continue to create one nightmare after another.
Whereas recent headlines have been about two events — an Israeli tank firing
on a Palestinian protest march, and American jets bombing what was said to
be an Iraqi wedding — there's been no shortage of horrors. Israel has
rightly apologized for Wednesday's attack that brought worldwide
condemnation. But its military onslaught on Gaza in the days preceding or
following the tragedy has been no less ferocious.
Israel Arrests Vanunu Reporter
Toronto Star, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: Israeli police have arrested a British journalist who in 1986
exposed the Jewish state's most sensitive secrets in an interview with
nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli newspaper said. The
Yedioth Ahronoth Web site said yesterday Peter Hounam was in the custody of
the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and being questioned on suspicion
of committing "security offences." A gag order prevented publication of
further details. The Israeli police declined comment. The Prime Minister's
Office confirmed a gag order was in place. In 1986, Hounam secured an
exclusive interview with Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli atomic
reactor in Dimona. His story in Britain's Sunday Times led independent
analysts to conclude Israel had stockpiled as many as 400 nuclear weapons.
Israel abducted Vanunu and jailed him for 18 years. Hounam came to Israel
for Vanunu's April 21 release and is believed to have spent time with him in
a Jerusalem church despite Shin Bet restrictions on the ex-convict's
contacts with the press. ...Vanunu is not allowed to give interviews or meet
foreigners. However, it was not known if these restrictions were linked to
Hounam's arrest.
27 May 2004
Breeding Brutality in Iraq
Is Abu Ghraib an exception or is this what war and occupation are all about?
By David Corn TomPaine.com, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: Imagine if the wish-you-were-here photos and video footage of the
prisoner abuse in Iraq documented Americans murdering Iraqi detainees. Say
there was film of two military intelligence soldiers sliding a sleeping bag
over the head of an Iraqi and rolling him back and forth, sitting on his
chest, and placing a hand over his mouth until he was asphyxiated. Might
that generate front-page headlines and bipartisan denunciations on Capitol
Hill? The event happened, but no snapshots have materialized. An
enterprising reporter at the Denver Post, Miles Moffeit, unearthed
the next best thing: Pentagon documents detailing this brutal episode, which
occurred in November at a detention facility in Al Qaim, northwest of
Baghdad. The victim was Iraqi Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who headed
Saddam Hussein's air force. He had turned himself in, and interrogating him
became the responsibility of two soldiers in the 66th Military Intelligence
Company. After Mowhoush was killed by his interrogators, a cover story was
concocted. U.S. military officials released a statement that noted Mowhoush
had died during an interview: "Mowhoush said he didn't feel well and
subsequently lost consciousness. The soldier questioning him found no pulse,
then conducted CPR and called for medical authorities. According to the
on-site surgeon, it appeared Mowhoush died of natural causes." Natural
causes? Is being suffocated to death a natural cause within U.S. military
facilities? Unfortunately, that appears to be not so far-fetched a
conclusion. The Mowhoush case is but one of dozens. Last week, a senior
military official told reporters at the Pentagon that the Army has
investigatedor is still nvestigating33 cases involving the deaths of 32
detainees in Iraq and five in Afghanistan. This is eight more than the Army
had previously reported.
SEE ALSO:
Robert Fisk: Follow Torture Trail at Abu Ghraib
(Common Dreams)
REVISITED:
David Corn: Can Iraq Get Any Worse?
(Nation)
Prison Interrogations in Iraq Seen as
Yielding Little Data on Rebels
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
New York Times, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: The questioning of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners last fall in the
newly established interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison yielded very
little valuable intelligence, according to civilian and military officials.
The interrogation center was set up in September to obtain better
information about an insurgency in Iraq that was killing American soldiers
almost every day by last fall. The insurgency was better organized and more
vigorous than the United States had expected, prompting concern among
generals and Pentagon officials who were unhappy with the flow of
intelligence to combat units and to higher headquarters. But civilian and
military intelligence officials, as well as top commanders with access to
intelligence reports, now say they learned little about the insurgency from
questioning inmates at the prison. Most of the prisoners held in the special
cellblock that became the setting for the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib
apparently were not linked to the insurgency, they said.
The Sham Handover
Daily Kos, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: The idiot establishment media is playing along with Bush (as usual)
and pretending that the "handover" date has significance beyond the
shuffling of a few legal documents.
Fact is, nothing much will change. The decidedly non-liberal Wall Street
Journal makes this clear as day...
SEE ALSO:
Behind the Scenes, US Tightens Grip on Iraq's Future
(Global Policy Forum)
Amnesty Slams "Bankrupt" Vision of US in
Damning Rights Report
Agence-France Press via Common Dreams, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: The United States has proved "bankrupt of vision and bereft of
principle" in its fight against terrorism and invasion of Iraq, human rights
group Amnesty International charged in a scathing report. The London-based
organisation's 2004 report, while also damning of rights violations in
dozens of other nations, particularly targeted the Washington-led "war on
terror" for sanctioning abuses in the name of freedom. The unilateral nature
of the conflict to unseat Saddam Hussein in Iraq had additionally "virtually
paralyzed" the United Nations' role in guaranteeing human rights on a global
level, Amnesty said Wednesday. REVISITED:
"No President has ever done more for human rights than I have." -G.W. Bush
REVISITED:
Deep Disgust: Bush's History of Human Rights Abuse
(BushWhackedUSA)
SEE ALSO:
Putting Bush and Bin Laden in Perspective
(BushWhackedUSA)
SEE ALSO:
Amnesty International Report 2004 Condemns Influence
of U.S. War on Terror (Amnesty
International)
Smart cookie...
Top Candidate to Lead Iraq's Interim Government Says He Doesn't Want the Job
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
New York Times, 27 May 2004
EXCERPT: An Iraqi nuclear scientist trumpeted as the likely interim leader
of Iraq withdrew his name from consideration on Wednesday, and the American
military captured a close aide of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite
cleric. The scientist, Dr. Hussain al-Shahristani, emerged on Tuesday after
Iraqi and American officials said that he was a leading candidate.
U.S. War Policy 'Grave Error' - Richard
Perle
Ex-Rumsfeld aide admits occupation of Iraq a failure
Britain, U.S. at odds over interim government's role
SANDRO CONTENTA
Toronto Star, 26 May 2004
Courtesy of Common Dreams
EXCERPT: One of the ideological architects of the Iraq war has criticized
the U.S.-led occupation of the country as "a grave error." Richard Perle,
until recently a powerful adviser to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
described U.S. policy in post-war Iraq as a failure. "I would be the first
to acknowledge we allowed the liberation (of Iraq) to subside into an
occupation. And I think that was a grave error, and in some ways a
continuing error," said Perle, former chair of the influential Defence
Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon. With violent resistance to the
U.S.-led occupation showing no signs of ending, Perle said the biggest
mistake in post-war policy "was the failure to turn Iraq back to the Iraqis
more or less immediately. "We didn't have to find ourselves in the role of
occupier. We could have made the transition that is going to be made at the
end of June more or less immediately," he told BBC radio, referring to the
U.S. and British plan to transfer political authority in Iraq to an interim
government on June 30. This public criticism of U.S. policy from one of the
leading advocates of the war — and a firm political ally of U.S. President
George W. Bush — indicates just how much Bush's political fortunes are being
damaged by post-war chaos.
Amnesty: "Killing of Children Must be
Investigated"
Electronic Intifada, 25 May 2004
EXCERPT: Amnesty International is calling on the Israeli authorities to
ensure that a thorough, independent and impartial investigation is promptly
carried out into the killing of two Palestinian children by members of the
Israeli army in recent days in the Gaza Strip. Sixteen-year-old Asma al-Mughayr
and her 13-year-old brother Ahmad were shot dead within minutes of each
other on the roof-terrace of their home in the southern Gaza Strip town of
Rafah on the morning of 18 May 2004. Each was killed by a single bullet in
the head, Asma while taking clothes off the drying line and her brother
Ahmad while feeding the pigeons. All available information indicate that the
bullets which killed the two children were fired from the top floor of a
nearby house, the highest building in the area, which had been taken over by
Israeli soldiers shortly before the two children where shot.
SEE ALSO:
The Crimes of War: Between Al-Zeitoun (Gaza) and Rafah
(ei)
Tanking Up on the Oil Crisis: The View
from Hubbard's Peak
By Mike Davis
TomDisptach via BushWhackedUSA, 26 May 2004
EXCERPT: M. King Hubbert was a celebrated oil geologist who in 1956
correctly prophesized that U.S. petroleum production would peak in the early
1970s, then irreversibly decline. In 1974 he likewise predicted that world
oil fields would achieve their maximum output in 2000; a figure later
revised by his acolytes to somewhere between 2006 and 2010. If the curve of
global oil production is indeed near the point of descent, as these experts
believe, it has epochal implications for the world economy. More expensive
oil will undercut China's energy-intensive boom, return OECD countries to
the bad old days of stagflation, and accelerate the environmentally
destructive exploitation of low-grade oil tars and shales. Most of all, it
will devastate the economies of oil-importing third-world countries. Poor
farmers will be unable to purchase petroleum-based artificial fertilizers
just as poor urban-dwellers will be unable to afford bus fares. (Already,
rising oil prices have brought chronic blackouts to cities throughout the
globe's southern hemisphere.) The only certain beneficiaries of this coming
economic chaos will be the big five oil corporations and their corrupt
partners: the Nigerian generals, Saudi princes, Russian kleptocrats, and
their ilk. Crude oil truly will become black gold. The rising value of an
increasingly scarce resource is a form of monopoly rent, and a future
permanent crude-oil regime of $50 per barrel (or higher) would transfer at
least $1 trillion per decade from consumers to oil producers. In plain
English, this would be the greatest robbery by a rentier elite in world
history. Someday, Enron may seem like the equivalent of a liquor store
hold-up by comparison. The oilmen in the White House, of course, have the
best view of the lush terrain on the far side of Hubbert's peak. No wonder,
then, that a map of the 'war against terrorism' corresponds with such
uncanny accuracy to the geography of oil fields and proposed pipelines. From
Kazakhstan to Ecuador, American combat boots are sticky with oil.
SEE ALSO:
The Costs of an Oil War: As many as 22,000 Iraq,
Afghan war veterans already seek care from VA system
(AP)
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