24 August 2004

Quasi-Legal Trials Set To Begin For Four at Guantanamo
Process Differs From U.S. Justice System
By Scott Higham
Washington Post, 24 August 2004
EXCERPT: Four suspected al Qaeda terrorists will face military trials this week at the Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in historic legal proceedings that have not been conducted by the U.S. government since World War II and are unlike anything most Americans face in the criminal justice system. Hearsay evidence will be allowed. Conversations between defendants and lawyers can be monitored in some circumstances. Exculpatory evidence can be kept secret from suspects. And appeals will go to a panel selected by the same government official who helped establish the commissions: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Military defense lawyers and human rights activists have condemned the proceedings as "fundamentally unfair." ..."Structurally, I think there are serious questions," said Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington lawyer who specializes in military legal issues. "This is not the military justice system. . . . It's an antique that's being rolled out of a museum case." ...This process is compromising our credibility," said David P. Sheldon, a former Navy appellate defense attorney who specializes in military law in Washington. "The individuals who will suffer and pay the price are not just the people being accused of these crimes. It's the citizens and the soldiers who will undoubtedly feel the wrath of people who will likely impose a similar type of grave judgment without regard to due process. If we don't play by the rules of the international community and respect human rights, then why should the rights of our soldiers be respected?" [BWUSA emphisis]

The Rambo Coalition
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Almost a year ago, on the second anniversary of 9/11, I predicted "an ugly, bitter campaign - probably the nastiest of modern American history." The reasons I gave then still apply. President Bush has no positive achievements to run on. Yet his inner circle cannot afford to see him lose: if he does, the shroud of secrecy will be lifted, and the public will learn the truth about cooked intelligence, profiteering, politicization of homeland security and more. ...As a domestic political strategy, Mr. Bush's posturing worked brilliantly. As a strategy against terrorism, it has played right into Al Qaeda's hands. Thirty years after Vietnam, American soldiers are again dying in a war that was sold on false pretenses and creates more enemies than it kills. It should come as no surprise, then, that Mr. Bush - who must defend the indefensible - has turned to those who still refuse to face the truth about Vietnam. All the credible evidence, from military records to the testimony of those who served with Mr. Kerry, confirms his wartime heroism. Why, then, are some veterans willing to join the smear campaign? Because they are angry about his later statements against the war. Yet making those statements was itself a heroic act - and what he said then rings truer than ever. The young John Kerry spoke of leaders who sent others to their deaths because they wanted to seem tough, then "left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude." Fifteen months after George Bush strutted around in his flight suit, more and more Americans are echoing Gen. Anthony Zinni, who received a standing ovation from an audience of Marine and Navy officers when he talked about the debacle in Iraq and said of those who served in Vietnam: "We heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?" Mr. Kerry also spoke of the moral cost of an ill-conceived war - of the atrocities soldiers find themselves committing when they can't tell friend from foe. Two words: Abu Ghraib. Let's hope that this latest campaign of garbage and lies - initially financed by a Texas Republican close to Karl Rove, and running an ad featuring an "independent" veteran who turns out to have served on a Bush campaign committee - leads to a backlash against Mr. Bush. If it doesn't, here's the message we'll be sending to Americans who serve their country: If you tell the truth, your courage and sacrifice count for nothing.
SEE ALSO:
These Charges Are False ...
It's one thing for the presidential campaign to get nasty but quite another for it to engage in fabrication.
LA Times,24 August 2004
EXCERPT: The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus. Make the charge simple: Dukakis "vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance"; Bill Clinton "raised taxes 128 times"; "there are [pick a number] Communists in the State Department." But make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation. Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal, and often even attempt an analysis or assessment. But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy over Dukakis' patriotism or Kerry's service in Vietnam. And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.
It must be infuriating to the victims of this process to be given conflicting advice about how to deal with it from the same campaign press corps that keeps it going. The press has been telling Kerry: (a) Don't let charges sit around unanswered; and (b) stick to your issues: Don't let the other guy choose the turf.
At the moment, Kerry is being punished by the media for taking advice (b) and failing to take advice (a). There was plenty of talk on TV about what Kerry's failure to strike back said about whether he had the backbone for the job of president — and even when he did strike back, he was accused of not doing it soon enough. But what does Bush's acquiescence in the use of this issue say about whether he has the simple decency for the job of president? ...No informed person can seriously believe that Kerry fabricated evidence to win his military medals in Vietnam. His main accuser has been exposed as having said the opposite at the time, 35 years ago. Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question, as well as by documentation. His accusers have no evidence except their own dubious word.

Bush's Superficial Wounds in the Vietnam Era
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: What was Bush doing with his youth? He was drinking. He was drinking like a fish, every night, into the wee hours. For decades. He gave no service to anyone, risked nothing, and did not even slack off efficiently.
The history of alcoholism and possibly other drug use is a key issue because it not only speaks to Bush's character as an addictive personality, but may tell us something about his erratic and alarming actions as president. His explosive temper probably provoked the disastrous siege of Fallujah last spring, killing 600 Iraqis, most of them women and children, in revenge for the deaths of 4 civilian mercenaries, one of them a South African. (Newsweek reported that Bush commanded his cabinet, "Let heads roll!") That temper is only one problem. Bush has a sadistic streak. He clearly enjoyed, as governor, watching executions. His delight in killing people became a campaign issue in 2000 when he seemed, in one debate, to enjoy the prospect of executing wrong-doers a little too much. He has clearly gone on enjoying killing people on a large scale in Iraq. Drug abuse can affect the ability of the person to feel deep emotions like empathy. Two decades of pickling his nervous system in various highly toxic substances have left Bush damaged goods. Even for those who later abstain, "visual-spatial abilities, abstraction, problem solving, and short-term memory, are the slowest to recover." That he managed to get on the wagon (though with that pretzel incident, you wonder how firmly) is laudable. But he suffers the severe effects of the aftermath, and we are all suffering along with him now, since he is the most powerful man in the world. ...We all know by now that Bush did not even do his full service with the Texas Air National Guard, absenting himself to work on the Alabama senate campaign of Winton "Red" Blount. Whether he was actually AWOL during this stint is unclear. But it is clear that not only did Bush slack off on his National Guard service, but he also slacked off from his campaign work. ...Again, decades of this sort of behavior do not leave a person untouched. Our world is in crisis and our Republic is in danger. It should not be left in the hands of a man who spent his life like this.

Bush is 'Exploiting 9/11 for Re-Election'
New Yorkers braced for violent protests aimed at Republican party convention next weekend
By David Usborne in New YorK
Independent (UK), 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: The invasion of the Big Apple is coming, and its residents could not be less delighted. From next weekend, about 50,000 delegates and their guests will pour into town for the Republican Party Convention. They may be joined by up to a million political protesters, some very noisome. Why us, is the cry of many New Yorkers who are dreading the confab of Republicans that starts on 30 August. Never before has the party of George Bush chosen New York as the host city for a convention. This is Democrat territory: fewer than one in five New Yorkers voted for Mr Bush in 2000. Solidarity is the answer. The Republicans settled on New York soon after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Coming to town in 2004 would be the perfect gesture, they thought, but Democrats see it differently. They say that the President is trying to exploit the tragedy of 2001 and use the backdrop of a maimed Manhattan to cast himself as the tough leader who can crush terrorism. For Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican himself, the four-day gathering is an opportunity for his city to sell itself. But he is concerned that it could go horribly wrong. How nice will New Yorkers be to their guests? And how violent may the promised protests become?

Study Finds Most Border Officers Feel Security Ought to Be Better
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
NYT, 24 August 2004
EXCERPT:  More than 60 percent of Border Patrol agents and immigration officers surveyed for a study issued on Monday said the Department of Homeland Security could do more to stop potential terrorists from entering the country, and more than a third said they were not satisfied that they had the tools and training to do so. The survey, of 500 border agents and immigration inspectors, was conducted for the unions representing them by Peter D. Hart Research Associates. It found them sharply divided on whether the country was safer now than before the 9/11 attacks: 53 percent said it was, but 44 percent said it was no safer or was less safe. "Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, it was extremely easy to enter the United States illegally," said T. J. Bonner, president of one of the unions, the National Border Patrol Council. ''Incredibly, this has not changed in any meaningful way." The survey also found low morale to be pervasive. [BWUSA empahsis.]

Final Overtime Rules Strip Protection from Millions of Workers
Economic Policy Institute, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Department of Labor's regulatory changes that went into effect today strip away the right to overtime pay for over six million workers. The original version of these rules, proposed by the Bush Administration in March 2003, would have stripped overtime protection from eight million workers. The result was widespread public opposition, and the administration promised that its final version of the rules would correct this problem, a promise it has failed to keep. For an analysis of the final overtime rule changes, read EPI’s Briefing Paper, Longer Hours, Less Pay

Can You Forgive Them?
Ostracizing the people who were right on Iraq.
By Timothy Noah
Slate, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: The non-rehabilitation that seems most baffling and unjust is that of Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector who argued till he was blue in the face that the United States would find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Ritter's reputation was dealt a devastating blow by a November 2001 cover story in the Weekly Standard about his weird transformation from Iraq hawk to Iraq dove. Ritter's conversion remains a mystery (he's argued that his views never changed, despite a substantial paper trail to the contrary), and the Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes offered it as exhibit A in his argument that Ritter could no longer be taken seriously. But the article is a lot less persuasive today on this latter point than it seemed at the time. It began with Ritter saying, "Iraq today represents a threat to no one," which, Hayes opined, was an argument only Tariq Aziz would make. Three years later, of course, Ritter's assessment seems sound (assuming it did not include people then living inside Iraq), and Hayes' characterization seems idiotic. ...Not long ago, I spoke with a Democratic moderate about the war in Iraq. He said he considered support for the Iraq war to be a necessary prerequisite to assuming any powerful role in the party. It showed that the person in question was willing to project U.S. force abroad. But wait, I asked. Do you still think the Iraq war was a good idea? After some hemming and hawing, he admitted that he'd rather we hadn't gone in. Then why make support for a mistaken policy a litmus test? Because, he repeated, it shows that the person in question is willing to project U.S. force abroad. I should emphasize that we weren't talking about whether troops should be withdrawn from Iraq, which is an entirely separate and vexing question that speaks to our responsibility in a country whose previous government we destroyed. What this man was saying was that it was better to have been wrong about Iraq than to have been right. That's the prevailing (though not always conscious) consensus in Washington, and it's completely insane. [BWUSA EMPHASIS]

23 August 2004

Wounded by Friendly Fire
By Gary Younge
The Guardian (UK), 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Vietnam war veteran and Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry has been ambushed and, for the moment, remains caught in enemy fire. Having made his five-month stint of decorated service in Vietnam the heart of his platform, it is now emerging as his achilles heel. ... There are three things we can learn from this. First, there is no level to which Republicans will not stoop to besmirch a character, belittle an issue or befuddle the electorate. Second, there is no level to which the Democrats will not stoop to attempt to neutralise these attacks. And third, that the Republicans will always win in this race to the bottom because so much less is expected of them and, when it comes to muck-slinging, they have no qualms about getting their hands dirty. Take Vietnam. At first sight this is an issue you would think the Bush administration would want to keep away from. Thanks to family connections, the president served his war in the Texas National Guard - and even then it is debatable whether he showed up. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, managed to defer being drafted five times, until the war was over, claiming he had "other priorities". Nine months and two days after the army changed the regulations so that married men with no children were no longer exempt, Cheney had his first child, Elizabeth, bringing a whole new meaning to the term family planning.
SEE ALSO: Dole Questions Kerry's Vietnam Wounds (AP)
SEE ALSO: Bush Campaign Worker One of Anti-Kerry Swift Boat Attackers (CHB)

While Kerry Lied for Medals, Bush Delivered Turkey to Troops
Kerry campaign fends off further 'friendly fire' as White House leaks another photo of Bush's thoroughly documented top-secret AWOL Mission to Vietnam; John McCain suggests that he might honestly speak his mind soon if candidates continue to fail to address issues of significance
By Eric Bosse
BushWhackedUSA, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Even as John F. Kerry cowered in the bulletproof luxury suite of his Swift boat, fabricating reports about his own bravery in a battle that never happened, George W. Bush dodged a hail of bullets in a top-secret mission to deliver turkey to American troops in Vietnam, according to several high-ranking White House officials (who prefer to remain unidentified, hence the bags over their heads during off-the-record press conferences). To support claims that Bush risked life and limb to boost the morale of American soldiers, the White House leaked what officials called "irrefutable photographic evidence."

Two New Witnesses Contradict Kerry's Swift Boat Critics
FactCheck.org, 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: We have updated our Aug. 6 article on the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad to include two new accounts that surfaced Aug. 22. One supported Kerry's account of the actions for which he was awarded the Silver Star, and the other supported Kerry's account of receiving enemy fire during the rescue for which Kerry was awarded the Bronze Star. The Silver Star section has been updated to include the following: On Aug. 22 an officer who was present supported Kerry's version, breaking a 35-year silence. William B. Rood commanded another Swift Boat during the same operation and was awarded the Bronze Star himself for his role in attacking the Viet Cong ambushers. He said Kerry and he went ashore at the same time after being attacked by several Viet Cong onshore. Rood said he was the only other officer present. Rood is now an editor on the metropolitan desk of the Chicago Tribune, which published his first-person account of the incident in its Sunday edition. Rood said he had refused all interviews about Kerry's war record, even from reporters for his own paper, until motivated to speak up because Kerry's critics are telling "stories I know to be untrue" and "their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us."

Dole Questions Kerry's Vietnam Wounds
AP, 22 August 2004
Courtesy of Talking Points Memo
EXCERPT: Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole suggested Sunday that John Kerry apologize for past testimony before Congress about alleged atrocities during the Vietnam War and joined critics of the Democratic presidential candidate who say he received an early exit from combat for "superficial wounds." Dole also called on Kerry to release all the records of his service in Vietnam. Separately, President Bush's re-election campaign continued to deny links to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an anti-Kerry group running ads in three states, after the resignation of a campaign volunteer who appeared in the group's new ad.
SEE ALSO:
Dole Knows Better
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: Today Bob Dole suggested that one or more of John Kerry's Purple Hearts may have been fraudulent in some way because they were for "superficial wounds." Dole knows better.
In a 1988 campaign-trail autobiography, here's how Dole described the incident that earned him his first Purple Heart: "As we approached the enemy, there was a brief exchange of gunfire. I took a grenade in hand, pulled the pin, and tossed it in the direction of the farmhouse. It wasn't a very good pitch (remember, I was used to catching passes, not throwing them). In the darkness, the grenade must have struck a tree and bounced off. It exploded nearby, sending a sliver of metal into my leg--the sort of injury the Army patched up with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart."

Bush uses 'smear' to block questions about his guard duty
Kerry Files Suit Vs. Ads Challenging His War Record
Reuters, 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry asked the Federal Election Commission on Friday to force Republican critics to withdraw ads challenging his military service, and accused the Bush campaign of illegally helping coordinate the attacks. The Kerry campaign said it filed the complaint against the group behind the ads, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, "for violating the law with inaccurate ads that are illegally coordinated with the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign and Republican National Committee." ...Bush and a top adviser have long-standing ties to people behind the advertisements, which claim Kerry lied about his Vietnam War service record, but the campaign denies any part in the ads themselves. The White House has declined to specifically condemn the Swift Boat commercials. It has instead challenged Kerry to join Bush in calling for an end to all ads funded by unrestricted donations, including those questioning Bush's service in the United States in the National Guard during the Vietnam War.
SEE ALSO:
Kerry TV Ad Pins Veterans' Attack Firmly on Bush
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JIM RUTENBERG
NYT, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Senator John Kerry released a television advertisement yesterday blaming President Bush for a campaign by a "front group" of veterans that Mr. Kerry said had smeared his Vietnam record, as he intensified his drive to gain control in a fight that some Democrats said could undermine his campaign for the presidency.

Controversial Overtime Rules Take Effect
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
NYT, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush administration's new overtime rules go into effect today, but the Kerry campaign has already begun attacking the overhauled regulations, saying they will hurt millions of American workers. ...The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, has issued a report, which many Democrats have relied on, concluding that the rules will exempt about six million workers from overtime coverage. Among those, the institute said, are 1.4 million low-level salaried supervisors, 130,000 chefs and sous-chefs and 900,000 workers with graduate or college degrees who will now be considered professional employees.

Still Not Getting By in Bush's America
By Joel Wendland
ZNet, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT: According to recent statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the gap between the rich and poor since 1967 has grown by 75 percent. While the average total household income for families in the bottom 20 percent has grown by $2,500 since 1967, the top 20 percent have seen their incomes soar by about $62,000. According to the same report, the share of national income held by the bottom 20 percent fell to only 3.5 percent. In other words, approximately 26 million households combined to earn only 3.5 percent of the total income earned by people in the US. While income has sunk for the poor, the middle strata have seen their wages stagnate over the same period. Meanwhile healthcare costs, housing, education, gas and oil, and food have soared. This growing disparity is of special concern as the jobs picture has looked bleak in the last three years. In the first two years of the Bush presidency, 2.6 million jobs were lost, nearly doubling the unemployment rate. While the Bush administration points to recent jobs creation to build a case for its reelection bid, over 1.5 million jobs remain unaccounted for. The jobs that have been created, says economist Art Perlo, may not even cover the number of people who entered the work force for the first time in the same period. This is certainly the case in recent months with only 112,000 jobs in June and 32,000 new jobs in July. At least 140,000 new jobs need to be added "each month just to absorb new workers," Perlo says. Further, according to economists, 60 percent of the jobs that have been created pay less than the national average in wages, the vast majority are in the low-paying service sector, few provide benefits such as health care coverage, and as many as 1/5 are temp jobs. Currently, the national average of weekly wages is at its lowest point since the official end of the Bush recession in late 2001.

21-22 August 2004

Big Lies for Bush
August 22, 2004
Boston Globe, 22 August 2004
Imagine if supporters of Bill Clinton had tried in 1996 to besmirch the military record of his opponent, Bob Dole. After all, Dole was given a Purple Heart for a leg scratch probably caused, according to one biographer, when a hand grenade thrown by one of his own men bounced off a tree. And while the serious injuries Dole sustained later surely came from German fire, did the episode demonstrate heroism on Dole's part or a reckless move that ended up killing his radioman and endangering the sergeant who dragged Dole off the field? The truth, according to many accounts, is that Dole fought with exceptional bravery and deserves the nation's gratitude. No one in 1996 questioned that record. Any such attack on behalf of Clinton, an admitted Vietnam draft dodger, would have been preposterous. Yet amazingly, something quite similar is happening today as supporters of President Bush attack the Vietnam record of Senator John Kerry.

Bearhug Politics: Careful Steps to a New Bush-McCain Alliance
By TODD S. PURDUM
NYT, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: It was one of the odder embraces in American politics since Sammy Davis Jr. hugged Richard M. Nixon at the Republican Convention 32 years ago this summer: George W. Bush and John McCain's back-wrapping bearhug and side-head-smooch on the campaign trail last week. For most of the past four years, Mr. McCain and the man who beat him for the Republican nomination in a bitter campaign in 2000 have treated each other like a pair of reversed magnets, members of the same metallurgical family held apart by reciprocal repulsion. Now their locked arms are raising eyebrows. "Don't make people who hate you hug you," Bill Maher joked on the HBO program "Real Time." "Whatever the Bush administration is blackmailing John McCain with, stop!" The newfound friendship may be good for late-night laughs, but it is deadly serious political business for both men, the result of a deliberate, months-long effort by the White House to woo the Arizona senator - the most popular national political figure in the country - and of Mr. McCain's self-interested susceptibility to same. The turnabout could not be more striking, and for both men the stakes could be nothing less than the presidency itself. Four years ago, relations were so strained that Mr. McCain left the Republican convention in Philadelphia two days early, returning for the final night only after a last-minute request by the Bush team. This year, he will have a prime-time speaking slot on the convention's first night in New York City, play host to the network anchors at a private dinner the day before, campaign with the president in several states the day after, speak to 10 or 15 state delegations and preside over a celebrity party with the comedian Darrell Hammond on the eve of Mr. Bush's re-nomination. So what's up?

Anti-Kerry Vets Not There That Day
By William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT: There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago—three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on February 28, 1969. One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other. For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election with a group of swift boat veterans and others contending that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions. Many of us wanted to put it all behind us—the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service—even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work. But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.
SEE ALSO:
Officer From Another Swift Boat Breaks Silence and Defends Kerry
By JIM RUTENBERG
NYT, 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: Vietnam veteran who served with Senator John Kerry on a Swift boat mission broke a 35-year silence this weekend to support Mr. Kerry's version of events from one of their operations together and to chastise veterans critical of the senator as having "splashed doubt on all of us." The veteran, William B. Rood, is now an editor at The Chicago Tribune, which ran on its Web site yesterday and in Sunday's paper a 1,750-word first-person article in which Mr. Rood recounted the mission. His account added to a growing debate over the most serious claims from the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And it ensured that questions swirling around the veracity of the group's claims, and the Kerry campaign's accusations that the group was connected to the Mr. Bush campaign, would dominate the contest for yet another day.
SEE ALSO:
JOHN KERRY'S WAR RECORD
Swift boat skipper: Kerry critics wrong
Tribune editor breaks long silence on Kerry record; fought in disputed battle
By Tim Jones
Chicago Tribune, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT: The commander of a Navy swift boat who served alongside Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry during the Vietnam War stepped forward Saturday to dispute attacks challenging Kerry's integrity and war record. William Rood, an editor on the Chicago Tribune's metropolitan desk, said he broke 35 years of silence about the Feb. 28, 1969, mission that resulted in Kerry's receiving a Silver Star because recent portrayals of Kerry's actions published in the best-selling book "Unfit for Command" are wrong and smear the reputations of veterans who served with Kerry. Rood, who commanded one of three swift boats during that 1969 mission, said Kerry came under rocket and automatic weapons fire from Viet Cong forces and that Kerry devised an aggressive attack strategy that was praised by their superiors. He called allegations that Kerry's accomplishments were "overblown" untrue.

Petty Patriots Perplex Public School with a Flag Flap
AP, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: Criticism over a Mexican flag hung in a classroom has led school officials to create a policy that says the display of foreign banners must be temporary and related to what is being taught in class. Officials at North High School, where the student population is 84 percent Hispanic, said they received complaints over a photograph in the Rocky Mountain News taken on Monday, the first day of school. The photo showed a Mexican flag displayed in a classroom next to a U.S. flag. Andrew Fox, who teaches English to Spanish-speaking students, said he wanted his Latino students to feel more welcome. School superintendent Jerry Wartgow said some people complained there should never be any non-U.S. flags displayed in the schools. "It's a school, for God's sake," said Wartgow. "That's where you study countries." Other people were upset that the American flag was hung improperly, with the stars on the wrong side. In response to the complaints, school principal Darlene LeDoux removed the Mexican flag and another one displayed in the school's lobby next to a poster of the Statue of Liberty. The News reported Friday that the new guidelines are still being written, but that they would protect the display of flags while requiring any such display to be related to the curriculum. It was unclear whether the display in Fox's classroom would be acceptable under the new guidelines, Denver Public Schools spokeswoman Tanya Caughey said.

Truth and Consequences
CJR Campaign Desk, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: While they may not be getting the details right about the connection between the Bush administration and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the campaign press finally is doing something we've been hoping for for months: Sorting out truth from fiction in the controversy over John Kerry's military service in Vietnam. ...Until late Wednesday night Kerry himself let the accusations fly without aggressively challenging them, until, as many papers reported today, he decided it was time to fight back. In wake of the senator's new approach, Campaign Desk has seen an equally rejuvenated press corps. Yesterday, the Washington Post published a report based on the official Navy records of LTJG Larry Thurlow, which calls into question Thurlow's criticism of Sen. Kerry. Thurlow has charged that Kerry's swift boat was not under attack from enemy fire on March 13, 1969. Thurlow, like Kerry, received a bronze star for his actions that day, and Thurlow's official navy records filed for the citation praises Thurlow for his action "despite enemy bullets flying about him."
Then today the New York Times took an in-depth look (nearly 3,500 words) at the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's "web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove."
In a break from "he-said, she-said" journalism the press found enough backbone to assert truth when supported by fact. Rather than relying on partisan talking points to provide a rebuttal, the Times' Kate Zernike and Jim Rutenberg assert with the newspaper's voice that "But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements." The Los Angeles Times' Matea Gold and Maria L. La Ganga did the same, writing, "A Times review of their accusations found that, in addition to Thurlow, other members also had given contradictory accounts of incidents and offered evidence of Kerry's alleged wrongdoing based on memories of events that they say they witnessed from a boat or two away. Military documents and accounts of crewmates who did serve with Kerry support the view put forth by the candidate and his campaign -- that he acted courageously and came by his five medals honestly."
SEE ALSO:
New Evidence Undermines Swift Vets' Attack on Kerry
David Corn
Capital Games, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: The latest volley from the Swift Vets shows what motivates these anti-Kerry veterans. They remain mad at him for opposing the war and addressing its worst aspects. As for what happened on March 13, 1969, the issue is whether to accept the accounts of veterans who are angry with Kerry or the documentary evidence that is seconded by Rassmann, a Republican, and Kerry's crew mates. Lambert's citation offers more reason to wonder about the Swift Boat group's version of events and to question its dedication to the truth.

The Politics Of Bullying
Paul Rogat Loeb
TomPaine.com, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: The best thing John Kerry did at the Democratic convention was to challenge the bullying. He talked of the flag belonging to all of us, and how “standing up to speak our minds is not a challenge to patriotism [but] the heart and soul of patriotism.” By doing this, he drew the line against the pattern of intimidation that the Bush administration has used to wage war on democracy itself. ...Whatever we may think of Bush’s particular policies, the most dangerous thing he’s done is to promote a culture that equates questioning with treason. This threatens the very dialogue that’s at the core of our republic. ...Think of the eve of the Iraq war, and the contempt heaped on those generals who dared to suggest that the war might take far more troops and money than the administration was suggesting. Think of the attacks on the reputations and motives of longtime Republicans who’ve recently dared to question, like national security advisor Richard Clarke, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and Bush’s own former Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill. Think of the Republican TV ads, the 2000 Georgia Senate race—which paired Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein—asserting that because Cleland opposed President Bush’s Homeland Security bill, he lacked “the courage to lead.”

Tsunami
The Campaign '04 information war is fast, deep, and fraught with lies. The press must rethink its coverage, or drown in a toxic tidal wave
BY BRYAN KEEFER
Columbia Journalism Review, July-August issue
EXCERPT: Political spin is as old as politics, and it is tempting to view the Campaign ’04 version as nothing more than an update of the same old, same old. Ask a dozen reporters about this campaign season and you’ll hear a dozen variations on recurrent themes: the campaigns are dishonest, the attacks and counterattacks fly nonstop, the wash of information dumped on the press is bewildering. Such assessments, though, miss a crucial new development: President Bush, Senator Kerry, and their operatives are deliberately using a cynical combination of calculated deception, speed, and volume to exploit the press’s reluctance to call a lie a lie. Rather than sorting through the facts and pointing out what is true and what is not — something good reporters are qualified to do — we too often treat the truth as something the reader or viewer should be able to discern from competing bits of spin. In doing so, we encourage the candidates to mislead the public. And when the “facts” are coming from every conceivable angle and around the clock, it makes it even more unlikely that the press will sort through it all and render a judgment. Bush has taken advantage of this like no other president before him (this is how he governs, not just how he campaigns) and Kerry is learning quickly how to play the game. The rules of engagement on the campaign trail have changed, and the press must change the way it covers the race or risk drowning — along with the voters — under a toxic tsunami.

The Two Faces of Lou Dobbs
By Zachary Roth
CJR Campaign Desk, 17 June 2004
[Bill Moyers had Lou Dobbs on NOW last night and the interview was so good we decided to go back and dig this article out.- BWUSA]
EXCERPT: In April, John Kerry's campaign released a TV ad attacking President Bush for supporting the export of U.S. jobs overseas. The ad was misleading -- although Gregory Mankiw, the chief White House economist, has said that, "outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," Bush himself has never explicitly said he favors sending jobs abroad. But Kerry's ad highlighted the fact that Democrats see corporate outsourcing -- in which American corporations abandon the U.S. in favor of cheaper sources of foreign labor -- as a potentially damaging issue for the president. During the Democratic primaries, both John Edwards and, to a lesser extent, Kerry attacked the president for policies that, they argued, encouraged job loss in the United States. The issue resonated with voters, especially in states like Ohio and Michigan, which have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Enter Lou Dobbs. The distinguished-looking host of CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" has established a reputation this year as one of the most outspoken opponents of corporate outsourcing. Dobbs has turned his nightly news show into a one-man campaign -- the head of the Business Roundtable called it a "jihad" -- against the practice. Night after night, he roundly attacks government trade policies that he believes encourage American corporations to ship jobs abroad. But it's not just U.S. policymakers who are the targets of Dobbs's indignation. He makes little attempt to hide his disdain for the companies that are, as he puts it, "exporting America." And Dobbs is watched, so it's fair to say his views sway voters.

New Study Finds Declines in Nonprofit Employment, Earnings for U.S. and States
OMB Watch, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: A study by OMB Watch released today found that employment in the U.S. nonprofit sector which had held up well during the 2001 recession and its brief aftermath, has stalled over the past year. Perhaps more troubling and unexpected, the report finds that nonprofits suffered declines in the average number of hours worked per week, average weekly earnings, as well as hourly wages. Findings for nonprofit employment within certain states mirrored those for the nation. The report, "Recent Trends in Nonprofit Employment and Earnings: 1990-2004," examined data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Employment Statistics (CES) payroll survey, for the years 1990 through July 2004. It found employment in the nonprofit sector continues to increase on a year-over-year basis, but by only about 0.5 percent for the past year. That is well below its average rate of 2.4 percent growth over the past 15 years, and less than half the 1.3 percent growth rate for total employment over the same period.

Halliburton Contracts Balloon Despite Being Under an Investigative Cloud
Company gets $4.3 billion in 2003
Center for Public Integrity, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: The oil services company Halliburton,
largely through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, has received more revenue from government contracts in the last year than from 1998 through 2002. In 2003, when the company had record revenue of $16.3 billion, Halliburton received contracts from the Department of Defense worth $4.3 billion, while in the previous five years it obtained less than $2.5 billion from the military, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

Wide U.S. Inquiry Into Purchasing for Health Care
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
NYT, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Justice Department has opened a broad criminal investigation of the medical-supply industry, apparently to determine whether hospitals and other medical care providers are fraudulently overcharging Medicare and other federal and state health programs for a wide array of goods - from rubber gloves to drugs to X-ray machines. More than a dozen medical-supply companies recently received federal subpoenas in what appears to be a wide-ranging investigation into the way suppliers market products to clinics, hospitals and nursing homes that serve Medicare and Medicaid patients, and whether those institutions properly account for the purchases. Industry executives expect many hospitals to receive similar requests in coming weeks. The central issue, according to current and former industry executives, is whether the industry's use of rebates, discounts, barter arrangements and refunds to hospitals and other medical centers means that Medicare and Medicaid are being charged higher prices for products than the hospitals are actually spending. The investigation appears to be centered on the medical-supply industry's dealings with Novation, a company in Irving, Tex., that is an industry leader in negotiating the contracts that thousands of hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and other facilities use to buy drugs and other supplies.

A Bush "Ask the President," Stump "show" Annotated and Analyzed
By Anthony Wade
OpEdNews.com, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush is stumping these days in a manner that belies his inability to actually connect with anyone. These are scripted events, called “ask the president” where Bush is surrounded by adoring throngs of supporters who want to cheer more than they really want to ask anything of substance. The events are staged, pre-planned and plastic, right down to the “questions” and the “ordinary citizens”. First, the crowd is packed only with supporters. Regular readers of my work already know about the arrests of dissenters at Bush rallies and how they insist on an Orwellian pledge to the President before gaining admittance to one of these events. Traditionally, Bush will ramble on for the first portion of the “ask President Bush” session, waxing prophetically about how the economy has turned a corner, and we gonna get those evildoers before entering into a game of softball with the “questions”. I have analyzed the most recent event, held in Southridge High School, in Beaverton Oregon. The absolute disconnect this President shows to this country and its citizens is staggering.

20 August 2004

Senators Ask Where $8.8 Billion in Iraq Funds Went
By Sue Pleming
Reuters via FindLaw.com, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: At least $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds that was given to Iraqi ministries by the former U.S.-led authority there cannot be accounted for, according to a draft U.S. audit set for release soon. The audit by the Coalition Provisional Authority's own Inspector General blasts the CPA for "not providing adequate stewardship" of at least $8.8 billion from the Development Fund for Iraq that was given to Iraqi ministries. The audit was first reported on a Web site earlier this month by journalist and retired Col. David Hackworth. A U.S. official confirmed the contents of the leaked audit cited by Hackworth (www.hackworth.com) were accurate. The development fund is made up of proceeds from Iraqi oil sales, frozen assets from foreign governments and surplus from the U.N. Oil for Food Program. Its handling has already come under fire in a U.N.-mandated audit released last month. Among the draft audit's findings were that payrolls in Iraqi ministries under Coalition Provisional Authority control were padded with thousands of ghost employees. In one example, the audit said the CPA paid for 74,000 guards even though the actual number could not be validated. In another, 8,206 guards were listed on a payroll but only 603 people doing the work could be counted. Three Democratic senators -- Ron Wyden of Oregon, Tom Harkin from Iowa and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota -- demanded an explanation from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the use of the funds by the CPA, which handed over authority to the Iraqis in June. ..."The CPA apparently transferred this staggering sum of money with no written rules or guidelines for ensuring adequate managerial, financial or contractual controls over the funds," said the letter sent by the senators on Thursday. "Such enormous discrepancies raise very serious questions about potential fraud, waste and abuse," said the senators. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions. An international audit report released last month that was requested by a U.N.-mandated monitoring body chided the CPA for oversight of spending of Iraq's oil revenue.

Voting While Black
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: The smell of voter suppression coming out of Florida is getting stronger. It turns out that a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation, in which state troopers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando in a bizarre hunt for evidence of election fraud, is being conducted despite a finding by the department last May "that there was no basis to support the allegations of election fraud." State officials have said that the investigation, which has already frightened many voters and intimidated elderly volunteers, is in response to allegations of voter fraud involving absentee ballots that came up during the Orlando mayoral election in March. But the department considered that matter closed last spring, according to a letter from the office of Guy Tunnell, the department's commissioner, to Lawson Lamar, the state attorney in Orlando, who would be responsible for any criminal prosecutions. The letter, dated May 13, said: "We received your package related to the allegations of voter fraud during the 2004 mayoral election. This dealt with the manner in which absentee ballots were either handled or collected by campaign staffers for Mayor Buddy Dyer. Since this matter involved an elected official, the allegations were forwarded to F.D.L.E.'s Executive Investigations in Tallahassee, Florida. "The documents were reviewed by F.D.L.E., as well as the Florida Division of Elections. It was determined that there was no basis to support the allegations of election fraud concerning these absentee ballots. Since there is no evidence of criminal misconduct involving Mayor Dyer, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement considers this matter closed." Well, it's not closed.

Wealthy Replace Taxes With Loans While Rest of Us Pay the Interest
By Robert B. Reich
The American Prospect, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: Two stark facts have become apparent about how our government now finances itself. The first is about who's paying taxes. There used to be a graduated system in which the rich paid a much larger proportion than the poor. But that's changed. None other than the Congressional Budget Office -- which, incidentally, works for a Republican Congress and is headed by a former Bush economist -- reports that two-thirds of George W. Bush's tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest 20 percent of American families, and the lion's share to the top 1 percent. Now the second fact, equally important: The Treasury Department tells us that the nation's total debt has soared from 5.7 trillion dollars four years ago to 7.3 trillion dollars today. Put these two facts together and you've got the real story. Wealthy Americans used to add to government revenues mainly through their tax payments. Now, wealthy Americans add to government revenues by lending the government money.

Worker Compensation Lagging Behind Productivity Gains
Economic Policy Institute, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: With employment still down 1.2 million jobs since the recession began, and unemployment essentially unchanged since the recovery began in late 2001, many workers lack the bargaining power to claim their fair share of the growing economy; thus, most of the benefits of growth have flowed to profits, not compensation. For further analysis of how worker compensation has fallen behind productivity, see the August 18 Snapshot.

Bush Religion Adviser Quits Campaign Post
Sexual Harassment Allegations Surface
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: Deal W. Hudson, publisher of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis and a close ally of the Bush White House, has resigned as an adviser to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign because of allegations that he sexually harassed a Fordham University student a decade ago. Hudson, 54, had been a key player in the Republican Party's effort to attract Roman Catholic voters. Because of his connections to the White House and his friendship with senior presidential adviser Karl Rove, he was widely regarded as a Catholic power broker in Washington. Hudson announced Wednesday in the online edition of National Review magazine that he was leaving his unpaid position in the Bush campaign because "a liberal Catholic newspaper" was about to publish an investigation detailing "allegations from over a decade ago involving a female student at the college where I then taught."

Bush Q&A's Are All on the Same Side
Pep Sessions Keep Protesters Out of Sight
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: On the president's campaign, each questioning session is like a 90-minute support group dedicated to him.

When Incumbents Attack
Of course George W. Bush is relentlessly attacking John Kerry -- he's got no other choice.
The American Prospect, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: ...it shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the first five months of this year, according to a Washington Post analysis of media buys in the top 100 U.S. media markets, 75 percent of Bush’s ads have been negative compared with just 27 percent of Kerry’s. The President also has taken the extraordinary step of attacking his opponent directly from behind the presidential podium. All in all, President Bush has been waging one of the most negative, nastiest campaigns in a generation. And looking to the Republican convention starting at the end of this month, expect more of the same -- precisely because Bush has no other choice but to attack.
To understand why, think back about a quarter of a century to another president who also accepted his party’s re-nomination in New York City: Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, Bush is an embattled incumbent elected without a mandate and stuck trying to defend a failed presidency. Both presided over an economic downturn. (Granted, Carter’s was more of a total meltdown, but Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a job loss on his watch.) Both contended with an energy crisis. Both were dragged down in a Mesopotamian morass: Bush in Iraq, Carter in Iran. And both faced an electorate that wanted them out of office. In June of 1980, Carter had a dismal 26 percent approval rating, and a Newsweek poll from two weeks ago found that only 43 percent of registered voters want to see Bush re-elected. Faced with that situation (and I will admit that Bush is in a stronger position than Carter since he does still have credibility on fighting the war on terrorism), there’s only one strategy for an incumbent president: attack. Since the American people seem to want to hire someone else for the job, the embattled incumbent has no choice but to convince them that the only other available candidate is totally unfit for the position.

FEC Votes to Curb Nonparty Donations
Stricter Rules Will Go Into Effect in January
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Federal Election Commission yesterday adopted new regulations that will make it significantly more difficult for independent political groups to continue to raise and spend millions of dollars in contributions for the 2006 election. The new rules become effective Jan. 1 and will not limit this year's explosion of spending by non-party groups such as America Coming Together and the Media Fund, which are closely aligned with the Democrats, and Progress for America on the Republican side. "We have done something huge," said Ellen Weintraub, the Democratic vice chairman of the FEC, after the 4 to 2 vote. Scott Thomas, a Democratic commissioner and strong advocate of tough regulation, dismissed the regulations as "tinkering" that "will prove inadequate." Weintraub countered: "It isn't tinkering. It's a big deal." The FEC adopted two major regulations. The first involves fundraising solicitations. If an appeal to a prospective donor "indicates that any portion of the funds" will be used to support or oppose a federal candidate, then the maximum that can be contributed would be $5,000. Currently, groups that refer specifically to President Bush and John F. Kerry are raising contributions that in some cases exceed $10 million. A group raising money for both federal and nonfederal candidates must raise at least half of its funds in amounts of $5,000 or less, according to the new rules. The second rule governs the way the groups collect both "soft money," defined as unlimited donations from corporation, unions and wealthy individuals, and "hard money," defined as limited donations from individuals.

Judge's Ruling Seen As Newsgathering Chill
By HOPE YEN Associated Press Writer
AP, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: A judge's decision to punish five reporters for refusing to identify their sources for stories about nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee threatens to chill vital newsgathering at a time of increased government secrecy, advocates say. U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on Wednesday held the reporters in contempt and fined each of them $500. He said the information was needed for Lee, a former nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of spying, to litigate his privacy lawsuit against government officials. Jackson said the fines would be suspended pending appeals. Attorneys for the journalists said they would appeal. It is the second time in two weeks that a federal judge in Washington has found journalists in contempt of court after they declined to disclose sources. Last week, a Time magazine reporter was held in contempt as part of a grand jury probe into the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity. "The threat to First Amendment rights that's going on this summer is unprecedented," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said. "We have reporters being subpoenaed. We have judges issuing illegal prior restraints on the media. "All this has to do with secrecy. The government is trying to keep more and more secrets all the time, and journalists are working harder to uncover those secrets. Given the terrorism climate, all this has come to a head," she said.

Sen. Kennedy Flagged by No-Fly List
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: U.S. Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government's secret "no-fly" list. Federal air security officials said the initial error that led to scrutiny of the Massachusetts Democrat should not have happened even though they recognize that the no-fly list is imperfect. But privately they acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed.

Punishment will be to continue military career...
General Said to Be Faulted Over Speeches
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: A Pentagon investigation has concluded that a senior intelligence officer violated regulations by failing to make it clear that he was not acting in an official capacity when, in speaking at churches, he cast the war on terrorism in religious terms, a Defense Department official said Thursday. In most instances the officer, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, was wearing his Army uniform. The inquiry, by the Defense Department's deputy inspector general, found that General Boykin, deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence, had also violated Pentagon rules by failing to obtain advance clearance for his remarks, which gained wide publicity through news reports last fall. ...The Washington Post, which reported the conclusion of the investigation on Thursday, said the inquiry had determined that General Boykin discussed his involvement in the war on terrorism at 23 religious-oriented events beginning in January 2002 and that he wore his uniform while speaking at all but two. He spoke mostly at Baptist or Pentecostal churches.

Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Anti-Kerry Ad
By KATE ZERNIKE and JIM RUTENBERG
NYT, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: An ad questioning John Kerry's war record sprang from an alliance between Texas Republicans and veterans angry about Mr. Kerry's criticism of the Vietnam War. ...Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election. The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the "baby killer" and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements. Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry "unfit" had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.

19 August 2004

Incompetent Condi
Former Iraq Arms Inspector Faults Prewar Intelligence
By PHILIP SHENON
NYT, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: A former Bush administration official who led the fruitless postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told Congress on Wednesday that the National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice had botched intelligence information before the war and was "the dog that did not bark" over Iraq's weapons program. In uncharacteristically caustic remarks about his former colleagues, the weapons inspector, David Kay, said the National Security Council had failed to protect President Bush from faulty prewar intelligence and had left Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "hanging out in the wind" when he tried to gather intelligence before the war about Iraq's weapons programs. "Where was the N.S.C?" Dr. Kay asked, suggesting that the president had come to depend too heavily on information supplied by Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and that the president needed to reach out to others for national security information. "Every president who has been successful, at least that I know of, in the history of this republic, has developed both informal and formal means of getting checks on whether people who tell him things are in fact telling him the whole truth," Dr. Kay told the Senate intelligence committee at a hearing called to discuss the findings of the Sept. 11 commission.  "I think this is particularly crucial and difficult to do in the intelligence area,'' he continued. "The recent history has been a reliance on the N.S.C. system to do it. I quite frankly think that has not served this president very well." ...Dr. Kay did not identify Ms. Rice by name in his often-impassioned testimony. But his remarks were clearly aimed at her performance and reflected a widespread view among intelligence specialists that Ms. Rice, perhaps Mr. Bush's most trusted aide, and the National Security Council have never been held sufficiently accountable for intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war. ...In his sharp attack on the National Security Council, Dr. Kay said that the council had failed, in particular, to provide Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell with the intelligence information they needed before the war about Iraq's weapons capabilities, especially after both had expressed some skepticism about the extent of Iraq's weapons programs. "Where was the National Security Council when, apparently, the president expressed his own doubt about the adequacy of the case concerning Iraq's W.M.D. weapons that was made before him?" Dr. Kay asked. "Why was the secretary of state sent to the C.I.A. to personally vet the data that he was to take the Security Council in New York, and ultimately left to hang in the wind for data that was misleading and, in some cases, absolutely false and known by parts of the intelligence community to be false?" he continued. "Where was the N.S.C. then?"

U.S. Voters Show Concern Over Security and Foreign Affairs
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: For the first time in decades, foreign affairs and national security issues have emerged in the American presidential campaign as greater concerns among voters than economic matters, according to a new survey. The survey released Wednesday by the independent Pew Research Center, found that 4 in 10 Americans now cite international and defense issues as the most important problems confronting the country. Only 1 in 4 mentioned economic concerns. Not since 1972, during the Vietnam War, have security concerns and foreign affairs issues dominated at this point in a campaign, the survey's authors said. The survey suggests that views on Iraq and the administration's success or failure in overcoming violent opposition there could decisively influence the race between President Bush and Senator John Kerry, according to the Pew director, Andrew Kohut. This could make Iraq a "tipping point" or a "trump card" in the coming campaign, he said.

For Post-9/11 Material Witness, It Is a Terror of a Different Kind
By ADAM LIPTAK
NYT, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: About 60 other men have been held in terrorism investigations under the federal material witness law since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a coming report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. Such laws, meant to ensure that people with important information do not disappear before testifying, have been used to hold people briefly since the early days of the republic. But scholars and critics say the government has radically reinterpreted what it means to be a material witness in recent years. These days, people held as material witnesses in terrorism investigations are often not called to testify against others; instead, frequently they are charged with crimes themselves. They lack constitutional protections like the requirement that criminal suspects in custody be informed of their Miranda rights. Moreover, they are often held for long periods in the same harsh conditions as those suspected of very serious crimes.
Mary Jo White, who supervised several major terrorism investigations as the United States attorney in Manhattan until she resigned in 2002, said the frequent and aggressive use of the material witness law in terrorism investigations was a recent development. "It was really my idea to use the material witness warrant statute in appropriate cases to detain for reasonable periods of time people who might not appear for a grand jury with information related to the 9/11 attacks," she said. The law is, she said, an important tool, but one that must be used judiciously.

Rising Cost of Health Benefits Cited as Factor in Slump of Jobs
By EDUARDO PORTER
NYT, 18  August 2004
EXCERPT: A relentless rise in the cost of employee health insurance has become a significant factor in the employment slump, as the labor market adds only a trickle of new jobs each month despite nearly three years of uninterrupted economic growth. Government data, industry surveys and interviews with employers big and small indicate that many businesses remain reluctant to hire full-time employees because health insurance, which now costs the nation's employers an average of about $3,000 a year for each worker, has become one of the fastest-growing costs for companies. Health premiums are sapping corporate balance sheets even more than the rising cost of energy. In the second quarter, the cost of health benefits rose at a 12-month rate of 8.1 percent - more than three times the inflation rate and the rate of increases in wages and salaries. "Health care is a major reason why employment growth has been so sluggish," said Sung Won Sohn, the chief economist at Wells Fargo.

Kerry Criticizes President's Troop Plan
By JODI WILGOREN
NYT, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: With repeated references to his own service in Vietnam, Senator John Kerry told fellow members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars here on Wednesday that President Bush's plan to move 70,000 troops out of Europe and Asia was vague and ill-advised in view of the North Korean nuclear threat. "Nobody wants to bring troops home more than those of us who have fought in foreign wars," Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, told some 6,000 veterans gathered for the V.F.W.'s annual convention, where Mr. Bush announced the plan on Monday. "But it needs to be done at the right time and in a sensible way. This is not that time or that way."

Porter Goss: Another Bush Intelligence Failure
Former House Majority Whip Pat Williams on Bush's nomination for Director of Central Intelligence and why the furrowed brow and secretive pout of Porter Goss, a longtime CIA apologist, is the wrong face to lead an agency in dire need of reform
BushWhackedUSA, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: Having served so long with Porter and knowing the political climate today, I expect, as do most observers, that the Senate will confirm him to head the CIA. As we all understand -- now -- America's intelligence apparatus is in need of a real overhaul, but, frankly, I'm not convinced that Porter Goss is the right person for the task. I will say he looks right -- Porter has one of those CIA faces: sincere, serious, secretive and worried -- he has that furrowed-brow look that says, "I know something really bad, but I can't tell you about it."  Perhaps that look comes from Goss' earlier days as a CIA operative and later from his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. So Porter looks the part; and he has experience -- but I question that experience. During the years we served together, Porter Goss was an apologist for the CIA and our other intelligence agencies as well. Back when only a few members of Congress understood that America was not being properly defended by the CIA and others, Porter Goss stoutly defended those agencies. And worse, he considered those who asked the hard questions as being weak on defense. Goss was a proponent not of reform, but rather of more money so the agencies could simply carry on with what we all now recognize were their inefficient, uncoordinated and, it turns out, dangerous malpractice. In 1998 Goss was the prime mover of securing an increase for those flawed agencies of $1 billion dollars -- not for reform but for the same old failed intelligence processes.
SEE ALSO:
Wrong for the CIA
David Corn
The Nation, Capital Games
EXCERPT: Most Democrats are now saying they will not raise a fuss over the Porter Goss nomination. For yet another reason why Goss is the wrong guy to head the CIA--in addition to the reasons detailed below-- click here....And the reasons why Goss should not get the job keep mounting. For an update to this update, click here.]

AUDIO LINK
'Sore Winners'
Radio Nation, 16 August 2004
EXCERPT: Radio Nation Show # 447 Part 1. Marc Cooper interviews author John Powers on his new book "Sore Winners" -- how the rest of us live in the world of George W. Bush
SEE ALSO: Part 2 of the interview with John Powers
Book Review noted at Amazon: L.A. Weekly editor/columnist John Powers surveys the landscape of George W. Bush's America and finds it littered with frothing liberals, sneering conservatives, sluggish reporters, and mindless commentators. From reality TV to the "embedded media," Powers dissects the post-9/11 milieu with something bordering on glee. Brooks can't help but be repulsed by journalists who are as incompetent and slothful as they are ideologically driven. True, our leaders are failing us at our time of greatest need. But, hey, he gets to write about this stuff! With sharp, snappy, self-confident prose, Powers delights in devastating the likes of Ann Coulter (engaging in debate with the strident right-winger "can only make you dumber"), Bill O’Reilly (pegged as a man who pens "short books with very large print"), and "serial bigot" Michael Savage. Not that the left escapes unscathed. The progressive mag The Nation is "profoundly dreary" and Fox's opposition voice Alan Colmes is dismissed as a "quasiliberal munchkin." Still, it's the incessantly wronged right (despite holding the White House, Congress, Supreme Court) that defines this era of "sore winners"--and for them the sometime NPR commentator reserves his bitterest bon mots. Powers is an adept essayist who, in contrast to, say, David Brooks, is as surefooted writing about culture as he is about politics. His breadth of interests and store of on-target epithets make for provocative reading for those on both sides of the great divide. --Steven Stolder

W.'s Big Fat Greek Pride
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld thought they could change the American identity by invading Iraq, that they could toughen up our 'tude and remove the lingering post-Vietnam skittishness about force and the "blame America first" psychology. They thought our shock-and-awe war would change America's image, adding some muscularity that would make Arab foes cower and the world bow down to the U.S. as an unassailable hyperpower.  The vice president and the defense chief have changed our identity and image in the world - but not in the way they envisioned. Our athletes are swaggering less and trying to be more sensitive to other athletes. Iraq is making us wring our hands over whether to blast our way into Najaf and Falluja, quavering with uncharacteristic sensitivity even as the White House fires verbal mortars at the domestic enemy, John Kerry, for suggesting that we be more sensitive. The presidential race seems frozen in some weird way, with no one breaking through, and the polls showing the candidates locked in a virtual tie. George W. Bush can't defend the mess he's made in Iraq, and John Kerry can't effectively attack Mr. Bush on Iraq. He has fallen into the president's trap and foolishly agreed that he would have given Mr. Bush the authority for the war even if he had known there were no W.M.D. and no security threats to the U.S. Barack Obama was wrong that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America." There is a liberal and a conservative America, and Mr. Bush is happy to govern only one of them.The new Pew Research Center poll finds the country ever more divided. "The public takes a paradoxical view of America's place in the world," the poll reports, with 45 percent of Americans saying the U.S. plays a more important and powerful role as world leader than it did 10 years ago, and 67 percent saying the U.S. is less respected. The president who promised a humble foreign policy ended up with a foreign policy inflated by hubris - which is, after all, a Greek idea.

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24 August 2004

"Bush's War" -- A Ten Year Struggle Projected
By Jim Michaels and Charles Crain
USA TODAY, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: A USA TODAY database, which analyzed unclassified U.S. government security reports, shows attacks against U.S. and allied forces have averaged 49 a day since the hand-over of sovereignty June 28, compared with 52 a day in the four weeks leading up to the transfer. Iraqi guerrillas are relying heavily on weapons that allow them to attack and then slip away, such as roadside bombs and mortars. In June and July, U.S. and Iraq forces were attacked with 759 roadside bombs and uncovered at least 400 others before they exploded. U.S. officials had said they expected the attacks to drop as Iraqis re-established control over their country. Their thinking: Iraqi security forces would be better at gathering intelligence, and support for militants would erode because insurgents would be attacking Iraqis rather than U.S. occupation forces. The officials still hold that view. But U.S. officers say the continuing attacks suggest that it will take time, possibly years, to crush the insurgency. President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have said U.S. forces will stay in Iraq as long as they are needed to assist Iraqi security forces. Iraqi forces are not yet trained and equipped to the point where they can assume responsibility for the country's security. And insurgents — be they former members of Saddam Hussein's regime, criminals or Islamic fundamentalists — remain entrenched. While most attention has been focused on the showdown in Najaf between Shiites and the new Iraqi government, data show the insurgency is a stubborn and continuing phenomenon throughout the country. "If we have the political will and stamina to stay, I could see this going on for 10 years," says Randolph Gangle, a retired officer who heads the Marine Corps' Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities in Quantico, Va. ...The fight against the Iraqi insurgency differs from other guerrilla wars. There is no single cause driving the fighters, nor is there a unified leadership. Making the situation even more complex, the insurgency includes multiple groups with differing goals and motives. Sometimes they fight together; other times they fight among themselves. Insurgents include former members of Saddam's Baath Party and ex-military officers who want to return to power, religious extremists who want Islamic rule, foreign fighters who want to hurt the United States and criminals motivated by money. "Here you have a whole hodgepodge of differing groups," Gangle says. He recently returned from Iraq, where he conducted research to update the Small Wars Manual, the Marine Corps' counterinsurgency bible. That diversity makes quashing the violence difficult. There is no way to attack the nerve center of Iraq's multifaceted insurgency. [BWUSA emphasis]

Five US Soldiers Killed in 24 Hours in Iraq
ABC News Online (Austrailia), 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Five US troops have been killed in Iraq and another wounded in the past 24 hours in a series of attacks and an accident, the military said on Sunday. One soldier was killed when a roadside bomb exploded at around 4:45pm local time, in the main northern city of Mosul, said a statement. Three US marines were killed in separate attacks in the volatile western province of Al-Anbar on Saturday, one in action and two died from wounds received in separate attacks on the same day, said another statement. Another marine also died in a road accident when his Humvee ploughed into a US tank, flipped and crashed in the province, which is home to the infamous flashpoint cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.

US Planes Bomb Najaf, Hopes of Peace Fade
AFP via ABC News Online (Austrrailia), 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: US planes have pounded Najaf's cemetery and historic centre near the Imam Ali shrine, dimming hopes of a peaceful end to a near three-week stand-off between US-led Iraqi troops and Shiite militia. Although American journalist Micah Garen was recuperating after an eight-day hostage ordeal in southern Iraq, fears were growing for two French journalists and an Italian, who has not been heard from since Thursday. Dense, black smoke spewed into the sky above the enormous, sacred Valley of Peace burial ground after a deafening explosion followed by a second blast in the early afternoon as a US plane flew overhead. Hours later, another two raids targeted the Old City around a world famous Shiite Muslim shrine, as sporadic gunfights and mortar attacks continued to reverberate through the ravaged streets, said an AFP correspondent.

Administration clears itself again...
Defense Leaders Faulted by Panel in Prison Abuse
By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 24 August 2004
EXCERPT: A high-level outside panel reviewing American military detention operations has concluded that leadership failures at the highest levels of the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs of Staff and military command in Iraq contributed to an environment in which detainees were abused at Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities, Defense officials said Monday. The report, set to be released Tuesday, does not explicitly blame Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for the misconduct or for ordering policies that condoned or encouraged it. But the panel implicitly faults Mr. Rumsfeld, as well as his top civilian and military aides, for not exercising sufficient oversight over a confusing array of policies and interrogation practices at detention centers in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq, officials said. The military's Joint Staff, which is responsible for allocating military resources among the various combatant commanders, is criticized for not recognizing that military police officers at Abu Ghraib were overwhelmed by an influx of detainees, while the ratio of prisoners to guards was much lower at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The report also criticizes the top commander in Iraq at the time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, for not paying close enough attention to worsening conditions at Abu Ghraib, delegating oversight of prison operations to subordinates. The highest-ranking Army reservist charged in the Abu Ghraib case, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, said Monday that he would plead guilty to at least some charges. [BWUSA emphasis]
SEE ALSO:
Judge Urges U.S. to Speed Abu Ghraib Case
By ROBERT H. REID
Associated Press, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: An Army reservist charged with abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison said Monday he will plead guilty to some offenses, acknowledging he broke the law and saying he accepts responsibility for his actions. The military judge in the case, meanwhile, complained of delays in the government investigation and warned he might dismiss charges against at least one accused soldier unless the probes were wrapped up by the end of the year. Judge Col. James Pohl's anger flared after being told a lone Army criminal investigator was reviewing thousands of pages of records contained in a secret computer server at Abu Ghraib. (BWUSA emphasis]
SEE ALSO:
Memo Appealed for Ways To Break Iraqi Detainees
Washington Post, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: A memo issued last summer by a U.S. Army military intelligence officer appealed for suggestions on how to extract information from prisoners in Iraq and called for tougher means of getting intelligence. "The gloves are coming off gentleman regarding these detainees," said the memo, which carried the signature of Capt. William Ponce Jr. The source of the memo, who refused to be identified, said it was sent by the intelligence staff of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, to all concerned military intelligence personnel in Iraq. In an apparent reference to Sanchez's head of intelligence, Col. Steven Boltz, the memo asserted that "Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks."  The memo asked for a list by Aug. 17, 2003, of "what techniques would they feel would be effective" and could be reviewed by legal experts. ...The source of the memo said it was issued about a month before the visit to Abu Ghraib by the commander of the U.S. military's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Defense attorneys for several of the defendants have said the visit by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who is now in charge of detention operations in Iraq, was designed to loosen restrictions on interrogation techniques and that the guards charged with abuse were acting under orders of military intelligence officers and other superiors.

Bush sensitive or insensitive?
Egyptian Cleric Warns US of Najaf Fallout
Aljazeera.net, 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: A leading Egyptian Islamic leader has warned that a "volcano of anger" could explode in response to US-led military action in Najaf and Falluja. In a statement on Saturday, Ali Gumaa, the mufti of Egypt and the country's highest authority on Islamic law, condemned the "continuing aggression by US-led forces on the Imam Ali shrine and Islamic holy places" in Iraq. "After the attack on the shrines of the Prophet's noble companions, after the humiliations and the terrorizing and killing of civilians, the world cannot expect… that a volcano of anger and indignation will not explode," Gumaa said. Gumaa is second in the Islamic hierarchy only to the shaikh of al-Azhar, Cairo's ancient university and institute of religious learning.
SEE ALSO:
Volcano of Anger Over Najaf
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Al-Jazeerah did "person on the street" interviews on the Najaf issue in Cairo and Beirut. The Egyptians said things like, "this is an American attack on Islam." Not on Najaf, or Shiism, or on Iraq. On Islam. That's what a lot of Muslims think, and they are absolutely furious. Some of my readers have suggested to me that it doesn't matter what Americans do, since Muslims hate them anyway. This statement is silly. Most Muslims never hated the United States per se. In 2000, 75 percent of Indonesians rated the US highly favorably. The U.S. was not as popular in the Arab world, because of its backing for Israel against the Palestinians, but it still often had decent favorability ratings in polls. But all those poll numbers for the US are down dramatically since the invasion of Iraq and the mishandling of its administration afterwards. Only 2 percent of Egyptians now has a favorable view of the United States. It doesn't have to be this way. The US is behaving in profoundly offensive ways in Najaf. U.S. military leaders appear to have no idea what Najaf represents. I saw one retired general on CNN saying that they used to have to be careful of Buddhist temples in Vietnam, too. I almost wept. Islam is not like Buddhism. It is a far tighter civilization. And the shrine of Ali is not like some Buddhist temple in Vietnam that even most Buddhists have never heard of. I got some predictably angry mail at my earlier statement that the Marines who provoked the current round of fighting in Najaf, apparently all on their own and without orders from Washington, were behaving like ignoramuses. Someone attempted to argue to me that the Marines were protecting me. Protecting me? The ones in Najaf are behaving in ways that are very likely to get us all blown up. The US officials who encouraged the Mujahidin against the Soviets were also trying to protect us, and they ended up inadvertently creating the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Such protection, I don't need. Radical Islamist terrorism is a form of vigilanteism. Angry young Muslim men see their own governments doing nothing about Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians, and bowing to US adventures like Iraq, and they grow disgusted. They have no hope of getting their governments to do anything about what they see as profound injustices. So they form small groups of engineers or other professionals and take matters into their own hands.

23 August 2004

BushWhackedUSA Comment
Viet Nam, Again -- What the Anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans and Others Are Really Fighting
Most soldiers and veterans march to only one drummer. They have been conditioned not to hear dissent, not to think for themselves, not to analyze, not to be skeptical, not to be suspicious of the motives of their leaders and not to act on their own volition. Many have vested their entire life in the values, attitudes and behavior of being a soldier and will eagerly clad themselves in good intentions to justify their thoughts and actions based upon what they believe to be patriotism. Only a few will pause to examine the underlying rationale, morality and wisdom of policies which American soldiers are ordered to force upon others. And then, if they happen to conclude that what they have been told is untrue, fewer still will act in behalf of those who have not been as careful. Deviation from 'group think' on that level is subject to the most severe punishment, on or off the battlefield. Vengeance and retribution become the order of the day. The stark parallel between Viet Nam and Iraq  is the morality of U.S. leadership and the passionate defense by patriots of the errant ethics that guide them.
Read/listen to John Kerry's testimony before Congress in April of 1971 to understand the misplaced anger and and vengeful reaction of so many...and then judge for yourself what was true then, about Viet Nam, and what is true today.
Audio and transcript provided by DemocracyNow.org
Listen Now/Read transcript below:

Kerry: Several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. Not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with a full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It's impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit. The emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. But they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. We called this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term ‘winter soldier’ is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the “sunshine patriot and summertime soldiers” who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country and we could be quiet. We could hold our silence. We could not tell what went on in Vietnam. But we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, not red coats, but the crimes which we are committing are what threaten it, and we have to speak out. I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it's created a monster. A monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history. Men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like it talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country. In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, “Some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedoms which those misfits abuse. And this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, his boys in Asia, whom the country was supposed to support, his statement as a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It's a distortion because we in no way considered ourselves the best men of this country. Because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to. Because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam. Because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees and they lie forgotten, in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country, which fly the flag, which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we were ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia. In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen, that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos, but linking such loss to the preservation of freedom which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy. And it's that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. We are probably much more angry than that, and I don't want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I am outclassed here. I know that all of you have talked about every possible – every possible alternative to getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know that you've considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I'm not going to try and deal on that. But I want to relate to you the feeling which many of the men who have returned to this country express. Because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found that most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm, burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace. And they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese, or American. We found also that all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs, as well as by search-and-destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism. Yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free-fire zones. Shoot anything that moves. And we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States falsification of body counts. In fact, the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against ‘oriental human beings’ with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European theater or let us say a non-third-world-people theater. And so, we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons, they marched away to leave the hill for the reoccupation of the North Vietnamese. Because – because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas because we couldn't lose and we couldn't retreat and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were “Hamburger Hills” and “Khe Sanhs” and “Hill 881's” and “Fire Base 6s” and so many others. And now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. Each day–(applause) [Chairman: I hope you won't interrupt, he's making a very significant statement. Let him proceed.] Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows. So that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.” We are asking Americans to think about that. Because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that. And we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly that “The issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism.” And the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people. But the point is, they aren't a free people now under us. They are not a free people. And we cannot fight communism all over the world and I think we should have learned that lesson by now. But the problem of veterans goes beyond this personal problem. Because you think about a poster in this country with a picture of Uncle Sam and the picture says “I Want You.” And a young man comes out of high school and says “That's fine. I'm going to serve my country.” And he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job, or maybe he doesn't kill. Maybe he just goes and he comes back. And when he gets become to this country, he finds that he isn't really wanted. Because the largest unemployment figure here in the country, it varies depending on who you get it from, the Veterans' Administration 15%, various other sources 22%, but the largest figure of unemployed in this country are veterans of this war. And of those veterans, 33% of the unemployed are black. That means one out of every 10 of the nation's unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam. The hospitals across the country won't or can't meet their demands. It's not a question of not trying. They haven't got the appropriations. A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in California. Not because of the operation but there weren't enough personnel to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death. Another young man just died in a New York V.A. Hospital the other day. A friend of mine was lying in a bed two beds away and tried to help him. But he couldn't. They rang a bell and there was no one there to service that man. And so he died of convulsions. 57%, I understand, 57% of all those entering V.A. Hospitals talk about suicide. Some 27% have tried. They try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care. Suddenly we are faced with a very sickening situation in this country because there's no moral indignation. And if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignancies and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country has seemed to have lain down and accepted something as serious as Laos just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times. We are here as veterans to say that we think we are in the midst of the greatest disaster of all times now. Because they are still dying over there. And not just Americans, Vietnamese. And we are rationalizing leaving that country so that those people can go on killing each other for years to come. Americans seem to have accepted the idea that the war is winding down, at least for Americans. And they have also allowed the bodies which were once used by a President for statistics to prove that we were winning this war to be used as evidence against a man who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in South Vietnam. We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact that this country has not been able to see that there's absolutely no difference between a ground troop and a helicopter crew. And yet, people have accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration. No ground troops are in Laos, so it's already to kill Laotians by remote control. But believe me, the helicopter crews fill the same body bags and they wreak the same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and Laotian country side as anyone else. The President is talking about allowing that to go on for many years to come. And one can only ask if we will really be satisfied when the troops march into Hanoi. We are asking here in Washington for some action. Action from Congress of the United States of America which has the power to raise and maintain armies and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war. We have come here, not to the President because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now. We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy, it's part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country. The question of racism which is rampant in the military. And so many other questions also. The use of weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions. In the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That's what we are trying to say. It’s part and parcel of everything. An American Indian friend of mine who lives on the Indian nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on the Indian reservation he watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians. And then suddenly, one day, he stopped in Vietnam and he said my God, I'm doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people. And he stopped. And that's what we are trying to say. That we think this thing has to end. We are also here to ask – we are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently: Where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask: Where are McNamara, Bundy, Kilpatrick and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country. Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country. In their blindness and fear, they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in ‘Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others and for ourselves, we wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service. As easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission. To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war. To pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country the last 10 years and more. And so when 30 years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why? We will be able to say “Vietnam.” And not mean a desert, not a filthy, obscene memory, but mean, instead, the place where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning. Thank you. (applause).

Weary of War, Iraqis in Najaf Blame 2 Sides - But Mostly the U.S. Occupation
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Hussein Hadi, deputy director of Najaf's main al-Hakim Hospital, says that the recent fighting has been even worse for civilians than the last time Mr. Sadr and his militia rebelled. Then, fighting lasted for more than two months, and the hospital received about 180 dead, Mr. Hadi said Sunday. In the last three weeks, the daily death toll has been about the same, but it includes more women and children than before. "This time, it's the average people that are dying," Mr. Hadi said. "Now the Americans are using heavier weapons. We see many children with more severe injuries." In Judaada, many such casualties have occurred. Majid Mousa, an 11-year-old boy whose leg was blown off below the knee in an American assault on Saturday, was one. Majid's face was freckled with shrapnel, which blinded him, doctors said. His 15-year-old brother was killed in the explosion. His father, a truck driver away on a run, does not know what happened. "He will carry the American occupation with him for the rest of his life," Mr. Mehdi said. Kaihla Fahem, 12, was sleeping when a mortar crashed into her home, causing a wall to collapse and gouging a large gash into her leg. It is not clear who fired the shot. Still, her mother, Um-Ali, 35, blames the American occupation. "We're fed up with Americans," she said. The American occupation often is a lightning rod for ordinary Iraqis' anger over the chaos that has befallen the country since the war. In an insurgent war and the confusion over who fired first, Americans are often blamed. Mr. Sadr, who is politically ambitious, has tapped into that anger, rallying thousands with calls of nationalism and religion.

'Staggering Amount' of Cash Missing In Iraq
by Emad Mekay
Common Dreams, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT: Three U.S. senators have called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to account for 8.8 billion dollars entrusted to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq earlier this year but now gone missing. In a letter Thursday, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Byron L Dorgan of North Dakota and Tom Harkin of Iowa, all opposition Democrats, demanded a "full, written account" of the money that was channeled to Iraqi ministries and authorities by the CPA, which was the governing body in the occupied country until Jun. 30.

Allied Soldiers Kill 3 Civilians at a Checkpoint in Afghanistan
By AMY WALDMAN
NYT, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: Soldiers from the American-led alliance killed three people after a pickup truck carrying them failed to stop at a checkpoint on Saturday night, officials said Sunday. A statement issued by the American ambassador here, Zalmay Khalilzad, expressed condolences for the loss of "innocent life" in the incident. Two of the dead were females and one was a male, according to a statement issued by military officials. Their ages were not provided. A man and a woman were also critically injured and evacuated from the site of the episode, in Ghazni Province, to Bagram Air Base.

Ah, the fine art of Bush administration diplomacy...
US Deal 'Wrecks Middle East Peace'
By Conal Urquhart
The Guardian (UK), 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: The US was yesterday accused by Palestinian leaders of destroying hopes for peace in the Middle East by giving its covert support to Israel's expansion of controversial settlements in the West Bank. American officials are privately admitting they have abandoned their demands that Israel freeze settlement activity, and have given Jerusalem tacit permission to build thousands of new homes on the disputed land. Palestinians fear that the expansion of settlements will make it impossible to establish a viable state on the land Israel took from Jordan in the 1967 war. Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister, said the US position would destroy the peace process, and Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, said America's unilateral redrawing of the road map was "a very grave development".

Nevermind the lack of electricity and clean water...
Anger Arises as Bush Bids to Exploit Olympic Games
By Lawrence Donegan
The Guardian (UK), 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: President George Bush stood accused of appropriating the Olympic movement for political means last night, amid reports he was planning to visit Athens later this week to watch some sporting events, including a potential gold-medal winning bid by the Iraqi football team. According to unconfirmed reports in the US, the White House is examining the logistical and security implications of Mr Bush travelling to the Greek capital in time for Saturday's football final. Iraq, whose progress to the semi-finals of the tournament has been one of the games' most captivating stories, will meet Paraguay tomorrow night for a possible place in the finals. The Greek foreign ministry confirmed last night that the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, will be in Athens for the closing ceremony. But it is the potential presidential visit to the games that will fuel a dispute between the election campaign of Mr Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney, and the US Olympic Committee over an advert which links Iraq's and Afghanistan's participation in the games with the US administration's "war on terror".

Top Brass to Evade Abu Ghraib Punishment; Medics Involved in Torture
By Brian Dominick
The New Standard, 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: When the findings of the latest US Army investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal are reported to Congress next week, no one of higher rank than colonel is expected to be named as directly responsible for the systemic abuses uncovered in the prison just outside Baghdad. Meanwhile, according to charges made by an ethicist in a major medical journal, military physicians and medics in Iraq have been complicit or actively engaged in some of the worst known incidents of cruelty, torture and murder.
SEE ALSO: Putting to Rest the "Few Bad Apples" Theory (ZNet)
SEE ALSO: US Forces Bombard Shrine in Iraq (New Standard via ZNet)

Arafat Aides Deplore Permissive U.S. Policy on Settlement Growth
By STEVEN ERLANGER
NYT, 23 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Palestinian leadership expressed dismay on Sunday at a report that the Bush administration is turning a blind eye to an expansion of Israeli settlements. The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, speaking to reporters in Ramallah, said: "I don't believe that America says now that settlements can be expanded. This thwarts and destroys the peace process."

21-22 August 2004

Cleric Keeps Grip on Najaf Shrine, Even While Saying He'll Yield It
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT, 22 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr remained in control of a holy shrine here on Saturday in defiance of the Iraqi government, even as his aides said they were making arrangements to hand over the shrine to the country's top Shiite leader. Early Sunday morning American forces mounted their largest attack on Mr. Sadr's guerrillas since the early days of the latest fighting here. Dozens of armored vehicles, including many tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, left the American base at the northern edge of Najaf to attack a buildfing complex just west of the shrine of Imam Ali. Meanwhile, another group of American forces moved closer to the mosque from the south. This pincer movement was a sharp intensification of pressure on Mr. Sadr after two days of relative calm. Commanders here said they were not sure whether the attack would lead to a broader assault or was merely an attempt to demonstrate American militant might. Mr. Sadr's militiamen still guarded the entrance to the shrine and the narrow streets around it, an area known as the Old City. While his aides said Friday that Mr. Sadr would surrender the keys to the shrine to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, by late Saturday, such a transfer did not appear imminent.

Who lost Iraq?
Two Power Brokers Collide in Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS
NYT, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT:  In Iraq, of late, it has been a tale of two cities, and of two men of vaulting ambition, each seeking a path to power in the Iraq that will emerge, some day, from the turmoil that has followed the downfall of Saddam Hussein. In Najaf, Moktada al-Sadr has shown how a portly cleric with a dedicated militia and an artful grasp of Shiite street politics can confront American power. In Baghdad, Ayad Allawi, also portly and Shiite, but secular and backed by American tanks, has used his place as Iraq's interim prime minister to warn Mr. Sadr that the time for his insurrection is running out. Adding to the drama, the two men have joined in conflict over Najaf's Imam Ali Mosque, the holiest shrine in the 1,300 years since the Shiite breakaway that followed the Prophet Muhammad's death. As the week ended, the confrontation had neither exploded nor subsided. There were signs that Mr. Sadr was seeking a way to back out, sparing himself and his fighters annihilation, and saving what he had sought all along - an enhancement of his claim to have defended his fellow Shiites' faith and pride. Dr. Allawi, committed to ousting Mr. Sadr and disarming his Mahdi Army but aware that storming the shrine would be a heinous blot on the reputation of any Shiite politician, seemed also to be reaching for a mediated solution, an outcome sure to be favored by Dr. Allawi's patrons in Washington, for whom a bloody showdown in Najaf was likely to be still more unpalatable. Messy times favor messy solutions. Even Iraqis who sigh for the brute simplicities of life under Saddam Hussein, as many now do, have not forgotten what he did when he, too, was confronted by an armed occupation of the Imam Ali shrine, during the Shiite uprising that followed the Persian Gulf war in 1991. ...If there has been one message written in all that the insurgents have done, whether Sunnis or Shiites, these Iraqis say, it is a rejection of the very idea that Iraq's future can be chosen under an American military umbrella - more broadly, of the idea that America and its notions should have any place in reshaping Iraq at all. When they were done with their spinning, senior Western officials who briefed reporters on the developments in Najaf seemed to agree. Najaf, one said bluntly, represented as crucial a juncture as America has faced in Iraq: one from which Iraq could proceed, with the emasculation of Mr. Sadr's rebellion, to a new period in which Iraqi politicians, not gunmen, could begin to set the country's agenda; or, conversely, if the government became resigned to leaving Mr. Sadr's militia still rooted in the city, to a further slide into chaos. "If the government takes a hit in Najaf, it would encourage the various armed groups to stand up and say, 'O.K., Najaf belongs to us,' 'Falluja belongs to us,' 'Ramadi belongs to us,' 'Samarra belongs to us,' " the official said. In that case, he said, what would be left would not be a country with an accepted constitution and elections, but a "Lebanon-ization," a fracturing into separate, warlord-ruled fiefs, with the gun supplanting the rule of law. Retreating into the orotund language favored by diplomats, he suggested that this was hardly what America intended when it came here promising Iraqis something far better than Saddam Hussein. "With different militias controlling different cities, that obviously doesn't promise the political stability Iraq needs," he said.

Once again, why do the terrorists hate us?
U.S. Now Said to Support Growth for Some West Bank Settlements
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NYT, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush administration, moving to lend political support to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at a time of political turmoil, has modified its policy and signaled approval of growth in at least some Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, American and Israeli officials say.

On Iraq's Border, Sailors of the Desert Smuggle Subsidized Gasoline
By ERIK ECKHOLM
NYT, 21 August 2004
EXCERPT: "You'd be amazed how much smuggling of fuels goes on," said Issam al-Chalabi, a former Iraqi oil minister who went into exile in Jordan in 1991 but has now established an energy consulting firm in Baghdad. "Even products that are imported into the country are then smuggled out," he said in an interview in Amman, Jordan's capital, noting that Iraq has recently had to import 60 percent of its gasoline at market prices plus the high cost of insurance and transport in a war zone.

20 August 2004

Bush's 'Evil Empire?'
Ethicist Questions Medical Workers' Role in Abuse
Abu Ghraib should be 'wake-up call for the Western world'
CNN, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: A leading bioethicist charges in a prestigious British medical journal that U.S. military medical personnel are complicit in abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and suggests an inquiry into their behavior in places such as Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, is in order. An editorial in The Lancet was accompanied by an article that cites government documents and news reports that found medical personnel responsible for treating prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "failed to protect detainees' human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings." The Pentagon denied the allegations, saying the article was drawn from "carefully selected media reports" and excerpts of testimony from congressional hearings, "not first-hand investigative work or accounts." Dr. Steven H. Miles, a professor in the center for bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, said his review of the documents revealed that medical staff failed to maintain medical records, conduct routine medical examinations or properly care for disabled or injured detainees. He also cited "isolated reports that medical personnel directly abused detainees." In one case, a medic inserted a catheter into the body of a prisoner who died under torture "to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital," Miles writes.

Iraqi Soccer Players Angered by Bush Campaign Ads
Sports Illustrated, 19 August 2004
Courtesy of ml
EXCERPT: Iraqi midfielder Salih Sadir scored a goal here on Wednesday night, setting off a rousing celebration among the 1,500 Iraqi soccer supporters at Pampeloponnisiako Stadium. Though Iraq -- the surprise team of the Olympics -- would lose to Morocco 2-1, it hardly mattered as the Iraqis won Group D with a 2-1 record and now face Australia in the quarterfinals on Sunday. Afterward, Sadir had a message for U.S. president George W. Bush, who is using the Iraqi Olympic team in his latest re-election campaign advertisements. In those spots, the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear as a narrator says, "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations -- and two fewer terrorist regimes." (To see the ad, click here.) "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. "He can find another way to advertise himself."
Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush's TV advertisement. "How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?" Manajid told me. "He has committed so many crimes."
SEE ALSO: Bloody Hands: Bush v. bin Laden

What Does Muqtada al-Sadr Want?
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: ...the Associated Press expresses confusion, both its own, and that of US government officials, about what Muqtada al-Sadr's goals are. I don't understand this confusion. Muqtada has given many sermons and interviews in the past 16 months outlining his goals exactly.
1) He wants the US troops out of the country immediately, which is to say, an end to Occuption. If there have to be foreign troops in Iraq, he wants them under a United Nations command.
2) He refuses to cooperate (he would say "collaborate") with the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi, which he sees as a puppet regime installed by the United States. He insists that no legitimate Iraqi governmental process can begin until the US is out.
3) He wants the reestablishment of a strong central Iraqi government with a strong military, but which has cut all ties with the Baathist past.
4) He wants Iraq to stay together rather than being partitioned, and has denounced Kurdish demands for loose federalism.
5) He wants Iraqi Shiism to emerge from Iran's shadow and to establish its independence from Iran. His movement is rooted in the Shiite ghettos of Iraq and is very indigenous. He is not Iran's catspaw in Iraq, quite the opposite. He is strong Iraqi nationalist.
6) He sometimes talks about "democracy" in post-American Iraq, but probably just means populism. Like Peron and Franco, his populism implies his ability to maintain and direct his own militia, who provide "order" (read puritanical morality imposed by force) to Shiite neighborhoods.
7) In the long term, he would like to see a system in Iraq similar to the regime in Iran. He wants Islamic law to be the law of the land, and he wants clerics to rule. His father studied with Ayatollah Khomeini and accepted the notion of clerical rule. So does Muqtada. That is, there may be a place for elections (as in Iran), but true power would rest in the hands of the clerics. He has admitted all this in Arabic press interviews.
So, I don't understand the widespread puzzlement reported by AP. It may not be a simple set of positions, but they aren't hidden from view or hard to understand.

Jonathan Schell on the Empire that Fell as it Rose
Tom Engelhardt
TomsDispatch.com, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: Had anyone in Washington bothered to read Jonathan Schell's prophetic -- or perhaps I should just say, historically on the mark -- book The Unconquerable World, Iraq could not have happened and all the dreams of the neocons, hatched in the claustrophobic confines of right-wing think tanks and the corridors of power in Washington, would have evaporated into thin air. A reconsideration of several centuries of the imperial "war system," as it built up through a series of extreme moments of violence in the last century to a kind of global paralysis that nonetheless left the Earth and all its inhabitants in deadly peril, Unconquerable World also laid out unerringly the successful resistance to that system, both by force of arms (in the form of national liberation movements) and by aggressively nonviolent means. In the process, Jonathan uncovered a series of nonviolent pathways in history that seemed to lead into a possible future and so might someday beckon us further. Because I edited the book, I had an advantage. I knew the moment we took Baghdad and the looting began that some kind of resistance movement (or movements) would drive our then triumphant President to the polls in November 2004 and I wrote that immediately. The Unconquerable World is now out in paperback. I seldom say this, but you would be making a terrible mistake not to add it to your bookshelf and not, then, to rush it to the top of your reading list.
[Here is a short excerpt from the note sent to Tom Engelhardt from Jonathan Schell.] "...if there was one thing that everyone suddenly seemed to agree on, it was that the U.S. was an empire, and a global one at that. There were the right-wingers, like New York Times columnist David Brooks, celebrant of America's yuppie class, who called the United States the first "suburban empire," and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, who wanted the U.S. to step up to "national greatness" and "benign" empire. (And which empire has not seen itself as benign?) There were the new realists, like the journalist Robert Kaplan, admirer of Henry Kissinger, who championed American "Supremacy by stealth," and supplied U.S. policy-makers with "Ten Rules for Managing the World." There were the liberal imperialists -- or, as I think of them, the romantic militarists-- like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East and elsewhere at the point of a gun. And then there was the left, which had long excoriated American imperialism and still did. Once, the left had stood alone in calling the U.S. imperial and was reviled for defaming the nation. Now it turned out to have been the herald of a new consensus. Yesterday's leftwing abuse became today's mainstream praise."

Into the Valley of Peace
By Daniel Smith
Foreign Policy In Focus via Asia Times, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT: No matter what the US, United Nations or Iraqi government officials say, the Arab "street" believes that the current Baghdad regime possesses only nominal sovereignty as it is a creation of and is maintained by infidel countries. Thus the blame for any attack on or any damage to the Imam Ali Shrine, regardless of which side or which nationality is responsible, will automatically fall on the US. The fact that some in the new Baghdad government and a significant bloc in the 1,100-member national conference convened in the capital have joined moderate Shi'ite clerics - including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani from his London hospital - in calling for negotiations with Muqtada, simply reinforces the constraints on military activity in Najaf. US standing in Iraq and the Islamic world is hostage to another reality over which Washington has even less control: the health and well-being of Muqtada himself. ...As of August, Iraq remains, and is largely perceived to be an artificial creation of the Bush administration and the US Congress and heavily reliant on 160,000 foreign troops. But like so many creations, its development and eventual maturation cannot be predicted, let alone controlled. The meeting of the national conference in Baghdad, postponed for two weeks and enlarged because of under-representation of ethnic and religious groups, has been roiled by events in Najaf and may have to be extended to get through its main task of choosing the 100 individuals for the advisory and constitutional drafting assembly that will oversee the interim government until elections in January. Among Washington's justifications for the continued presence of foreign military forces is the need to stabilize Iraq. Yet the presence of foreign military forces is a major cause of the instability. The resolution lies not in Najaf but in Baghdad, in simultaneously disarming the militia elements and significantly improving basic economic, health, and educational levels (not just "opportunities") among the inhabitants of Sadr City. Only then will Najaf's cemetery again become the Valley of Peace.

Anti-Americanism a Hit With Egyptian Audiences
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: A ballad drifted from the movie screen. The lyrics mourned a lost love, not an unusual climax for an Egyptian film. But this lost love was a place across the sea. "New York," the singer asked, "why do you resist tenderness?" It was music for the closing credits of "Alexandria . . . New York," the newest film by Egypt's leading director, Youssef Chahine. It is a cinematic divorce paper. Chahine said he had long admired the United States and its biggest city, but now he has made a film brimming with resentment. The film, set to open in Cairo next week, is about an aging Arab moviemaker who returns to New York after some years, meets an old lover and discovers he fathered a son by her. But the son rejects the father and, in the end, the father rejects the son. The relation is a melodramatic metaphor for relations between the United States and Arabs. "The violence which started in Hiroshima ends with you," the father cries out at the son at one point. In Cairo's entertainment world these days, it's hard to escape a wave of anti-Americanism. Often, a sure way to fill a theater is to lambaste U.S. foreign policy, cultural habits or military activity. One recent comedy lampooning the United States featured an exploding Statue of Liberty outside the lobby. Another stage production included a randy caricature of an American general and played to packed houses for four months. The sentiment driving such works is widespread across the Arab world, a recent poll showed. Ninety-three percent of people surveyed in Jordan in March had a somewhat or very unfavorable view of the United States, according to the study by the Pew Research Center. In Morocco, the figure was 68 percent.

U.S. Struggles to Win Hearts, Minds in the Muslim World
Diplomacy Efforts Lack Funds, Follow-Through
By Robin Wright
Washington Post, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush administration is facing growing criticism from both inside and outside its ranks that it has failed to move aggressively enough in the war of ideas against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups over the three years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Sept. 11 commission last month called for a vigorous strategy for promoting image and democratic values of the United States around the world, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the administration is working hard on those efforts.  But Middle East experts -- and some frustrated U.S. officials -- complain that the administration has provided only limited new direction in dealing with anti-American anger among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims and is spending far too little on such efforts, particularly in contrast with the billions spent on other pressing needs, such as homeland security and intelligence. On its boldest policy ideas, such as the Greater Middle East Democracy Initiative, the administration has limited its follow-through or deferred to the very governments that have most resisted democratic reforms, specialists and some U.S. officials say. "It's worse than failing. Failing means you tried and didn't get better. But at this point, three years after September 11, you can say there wasn't even much of an attempt, and today Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. and the degree of distrust in the U.S. are far worse than they were three years ago. Bin Laden is winning by default," said Shibley Telhami, a member of a White House-appointed advisory group on public diplomacy and Brookings Institution scholar.

Iran Says It May Pre-empt Attack Against Its Nuclear Facilities
By NAZILA FATHI
NYT, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: Iran's defense minister, Vice Adm. Ali Shamkhani, has warned that Iran may resort to pre-emptive strikes to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. Admiral Shamkhani made his comments in an interview on Al Jazeera television on Wednesday in response to a question about the possibility of an American or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear projects. "We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," he said. "Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly. Any nation, if it feels threatened, can resort to that." There has been speculation here that Israel may attack Iran's nuclear sites, as it struck against Iraq's nuclear facilities at Osirak in 1981. A commander of Iran's hard-line Revolutionary Guards warned this week that Iran would strike Israel's reactor at Dimona if Israel attacked Iran's nuclear sites. "If Israel fires one missile at Bushehr atomic power plant, it should permanently forget about the Dimona nuclear center, where it produces and keeps its nuclear weapons," said the commander, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr. Admiral Shamkhani said Iran was certain that Israel would not carry out such an attack without a green light from the United States. "So you cannot separate the two," he said.

North Korea Is Reaching Out, and World Is Reaching Back (except Bush)
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
NYT, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: Even as the Bush administration has worked to isolate North Korea in a campaign to make it drop its nuclear program, Asian and European governments have been actively engaging it on diplomatic, cultural and economic levels. Now, with the pace of engagement quickening, it is the administration that risks becoming isolated, experts say, a possible factor in a recent moderation in its stance. A country famous for its hermetic borders, North Korea now has embassies in 41 countries and diplomatic ties with 155. It recently held the first-ever military talks with its former archenemy, South Korea, and is moving toward normalizing diplomatic relations with its former colonizer, Japan. North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, a hard-core Communist who has begun tilting his country toward a market economy, extolled the virtues of profit during a visit in June to a North Korean factory. South Korean businesses will start operating this year in an industrial park in the North that by 2006 is expected to employ 30,000 North Korean workers. Against this backdrop of intensifying engagement, Washington's attitude has begun easing in recent weeks. In June, President Bush, who famously lumped North Korea into his "axis of evil," made the first significant offer to the North Koreans since coming into office. The Bush administration had come under increasing pressure from Democrats and other participants in talks on North Korea's nuclear program - South Korea, China, Russia and Japan - to come up with an offer. "They were drifting away from the U.S.'s line, and the U.S. was becoming isolated," said Chung In Moon, a foreign affairs professor at Yonsei University here and an adviser to President Roh Moo Hyun. "They were fed up with America's failure to come up with a concrete plan, and the Americans realized that."

The Chávez Victory: A Blow to the Bush Administration
By JUAN FORERO
NYT, 20 August 2004
EXCERPT: When President Hugo Chávez was ousted in a coup two years ago, the Bush administration celebrated, calling the ouster his own doing. The rest of Latin America was left fuming by the overthrow and expressed strong support for Mr. Chávez as he was almost immediately swept back into power in a popular uprising. On Sunday, when Mr. Chávez triumphed over his adversaries in a referendum on whether he should be recalled from office, countries from Brazil to Argentina, Colombia to Spain heartily congratulated him. The United States remained silent for more than a day, until a State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, offered tepid backing for the "preliminary results." The resounding victory was a blow to the Bush administration, which has struggled with how to deal with Mr. Chávez, a leftist firebrand who presides over the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and has opposed Washington on every major initiative in Latin America. "There's no doubt in my mind that at least in the White House - I don't know about the State Department - there was a deep desire to see Chávez lose," said former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center monitored the election and who has briefed American officials on his efforts to broker a peace between the government and its opponents. Now, the United States has the challenge of constructing, from the ground up, a new relationship with Mr. Chávez, who has done everything imaginable to antagonize what he calls "the colossus to the north." He has used an expletive to describe President Bush, threatened to hold back oil sales if the United States invaded, and expanded Venezuela's ties with Cuba. His campaign to win in the vote was built largely on demonizing the United States. "The Bush government will be defeated on Sunday," Mr. Chávez told reporters three days before the recall vote. "The confrontation in Venezuela is not really with this opposition. The opposition has a master, whose name is George W. Bush." ...The United States has also provided money to groups like Súmate, which violated elections norms early on Monday by distributing results of a survey of voters leaving the polls that showed Mr. Chávez losing by a wide margin. Mr. Chávez seized on this financing of anti-government groups, channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy, to whip his supporters into an anti-American frenzy. "The United States is stuck in a time warp," said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "It is using tools from the cold war, when money from the National Endowment for Democracy was useful in funding anti-Communist movements."

19 August 2004

Time to Quit Iraq (Sort Of)
By EDWARD LUTTWAK
NYT, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: Many Americans now believe that the United States is depleting its military strength, diplomatic leverage and Treasury to pursue unrealistic aims in Iraq. They are right. Democracy seems to interest few Iraqis, given the widespread Shiite proclivity to follow unelected clerics, the Sunni rejection of the principle of majority rule, and the preference of many Kurds for tribe and clan over elected governments. Reconstruction was supposed to advance rapidly with surging oil export revenues, but is hardly gaining on the continuing destruction inflicted by sabotage and thievery. And in any case, it is unlikely that the new Iraqi interim government will be able to oversee meaningful elections in a country where its authority is more widely denied than recognized. Yet few Americans are prepared to simply abandon Iraq. For one, they are rightly concerned that to do so would be a mortal blow to America's global credibility and encourage violent Islamists everywhere. An outright withdrawal would leave the interim government and its feeble forces of doubtful loyalty to face the attacks of vastly emboldened Baath regime loyalists, Sunni revanchists, local and foreign Islamist extremists and the ever-more numerous Shiite militias. The likely result would be the defection of the government's army, police and national guard members, followed by a swift collapse and then civil war. Worse might follow in the Middle East - it usually does - even to the point of invasions by Iran, Turkey and possibly others, initiating new cycles of repression and violence. Thus the likely consequences of an American abandonment are so bleak that few Americans are even willing to contemplate it. This is a mistake: it is precisely because unpredictable mayhem is so predictable that the United States might be able to disengage from Iraq at little cost, or even perhaps advantageously. Here's why:

Half-cocked Marines responsible for the standoff at Najaf
8-Day Battle for Najaf: From Attack to Stalemate
By ALEX BERENSON and JOHN F. BURNS
NYT, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: Acting without the approval of the Pentagon or senior Iraqi officials, the Marine officers said in recent interviews, they turned a firefight with Mr. Sadr's forces on Thursday, Aug. 5, into a eight-day pitched battle, one fought out in deadly skirmishes in an ancient cemetery that brought them within rifle shot of the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine. Eventually, fresh Army units arrived from Baghdad and took over Marine positions near the mosque, but by then the politics of war had taken over and the American force had lost the opportunity to storm Mr. Sadr's fighters around the mosque.  ...The Najaf battle has also raised fresh questions about an age-old rivalry within the American military - between the no-holds-barred, press-ahead culture of the Marines and the slower, more reserved and often more politically cautious approach of the Army. Army-Marine tensions also have surfaced previously, notably when the Marines opened the Falluja offensive. As they replay the first days of the Najaf battle, some commanders are wondering if a more carefully planned mission would have had a better chance to succeed. "Setting conditions for an attack requires extensive planning and preparations," said Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, who commands an Army battalion that arrived to reinforce the Marine unit here two days after the fight began. "If you don't have those things in place and you attack, a lot of times it fails." When the United States transferred power to the interim government in June, both American and Iraqi officials insisted that authority for major decisions on the use of force would be exercised by the new Iraqi leadership, in particular Dr. Allawi, a former enforcer for Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who defected in the 1980's and became leader of an exile political party. Senior United States military commanders emphasized that while they retained command of their troops, the forces were there to serve the Iraqi government. But in the battle in Najaf, at least, the marines here say they engaged Mr. Sadr's forces at the request of the local Iraqi police. They did not seek approval from senior military commanders or from Iraqi political leaders, with the exception of the governor of Najaf. The governor, Adnan al-Zurfi, an Allawi appointee, refuses to confirm having given the green light, although American commanders in Baghdad cited his commands repeatedly as the political cover for the Marine attack. In past week, the interim government has twice halted major American-led attacks on Mr. Sadr's forces as they were about to begin. It now says it will use Iraqi troops for future battles. But it is far from clear, judging from the lukewarm assessments of American commanders in Najaf, that the American-trained Iraqi units that fought alongside the Americans last week are capable of taking the lead in any showdown with Mr. Sadr.

A Unifying Factor Across Iraq
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: "I advise the dictatorial, agent government to resign ... Iraqi people demand the resignation of the government ... they [US] replaced Saddam with a government worse than him."
- Muqtada al-Sadr, August 13
Imagine a Muslim army about to bomb the Vatican with the help of a few Christian mercenaries while the Pope is away, recovering from an angioplasty in London and silent about the whole drama. This is roughly what is happening in Najaf, Iraq, where the forces of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the United States stand eyeball to eyeball pending a "final showdown".

Pentagon and White House policies out of bounds
Abuse Inquiry Faults Officers on Leadership
By THOM SHANKER and KATE ZERNIKE
NYT, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT:  A high-level Army inquiry has found that senior American commanders created conditions that allowed abuses to occur at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by failing to provide leadership and enough resources to run the jail, according to Pentagon and military officials. But the inquiry found no evidence of direct culpability above the colonel who commanded the military intelligence unit at the prison, these officials said. They would only speak anonymously because the report is still being reviewed and may be revised. It is expected to be delivered to Congress early next week. The investigation, opened by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, is expected to blame at least two dozen military intelligence personnel, civilian contractors and Central Intelligence Agency officers for wrongdoing, officials said. Military medical personnel who witnessed abuse or learned of it when treating injuries among detainees, but did not report it up the chain of command, are also cited.

U.S. eagerly contributes half
Worldwide Military Spending Nears $1 Trillion
By Thalif Deen
Asia Times, 19 August 2004
EXCERPT:  After declining in the post-Cold War era of the early 1990s, global military spending is on the rise again - threatening to break the US$1 trillion barrier this year, according to a group of United Nations-appointed military experts. The 16-member group estimates that military spending will rise to nearly $950 billion by the end of 2004, up from $900 billion in 2003. By contrast, rich nations spend $50 billion to $60 billion on development aid each year. The 2004 estimates would be "substantially higher if the costs of the major armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were included", the experts say in a 30-page report released in New York. The US Congress has authorized spending of about $25 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq in 2004, but that is expected to more than double by the end of the year. US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate in May that war spending in Afghanistan and Iraq was approaching about $5 billion a month. He predicted that total costs for 2005 would be $50 billion to $60 billion.  "At a time when global poverty-eradication and development goals are not being met due ... to a shortfall of necessary funds, rising global military expenditure is a disturbing trend," warns the UN study. The report, titled "The Relationship between Disarmament and Development in the Current International Context", will go before the 59th session of the UN General Assembly beginning mid-September. ..."The United States now accounts for about half of world military spending, meaning that it is spending nearly as much as the rest of the world combined," said Natalie J Goldring, executive director of the program on global security and disarmament at the University of Maryland. "This is difficult to justify on the basis of known or anticipated threats to US national security."

World's Anti-AIDS Donations Slow, Cutting U.S. Contribution, Too
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
NYT, 18 August 2004
EXCERPT: The rest of the world has contributed so little to the fight against AIDS that the United States cannot make its full contribution this year, President Bush's global AIDS coordinator said yesterday. The coordinator, Randall L. Tobias, said he would wait two months beyond the contribution deadline, hoping other countries or private donors would come up with $240 million in donations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. By law, the United States can give only a third of all the money going to the fund, so if other countries do not give enough, the government must limit its matching grant. "I'm very hopeful that the rest of the world will take action, so we can donate the full amount," Mr. Tobias said. In announcing formation of the fund in 2002, Secretary General Kofi Annan said he hoped it would attract up to $10 billion a year. Instead, it has struggled to raise much over $1 billion annually, and has handed out $3 billion in 128 countries so far. Fund administrators have pointed out that poor African and Asian countries need time to rebuild frayed health-care systems and would have trouble absorbing billions right away, but the response has been disappointing. "I don't have an explanation for why other countries have not stepped up to the magnitude that is needed," Mr. Tobias said yesterday. He did not criticize any country, but he praised the British, who in June effectively doubled their pledge for the next three years.

Neo-Con Ideology, Not Big Oil, Pushed for War
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, 17 August 2004
EXCERPT: Why did the administration of President George W Bush push to invade Iraq? Most left-wing critics - epitomized perhaps by Michael Moore's blockbuster documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 - have rather reflexively argued that the economic factor, particularly the interests of Big Oil or "the ruling class", must have been decisive. But many right-wing critics, who know the ruling class from the inside, lean to a different explanation, in part by pointing out that Big Oil, to the extent it took any position at all on the war, opposed it. As evidence, they cite the unusually public opposition to a unilateral invasion voiced quite publicly by such eminent oil and ruling class-related influentials as former president George H W Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and secretary of state James Baker. While they do not deny that some economic interests - construction giants, such as Halliburton and Bechtel, and high-tech arms companies - may have given the push to war some momentum, the decisive factor in their view was ideological, and the ideology, "neo-conservative". Powered by both Jewish and non-Jewish neo-conservatives centered in the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney and by White House deference to the solidly pro-Zionist Christian Right, the neo-conservative world view - dedicated to the security of Israel and the primacy of military power in a world of good and evil - emerged after September 11, 2001, as the driving force in President Bush's foreign policy, as well as the dominant narrative in a cowed and complacent mass media.
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Geopolitics in Iraq an Old Game
By Henry C K Liu
Asia Times, 17 August 2004
EXCERPT: Introduction-The Americans are not the only ones to have had a tough time of it in Iraq. Neither the Persians nor the Ottomans could keep the population effectively in check, and the British occupiers also failed. Iraq's troubled history goes back centuries, and its echoes resound forcefully today.