31 October 2003

Government contracts for sale, CHEAP!
Report Links Iraq Deals to Bush Donations
Associated Press, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday. The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president's 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years. The report was released by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based research organization that produces investigative articles on special interests and ethics in government. Its staff includes journalists and researchers. The Center concluded that most of the 10 largest contracts went to companies that employed former high-ranking government officials, or executives with close ties to members of Congress and even the agencies awarding their contracts. Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries. "No single agency supervised the contracting process for the government," Center executive director Charles Lewis said. "This situation alone shows how susceptible the contracting system is to waste, fraud and cronyism." [emphasis by BWUSA]
SEE ALSO: Report: Winning Contractors (Center for Public Integrity)

U.S. Prosecutes Greenpeace, Threatens Future of Direct Actions
By Duncan Campbell
Guardian (UK), 31 October 2003
EXCERPT: Greenpeace is being taken to court by the US government because of its action against the illegal importation of mahogany. Its lawyers says it is the first time an entire organisation has been criminally prosecuted for the activities of two members. The prosecution arises from the activity in April last year of two Greenpeace members who boarded a vessel off the coast of Miami allegedly carrying mahogany from Brazil to the US and hoisted a banner saying: "President Bush, Stop Illegal Logging." They were accompanied by journalists who recorded the event. Both protesters and 12 other Greenpeace activists in support vessels were arrested and jailed over the weekend. Six were charged with misdemeanours, and pleaded guilty.

U.S. falls to 31st for killing reporters in Iraq
Reporters Without Borders Survey Ranks Nations Relative to Freedom of the Press
Reporters Without Borders, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Reporters Without Borders is publishing its second world press freedom ranking. As in 2002, the most catastrophic situation is to be found in Asia, especially North Korea, Burma and Laos. Second from last in the ranking, Cuba is today the world's biggest prison for journalists. The United States and Italy were given relatively low rankings. ...To compile this ranking, Reporters Without Borders asked journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists to fill out a questionnaire evaluating respect for press freedom in a particular country. A total of 166 countries are included in the ranking (as against 139 last year). The other countries were left out because of a lack of reliable, well-supported data. ...The ranking distinguishes behaviour at home and abroad in the cases of the United States and Israel. They are ranked in 31st and 44th positions respectively as regards respect for freedom of expression on their own territory, but they fall to the 135th and 146th positions as regards behaviour beyond their borders. The Israeli army's repeated abuses against journalists in the occupied territories and the US army's responsibility in the death of several reporters during the war in Iraq constitute unacceptable behaviour by two nations that never stop stressing their commitment to freedom of expression.

Krugman's Analysis of Growth Figures
A Big Quarter
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 31 October 2003
EXCERPT: ... unless we start to see serious job growth — by which I mean increases in payroll employment of more than 200,000 a month — consumer spending will eventually slide, and bring growth down with it. Still, it's possible that we really have reached a turning point. If so, does it validate the Bush economic program? Well, no. Stimulating the economy in the short run is supposed to be easy, as long as you don't worry about how much debt you run up in the process. As William Gale of the Brookings Institution puts it, "Almost any tax cut or spending increase would succeed in boosting a sluggish economy if the Federal Reserve Board follows an accommodative monetary policy. . . . The key question is, therefore, not whether the proposals provide any short-term stimulus, but whether they are the most effective way to provide stimulus." Mr. Gale doesn't think the Bush tax cuts meet that criterion, and neither do I. To put it more bluntly: it would be quite a trick to run the biggest budget deficit in the history of the planet, and still end a presidential term with fewer jobs than when you started. And despite yesterday's good news, that's a trick President Bush still seems likely to pull off.

Corps Voters
For over two decades, the bond between the GOP  and the U.S. military has been getting stronger. Since the invasion of Iraq, that may be changing.
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Washington Monthly, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Republicans have maintained an advantage of between 15 and 20 points on national security for the last 20 years, since Ronald Reagan's massive defense spending bills, an advantage which right now equals the Democratic advantage on the economy. The calibrations are so precise that minute shifts matter. The great political triumph of Bill Clinton's presidency was to move the Democratic advantage on the economy by between two and three points; this slight shift, Aldrich and other political scientists say, boosted him to sweeping reelection victory in 1996, and enabled his party to improve their congressional advance in 1998, an historic achievement for the party of a second-term president. What has some Republicans scared is the specter of a similar shift, numerically small but profound, that dents the GOP's advantage on national security and threatens their slim electoral majority. This is the kind of vulnerability that could change the structure of American politics.

Prosecutor Says Terror Trial Is Imminent
By ANNE GEARAN Associated Press Writer
AP in FindLaw, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: The first terrorism trial before a U.S. military tribunal is fast approaching, the Pentagon's chief prosecutor for the planned trials said Thursday. "I think it's safe to say that our start is imminent, soon," said Col. Frederic L. Borch III, who oversees nine prosecutors in a Pentagon office set up to handle the upcoming trials. Borch, speaking to an American Bar Association gathering, would not be more specific. Plans have been in the works for such trials for nearly two years, but the White House has given no date for the first tribunal, nor specified who would be tried or where. Lawyers working with the Pentagon predict the first tribunal will take place at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. military is holding several hundred foreign prisoners picked up in the hunt for terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001. The trial, when it comes, will mark the first time since World War II that the United States has put wartime prisoners on trial in such a proceeding. Civil liberties groups, civilian defense lawyers and others have called the framework for tribunals unfair to defendants and an invitation for other countries to railroad American soldiers picked up in overseas conflicts.

GOP Fails to Break Pickering Filibuster
By JESSE J. HOLLAND Associated Press Writer
AP in FindLaw, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Senate Republicans on Thursday failed to break a Democratic filibuster of U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering's promotion to the federal appeals court, continuing a two-year standoff tinged with accusations of racial, religious and regional politics. Pickering, a Mississippi federal judge who wants a seat on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, has been accused by Democrats of supporting segregation. He also has been accused of pushing anti-abortion and anti-voting rights views during his time as a state lawmaker.

Dems Weighing Iraq Probe
Minority on Senate Intelligence panel discuss acting alone
By Alexander Bolton
The Hill, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are discussing whether to launch an independent investigation of how the White House handled pre-war intelligence on Iraq. To prepare for such a possible move, they have already obtained from former CIA officials the names of intelligence operatives who would be willing to testify in such an all-Democratic forum behind closed doors. Sen. John Rockefeller (W.Va.), the ranking Democratic member and vice chairman of the committee, met with fellow Democratic panel members Carl Levin (Mich.) and Dick Durbin (Ill.) last Thursday to review whether to mount a separate investigation in response to what they view as Republican efforts to shield President Bush and the administration from scrutiny over the pre-invasion decision-making process. ...Rule Six authorizes Roberts or Rockefeller to launch an investigation if five other members of the committee concur. In addition to Rockefeller, there are seven Democrats on the committee — making it nearly certain that Rockefeller would have the necessary support to move forward should he chose to do so. Rule Seven allows either the chairman or the vice chairman to issue subpoenas “for the attendance of witnesses or the production of memoranda, documents, records or any other material.” Intelligence committee Democrats note that their panel is the only one in Congress that gives the minority the power to conduct an investigation and issue subpoenas.

U.S. Says No Carbon Dioxide Cut for Industries
AP, 31 October 2003
EXCERPT: The US Senate yesterday rejected a plan, by 55 votes to 43, to curb carbon dioxide emissions from industry. The measure was sponsored by two senators, John McCain, a Republican, and Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, who described it as the opening shot in the task of persuading Congress to address global warming. Their bill would have required industrial plants, but not vehicles, to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 2000 levels by 2010. Mr McCain said it was a "first step". But Larry Craig, the Idaho senator, said there was no need for a "massive new regulatory process" for industrial carbon dioxide. "It is not a pollutant. It does not represent a direct threat to public health."
SEE ALSO: Meanwhile, Polar Ice Cap the Size of Scotland Melts (Guardian)

Michael Moore Predicts Bush Loss in 2003
By Damian Guevara
Plain Dealer, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Documentary filmmaker and political commentator Michael Moore told a packed house at the College of Wooster yesterday that growing anger among Americans over the Iraq war could bring down the Bush White House in 2004. "Americans don't like being lied to," Moore said. "More and more of our fellow Americans have figured out that we were led to war on a lie."
SEE ALSO: David Corn on Bush's Lies and the Media's Complacency (TP)

Husband Sues Florida to Halt Wife's Feeding
Michael Schiavo and the ACLU are challenging the constitutionality of 'Terri's Law,' enacted to keep the brain-damaged woman alive.
LA Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Opposed by Florida's governor, legislators and even the president, the husband of a severely brain-damaged woman went to court Wednesday to challenge the constitutionality of a state law passed specifically to keep his wife alive. Michael Schiavo contends his wife, Terri, who has been in a vegetative state for the last 13 years, would not have wanted her life prolonged by being hooked to a feeding tube. A state court had agreed with him, and allowed the removal of the life-sustaining device, but Florida lawmakers rushed through a special law last week empowering Gov. Jeb Bush to order the tube reinstated.

Corporate Plea on Tax Breaks: Ours Come First
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
New York Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: It has been promoted as a bill to create jobs, to enhance American competitiveness and to level the playing field for companies overseas. But as House lawmakers pushed ahead this week with the biggest overhaul of corporate taxes in two decades, they found themselves briefly fixated on bows and arrows. "U.S. manufacturers of bows and arrows are fleeing in droves for Korea and China," said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. The problem, he told members of the House Ways and Means Committee, is that American arrows are hit with a 12.4 percent excise tax, but imported arrows are not. So it was that members of the tax-writing committee agreed to drop the excise tax on arrows, along with excise taxes for fishing tackle boxes and fish-finding devices that use sonar. Liquor and wine distributors were given a four-year tax break worth $234 million and movie studios received a break on foreign royalties worth $600 million over 10 years. These and other special-interest nuggets were little more than pocket change in a bill that would offer corporations $128 billion in new tax relief over the next decade. ...The lobbying rush is far from over. The bill moving through the House will have to be reconciled with a similar but more modest bill in the Senate. The Senate bill aims at pay for itself, by offsetting the cost of $70 billion in new tax breaks with money from repealing the old export subsidy and an assortment of other measures. Though House and Senate leaders are determined to pass a bill of some kind, lawmakers say the fight may well drag into next year.

Senate Nears Approval of Bill Allowing Forest Thinning
California fires serve as an impetus for the measure, similar to Bush's initiative. Critics say it's a cover to expand commercial logging.
By Richard Simon
LA Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Responding to California's devastating wildfires, the Senate on Wednesday moved toward approving a version of President Bush's plan for limiting environmental and judicial reviews of forest-thinning projects he says are designed to reduce fire risk. The measure, which has languished in the Senate for months, is expected to pass as early as today. "It is urgent not just because the Senate needs to respond in a heartfelt way to the tragedies in California," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "But if this legislation is not passed … we will see that repeated again and again. "The bill, based on Bush's "healthy forests" initiative, is designed to speed the thinning of up to 20 million acres of federal forest land — much of it in California. Environmentalists have attacked the legislation as a ploy to promote commercial logging far beyond communities facing potential threats.

Armed Services: Voluntary No More?
by Lawrence J. Korb
Center for American Progress, October 29, 2003
EXCERPT: The war against Iraq will cause several long-term problems for the nation. Some of these problems are obvious, a growing budget deficit and lasting damage to such long-standing international organizations like the UN and traditional alliances like NATO. But often overlooked is the damage that the Bush administration's approach to the war has caused to the all-volunteer military (AVF). ...creating this military on an all volunteer basis did not happen overnight, nor did it happen by accident. Over the past three decades, since the war in Vietnam forced an end to the draft, civilian and military leaders have sent forces into combat with the best training and equipment and clear objectives. They applied overwhelming force and had clear exit strategies. When reserves had to be activated they were given adequate notice and were not called up more than once every five or six years. Finally, and most importantly, when an administration used the military improperly, as the Reagan administration did in Lebanon and the Clinton administration did in Somalia, the Presidents admitted their mistakes and withdrew the military before more problems were created for the military and the country.

Whistleblower: Cheney's Hawks 'Hijacking Policy'
By Ritt Goldstein
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington's official line. "What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour...it's worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam," said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel. "[President] George Bush isn't in control...the country's been hijacked," she said, describing how "key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed". Ms Kwiatkowski, who retired this year after 20 years service, was a Middle East specialist in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, headed by Douglas Feith. She described "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress", adding that "in order to take that first step - Iraq - lies had to be told to Congress to bring them on board".
SEE ALSO: Halliburton Gets Iraq Boost (Guardian)

How Much Did Bush Know Before 9/11?
Mother Jones, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Though he still refuses to hand over "very sensitive documents," President Bush insisted on Monday that his staff is cooperating fully with the commission set up to "prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1073834,00.html
SEE ALSO: The Dark Art of Deception: 9/11 Death Toll Drops Again (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Bush to Stake Bid for Reelection on Peace and Security (Globe)

Senators Set Deadline for CIA in Iraq Probe
By Tabassum Zakaria
Reuters in ABC News, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday demanded that the CIA produce documents and schedule interviews for the panel's assessment of prewar intelligence on Iraq by noon on Friday. "It is our desire that the committee's review will serve to validate the good work of the intelligence community and, where necessary, provide corrective suggestions where the intelligence product might have been better," said a joint letter from committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, and senior Democrat Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia.

After the end of two years of lovey-dovey coverage, you'd be mad too...
Is Media Bias Filtering Out Good News from Iraq?
FAIR, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Are the media ignoring the good news in Iraq? From pundits to White House officials, that's what many critics are saying. According to George W. Bush (10/6/03), "We're making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter." While these complaints have sparked extensive discussion and debate in the media, an examination of coverage finds very little substance to this critique of media treatment of Iraq.

From the Screen to the Streets: The Rise of New Media
By Howard Rheingold
In These Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: It has taken 10 years of talk about "new media" for a critical mass to understand that every computer desktop, and now every pocket, is a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, and organizing tool‹and to learn how to use that infrastructure to affect change. Previous technologies allowed users only to communicate one-to-one (telephones) or few-to-many (broadcast and print media). Mobile and deskbound media such as blogs, listservs and social networking sites allow for many-to-many communication. This provides opportunities and problems for progressive political activists in three key areas: Gathering and disseminating alternative and more democratic news; creating virtual public spheres where citizens debate the issues that concern democratic societies; and organizing collective political action.

Grammatically challenged serial liar professes his conversion
Bush Says Religion Helped Him Stop Being a Drunkard
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: President Bush, speaking Wednesday night at a Christian youth center in Dallas, gave an unusually candid assessment of religion's role in leading him from his wayward youth. "You've got to understand that sometimes, and a lot of times, the best way to help the addict, a person who is stuck on drugs and alcohol, is to change their heart," Bush said to a cheering audience at the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship. "See, if you change their heart, then they change their behavior. I know."

29 October 2003

Bush's Urgent Task: To Calm Public's Growing Impatience
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
New York Times, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: The idea (to hold a full-scale news conference) had been under consideration for several weeks, but it was only after the attacks in Baghdad on Monday that Mr. Bush decided to take his message directly to the voters and the world. For weeks, while opinion polls showed diminished support for his postwar leadership, he had accused the press of filtering out good news from Iraq and overplaying the bad. The decision reflects how urgent it is for the White House to keep public opinion about Iraq from deteriorating to the point that it could limit the president's policy choices and threaten his chances for re-election. With Election Day just over a year away, Mr. Bush will come under increasing pressure to start showing results in Iraq and bringing troops home. But, faced with an evolving threat that will require military flexibility, he also may be counting on an electorate patient enough to deal with what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld now calls a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...Despite his longstanding attempts to cast his foreign policy as conducted without regard to polls or domestic politics, he was drawn into rare comments about the electoral implications of a drawn-out conflict in Iraq. Mr. Bush said he expected the American people to be patient because they were "able to differentiate between politics and reality," suggesting that he would cast criticism of his leadership as partisan and unfounded. [BWUSA bold]

The White House Whine: 'It's All the Media's Fault'
By Dante Chinni
Christian Science Monitor, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: After several months of bad news, the Bush administration has discovered the source of its problems. It turns out that it's not the Democrats, not really anyway. It's not Saddam or Osama. It's not even Bill Clinton. No, the problem, it turns out, is the media. The press, particularly the Washington press, has created a "filter" that's blocking the good news from getting out, the president says. He insists that positive stories abound in Iraq and in the US economy. Things are looking up all over. But you in the public aren't being allowed to hear about it. And if you could hear about it, you'd feel a lot better about the direction of the country. ...This is all very interesting, even compelling, save for one small problem. When one looks at the facts, the argument just doesn't hold up. In fact, up until the last few months, one could argue that the Bush administration has had a relatively easy time of it with the press. Most of the potential "scandals" the press could have latched on to - Enron, Halliburton, etc. - were mostly overlooked, even by the usually tenacious Washington press corps, in large part probably because since Sept. 11 there are bigger issues at stake.

Thanks From Corporate Tax Dodgers
TomPaine.com, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Dear Mr. President, you're truly the gift that keeps on giving. Faced with a record deficit and $87 billion more for Iraq, another president might think of raising taxes on corporations. Not you. You and Rep. Bill Thomas are actually working on a plan to give us more than $135 billion in new tax breaks. A special thanks is in order from our friends at companies like Bank of America, Pfizer and Hewlett-Packard. They already dodge taxes by setting up shop in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, yet still stand to benefit from this latest loophole lollapalooza. We'll never forget that you're the president who slashed our taxes by 40% in just three years. No president has ever managed such a feat. Quite honestly, though, we want more.
SEE ALSO: Dodging Taxes is Big Business for Corporations (TP)
SEE ALSO: Corporate Taxes Have Been Slashed, Why Doe it Again? (TP)

The Wilson-CIA Leak, WMDs and the Dems
By David Corn
The Nation, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: As the Bush White House juggles two political grenades--the Wilson leak and the MIA WMDs--there are two questions: can Bush and his gang prevent detonations, and can the Democrats make it difficult for Bush to defuse these controversies and escape without offering full explanations?

Regulators Sue Fund Company for Securities Fraud
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
New York Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Federal and state securities regulators filed civil lawsuits today against Putnam Investments and two of its senior fund managers, contending that both the giant mutual fund company and its executives committed securities fraud beginning as early as 1998. The case against Putnam, the fifth-largest mutual fund company in the nation with $272 billion under management, involves its practice of allowing some large investors to trade rapidly in and out of shares, even though its stated policy was to prohibit such trades. Regulators also contend that Putnam engaged in securities fraud by failing to disclose to fund shareholders or to its board of directors a series of personal trades by its managers that harmed public shareholders. ..."There are some 95 million Americans who are invested in mutual funds, representing half the households in this country, and they deserve better," said Stephen M. Cutler, director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We're going to continue to be aggressive in pursuing appropriate enforcement actions where mutual funds abuse the trust of those investors." [BushWhackedUSA emphasis]

Bush Won't Commit to Giving Classified Reports to 9/11 Panel
By PHILIP SHENON
New York Times, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: President Bush declined today to commit the White House to turning over highly classified intelligence reports to the independent federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, despite public threats of a subpoena from the bipartisan panel.

Justice Dept. Tightens Security in C.I.A. Leak Case
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times,29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Justice Department and F.B.I. officials have imposed tighter secrecy restrictions over the inquiry into the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, government officials said on Tuesday. In an unusual step, they have removed the director of the F.B.I's Washington office from the list of officials with access to the case.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Terrorists
By Patrick Taylor
Open Source Politics, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Department of Justice’s first priority is to prevent future terrorist attacks.
--Preserving Life and Liberty
The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) doesn't normally rate as a threat in most people's books (excepting the tin-foil hat crowd that thinks the ACLU will use black helicopters to kidnap their children), but the Bush Administration has taken their criticisms of the USA PATRIOT Act [PDF 400KB] very personally. The ACLU got under the Administration's skin so much that the Department of Justice started a website called Preserving Life and Liberty. I won't cover the ACLU specific portions of the site in this article, but the overall content of the site makes me realize how effective the ACLU has been in building opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act. Perhaps the Justice Department thought they were creating a public relations-savvy website but "Preserving Life and Liberty" is ham-fisted propaganda plain and simple. [BWUSA emphasis]

Republicans - Please Take Back Your Party
by Thom Hartmann
OpEdNews.Com, (date unknown)
EXCERPT: ...the Republican Party has been seized by Ayn Rand utopians, Pat Roberson fundamentalists, and the largest and dirtiest of America's corporate elite. They've trashed the values of Lincoln and Eisenhower, rejected Jesus' words in Matthew 25, and turned our commons into a dumping ground while using our nation's treasury as a honey pot. At the same time, there's a growing concern that George W. Bush's projected quarter-billion-dollar campaign war chest, and demonstrated willingness to use Big Lie techniques and October Surprise wars, will be enough to induce national amnesia in 2004, destroy the last vestiges of a civil society, and permanently turn our nation into the land of the observed and the home of the worried-about-the-terror-alert. And, so, those of us "on the left" ask our Republican friends: Please take your party back from these fanatics, before it's too late for America to ever again be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

28 October 2003

An Empire of Widows and Orphans
George Bush, the Anti-Family President
By BILL KAUFFMAN
CounterPunch, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: The leadership of the family values Right is hopelessly compromised by its long-term adulterous affair with the Republican Party. But plenty of good folks who call themselves "conservatives" mean by that now-useless term that they believe in the integrity of families and small communities and detest the vulgar, home-wrecking, and even murderous intrusions of corporate capitalism and Big Government. As they watch this latest American diaspora, as young husbands and wives tearfully leave spouses and children and extended families to serve the Empire, we should remind them that the only foreign policy compatible with healthy family life is one of peace and non-intervention.
SEE ALSO: Ministers of War: Criminals of the Cloth, By WILLIAM A. COOK (CounterPunch)

Bush Administration's Intolerance of Dissent Resembles Communist China's
By Liu Baifang
L.A. Times, 26 October 2003
EXCERPT: Lately, I find myself worrying about my adopted country, the United States. I'm alarmed that dissent is increasingly less tolerated, and that those in power seem unable to resist trying to intimidate those who speak their minds. I grew up in the People's Republic of China, so I know how it is to live in a place where voicing opinions that differ from official orthodoxy can be dangerous, and I fear that model.

A Must-Read!
Interview with Bill Moyers: Squeezing the Media
Buzzflash, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Look, the founders of our government, the fellows who gave us the First Amendment, didn't count on the rise of these megamedia conglomerates. They didn't count on huge private corporations that would own not only the means of journalism but vast swaths of the territory that journalism is supposed to cover. When you get a handful of conglomerates owning more and more of our news outlets, you're not going to find them covering the intersection where their power meets political power. The fact is that big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are the undisputed overlords of politics and government today.
SEE ALSO: How Ultra-Conservative Commentators Intimidate Mainstream Media (St. Louis Journalism Review)

Power Grab by the Gun Lobby
By Thomas Oliphant
26 October 2003
EXCERPT: With President George W. Bush and nearly all Republicans in its pocket, the gun crowd -- from the well-heeled manufacturers to friendly dealers like the one in Washington state that can't figure out how a semiautomatic assault rifle in its inventory got into the hands of the alleged Washington-area sniper duo -- is seeking that holy grail of the corporate irresponsibility movement, complete immunity from lawsuits seeking civil punishment for unsafe or negligent practices proved to a judge's or jury's satisfaction. As things stand now, the gun lobby is still a handful of votes short -- six to be precise -- of the 60 needed to stop a filibuster. Their leader, Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, is confident, and he just picked up support from a prominent Democrat -- Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who might face a close reelection race next year in gun-friendly South Dakota.

Tom Delay Ambushes Texas and America
By Steven Hill and Rob Richie
Progressive Populist, 15 November 2003 Issue
EXCERPT: Led by US House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Bush political mastermind Karl Rove, Texas Republicans have completed their ambush of congressional Democrats. After Delay spent three days huddled in private conferences with bickering Republican legislators, they gerrymandered US House districts in order to knock off as many as seven Democratic incumbents -- and help secure right-wing Republican dominance of the House of Representatives for a decade.

Help Save Reproductive Rights
By Peter Rothberg
The Nation, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Senate voted Tuesday to ban so-called "partial-birth" abortions, marking the end of eight years of legislative skirmishes and the beginning of a major court battle, which could begin even before President Bush signs the bill into law, which he's said he'll do. This will become the first federal ban on a specific abortion method since a woman's constitutional right to have an abortion was established by the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

Study Finds Canadian Drugs Cheaper and Safe
LA Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Importing cheaper prescription drugs from Canada could save Illinois up to $90 million a year without compromising safety, says a state report. Investigators found that drugs from Canada are safe and effective, that Canadian regulators provide protections comparable to those in the U.S., and that drugs sold in Canadian pharmacies are made in federally approved facilities.

Survey Says Gifts to Big Charities Down for First Time in 12 Years
Associated Press, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: Economic troubles and post-9/11 fatigue factor into the 1.2% decline in 2002. The Red Cross bumps the Salvation Army out of first place. Contributions to the largest charities fell in 2002 for the first time in a dozen years because of the troubled economy and uncertainty among donors, a survey finds. Donations to the 400 largest charities dropped 1.2% last year, to $46.9 billion from $47.5 billion in 2001, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual survey released today. During the previous five years, donations increased an average of 12% a year.

True Believers, Please Rise
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Congressional Republicans need to schedule a meeting with the mirror this morning. ...The occasion for this meeting is Speaker Dennis Hastert's effort to ram through an Air Force tanker deal for the Boeing Corporation. This deal isn't just shady — it's the Encyclopaedia Britannica of shady. It's as if somebody spent years trying to gather every single sleazy aspect of modern Washington and cram it all into one legislative effort.

Negotiators on Medicare Bill Fear That Premiums Might Vary
By ROBERT PEAR
New York Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Struggling to complete work on a giant Medicare bill, House and Senate negotiators expressed concern on Monday about new data suggesting that premiums would vary widely from state to state and even within states. Lawmakers have agreed on the basic structure of drug benefits to be offered to 40 million elderly and disabled people under Medicare. But they have been unable to agree on sweeping changes in the overall structure of Medicare, which would require the traditional government-run program to compete directly with private health plans.

27 October 2003

Tens of Thousands Protest Against Bush's Iraq Policies in Washington
Gerald Herbert
AP, Canadian Press, 26 October 2003
EXCERPT: To chants of "Impeach Bush," tens of thousands of anti-war protesters rallied in the U.S. capital Saturday and delivered a scathing critique of President George W. Bush and his Iraq policy. Demanding an end to the U.S.-led occupation and the quick return of troops, the demonstrators gathered on a sunny fall day at the Washington Monument to listen to speeches and songs of peace.

What is Bush hiding?
Both Parties' Senators Accuse White House of Stalling 9/11 Probe
Associated Press, 26 October 2003
EXCERPT: Members of both parties are accusing the White House of stonewalling the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by blocking its demands for documents despite threats of a subpoena. "I call on the White House to turn over the documents they are withholding from the independent commission -- and do it now,'' Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., co-author of the legislation that created the independent commission, said Sunday. The 10-member, bipartisan commission has until May 27 to submit a report that also will deal with law enforcement, diplomacy, immigration, commercial aviation and the flow of assets to terror organizations. "If they continue to refuse, I will urge the independent commission to take the administration to court,'' said Lieberman, who is running for president. ``And if the administration tries to run out the clock, (Arizona Republican Sen.) John McCain and I will go to the floor of the Senate to extend the life of the commission.''
SEE ALSO: Bush Administration Obstructs Investigation (Yurica Report)
SEE ALSO: 9/11 Inquiry May Subpoena White House (Guardian)

If Bush Doesn't Read Papers, How Can He Criticize Media?
By David Corn
LA Weekly, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: A few weeks ago, George W. Bush noted during an interview that while he glances at newspaper headlines, he ³rarely² reads the actual articles because ³A lot of times there¹s opinions mixed in with news.² So where does he get his info? Bush said he prefers to be briefed by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. ³The best way to get the news,² he explained, ³is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what¹s happening in the world.² Lately Bush also has been warning the American public not to pay attention to other sources, such as journalists who report that all is not going well in the land of occupation. ³We¹re making good progress in Iraq,² Bush said. ³Sometimes it¹s hard to tell when you listen to the filter.² The filter is Bushspeak for the media.

Filtering the Smog: Will Lying Government Insiders Be Held Accountable?
By Frank O'Donnell
TomPaine.com, 25 October 2003
EXCERPT: This just in from the U.S. General Accounting Office: The Bush administration has undermined enforcement of the Clean Air Act. The public will be breathing dirtier air‹and many of us dying sooner‹as a result. Frankly, this isn't news to those of us who monitor the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency for a living. We have known for some time that under President Bush, the EPA has become something of a wholly owned subsidiary of such huge polluters‹and generous GOP campaign contributors‹as ExxonMobil and Southern Company. (And what a deal for them, when you think of it: EPA politicos, working on their behalf, with salaries paid for by taxpayers!) Even so, it may be useful for the GAO, often called the "congressional watchdog agency," to set out its findings for the public.

Democrats attack Bush over Iraq
BBC News, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Democratic Party's presidential hopefuls have fiercely criticised US President George W Bush's policy on Iraq.
But the nine candidates also clashed over which of them could best handle the country's foreign policy demands. The exchanges came in the fifth televised debate between contenders for the 2004 election nomination. Senator John Kerry said Mr Bush had been wrong on Iraq at every step and had created a "fraudulent coalition". Senator Kerry said Mr Bush had pledged to work through the United Nations and honour the weapons inspection process, but had done neither. "Our troops today are more exposed, are in greater danger, because this president didn't put together a real coalition, because this president's been unwilling to share the burden and the task," he said.

Middle class market instrument exploited
Shadow on Mutual Funds in the U.S.
The Globe and Mail, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: The trading scandal, in which wealthy clients received preferential and sometimes illegal assistance, was uncovered by New York State's crusading Attorney-General, Eliot Spitzer, who is vowing to clean up the industry's behaviour. He's the law-enforcement official who forced the Wall Street investment banks to make major changes in the way their analysts conducted their activities, after his investigators found that the research was often designed to help win banking and underwriting business rather than to provide impartial advice to investors. But the mutual-fund scandal affects many more ordinary investors, who have long accepted that owning such funds is about the safest way to play the markets. So far, it appears the big Canadian mutual fund players have been much more scrupulous in policing trading activity. There is no sign of the practices that have disadvantaged so many investors and cast such a dark shadow over the credibility of the U.S. industry.

Illinois Seeks Permission to Buy Drugs
By MONICA DAVEY
New York Times, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich will ask the federal authorities to give Illinois special permission to buy its employees' prescription drugs from Canada because, he said Sunday, he now has evidence the move would be safe for consumers and would save the state more than 16 percent of its annual share of drug costs. ...According to a summary of the report released on Sunday by Mr. Blagojevich's office, state employees and retirees using three prescriptions a month could save as much as $1,008 a year if they filled all their prescriptions through a Canadian mail-order plan. An average employee might save less than half of that.

If it's not insurance, just what are these guys selling?
Filing Just Two Claims in Eight Years Can Be Risky
To hold down costs, home insurers trim unprofitable policies
By Bruce Mohl
Boston Globe, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: Home insurance companies are searching through their customers for the ones they want to keep: those who file few claims or, better yet, none at all. Rising construction costs, weather losses, and a poor investment climate have made insurance companies wary of anyone who files claims with any frequency. At most companies, that's anyone who files more than one claim every eight years, the industry average.

Rumy Reinterprets the War on Terror
by James Ridgeway
Village Voice, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: Will Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld never stop? Portrayed in the mainstream press as a crotchety but smart geezer, Rumy has practically set up his own government. It's almost like a mini-coup in Bush's Washington. Just a few days ago Attorney General John Ashcroft was telling people how great the war on terror was turning out to be. Now comes Rumsfeld, interrupting the AG, with another interpretation of the facts.

The $87 Billion Debate That Wasn't
By Matthew Miller
Tribune Media Services, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: Don't be fooled by last-minute Republican feuds over whether up to $10 billion slated for Iraq should be a "loan." The uneventful passage of President Bush's new $87 billion package continues a shocking pattern of "debate" in which the central issues are barely mentioned. The timidity Democrats displayed in refusing to make a stand over the plan's financing is a depressing reminder of how unwinnable Democrats believe most political fights are nowadays. Critics are mad at Democrats, to be sure, but ultimately for the wrong reasons. Some complain that in voting against the package, House Democrats and some presidential contenders proved the party is unfit to manage national security. Others instead lament Bush's high-handedness. How dare Bush tell Democrats that he was not interested in negotiating on the $87 billion, that "this is the way it has to be." What can you do, Democrats whine, when a president says it's my way or the highway? For many Democrats, the apparent answer is, "You cave and give the president what he wants." The better answer, which Democrats didn't have the guts to pursue aggressively, was to filibuster over the plan's financing and use the showdown to sear into the public mind the perverse priorities of the Bush White House at a time of supposed war and "sacrifice."

  AUDIO LINK   
Bad Ideas Have No Consequences for Free Market Conservatives
Interview by Matthew Rothschild of Thomas Frank and David Mulcahey of The Baffler Magazine
Progressive Radio, Progressive Magazine

  BOOK REVIEW 
The Awful Truth
By Russell Baker
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman
New York Review of Books, 6 November issue
EXCERPT: In the higher levels of journalism there is a curious uneasiness about dealing candidly with the quite natural relationship between various money interests and government. All politics is to a great extent about who gets the lion's share of the money at a government's disposal, and a public that realized this might be less insouciant about elections than today's American nonvoter. Journalism is reluctant, however, to make much of an effort to find out who will benefit if a given candidate wins, and who will lose out. Instead of providing this valuable information, the media tend to explain politics in terms of high-sounding ideological piffle about a "conservatism" and a "liberalism" which have very little pertinence to anything of consequence to the voter. The result is to deaden public interest in politics by diverting the mind from the fact that there is real money at stake. It seems slightly scandalous that Krugman has persisted in noting that the present administration has been moving the lion's share of the money to an array of corporate interests distinguished by the greed of their CEOs, an indifference toward their workers, and boardroom conviction that it is the welfare state that is ruining the country. Krugman has been strident. He has been shrill. He has lowered the dignity of the commentariat. How refreshing.

24-26 October 2003

Administration Faces Supoenas From 9/11 Panel
By PHILIP SHENON
New York Times, 25 October 2003
EXCERPT: The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said that the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks. The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence. "Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. "I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he is president. "That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document."

Anti-War Rallies Today on Both Coasts
By JENNIFER C. KERR
Associated Press, 25 October 2003
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Organizers predicted more than 30,000 people would turn out in Washington for a march and speeches calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq on Saturday. Thousands more were expected to flock to San Francisco for the biggest protest there since April, when more than 10,000 people filled the streets. Vietnam veteran David Cline sees resemblances between the war in Iraq and the one in which he almost lost his life. "This has got a lot of eerie parallels to what we went through," Cline said. As president of Veterans for Peace, Cline planned to join protesters to demonstrate against the war. "The U.S. government has no right to try and recolonize Iraq," said Peta Lindsay, national youth and student coordinator for International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which is organizing the protests with another group, United for Peace and Justice.

Internal Email Reveals Halliburton's Strategy to Combat Accusations of Overcharging the Government
Daily Mislead , 24 October 2003 |
EXCERPT: Negative publicity from the Bush Administration's award of a $7 billion no-bid contract to a Halliburton subsidiary with a history of overcharging the government has led Halliburton CEO David Lesar to direct his employees to counter with a letter-writing campaign, according to an internal company e-mail provided to The Daily MisLead. The negative publicity has also embarrassed the administration, given President Bush's pledge in the wake of earlier corporate scandals that "corporate leaders who violate the public trust should never be given that trust again." The Halliburton subsidiary, previously known as Brown & Root, was cited at least twice in the past six years by the General Accounting Office for inflating costs -- for example, by providing more staffers and services than necessary. Brown & Root also paid $2 million last year to settle a criminal charge for overbilling the government.

Has George W. Bush Met His Own Ken Starr?
Presidential Lies, Those Who Expose Them, and How We Ought to Judge Among Them
By JOHN W. DEAN
FindLaw, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Washington editor of The Nation, David Corn, has written a powerful -- not to mention disquieting -- 324-page polemic addressing the pervasive mendacity of George W. Bush's administration. It is entitled The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Actually, calling the book a polemic is misleading. It may be more accurate to call it a bill of particulars -- the document that provides the specific charges underlying an indictment. In this case, the charges are highly credible. Corn is an experienced and respected Washington journalist. His evidence is overwhelming, his tone is measured, and his book a jaw dropper. This devastating work is not a laundry list of false statements; rather, it is the chronology of a presidency. Corn found that "lies, in part, made this president, and lies frequently have been the support beams of his administration."

Lowering the Bar for Job Creation
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 24 October
EXCERPT: John Snow, the Treasury secretary, told The Times of London on Monday that he expected the U.S. economy to add two million jobs before the next election — that is, almost 200,000 per month. ...His forecast was higher than those of most independent analysts; nothing in the data suggests that jobs are being created at that rate. Still, Mr. Snow may get lucky, and the job market may pick up. But his prediction was a huge climb-down from administration predictions earlier this year, when the White House insisted that it expected the economy to add more than five million jobs by next November. And even if Mr. Snow's forecast comes true, that won't vindicate the administration's economic policy. In fact, while private analysts are criticizing Mr. Snow for being overly optimistic, I think the stronger criticism is that he's trying to lower the bar: to define as success a performance that, even if it materializes, should really be considered a dismal failure.

Bush's Assaults on Women--Updated
By Katrina vander Heuvel
The Nation, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: Since George W. Bush arrived in DC, he has been waging a not-so-quiet war against women and families, as I detailed in a recent weblog. Now, Bush has vowed to sign into law legislation passed yesterday by the Senate that would ban so-called "partial-birth" abortions. As NARAL President Kate Michelman said, "The Senate took its final step toward substituting politicians' judgement for that of a woman, her family, and her doctor...No one should be fooled as to the real intentions of this Bill's sponsors; they want to take away entirely the right to personal privacy and a woman's right to choose."

Taking Bush Personally
By Michael Kinsley
Slate, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: Conservatives wonder why so many liberals don't just disagree with President Bush's policies but seem to dislike him personally. The story of stem-cell research may help to explain. ...If he's got both his facts and his logic wrong—and he has—Bush's alleged moral anguish on this subject is unimpressive. In fact, it is insulting to the people (including me) whose lives could be saved or redeemed by the medical breakthroughs Bush's stem-cell policy is preventing. This is not a policy disagreement. Or rather, it is not only a policy disagreement. If the president is not a complete moron—and he probably is not—he is a hardened cynic, staging moral anguish he does not feel, pandering to people he cannot possibly agree with, and sacrificing the future of many American citizens for short-term political advantage. Is that a good enough reason to dislike him personally?

Arctic's Loss of Sea Ice Linked to Warming Trend
NASA's new satellite data show the creation of more open water in the region, despite inconsistencies in heat around the globe.
By Usha Lee McFarling
LA Times, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: The historic loss of sea ice seen in the Arctic in recent years is tied to widespread warming in the polar region that is increasing at a rate of more than 2 degrees per decade, according to a NASA satellite study released Thursday. Last year, the summer ice that normally clogs Arctic seas was at historically low levels. This summer, the ice remained at near record lows, and the Arctic's largest ice shelf cracked apart. Researchers have suspected the loss of ice was due to warmer temperatures but had only spotty measurements on which to base their conclusions. The new study, which will be published Nov. 1 in the Journal of Climate, used a polar-orbiting satellite from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to measure surface temperatures throughout the Arctic. The study found temperatures over sea ice have been gradually rising over the last 100 years. But in the last 20 years, the temperatures have been rising eight times faster. ..."The general consensus of the climate community is that at least part of this [Arctic change] is due to human impact… How much is a matter of debate," said Mark Serreze, an expert on Arctic snow and ice at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Democrats Say G.O.P. Endangers Medicare Drug Accord
By ROBERT PEAR
New York Times, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: A day after Republican negotiators said they had reached a tentative agreement on a prescription drug benefit for the elderly, Senate Democrats said on Thursday that the benefit could be in jeopardy if House Republicans insisted on a plan forcing the traditional Medicare program to compete directly with private health plans.

Senate Approves Easing of Curbs on Cuba Travel
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
New York Times, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: In a firm rebuke to President Bush over Cuba policy, the Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly voted to ease travel restrictions on Americans seeking to visit the island. The 59-to-38 vote came two weeks after Mr. Bush, in a Rose Garden ceremony, announced that he would tighten the travel ban on Cuba in an attempt to halt illegal tourism there and to bring more pressure on the government of Fidel Castro. The House of Representatives has repeatedly passed legislation to ease the travel ban, including a vote of 227 to 188 last month approving virtually identical language. But in previous efforts, the House leadership has been able to use back-room maneuvers to bottle it up.

Bush Brothers Become Big Brother
By Dick Meyer
CBSNews.com, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: This has been terrifying week for people who are concerned about big government meddling in families' most personal and painful decisions. I would say it's been a terrible week for conservatives, but most of the people who call themselves conservatives are celebrating and crowing. I think they're radicals. I'm referring, of course, to the unprecedented intervention of Governor Jeb Bush and the Florida legislature in the tragic case of Terri Schiavo, and to the Senate vote, supported by President Bush, banning a certain type of procedure to terminate pregnancies in cases where the mother's life or health are at risk. The idea of legislatures, governors and presidents dictating what families can do in these most private situations is mind-boggling. It is as intrusive as government can be. It is, in both cases, almost certainly unconstitutional.

If It Ain't Broke, Break It: Bush's Environmental Policy
TomPaine.com, 24 October 2003
EXCERPTS: When it comes to sheer nerve, you've got to hand it to George W. Bush. Air pollution is called "clear skies." Wilderness logging is "healthy forests." The newest Bush attack on the environment doesn't have an Orwellian name yet, but it could be the most insidious of all--a dismembering of the regulatory process itself.... So if it's good for the environment and good for the economy, why is the administration proposing to eviscerate NEPA, by restricting the use of environmental impact reports and exempting projects from public scrutiny? That¹s a question for James Connaughton. As head of Bush¹s Council on Environmental Quality, which proposed the rollbacks, he'll soon decide their fate. Oh yes. Before he was Bush's top advisor on the environment, Mr. Connaughton had an illustrious career as an oil industry lobbyist.

Malpractice Makes Perfect: GOP Milks Bogus Insurance Crisis
By Stephanie Mencimer
Washington Monthly, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: When he went out on strike last January, Dr. Robert Zaleski had his 15 minutes of fame. The Wheeling, W. Va., orthopedic surgeon was one of two dozen surgeons to walk off the job in January to protest his state's high costs of malpractice insurance. Arguing that "frivolous lawsuits" were driving up insurance premiums and forcing physicians to leave the state, Zaleski and his colleagues threatened to stay out for 30 days unless the legislature passed a bill that would cap non-economic damages in such suits at $250,000. As the walkout turned into a national story, Zaleski became one of its most visible faces, making the rounds of TV news shows....Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that Zaleski may be more a source of the problem than a victim of it.

Consumers Win in Senate Vote on Class Action
Statement by Joan Claybrook
Public Citizen, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: e are relieved that enough Senate lawmakers today saw the class action bill for what it was – a boon to big business but a dreadful measure for consumers, who would have found significant roadblocks when attempting to have their day in court. The opponents of this anti-consumer bill were subjected to incredible pressure from the biggest business lobbies in the nation as well as the White House. We commend them for stopping a bill that would have closed the courthouse door on millions of consumers. The bill would have given corporate defendants an undue advantage in fighting legitimate lawsuits involving consumer fraud and unfair workplace practices. Today’s narrow vote means that consumers and workers will retain strong protections against the growing abuses they face. ...This rebuke to the business lobby came because it was unwilling to negotiate in good faith.

23 October 2003

Cheney's Grip Tight on Foreign Policy Reins
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: The image was not an edifying one: the president of the United States a horse, his vice president, the rider. But that is the picture Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used to describe the  power relationship between US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in a recent interview with the National Journal. Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Biden's account, sometimes talks Bush into pursuing a more conciliatory foreign policy line, as he has done with North Korea or the United Nations from time to time. "Like with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water. But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, 'Un-uh', and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water. That's my image of how it goes," Biden said.

Once at Arm's Length, Wall Street Is Bush's Biggest Donor
By GLEN JUSTICE
New York Times, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: Two weeks before he was sworn into office, Mr. Bush held a business leaders forum in Texas with dozens of prominent executives, but with no chief executive from Wall Street. Likewise, such executives were absent from his economic summit in Waco, Tex., in August 2002. "There was some `we're from Texas, we're not from Wall Street,' " said Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey, a Democrat who served as co-chairman at Goldman Sachs before taking office. "To their credit, they've moved away from that." ...A study to be released today shows that the financial community has surpassed all other groups, including lawyers and lobbyists, as the top industry among Mr. Bush's elite fund-raisers. The list of those generating $100,000 and $200,000 now includes chief executives like Henry M. Paulson of Goldman Sachs, John J. Mack of Credit Suisse First Boston and Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, whose firm has already raised twice the amount for Mr. Bush's re-election that it did during the entire 2000 campaign cycle. "It's really a question of policy, that's what's driving this," said Marc Lackritz, president of the Securities Industry Association, which represents more than 650 securities firms. "It's a pro-investor policy. Executives say the support is fed by patriotism and other factors, including the administration's actions to fight terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks, which struck the country's financial nerve center. Financial executives are also providing money for the Republican convention, which is scheduled for New York next summer and will bring hundreds of business leaders to the city.

White House Stands by Rumsfeld Despite Lack of Optimism
By Dave Moniz and Tom Squitieri
USA Today, 22 October 2003
After a year of telling us that invading Iraq was central to the war on terror, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld kinda sorta admits that the invasion had nothing to do with terror, and Bush says ""That's exactly what a strong and capable secretary of defense like Secretary Rumsfeld should be doing." Daily injections of global hegemony must have some psychedelic side effects!
EXCERPT: The United States has no yardstick for measuring progress in the war on terrorism, has not "yet made truly bold moves" in fighting al-Qaeda and other terror groups, and is in for a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a memo that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent to top-ranking Defense officials last week.
SEE ALSO: When Facts Don't Matter (TomPaine.com)

Cold-Hearted Bastards: Compassionate Conservatism in Action
By Doug Thompson
Capitol Hill Blue, 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: Well, it¹s official. The so-called "compassionate conservatives" at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are, in fact, sanctimonious, uncaring, hypocritical bastards. And the President who claims to care so much for the Americans he has sent in harm's way in Iraq cares so little for the soldiers who have given their lives for their countries that he has not attended a single ceremony when those dead heroes came home. Not one. Nada. Even a draft dodger named Bill Clinton took the time to stand and recognize fallen soldiers when they came home. Not Dubya. He¹d rather not deal with those who died fighting his war in Iraq. He won¹t take the time to honor them when they come home. Even worse, his administration has banned the the traditional homecoming ceremonies that honor the war dead.
SEE ALSO: Fed Official: Jobs Lost Under Bush 'Permanently Gone' (Reuters)

Bush Administration Misleads Public About Poll Data from Iraq Surveys
Dr. James J. Zogby
Gulf News, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: While Cheney noted that when asked what kind of government they would like, Iraqis chose "the US hands down," in fact, the results of the poll are actually quite different. Twenty-three per cent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 per cent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 per cent say Syria, 7 per cent say Egypt and 37 per cent say "none of the above." That's hardly "winning hands down."
SEE ALSO: Bush Counts on Low Expectations to Look Good (Newsweek)

White House Bent on Destroying Important Environmental Law
By John Adams
TomPaine.com, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: Of America's landmark environmental laws, only one statute has protected so much of our natural heritage‹public lands, national forests and even the sea‹for so long. It's probably the most important environmental law that you've never heard of. Unfortunately, the White House does know about the law, and it is hell-bent on destroying it. Ironically, a Republican president was responsible for authorizing the very statute now threatened by President Bush. On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act. Commonly known by its acronym, NEPA directs federal agencies to "prevent or eliminate damage to the environment." Okay, but what exactly does that mean? People understand what the Clean Air Act does: it protects the air we breathe. The same goes for other well-known, self-explanatory laws like the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. Without diminishing NEPA's significance, therein lies the reason for its relative obscurity.

House Dems Push for Vote on FCC Rollback, GOP Leadership Likely to Block Effort
By David Ho
Editor and Publisher.com, 23 October 2003
WASHINGTON -- (AP) A mostly Democratic group of House members on Tuesday urged Republican leaders to schedule debate and a vote on a resolution that would repeal media ownership rules approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this year. The leadership has pledged to kill the measure, which moved to the House last month after the Senate's 55-40 approval. The resolution would undo changes to FCC regulations governing ownership of newspapers and television and radio stations.

22 October 2003

George of Arabia: The Unholy Alliance Between Bushes and Saudis
By Michael Moore
Rolling Stone, October 2003
EXCERPT: The questions I have about the attacks on September 11th, however, are not about how the terrorists got past our defense system, or how they were able to live in this country and never be detected, or how all the Bulgarians who worked at the World Trade Center got a secret communique to not show up to work that day, or how the towers came down so easily when they were supposedly built to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis and truck bombs in their parking garage. These were all questions that a special commission investigating September 11th was supposed to answer. But the very formation of that commission was opposed by the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress. Reluctantly, they finally agreed -- but then they tried to block the investigative body from doing its job by stonewalling it on the evidence it sought. Why wouldn't the Bush people want to find out the truth? What were they afraid of?

Senate still doesn't get it: there is no connection between Iraq and 9/11
Jeffords Only Dissenter on Terrorism Medal Vote
By Claude R. Marx
Barre Times, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: Because he objects to efforts to link the war in Iraq to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., was the sole dissenter on a vote urging President Bush give the War on Terrorism Medals to soldiers fighting in Iraq. By a 97-1 vote margin, the Senate on Friday passed a non-binding resolution urging that the medal be given to soldiers fighting what Bush has called the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the Philippines and the war that resulted in the ouster of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Jeffords said the goals of Iraq were not related to the terrorism war and should not be linked to the Afghanistan and Philippines operations.

Anyone But Bush
By William Rivers Pitt
TruthOut.org, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: The thing is, the conservative White House defenders are spot-on correct about one thing. I despise George W. Bush. I despise his Vice President, his Senior Political Advisor, his Chief of Staff, his Defense Secretary, his Assistant Defense Secretary, his Attorney General, his National Security Advisor, and his chosen Ambassador to the United Nations. Those names, in case you are confused, are Cheney, Rove, Card, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Rice and Negroponte. I despise his Congressional allies, who have shredded their constitutional duties by refusing to investigate a variety of incredible crimes. For the record, these crimes include the fabrication of Iraq war evidence, the outing of a WMD-hunting CIA agent in an act of political revenge, and the serious questions about how four commercial aircraft fooled the entire domestic defense shield and the entire intelligence community long enough to kill three thousand people. I despise any and all of his people who fanned out two years ago to pound into the American consciousness the idea that criticizing Bush is treason.

The Spy Who Was Thrown Into the Cold: Why Plame Was Outed
By Julian Borger
Guardian (UK), 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: It is early autumn in Washington. The leaves are falling, another election season is limbering up, and the nation's capital is once more embroiled in a gale-force scandal. It is an extraordinary affair that combines espionage, political dirty tricks and weapons of mass destruction - a heady mix normally found only in airport thrillers. But fact has had a knack of trumping fiction in Washington lately. In principle at least, this is worse than Watergate and far worse than Bill Clinton's sexual liaisons. According to the claims now under scrutiny by the FBI, senior officials in the Bush administration (possibly including aides close to the president himself) blew the cover of a high-ranking CIA agent in order to punish and discredit her husband, a critic of the administration. In doing so, they endangered the very national security in the name of which the administration has so far invaded two countries. Ironically, the agent in question was a leading player in the monitoring and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction around the world. Her outing has undoubtedly hamstrung that pursuit.

And He’s Head of Intelligence?
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek, 27 October Issue
EXCERPT: President Bush’s commission on public diplomacy recently noted that in nine Muslim and Arab nations only 12 percent of respondents surveyed believed that “Americans respect Arab/Islamic values.” Such attitudes, the commission argued, create a toxic atmosphere of anti-Americanism that cripples U.S. foreign policy and helps terrorists. To address the problem the commission suggested a major reorganization of the American government, hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and the creation of a new cabinet position. I have a simpler, more urgent suggestion: fire William Boykin.

Electronic Voting: What You Need To Know
By William Rivers Pitt
Interview
Truthout.org, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: In July of 2003, I sat down for an extended, free-wheeling interview in Denver with three of the smartest people I have ever met. Rebecca Mercuri, Barbara Simons, and David Dill have been at the forefront of the debate surrounding the rise of electronic touch-screen voting machines in our national elections. Sufficed to say, they are three computer scientists/engineers who are as well versed on these matters as anyone you will ever meet. Scroll quickly to the bottom of this interview before reading to view their CVs. If you are completely new to this, the issue in brief: In the aftermath of the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. After much wrangling, it appears the powers that be have settled upon electronic touch-screen voting machines as the solution. There are, however, a number of serious concerns about the viability of these machines that have been raised. The matter strikes to the heart of our democracy. If the votes are not counted properly, our democracy is broken forever. More data on this is linked below, after the CVs.

21 October 2003

Listening to Mahathir
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: Not long ago Washington was talking about Malaysia as an important partner in the war on terror. Now Mr. Mahathir thinks that to cover his domestic flank, he must insert hateful words into a speech mainly about Muslim reform. That tells you, more accurately than any poll, just how strong the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Southeast Asia has become. Thanks to its war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, Washington has squandered post-9/11 sympathy and brought relations with the Muslim world to a new low. And bear in mind that Mr. Mahathir's remarks were written before the world learned about the views of Lt. Gen. William "My God Is Bigger Than Yours" Boykin. By making it clear that he sees nothing wrong with giving an important post in the war on terror to someone who believes, and says openly, that Allah is a false idol — General Boykin denies that's what he meant, but his denial was implausible even by current standards — Donald Rumsfeld has gone a long way toward confirming the Muslim world's worst fears. Somewhere in Pakistan Osama bin Laden must be enjoying this. The war on terror didn't have to be perceived as a war on Islam, but we seem to be doing our best to make it look that way. [BWUSA emphasis]

Bush Team's Conflicts With CIA Marred Reporting on Iraqi Weapons
By Seymour M. Hersh
New Yorker, 27 October 2003 Issue
EXCERPT: Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them. “They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.” The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
  AUDIO LINK 
SEE ALSO: Tracking Intelligence Flaws on Iraq Nuclear Story: Interview with Seymour M. Hersh on NPR:(about 70% down the page)  An article in The New Yorker magazine provides a new look at the White House’s use of information on Iraq, uranium and Niger. According to the article, the filtering system used for the last 50 years to screen out bad intelligence was subverted by "stovepipes" that channel information directly to top leadership.

Pentagon Deleted Parts of Crusading General's Apology
CNN, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: An apology from Lt. Gen. William Boykin for casting the war on terrorism in terms that offended some Muslims originally included a promise that he would no longer speak at religious events, CNN has learned. But that language was deleted on the advice of Pentagon attorneys and the press office, a Pentagon spokesman said. Other statements also were withdrawn by the Pentagon, a spokesman said, included Boykin's belief that God put President Bush in the White House.

This is homeland security?!
Feds Took Five Weeks to Find Box Cutters on Planes
AP, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: A college student who told authorities he placed box cutters and other banned items aboard two airliners to test security was charged today with taking a dangerous weapon aboard an aircraft and was released without bail. Nathaniel Heatwole, 20, told federal agents he went through normal security procedures at airports in Baltimore and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. Once aboard, he said he hid the banned items in compartments in the planes' rear lavatories. A preliminary hearing was set for Nov. 10. Assistant U.S. Attorney Harvey Eisenberg said the government was not seeking detention, and U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan K. Gauvey freed Heatwole on his own recognizance. Although Heatwole sent an e-mail to federal authorities saying he had placed the items aboard two specific Southwest Airlines flights, it took authorities nearly five weeks to find them.

Bush's Pill-Popping, Gambling, Heartless Virtue-Mongers
By John Sutherland
Guardian (UK), 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: It was America's "virtuous majority" (as they conceive themselves) who made George W Bush president. He keeps these core voters sweet by appointing aggressively virtuous subordinates - men whose sole claim to office, as Bill Maher puts it, is that they "read the Bible and fuck their wives". (Maher, you'll remember, lost his talk show on the ABC network for saying that the 9/11 bombers, whatever else, were not "cowards"). What, Bush was asked, was the first thing he would do on taking over the White House? "Hose down the Oval Office", he virtuously replied.
SEE ALSO: Bush Initiative Imperils Jobs of Disabled (Boston Globe)

U.S. Posts Largest Budget Gap in History
Reuters, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: The U.S. government posted its largest budget gap in history in the just-ended 2003 fiscal year, $374.22 billion in red ink, the Treasury Department said on Monday. That broke the previous record of more than $290 billion in the 1992 budget year. As a percentage of the economy, the deficit totaled 3.5 percent, the largest since 1993. In its final monthly budget statement for fiscal 2003, the Treasury also said the government posted a $26.38 billion surplus in September.

  AUDIO LINK 
The Roaring Nineties
Talk of the Nation (NPR) Interview with Joseph Stiglitz (about 50% down the page)
author of The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade (Norton 2003) Remember just a few years ago when economic growth seemed limitless and globalization was the buzzword of the moment? What happened? Join NPR's Lynn Neary and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz for a discussion of the decade and the future of the American economy.

20 October 2003

Bush's Pro-Pollution Policies
WhiteHouseForSale.org, current
EXCERPT: The Bush administration has gone to great lengths, even so far as giving false information to Congress, to gut a clean air regulation opposed by electric utilities ­ an industry that funneled $4.8 million into Bush¹s 2000 campaign, according to Public Citizen¹s new report EPA¹s Smoke Screen: How Deception of Congress, Campaign Contributions and Political Connections Gutted a Key Clean Air Rule.
SEE ALSO: EPA Will Not Protect Public From Dioxins In Land-Applied Sewage Sludge (CDPN)
SEE ALSO: Halliburton, Again: Cheney's Company Protected from Regulation (WP)

Sick, Wounded U.S. Troops Held in Squalor
By Mark Benjamin
UPI, 17 October 2003
EXCERPT: Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks here while they wait -- sometimes for months -- to see doctors.

Did Bush really skip out on his military service?
The AWOL Story: George W's Missing Year
By Marty Heldt
Progressive Populist, November 1 Issue
EXCERPT: Both Bush and his aides have made numerous statements to the effect that Bush fulfilled all of his guard obligations. They point to Bush's honorable discharge as proof of this. But the records indicate that George W Bush missed a year of service. This lack of regular attendance goes against the basic concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who maintain their skills and preparedness through regular training. And we know that Bush understood that regular attendance was essential to the proficiency of the National Guard. In the Winter 1998 issue of the National Guard Review Bush is quoted as saying "I can remember walking up to my F-102 fighter and seeing the mechanics there. I was on the same team as them, and I relied on them to make sure that I wasn't jumping out of an airplane. There was a sense of shared responsibility in that case. The responsibility to get the airplane down. The responsibility to show up and do your job."
SEE ALSO: Chickenhawk: A Reflection On American Heroism, an essay by Dom Stasi reprinted here in BushWhackedUSA.
SEE ALSO: Bush Family NAZI Ties Still Making Headlines (Canadian Press)

Unite and Take Over: The Anti-Bush Effort
By Mark Hertsgaard
TomPaine.com, 18 October 2003
EXCERPT: Who says George W. Bush never did anything for the great outdoors? His running for reelection could be the best thing to happen to the U.S. environmental movement in years. The threat of four more years of Bush has provoked a significant rethinking of the movement's tactics, according to interviews with movement leaders, their financial supporters, and political advisers. Not only has it energized activists like never before, it has also produced unprecedented expressions of unity within the movement and beyond ‹specifically with labor unions, feminist organizations and civil-rights groups. While the short-term goal is a new president in 2004, some environmental leaders hope the Beat Bush campaign will help these groups build working relationships that could give rise to a broad-based progressive movement in the United States.
SEE ALSO: Seize the Moment for Media Transformation (ITT)
SEE ALSO: Rickie Lee Jones Battles Drugs and Bush (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Kucinich's Childhood Poverty Shapes Policies (AAS)
SEE ALSO: Two Top Democrats Drop from Iowa Race (NYT)

CBO Says Tanker Lease is $6.7 Billion More than Purchase
Taxpayers for Common Sense, 17 October 2003
EXCERPT: This new report [from the Congressional Budget Office] further confirms that the current $29.8 billion Boeing tanker proposal will take taxpayers to the cleaners. The federal government is guaranteeing Boeing the largest sale of 767s in the history of the production line and Boeing¹s response is to bilk us for billions.

Two Decades of Growing Inequality
By Robert Greennstein and Isaac Shapiro
Inequality.org, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: Data issued on August 29 by the Congressional Budget Office show that the income gap between the very wealthy and the rest of the nation widened dramatically in the 1990s for the second consecutive decade.  The CBO data, which cover the period from 1979 to 2000, provide the most comprehensive information available on changes in incomes for different income groups.

Michael Moore's New Book Tops Bestseller List
New York Times, 19 October 2003
Dude, Where's My Country? shot to the number one spot on the Times nonfiction hardcover bestseller list in its first week in bookstores, bumping Al Franken's Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) down to third place. Right-winger Bill O'Reilly retains the number two slot.

18-19 October 2003

  BushWhackedUSA Guest Editorial 

Direct Deposit
by Dom Stasi
EXCERPT: The wealthiest person, who’s ever lived, lives today. His name is unimportant here. Suffice to say his fortune is estimated at around $40 billion. I mention this princely sum only that it might appear as chump change when compared against the treasure our nation’s president has at his disposal. Yes, I said disposal.

Democrats Search for Their Soul
Where's The Party At?
By Sudhir Muralidhar
Columbia Political Review
EXCERPT: To get a sense of the internal conflicts plaguing the Democratic Party today, one need merely have attended two important party events this past summer. The first was the Take Back America Conference, a three-day event organized by liberal activists that featured 7 of the 10 Democratic Presidential candidates, a boisterous crowd of grassroots organizers, and an atmosphere of optimism and anger. The other, the annual conference of the Democratic Leadership Council, was put on by the party’s centrist wing and featured speakers that the New York Times described as “glum” and “combative,” a small crowd of politicians and businessmen, and not a single Presidential candidate. And even though both conferences were held on behalf of the Democratic Party, the speakers at each event spent most of their time attacking the organizers of the other.

Scrambling the Lines
By Justin Slaughter
Columbia Political Review
EXCERPT: It says much about the state of American politics that the two parties have started to fight over how to draw lines. Since the 2002 elections, a major war has erupted between the Democrats and Republicans over the status of congressional district boundaries across the nation, a fight that culminated this summer with the flight of Texas State Senate Democrats across state lines to Oklahoma. Yet, while conventional wisdom has often characterized the struggle over redistricting as merely another battle in the ongoing political war between the two major parties, the crisis in fact reveals a frightening trend: while the Democrats do tend to grandstand and vilify the Republicans, the GOP seems willing to break all the rules to increase its electoral power. Nowhere is that made clearer than in the recent political crisis in Texas.

Bush Rocked by Senate Rebellion on Iraq
Republicans urge president to get a grip as funding revolt further undermines his authority
Julian Borger
The Guardian, 18 October 2003
EXCERPT: A Republican rebellion in the Senate against White House plans for rebuilding Iraq raised questions yesterday about President George Bush's authority in Washington as he struggles to maintain control of a divided administration. A late-night Senate vote to turn half the $20bn (£12bn) Iraq reconstruction budget into a loan marked a serious setback for the administration, which had wanted all the money in the form of a grant. It also came as a personal defeat for the president. On Tuesday, Mr Bush had called in nine Republican rebels and ordered them to support his version of the bill, reportedly slamming a table at one point and refusing to answer their questions.

Bush's Popularity With Older Voters Is Seen as Slipping
By ROBIN TONER
New York Times, 19 October 2003
EXCERPT: President Bush's support among older voters has dropped substantially in recent months, eroding recent Republican gains and highlighting the importance of this critical electoral bloc in 2004, political strategists and analysts say. The trend underscores the stakes for Mr. Bush in the current Congressional negotiations aimed at creating a long-promised prescription drug benefit in Medicare, which covers 40 million elderly and disabled Americans. Mr. Bush's popularity has declined over all since early summer, but some recent polls suggest that he lost significantly more ground among voters 65 and older than he did among younger Americans. Politicians in both parties consider older voters to be particularly important because they are much more likely to vote than younger people, and because they are heavily concentrated in states that are often presidential battlegrounds, like Florida and Pennsylvania.

Flying in the Face of Reason
Los Angeles Times, 18 October 2003
EXCERPT: You wouldn't know it from the recent space business contracts Boeing Co. has won, but the Air Force in July suspended the aerospace giant from seeking new rocket orders. So why is Boeing still winning contracts? The federal government says its hands are tied because only Boeing can boost these particular satellites into orbit. The government's inability to enforce the rare suspension of a major defense contractor should trouble taxpayers who are picking up the $1.8-trillion tab for 1,500 current weapon systems now in development or production. (Track the parade of contracts at http://www.dod.mil/contracts.) The Pentagon's inspector general faults the department's financial statements as "generally unreliable" and the secretary of the Air Force worries that the increasingly small circle of defense contractors has accumulated enough political muscle to design and build weapons based on what's best for shareholders rather than soldiers in the field.

Make that ecodeceit
Presidential Ecospeak
New York Times, 18 October 2003
EXCERPT: President Bush's nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Mike Leavitt, finally won committee approval this week, but not before a half-dozen senators had openly expressed exasperation at his habit of retreating behind ecofriendly phrases when asked about his record as Utah's governor. Which means, of course, that Mr. Leavitt will fit right in with the Bush administration. Indeed, Mr. Bush himself may fairly be said to have become the master of the ostensibly ecofriendly sound bite, offering oversimplified solutions to complex environmental problems and wrapping them in tempting slogans that hide their generally pro-business tilt. "Healthy Forests," for instance, describes an initiative aimed mainly at benefiting the timber industry rather than the communities threatened by fire. "Freedom Car" (to be powered by "Freedom Fuel") describes a program to develop a hydrogen-fueled car that, while beguiling in the long term, absolves automakers from making the near-term improvements in fuel economy necessary to reduce oil dependence and the threat of global warming. These verbal contortions reached a new plateau a few weeks ago in back-to-back presidential appearances at a power plant in Michigan and in the Rose Garden. Mr. Bush's purpose was to defend his controversial decision in August to rewrite the Clean Air Act in ways that spared power companies the expense of making investments in pollution controls whenever they upgraded their plants and increased emissions.

36 Reasons To Vote For Bush and Republicans In 2004
by James Boyne
OpEdNews.com, 17 October 2003

Wall Street institutions in collusion with ENRON
Partners in Crime
By Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
Fortune Online, 13 October 2003
EXCERPT: The untold story of how Citi, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Merrill Lynch helped Enron pull off one of the greatest scams ever. The complicity of so many highly regarded Wall Street firms in the Enron scandal is stunningly documented in internal presentations and e-mails, many of which have never before been published. It seems that the banks have gotten off easy so far. ...Long before it was a public scandal, the Enron scam was well known among Wall Street institutions. After all, they were making it possible.

School administrators cooked the books. Whistleblower victimized
The Bush "Houston Miracle" Is Bogus
Bill Moyers' NOW on PBS
17 October 2003
Dropouts were recorded as transfers, test scores were falsified, students misplaced and falsely classified to inflate test results. Administrators motivated by education funding rules and blind requirements for accountability measured solely through "objective" test scores. Suspiciously good numerical results were never questioned. Fraud and deception was the outcome, not quality education.. Bush touted the accomplishments of education programs in Texas. It was all a sham. Bush's Secretary of Education, Ron Page, headed up this shoddy effort in Houston and hopes to bring this miracle to the whole nation.

Diebold Election Systems has had a tumultuous year, and it doesn't look like it's getting any better.
Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?
By Kim Zetter
Wired.com, 13 October 2003
EXCERPT: Last January the electronic voting machine maker faced public embarrassment when voting activists revealed the company's insecure FTP server was making its software source code available for everyone to see. Then researchers and auditors who examined code for the company's touch-screen voting system released two separate reports stating that the software was full of serious security flaws. Now a former worker in Diebold's Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machines before the state's 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials. If the charges are true, Diebold could be in violation of federal and state election-certification rules. The charges also raise questions about the integrity of the Georgia election results and any other election that uses patched Diebold systems that have not been re-certified.

Met Any Judeo-Christians Lately?
Bryan Collinsworth
PoliticalAims.com, 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: Seventeen years ago, in the landmark Bowers v. Hardwick case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Burger cited ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ as his justification for denying gays the right to private, consensual sex. "Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeao-Christian moral and ethical standards," he declared.

Un-American Activities
By Anthony Lewis
The New York Review of Books, 23 October Issue
Review of
Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism
by David Cole
New Press, 315 pp., $24.95
EXCERPT: The Times of London last May published a letter to the editor from Tony Willoughby of Willoughby & Partners, a firm of solicitors. "The head of IT [information technology] at our law firm," he wrote, is a Muslim. He is a gentleman in every sense of the word. His fanaticism, if he has any, is restricted to cricket. Last Sunday he went on a business trip to California. On arrival at Los Angeles he was detained and interrogated on suspicion of being a terrorist.... For the first 12 hours he was refused access to a telephone. After 16 hours, not having been given any food, he asked if he could have some. He was given ham sandwiches and, when he explained that he could not eat pork, was told: "You eat what you are given." He did not eat. He was eventually escorted back to the airport in handcuffs and deported. Mr. Willoughby wrote to American officials seeking an explanation. He got back what he calls "a fobbing-off letter"—and his firm's laptop computer, which had been confiscated at the airport. Its data had been wiped out. That is a mild example, very mild, of what has happened to the US government's treatment of aliens since September 11, 2001. ...The repressive measures that President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft first took against aliens are now being applied to citizens.

17 October 2003

Global Redlining: Bush Plunges U.S. into Rapid Decline
By Glen Ford and Peter Gamble
Black Commentator, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: The previously unthinkable is now on the table. Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter, is giving serious consideration to trading its black gold in euros, a switch that would surely set dominos in motion among other oil producing nations and, ultimately, knock the dollar off its global throne. Americans can thank George Bush and his Pirates for accelerating a process that might have taken decades to evolve, but which now looms as a "catastrophe" on the horizon. "There are already a number of countries within OPEC that would prefer to trade in euros," said oil analyst and U.S. Council on Foreign Relations member Youssef Ibrahim, in an interview with the Moscow Times, October 10. "Putin's putting a big card on the table."

The Sweet Spot
By Paul Krugman
New York Times, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: Almost every expert not on the administration's payroll now sees budget deficits equal to about a quarter of government spending for the next decade, and getting worse after that. Yet the administration insists that there's no problem, that economic growth will solve everything painlessly.  ...the administration's tax cuts are, in a fundamental sense, phony, because the government is simply borrowing to make up for the loss of revenue. In 2004, the typical family will pay about $700 less in taxes than it would have without the Bush tax cuts — but meanwhile, the government will run up about $1,500 in debt on that family's behalf. ...Will someone be able to find the political sweet spot, the combination of fiscal responsibility and electoral smarts that brings the looting to an end? The future of the nation depends on the answer.

Rumsfeld excuses the inexcusable
"State Religion" Backed By Military Leaders
Courtesy of Tapped, 16 October 2003
Associated Press:
Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin has made several speeches -- some in uniform -- at evangelical Christian churches in which he cast the war on terrorism in religious terms. Boykin said of a 1993 battle with a Muslim militia leader in Somalia: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."
And from Reuters:
In another speech, Boykin said God selected George W. Bush as president.
"Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." Describing America's fight with Islamic extremists, Boykin also said, "The enemy is a spiritual enemy. He's called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan."
Now for Rumsfeld's excuse:
AP - "We're a free people. And that's the wonderful thing about our country," Rumsfeld said. "I think that for anyone to run around and think that that can be managed and controlled is probably wrong. Saddam Hussein could do it pretty well, because he'd go around killing people if they said things he didn't like."
SEE ALSO: U.S. Defends Role of Evangelical General at War with Satan (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: The Pentagon Unleashes Holy Warrior (LA Times)

Dick Cheney's Special Interest in $87 Billion
By John Nichols
The Nation, 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: Vice President Dick Cheney has a special interest in this week's Congressional debate on the Bush administration's request for $87 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and other military adventures abroad. If approved by the House and Senate in its current form, the proposal would allocate roughly $20 billion to reconstruct Iraq, with most of the rest of the money going to cover the costs of the occupation. Approval of the $87 billion package would be good news for Cheney, who it is now evident, retains ties to his former employer, the energy and construction conglomerate Halliburton. Halliburton is, of course, a prime benecificary of military and reconstruction expenditures in Iraq.
SEE ALSO: Cheney Isn't the Only Fat Cat Who Benefits (Missoula Independent)
SEE ALSO: Lies About Iraq Rise to Absurdity (AJC)
SEE ALSO: Searching for Truth on Iraq (Intervention)

Sell Us a Story: Bush's Orwellian Campaign for 2004
By Paul Street
ZNet, 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: If there was true democratic decency at the heart of the American political system, George W. Bush's defeat in 2004 would be practically a foregone conclusion. During its narrowly and illegally attained reign, the Bush White House has overseen the loss of more than three million American jobs - a new record. The poverty rate has risen for both of the years for which we have complete data during the Bush administration, with 1.7 more Americans pushed below the federal government's notoriously inadequate poverty level in the second of those years (2002). In the face of this mounting need, which results to no small extent form its policies, the White House has transformed a federal budget surplus into a massive, record-setting deficit that promises to cripple government's capacity to meet the needs of all but the privileged few for an untold number of years. It has advanced gargantuan tax-cuts for the already wealthy, starving government's ability to provide ever-more-necessary social programs and services and even "homeland security" while feeding a military machine and an imperial campaign that increases the likelihood of future terrorist attacks.

"PlameGate" Updates
The Argonist, 16 October 2003
Check out the excellent survey and several links provided.

Papered Over
The country's leading editorial pages are ignoring the Plame scandal.
By Michael Tomasky
The American Prospect, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: If you've been feeling that the Bush administration may be skating free of having to wrestle with the Valerie Plame controversy and are wondering why this is happening, let me submit one possible explanation: The major media are putting no pressure whatsoever on the administration, or the president, to do anything.

White House Spurns Democrats on CIA Leak Probe
By Randall Mikkelsen
Reuters, 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Bush administration on Wednesday spurned the advice of Democratic senators who had urged steps to ensure White House aides cooperate with a federal criminal probe of a news leak identifying a CIA operative. "We believe it is inconsistent with the constitution's separation-of-powers principles for members of Congress to direct the president's management of White House employees, as it would be for the president to suggest specific ways in which senators should handle their own staffs," White House counsel Alberto Gonzales wrote to a group of Senate Democrats. Steps suggested by the Democrats included firing any staffer who did not cooperate with Justice Department investigators or tampered with records sought in the probe. ...Bush has said he wants to find the leaker but is not sure if the investigation will succeed.

America's Marital Rows
BBC News, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: For it is Marriage Protection Week in the United States, proclaimed by President George W Bush "to focus our efforts on preserving the sanctity of marriage", with the support of 30 conservative groups. Many of these organisations believe that marriage - which they see as the bedrock of American society - has been placed in grave danger both by homosexual activists who are calling for same-sex unions, and feminists who in recent decades have placed great emphasis on women's independence and sexual liberation.

16 October 2003

GOP Senators Granted Access to Planes in Iraq, Democrats Denied
By Sarita Chourey
The Hill, 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: On returning from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, a group of Senate Republicans said yesterday that the Bush administration deserves a lot more credit for successful reconstruction efforts in those war-torn nations. Meanwhile, several Senate Democrats complained that they were denied access to a plane for a inspection tour of their own. "For whatever reason, Sens. [Chris] Dodd [D-Conn.] and others who requested the opportunity to travel were prohibited from doing so, and I think that requires a better explanation that the one I've been given so far," Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said. "We have no understanding. We were told that an [Air Force] airplane was not available," adding that Britain offered them the use of an airplane. "If Britain can offer United States senators an airplane, you would think the United States government could do so as well." Daschle added: "We have to assume that what [Republican senators] saw is accurate."

The Bush Family Curse: U.S. Trapped in Administration's Illogic
By Maureen Dowd
New York Times, 16 October 2003
EXCERPTS: Mr. Bush said in interviews that he wanted to "go over the heads of the filter and speak directly with the people" because there was a "sense that people in America aren't getting the truth." He is right that there has been a filter that has made it hard for Americans (and even Congress) to get the truth on Iraq, but it isn't the press. It's an administration that comically thinks when it hauls out Dick Cheney to say in his condescending high school principal voice that 2 + 2 = 5, we'll buy it.... The fundamental problem for the Bush administration is that it is endlessly propounding a contradiction: Wanting us to worry that we are battling for our lives against the terrorists, and wanting us to stop worrying about the state of the battle.

John Edwards' Petition to Stop the Blank Check for Iraq
Take Action!
Stop The Blank Check In Iraq
You can help stop the blank check in Iraq by signing John Edwards' petition online. And invite your friends to learn about this issue -- so they can sign the petition as well. Together we'll tell George W. Bush to stop putting all of the burden of reconstructing Iraq on American troops and American taxpayers.

  AUDIO LINK 
Interview with William Greider
Diane Rehm Show, 16 October 2003
The U.S. system of capitalism has been the greatest engine for wealth creation in history, but author William Greider argues it's ripe for reform. He details why and how it must be changed in his new book, "The Soul of Capitalism". Greider argues that the center of power in the American capitalist system is not in the hands of the one or one-half percent of the most wealthy. Instead, he maintains, it is within the grasp of a majority of the population with potentially dominant amounts of savings and retirement funds in corporate stocks. All that needs to be done is to find a way to exercise that power based on on moral and ethical grounds and on what is good for people and the world.
Web Site:  williamgreider.com

Halliburton Accused of Iraq Overbilling
California Rep. Waxman says the Texas oil-services company overcharged U.S. for exporting oil.
CNN Money (Reuters), 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: A Democratic lawmaker Wednesday accused Halliburton, the Texas oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, of overcharging the U.S. government for gasoline the firm imports into Iraq. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which defends its pricing as fair, has a contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild Iraq's oil sector. This has included importing gasoline products which are in short supply to the oil-rich nation. "Millions of Americans want to help Iraqis but they don't want to be fleeced [by Halliburton]," Rep. Henry Waxman, of California, told a news conference.

Bush Fall PR Campaign
Quote of the Day
Courtesy of Talking Points Memo,
15 October 2003
By George Nethercutt. George is a congressman from Washington running against the incumbent senator, Patty Murray. In a speech Monday, he got a little carried away with his ‘we’re building new schools right and left in Iraq’ enthusiasm.
"The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable. It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.”

Senior Federal Prosecutors and F.B.I. Officials Fault Ashcroft Over Leak Inquiry
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: Several senior criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department and top F.B.I. officials have privately criticized Attorney General John Ashcroft for failing to recuse himself or appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of a C.I.A. operative's identity. The criticism reflects the first sign of dissension in the department and the F.B.I. as the inquiry nears a critical phase. The attorney general must decide whether to convene a grand jury, which could compel White House officials to testify.

The Revision Thing - A History of the Iraq War Told Entirely In Lies
Harper's Magazine Online, October Issue
EXCERPT: All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.

Patriot Act?
Wesley Clark says he knew the Iraq War was wrong. So why didn't he say something -- before it was too late?
By Rick Perlstein
The American Prospect, 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: ...ears pricked up when Clark was asked, "When you were on CNN, why did you choose not to help inform the debate on whether to go into Iraq by revealing what [you have been told]?" He did not acquit himself well with his answer. "I tried several times to tell this story," he began, then coughed, perhaps in pause to collect his thoughts. "And I'm -- I was hired by CNN as a military commentator. That's" -- another pause -- "I commented on military plans and operations. There were other people who worked the policy piece. And, um, that may sound like not much of a distinction to you, but for CNN it was significant." This raised more questions than it answered...

All the President's Votes?
A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large - and pro-Republican - corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive
The Independent, 14 October 2003
EXCERPT: The problem is, computer touchscreen machines and other so-called DRE (direct recording electronic) systems are significantly less reliable than punchcards, irrespective of their vulnerability to interference. In a series of research papers for the Voting Technology Project, a joint venture of the prestigious Massachussetts and California Institutes of Technology, DREs were found to be among the worst performing systems. No method, the MIT/CalTech study conceded, worked more reliably than hand-counting paper ballots - an option that US electoral officials seem to consider hopelessly antiquated, or at least impractical in elections combining multiple local, state and national races for offices from President down to dogcatcher.

Recession? No problem...
Bush Breaks Own Campaign Fund-Raising Records
Reuters, 14 October 2003
EXCERPT: President Bush smashed his own campaign fund-raising record in the last three months, bringing in $49.5 million for his re-election bid and eclipsing the financial efforts of his Democratic rivals. The financial haul for July, August and September broke Bush's own record of $34.4 million raised in the second quarter of the year and gave him a total of nearly $84 million, campaign officials said on Tuesday.
SEE ALSO: Almost Half Bush's Funds Raised from 285 People (WP)
SEE ALSO: Will Bush Campaign Coverage Be as Uncritical as Invasion Coverage? (Intervention Magazine)
SEE ALSO: No Wonder Bush Doesn't Connect With the Rest of the Country (SPI)

Bush & Co. Use the Big Brother Sales Strategy
By James Pinkerton
Newsday.com, 14 October 2003
EXCERPT: Gannett News Service reported that 11 different U.S. newspapers had unwittingly printed identical five-paragraph letters-to-the- editor from soldiers in Iraq. The letters were full of upbeat puff - "the quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored" - the kind that some PR blitzer might dream up. None of the soldiers contacted by Gannett for comment said that they had written the letter; it had been handed to them for signature, they said, by Army superiors. Indeed, one soldier said he hadn't even seen the letter before it appeared in his hometown paper. Somewhere, Orwell's ghost is smiling grimly. In his novel "1984," the British writer imagined a Ministry of Truth that would be responsible for manufacturing news of victories and triumphs. Now, it's no longer fiction; it's your tax dollars at work.

  AUDIO/VIDEO LINK 
Michael Moore on Democracy NOW!
15 October 2003

Rat Out the Spy Leakers
Progressive Populist, November 2003 issue
EXCERPT: For a man who promised to bring honor and integrity into the White House, George W. Bush's administration has been brought low by mendacity, incompetence, lies and now the infamy of a full-blown scandal over the naming of a deep-cover spy to get even in a political vendetta. Bush's statements that he wants to get to the bottom of the Plame scandal are as laughable as O.J. Simpson's determination to find his wife's murderer. Even through Dubya claims he seldom reads newspapers, he surely has known since mid-July that somebody in his shop deliberately blew the cover of an undercover CIA operative in a mindless political retaliation. But Dubya did nothing about it, even after the CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak to conservative columnist Robert Novak.

If Viewers are Misinformed, Has Fox News Failed or Succeeded?
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 15 October 2003
EXCERPT: Ever worry that millions of your fellow Americans are walking around knowing things that you don't? That your prospects for advancement may depend on your mastery of such arcana as who won the Iraqi war or where exactly Europe is? Then don't watch Fox News. The more you watch, the more you'll get things wrong.

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31 October 2003

Flight of Hawk Stirs Pentagon Nest
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, 1 November 2003
EXCERPT: A major Pentagon hawk has abruptly resigned his post in a move that, in the context of other recent developments, is likely to fuel speculation that the White House might be trying to soften the harder edges of its controversial policies. The Pentagon announced on Wednesday evening that Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, J D Crouch II, was resigning effective Friday in order to return to "academia" at Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU). Significantly, the announcement did not give a reason for his departure, nor for the suddenness with which it is taking place. And no one was named to replace him. While officials stressed that Crouch, who has a long association with many of the key figures who have promoted military pre-eminence as the United States's post-Cold War strategy, was leaving voluntarily, some sources said that his resignation reflected a loss of influence on the part of right-wing and neo-conservative hawks centered in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office. "He's not being fired, but they're starting to move people around," said one knowledgeable source. "It's all about [Bush's] re-election and how to get rid of the loonies without looking like they screwed up." [BWUSA emphasis]

Top Israeli Officer Says Tactics Are Backfiring
By Molly Moore
Washington Post, 31 October 2003
EXCERPT: Israel's senior military commander told columnists for three leading newspapers this week that Israel's military tactics against the Palestinian population were too repressive and were fomenting explosive levels of "hatred and terrorism" that might become impossible to control. ..."In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interests," Nahum Barnea, columnist for the Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper, quoted ( Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces) Yaalon also said he believed the Israeli government contributed to the failure of Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian prime minister because it was too "stingy" and was unwilling to make concessions to bolster his authority. ...But Yaalon's remarks, echoed by equally vociferous criticism from other military officers interviewed Thursday, revealed a schism between military and political leaders over the government's handling of a conflict that many officers and soldiers say they believe is not winnable through military force, incites more terrorism than it prevents and mistreats innocent Palestinians. Almost 900 Israeli citizens or foreign residents of Israel have been killed in attacks by Palestinians, and Israeli military forces have killed about 2,500 Palestinians. "We're in a more serious situation that the U.S. was in Vietnam," said reserve Brig. Gen. Yiftah Spector, one of the most decorated fighter pilots in Israeli military history. Spector was grounded as a flight instructor last month after signing a letter, along with 26 other reserve pilots, calling the military's targeted killings of militants in crowded civilian neighborhoods "illegal and immoral." Israel's military policies in the Palestinian territories, Spector said, are "opposing everything I was raised on" during his career in the air force.

Israel to Raze With Robot Bulldozers
By GAVIN RABINOWITZ
Associated Press, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: The giant Caterpillar bulldozer, used by the Israeli military to destroy Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (news - web sites), now comes with a controversial new feature: remote control. Israel says its remote-control technology will lower risks to soldiers. But Palestinians fear it will lead to more frequent raids using the machines and make the three-year conflict even bloodier. The remote-controlled D-9 bulldozer and a remote-control version of the Humvee, equipped with machine guns, were developed by the Israeli army and the Technion Institute of Technology. Both machines are U.S.-made, with Israeli modifications. They are expected to go into service in the next few weeks. The army refused to comment or reveal further details about the new equipment. ...U.S. Embassy spokesman Paul Patin would not comment on the specific vehicles. He said that when Israel modifies U.S. products, the Pentagon (news - web sites) makes sure "they are used in a manner acceptable to our laws." ...The Peoria, Ill.-based company, Caterpillar, which produces the bulldozer, said in a statement that it "shares the world's concern over unrest in the Middle East," but that with more then 2 million of its machines in use worldwide, it has "neither the legal right nor the means to police individual use of that equipment."

GOP unity is strained by attacks, Trent Lott says "Mow the whole place down"
By Geoff Earle
The Hill, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Senior Republicans have begun raising concerns about the administration’s strategy in Iraq amid daily attacks on U.S. forces there. ...Asked whether he favored any policy changes in Iraq, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) responded: “We need to have a different mix of troops, is the key. We may need to move some troops around.” Lott suggested moving more troops from the relatively stable south closer to the region around Tikrit, where attacks on U.S. forces have been common. He said there was a need for more trained military police, adding that his comments were not a criticism. “Honestly, it’s a little tougher than I thought it was going to be,” Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”

American Enterprise Institute tripe served in Chicago
They Hate Us Because We're There
Chicago Sun Times in The Hill, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Why do they hate us? Why do they hate the Red Cross? For distributing blankets? For feeding the hungry? For showing up at the worst spots on earth, during the most awful crises and setting up tents? The answer is that the Red Cross is hated for the exact same reason the United States — or Israel for that matter — is hated. They are there. They exist. That is reason enough for terrorists.

Robert’s Rules For Rummy
By Jonathan Alter
Rumsfeld’s 1950s-style unilateralism is out of touch with the way the world works
NEWSWEEK, 3 November issue
EXCERPT: I can’t help it. I like Donald Rumsfeld and I like his sharp elbows. I like the way he spars with reporters and tries to cut through all the Beltway gunk. Of course he probably should have been fired last summer for incompetence. His “plan” for postwar Iraq, if one can call it that, was beyond inadequate: his failure to secure key installations with military police, his politicizing of intelligence, his insulting of allies and his arrogant insistence on phony estimates of the cost of securing and rebuilding the country all will cloud his reputation. If he’d bothered to read a State Department report about the occupation, he could have saved scores of lives and billions of dollars. But that was then. The question about Rumsfeld now isn’t whether he’ll be brought low by his high-handedness. He ain’t going anywhere. It’s whether he is a supple enough thinker to adjust to the modern world as it is, not as he demands it should be.

Where Are the Missing Billions?
By Dominic Nutt
Guardian (UK), 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: The billions pledged for the reconstruction of Iraq at the donors' conference in Madrid look pretty good on paper. It would certainly be churlish to sniff at $33bn (£20bn) - specially when you consider that at a similar conference for Afghanistan, after the Taliban were defeated, the world could only scrape together $4.5bn (£2.7). In fact, the world has promised the equivalent of around $1,400 (£848) for each Iraqi citizen, when Afghans got just $57 (£34). So, should we be asking why Iraq, a middle-income country, is worth so much more to the world than Afghanistan, which is one of the poorest countries on earth and has few natural resources? It may genuinely be the case that President George Bush has stumped up $20bn (£12bn) of the Madrid money for altruistic reasons. But it does raise the question: why has Iraq been given more than four times the amount pledged to Afghanistan? Is it because Afghanistan does not produce oil?
SEE ALSO: Press Review: 'Iraqis Will Not Accept Occupation'

Our Strategy Helps the Terrorists, Israeli Army Chief Warns Sharon
By Chris McGreal
Guardian (UK), 31 October 2003
EXCERPT: Israel's army chief has exposed deep divisions between the military and Ariel Sharon by branding the government's hardline treatment of Palestinian civilians counter-productive and saying that the policy intensifies hatred and strengthens the "terror organisations". Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya'alon also told Israeli journalists in an off-the-record briefing that the army was opposed to the route of the "security fence" through the West Bank. The government also contributed to the fall of the former Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, by offering only "stingy" support for his attempts to end the conflict, he said.
SEE ALSO: Bush's Mideast Policy on Hold (LA Times)

Our reputation abroad, thanks to Bush...
European Poll Labels U.S. and Israel as Biggest Threats to World Peace
E.U. Observer, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Over half of Europeans think that Israel now presents the biggest threat to world peace according to a controversial poll requested by the European Commission. According to the same survey, Europeans believe the United States contributes the most to world instability along with Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The specially commissioned poll which asked citizens 15 questions on "the reconstruction of Iraq, the conflict in the Middle East and World peace", has caused controversy in Brussels.

30 October 2003

Eyes Wide Shut: Bush Illogic Continues
By Maureen Dowd
New York Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," he said. In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." The war began with Bush illogic: false intelligence (from Niger to nuclear) used to bolster a false casus belli (imminent threat to our security) based on a quartet of false premises (that we could easily finish off Saddam and the Baathists, scare the terrorists and democratize Iraq without leeching our economy). Now Bush illogic continues: The more Americans, Iraqis and aid workers who get killed and wounded, the more it is a sign of American progress. The more dangerous Iraq is, the safer the world is. The more troops we seem to need in Iraq, the less we need to send more troops. The harder it is to find Saddam, Osama and W.M.D., the less they mattered anyhow. The more coordinated, intense and sophisticated the attacks on our soldiers grow, the more "desperate" the enemy is. In a briefing piped into the Pentagon on Monday from Tikrit, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno called the insurgents "desperate" eight times. But it is Bush officials who seem desperate when they curtain off reality. They don't even understand the political utility of truth.

Intelligence Veteran Faults Iraq Arms Data
By Sonni Efron and Greg Miller
LA Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: The newly retired head of the State Department's intelligence arm said Tuesday that the U.S. intelligence community "badly underperformed" for years in assessing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and should accept responsibility for its failure. The assessment by Carl W. Ford Jr., former assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, marked the first time a senior official involved in preparing the prewar assessments on Iraq has asserted that serious intelligence errors were made.

U.N. Says It Will Withdraw Baghdad Staff
AP in New York Times
30 October 2003
EXCERPT: The United Nations is temporarily pulling its staff out of Baghdad while it evaluates the security situation, but U.N. workers will remain in northern Iraq, a spokeswoman said Wednesday. ``We have asked our staff in Baghdad to come out temporarily for consultations with a team from headquarters on the future of our operations, in particular security arrangements that we would need to take to operate in Iraq,'' U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said late Wednesday. ``This decision is not an evacuation and it doesn't affect the north.'' Okabe would not say when the staff would leave Baghdad or give other details.

Afghans Tell of Torture During Security Sweep
Villagers say a militia working for the U.S. went on a rampage while hunting Taliban.
By Paul Watson
LA Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Villagers with broken limbs, deep cuts and severe bruises say Afghan militia fighters working as guides for U.S. troops went on a spree of looting, beatings and torture here during a military sweep last week. The militiamen frequently guide the Americans on missions to search for Taliban and Al Qaeda guerrillas, wear U.S. military camouflage fatigues and carry assault rifles. None of about 50 villagers who described the abuses in interviews, or who were questioned at an elders meeting, said U.S. forces witnessed the assaults or thefts during the search for Taliban guerrillas. A U.S. military spokesman said he had no reports of unprofessional conduct by militias operating under U.S. control.

Damage Estimate in Ecuador Lawsuit Mounts to $6 Billion
A new study says the environmental cost of Texaco's oil drilling is higher than thought.
By T. Christian Miller
LA Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Lawyers for about 30,000 Ecuadoreans suing ChevronTexaco Corp. unveiled a new report Wednesday that dramatically upped the total bill for alleged environmental damage as a result of drilling operations to more than $6 billion. David Russell, an environmental expert hired by the plaintiffs, said that two decades of oil drilling operations had contaminated nearly 1,000 acres of wetlands and more than 120 miles of rivers and streams. ChevronTexaco, which says it conducted a $40-million cleanup after ceasing operations in 1992, dismissed the five-page report as lacking documentation for its claims. "There is no validity to the study because there is no study," said Maripat Sexton, a ChevronTexaco spokeswoman. "These costs have no credible, substantiated basis." The new figure — six times the previous estimate — came as the lawyers also released internal company memos showing that company officials had worried that oil operations may have been sending contaminated water into the Amazon. The case is being widely watched by environmental lawyers and oil industry analysts to see whether a court in a foreign country can hold a multinational corporation financially responsible for environmental damage in that nation. Texaco, which has said the oil drilling operations were not responsible for poisoning people, animals or the environment, pumped more than 1.5 billion barrels of oil out of Ecuador from 1972 to 1992.

New Iraq 'Well on Way to Becoming Islamic State'
By David Rennie
Telegraph (UK) 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: The United States is failing in its mission to create a secular, overtly pro-Western Iraq, a leading adviser to the American administrator Paul Bremer said yesterday. Instead, the new, democratic Iraq appears bound to be an Islamic state - with an official role for Islam, and Islamic law enshrined in its constitution. That prospect is triggering alarm and opposition from the White House and the Pentagon, Noah Feldman, a leading American expert in Islamic law, told The Daily Telegraph.
SEE ALSO: Analysis: Bush May Have to Cut and Run (SMH)

Yet another Bush lie debunked...
U.S. Commanders Admit to Fighters Not Entering Iraq From Syria
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Commanders of U.S. military forces responsible for monitoring the border between Iraq and Syria say there is no evidence from human intelligence sources or radar surveillance aircraft indicating that significant numbers of foreign fighters are crossing into Iraq illegally. U.S. and Iraqi forces are working together to secure Iraq's borders against infiltration by foreigners intent on assisting attacks against troops and civilians associated with the occupation. U.S. officials blamed foreign fighters for four suicide car bombings in Baghdad on Monday that killed at least 35 people.
SEE ALSO: Foreigners Cited in New Iraqi Violence (Globe)
SEE ALSO: The Danger of Defeat (WP)
SEE ALSO: Pentagon May Pull Back WMD Search (AP)
SEE ALSO: As Many As 15,000 Iraqis Killed in Invasion (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Frontline Aid Agency Joins Baghdad Exodus (SMH)
SEE ALSO: Arabian Nightmare (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Deadline Set for Tenet to Provide Prewar Intelligence (WP)

World Bank to Back Controversial Caspian Oil Pipeline
By Rob Evans and Owen Bowcott
Guardian (UK), 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: A controversial scheme led by the oil giant BP to build a huge, strategically important pipeline is about to win crucial backing, according to a leaked document. Despite widespread criticism, the World Bank is due to approve at a meeting tomorrow a $250m (£149m) loan to a consortium to build a pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea to the Turkish port of Ceyhan via Georgia.

Remember how the U.S. 'liberarted' Afghanistan?
The Rise of Narco-Terrorists in Afghanistation
By Ian Traynor
Guardian (UK), 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by "narco-terrorists" and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed, the UN warned yesterday.
SEE ALSO: Our Friends, The Warlords (Guardian)

U.S. Responses to Bolivia and Venezuela: A Study in Opposites
By Dannah Baynton
ZNet, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Hoping for consistency from the Bush administration is something like playing the lottery: You play the game, but deep down, you know you¹re going to lose. But even for this administration, the U.S. response to recent events in Bolivia and Venezuela reveals cynical and transparent contradictions. Last year on April 11, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was overthrown in a short-lived coup. In less than two days he was returned to power due to the overwhelming support of Venezuelans, who had voted him into office by a landslide. President Chávez was, and still is, a democratically elected president. Last week in Bolivia, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demand the resignation of an unpopular president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. They won that resignation. President Sánchez de Lozada was a democratically elected president.

State Department Official Slams Pentagon
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
AP in My Yahoo!, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: A top State Department official criticized the military Tuesday for agreeing to a wartime cease-fire with an Iranian rebel group based in Saddam Hussein's Iraq . "We shouldn't have been signing a cease-fire with a foreign terrorist organization," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

War: "It's Not Over Until It's Over"
By Richard Hart Sinnreich
Washington Post, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: As our casualties continue to mount, America's leaders could do themselves and us a favor by calling things by their right names. What's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan today is not nation-building. It's not postwar reconstruction. It's not pacification. It's war. It's not war just because both nations are crawling with troops. So are others. Nor is it war just because people continue to die violently. That happens every day in every city in the world. Nor is it war just because some of the victims wear uniforms. That too is not uncommon even in peacetime. It's war because our undefeated enemies say it is and behave accordingly. In that stubborn resistance lies a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American political leaders since World War II: It's not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It's the loser. For their part, those who object to overwhelming force routinely fail to connect its price to producing the acceptance of defeat that alone can deter what may be even greater costs, or worse, still another war. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are witnessing the latest object lesson in the consequences of that false military economy. The question is whether, next time around, we'll remember it.

29 October 2003

BUSH'S STRANGE SUCCESS
From Tapped, The American Prospect
28 October 2003
EXCERPT: So how do you spin a series of suicide attacks that has killed several dozen and wounded hundreds? Just ask the president:
There are terrorists in Iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress. The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react.
So . . . we'll know we're losing when the attacks stop? Seems pretty unpersuasive to me, and it looks like some prominent veterans aren't buying it either:
Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a presidential candidate, likened Bush's statement to the "light at the end of the tunnel" claims during the Vietnam War. "Does the president really believe that suicide bombers are willing to strap explosives to their bodies because we're restoring electricity and creating jobs for Iraqis?" Kerry asked in a statement.
Bush got a similar reprimand earlier from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has supported the president on Iraq. "This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam, in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground," he told Newsweek. [ BWUSA bold]

UN Sees Unprecedented Afghan Opium Boom
Center for Security Studies, Zurich, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Opium cultivation is growing like a cancer in Afghanistan and risks transforming the world's leading supplier into a state of narco-terrorists and drug cartels, a UN survey said on Wednesday. Opium poppy cultivation is spreading to areas it has never been seen in before, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its Afghanistan Opium survey for 2003 - the first conducted in cooperation with the national government.

Bush Retreats from Mideast Peace Efforts
By Barbara Slavin
USA Today, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: When Israel announced last week that it would permit construction of hundreds of Jewish apartments in the West Bank, the State Department acknowledged that the action directly violated commitments Israel made in June to quit building settlements in Palestinian territory, a crucial part of the U.S.-backed "road map" for peace. But instead of a harsh rebuke, the State Department's reaction was low-key: "I can't really comment on it, other than to say we have made our policy clear, which is that, under the road map, Israel has made a commitment to stop settlement activity, and sticking to that commitment is important," deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said.
SEE ALSO: Israel Orders Permits for Palestinians to Live in Their Own Homes (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Israel Debates Evacuation of Settlements (Haaretz)

Faces of the Fallen
Flash animation
Washington Post, 28 October 2003
When Bush calls a wave of terror attacks "progress" and considers reporting of the bad news from the Iraq fiasco biased against him, it grows increasingly difficult to believe these Americans did not die in vain.
SEE ALSO: Bush: 'Handful of People Who Don't Want to Live in Freedom' (transcript)

U.S. Takes Softer Tone on Iran, Once in the 'Axis of Evil'
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
New York Times, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Bush administration assured Iran on Tuesday that the United States did not favor "regime change" in Tehran and signaled a new willingness to engage in a dialogue with Iran over its nuclear program, its alleged support of terrorism and other issues. The administration's newly conciliatory approach toward Iran, enunciated by Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, resolved at least part of a contentious internal debate among aides to President Bush, administration officials said. The officials said Iran's nuclear program and the safe haven it is said to have offered members of Al Qaeda remain major obstacles to improving relations but that entering into conversations with Iran on those and other issues was also considered urgent. The change in tone comes slightly less than two years after Mr. Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union address, grouped Iran with Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil."

A summary of recent international polls
Bush Falls From Favor Abroad, Too
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, 30 October 2003
EXCERPT: If United States President George W Bush was surprised on his recent trip to Indonesia by the negative image the country's Muslim leaders had of his administration, he is unlikely to be reassured by two new surveys from Latin America and Europe. Nearly 90 percent of more than 500 elite figures in six Latin American countries polled by the University of Miami School of Business and Zogby International gave Bush a negative rating. Fifty percent of respondents gave his performance the lowest possible rating: "poor". Bush's highest negatives were found in the region's traditional powerhouses: Brazil (98 percent), Argentina (93 percent) and Mexico (92 percent), according to the survey. A second poll carried out by Eurobarometer for the European Commission of all 15 European Union (EU) countries found that more than two-thirds of citizens saw the US-led war in Iraq as "not justified". Only 6 percent of the 7,515 people polled said that they believe Washington should be in charge of security in Iraq, while 43 percent agreed the job should be given to the United Nations. Even in Baghdad itself, pollsters found skepticism about US intentions running high, according to a new Gallup poll of the Iraqi capital. Only 4 percent of respondents there said they accepted Washington's main stated reason for going to war - to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. More than four in 10 said that they believed the principal objective was to secure Iraq's oil reserves.

Five Killed as Suicide Bombers Strike Again
By Jack Fairweather
The Telegraph, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: Anti-American terrorists in Iraq yesterday followed up their suicide attacks in Baghdad with a bombing in Fallujah, killing at least five people. The bomber, driving a small car packed with explosives, blew himself up outside a school 100 yards from a police station in the town, which has seen stiff resistance to American forces, leaving burnt and mangled bodies scattered on the ground. ...Nada Doumani, the ICRC's spokesman in Baghdad, said: "We're still trying to overcome the shock and horror of what has happened here. We have a duty to the Iraqi people to remain, but if that means the likelihood of more attacks then we'll pull out at once. "The ICRC has about 600 Iraqi employees in the country and 30 foreign staff, cut from a peak of 130 after a suicide bomber attacked the United Nations headquarters in August and killed 22 people, including the mission's head. Other aid agencies said they were withdrawing expatriates in the face of the threat, despite a plea from Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, for them to stay.

Two C.I.A. Workers Killed in Afghanistan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Two Americans working for the CIA have been killed in an ambush while tracking terrorists in Afghanistan, the agency said Tuesday. The ambush Saturday happened on the same day and in the same region as a six-hour firefight in which U.S.-led coalition aircraft and Afghan militia killed 18 rebel fighters, the U.S. military reported from its headquarters in Afghanistan Tuesday. Six Afghan militia soldiers were wounded in the fighting, but there were no coalition casualties, the military said. It was unclear whether the two incidents were linked, but the military did not explain why its account of the fighting was delayed by three days. They were ``tracking terrorists operating in the region'' of Shkin, a village in eastern Afghanistan, when they were killed Saturday, the CIA said in a statement. The pair was working for the CIA's Directorate of Operations, which conducts clandestine intelligence-gathering and covert operations. The agency did not provide details of the ambush or the two operatives' mission.
Also:  Last week, U.N. Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno told the U.N. Security Council that deteriorating security in Afghanistan was a significant obstacle to reconstruction. He claimed that the Taliban have established ``de-facto control'' in certain border areas, including in Paktika province, site of Saturday's fighting. The Afghan government strongly rejected the U.N. official's claims the Taliban have taken control of border regions, and said threats to stability in the country shouldn't be exaggerated.

France 'To Aim Nuclear Arms at Rogue States'
By Philip Delves Broughton in Paris
The Telegraph, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: France is to enact a historic shift in military strategy by targeting its nuclear missiles on "rogue states" that have weapons of mass destruction, it was reported yesterday. In the longer term, the strategy will "take into account" China as a potential threat, according to the newspaper Libération. It said the new doctrine - the fruit of several years of reflection by the defence ministry, will be announced in the next few weeks. If confirmed, the move will overturn 40 years of French nuclear strategy founded on the principle of deterrence against declared nuclear powers and expose President Jacques Chirac to further attack from anti-nuclear protesters. He was condemned for briefly resuming French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1996.

Gunmen Kill a Deputy Mayor of Baghdad
San Francisco Chronicle, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: Unknown gunmen assassinated a deputy mayor of Baghdad in an apparent hit-run shooting, the U.S. occupation authority reported Tuesday. Faris Abdul Razzaq al-Assam, deputy mayor for technical services, had returned from last week's international Iraq donors' conference in Madrid, Spain, when he was shot Sunday, the Coalition Provisional Authority said.

28 October 2003

Wolfowitz's Wakeup Call in Baghdad
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, 29 October 2003
EXCERPT: "There are terrorists in Iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress," Bush said. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react." But to more impartial analysts, the one-two punch by anti-US forces suggested that, if anything, resistance to the occupation is growing and becoming more coordinated and sophisticated. Until now, US officials have contended that resistance is confined to die-hard loyalists - or what the Pentagon often refers to as "deadenders" - of ousted President Saddam Hussein, foreign jihadis inspired by or associated with al-Qaeda and common criminals, several thousand of whom were released from prison in a general amnesty just before the US-led invasion. Such a characterization naturally suggests that the resistance lacks any legitimacy. But this description appears increasingly at odds with accounts by journalists who have interviewed men identified as resistance fighters, very few of whom have had good words to say about Saddam, as well as recent statements by US military officers on the ground.

A Willful Ignorance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT:  But there's something broader going on: a sort of willful ignorance, supposedly driven by moral concerns but actually reflecting domestic politics. Surely it's important to understand how others see us, but a new, post 9/11 version of political correctness has made it difficult even to discuss their points of view. Any American who tries to go beyond "America good, terrorists evil," who tries to understand — not condone — the growing world backlash against the United States, faces furious attacks delivered in a tone of high moral indignation. The attackers claim to be standing up for moral clarity, and some of them may even believe it. But they are really being used in a domestic political struggle. ...Which brings me back to my starting point: we'll lose the fight against terror if we don't make an effort to understand how others think. Yet because of a domestic political struggle that seems ever more centered on religion, such attempts at understanding are shouted down.

Iraq Paradox: Cracking Down While Promoting Freedom
By DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT:  At one of the first meetings of the White House's new Iraq Stabilization Group, days before the series of attacks on Monday that left at least 34 dead, President Bush's aides debated the trade-off between locking down Baghdad and demonstrating to Iraqis that they now live in an open society, where they are free to shop, go to work or even protest the American-led occupation." Locking down Baghdad would take enormous manpower and resources, more than the administration has been willing to provide," said Michele A. Flournoy, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, and a former Pentagon official in the Clinton administration. Even were such a lockdown possible, she said, "It would be at a great cost — perhaps at the cost of turning the Baghdad population against us, decisively."

International Red Cross to Pull Foreign Staff Out of Iraq
Peter Capella
Story from AFP / 27 October 2003
Courtesy of The Agonist
EXCERPT: The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Monday it will pull foreign staff out of the Iraqi capital after a car bomb blew up at its Baghdad office, killing two employees and 10 other people. "We will begin tomorrow to fly out expatriate staff and then we'll see how we can continue our work with our Iraqi staff," Pierre Gassmann, head of the ICRC delegation in Baghdad, told the website of Germany's ARD public television. The organisation, which has some 35 foreign staff in Iraq and 800 Iraqi workers, would continue not to ask for military protection, Gassmann said. "If we decide to ask for military protection, we will be exactly where the enemy is seen -- at the side of the coalition troops," he said.

Iraqis Celebrate. Then Brutal Reality Dawns
One by one, the bombers struck - killing men, women and children as they prepared for holy month of Ramadan
By Michael Howard in Baghdad
The Guardian, 28 October 2003
For most Baghdad residents, it should have been a day of double celebration. The start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and no Saddam Hussein to spoil the party. Workers looked forward to reduced office hours and a seasonal bonus in their pay packets. Grocery stores and sweet shops did brisk business as families prepared for ifthar, the evening meal that ends the daylight fast. Then reality dawned. In 45 terrifying minutes, a series of apparently choreographed attacks left 34 Iraqi police officers and civilians dead, and at least 224 injured. An American soldier was also killed.
SEE ALSO:   Audio Link    Red Cross Targeted in Baghdad (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Analysis: No Target Out of Reach for Iraqi Resistance (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Now Is It Safe to Say It's Not Going Well? (Nation)

Forget the 'brutal tyrant' justification for war...
Bush and Blair Embrace Dictator Who Boils Victims to Death
By George Monbiot
Guardian (UK), 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water.... But Uzbekistan is seen by the US government as a key western asset, as Saddam Hussein's Iraq once was. Since 1999, US special forces have been training Karimov's soldiers. In October 2001, he gave the United States permission to use Uzbekistan as an airbase for its war against the Taliban. The Taliban have now been overthrown, but the US has no intention of moving out. Uzbekistan is in the middle of central Asia's massive gas and oil fields.

U.N. Cuts Details of Western Profiteers from Congo Report
By Declan Walsh
London Independent, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: A controversial section has been omitted from a UN report on the plunder of wealth in the Democratic Republic of Congo due out this week. Senior UN officials objected to part of the report by a UN panel investigating the illegal exploitation of Congo's wealth, fearing it could derail the peace process. Sources say the section includes details on how shady networks of business and military figures, some tied to the governments of Rwanda and Uganda, are continuing illegally to export gold, diamonds and other minerals from eastern Congo. The contested material has been cut from the public version of the report but was privately distributed to Security Council members, who will debate it on Thursday.

The Foxification of Britain: Murdoch Targets the BBC
By Dame Anita Roddick
Intervention Magazine, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: London--If you live any decent amount of time in the USA, as I do, broadcast media will drive you nuts. So it's been fascinating watching what has been going on in the British media over the past few months. The attacks on the BBC by Tony Blair and his government, joining forces with Rupert Murdoch and his executives at BSkyB, must be viewed in the context of what's already become a fait accompli in the United States -- the diminution of public space, especially public broadcasting space, by the ever more powerful forces of privatization.

Another Holocaust?
By Daniel Pipes
Asia Times, 28 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, informed the world on October 16, among other things, that "Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them". In reaction, Condoleezza Rice, the US National Security Adviser, described Mahathir's comments as "hateful, they are outrageous". She then added, "I don't think they are emblematic of the Muslim world." If only she were right about that. In fact, Mahathir's views are precisely emblematic of Muslim discourse about Jews - symbolized by the standing ovation his speech received from an all-Muslim audience of leaders representing 57 states. Then, a Saudi newspaper reports, when Western leaders criticized Mahathir, "Muslim leaders closed ranks" around him with words of praise ("very correct", "a very, very wise assessment"). ...Condoleezza Rice and other top-ranking officials need to recognize the power and reach of the anti-Jewish ideology among Muslims, then develop active ways to combat it. This evil has already taken innocent lives; unless combated it could take many more.

Still Waiting for the Euphoria
A poll among Iraqis indicates the Bush team was wrong in foreseeing a warm welcome for the occupiers.
By John Zogby
LA Times, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: One thing is clear: The predicted euphoria of Iraqis has not materialized. Months after the U.S. military victory, American policymakers and troops are left not only with the daunting task of nation-building and restoring the country's devastated infrastructure but also with having to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis who are not keen on the U.S. occupation. Iraqis, like their fellow Arabs, feel victimized by a history of betrayal and humiliation at the hands of Western powers. It appears that U.S. policymakers overlooked or misread this sentiment.

‘Ready for Jihad’
Despite War on Terror Alliance, Many Pakistanis Still Denounce America
By Dave Marash
ABC News.com, 27 October 2003
Hostility toward the U.S. runs high in the madrasas (seminaries) and the Pakistani army.
EXCERPT: From the testimony of recently captured fighters in Afghanistan, they will go from the classroom to the caves of eastern Afghanistan to the battlefield with little training, and sometimes, even without weapons. Jihad is not preached and hate is not fomented in all Pakistan's madrasas, but ABCNEWS' visits to several sites suggested both ideas predominate in a madrasa system that has grown from 2,000 schools in 1987 to an estimated 13,000 today. ...Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Quaid-E-Azim University professor who is one of Pakistan's top nuclear physicists [said] "There's no doubt that there is a significant element within the Pakistani military that is anti-modern, anti-secular, anti-West, and perhaps a dominant element which is very opposed to Pakistan's having taken a U-turn on the Taliban in Afghanistan," with which Pakistan formerly was allied, Hoodbhoy said. "And," Hoodbhoy added, "there is hostility towards the U.S. in the army." Adding to the danger, Pakistan has built nuclear weapons and missiles that can deliver them up to 2,000 miles. The prime target of Pakistan's nuclear weapons is its neighbor India. The likely flashpoint is the disputed territory of Kashmir. Just last year, Hoodbhoy noted, India and Pakistan were yet again, on the brink of war. "We've somehow become fatalistic about the whole thing," he said. "To my mind, that makes it all the more dangerous. The more one plays on the brink, the less one is sensitized to the dangers of nuclear conflict, and these dangers are very real."

27 October 2003

Yes, but a desperation that lasts and lasts...
Bush: Iraq Attacks Signs of Desperation
By PAULINE JELINEK
Guardian, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT:  President Bush said Monday that U.S. progress in Iraq is making insurgents more ``desperate'' and spurring attacks such as the bombings at the international Red Cross headquarters and four police stations across Baghdad that killed dozens of people. Defense officials said earlier Monday that they thought loyalists of fallen Iraq leader Saddam Hussein likely were responsible for the latest series of bombings and described the last two days as a significant spike in attacks - a surge of violence that showed some level of coordination.

Guerrillas in No Danger of Running Out of Arms
By John Diamond
USA TODAY, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT:  Iraqi guerrillas have an abundant supply of small arms and explosives that could allow them to maintain their pace of attacks indefinitely, Pentagon and U.S. Central Command intelligence analysts have concluded. The discovery of thousands of arms caches — not only at military bases, but also in schools, mosques, hospitals and homes — indicates to U.S. commanders that there remain thousands more undiscovered caches accessible to guerrillas. Coalition commanders have various estimates for how much is stored in those caches. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez cited an estimate of 650,000 tons, an enormous figure equal to about a third of the U.S. military's vast ammunition stockpile. Brig. Gen. Robert Davis, the officer in charge of a program to collect and destroy Iraqi weapons stocks, said the figure could be closer to 1 million tons. Dan Coberly, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing destruction of seized Iraqi arms, said in an interview, "No one has a firm number for the total amount" of small arms in Iraq.  "We don't have any notion at this point where all of these sites are," Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad last week. "We're still finding ammunition in backyards. Every day we're finding it."[BWUSA emphasis]

New Explosions Hit Baghdad
The first blast went off near the ICRC
BBC News, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: Two large explosions have struck central Baghdad. Witnesses said an ambulance exploded as it entered the gates of a building used by the International Committee of the Red Cross. At least three people were killed and several injured. About 15 minutes later another blast exploded in the Shaab district in northern Baghdad. Local people said the building which was attacked was a police station. The blasts come a day after a rocket attack on the Rashid hotel, where a top US official was staying. That incident left one person dead and 17 others injured.
SEE ALSO: At Least 35 Die in Baghdad Car Bombings (Chicago Tribune), Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shiite Muslim member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said the United States must speed up the training of Iraqi police and soldiers and employ ruthless measures to crush the insurgency. "There is no doubt about it that we need to change the rules of engagement with these people," al-Rabii told CNN. "The rules of engagement now are too lenient." The rocket attack Sunday struck the Al-Rasheed Hotel, where Wolfowitz was staying at the end of a three-day Iraq visit. The deputy defense secretary said afterward that attack "will not deter us from completing our mission" in Iraq. But the bold blow at the heart of the U.S. presence here clearly rattled U.S. confidence that it is defeating Iraq's shadowy insurgents.

U.S. Case for Helping Iraq Suffers a Setback
By ALEX BERENSON
New York Times, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: In purely military terms, the rocket attack Sunday morning on a hotel being used by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and a leading architect of the war against Saddam Hussein, meant little. But the strike is a serious setback for the Bush administration as it tries to persuade the world to focus on the positives of the American occupation, on falling crime and new schools, on cleaner streets and freer speech.

Insurgents' Rockets Drive Americans from Main Hotel; Wolfowitz Says U.S. Undeterred
By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT:  The U.S. occupation authority retreated from its headquarters Sunday after Iraqi insurgents, using a ''science project'' of a rocket launcher, attacked the heavily guarded hotel with a missile barrage that killed an American colonel, wounded 18 other people and sent the visiting deputy defense secretary scurrying for safety. Paul Wolfowitz, the shaken-looking but unhurt Pentagon deputy, said the strike against the Al Rasheed Hotel, from nearly point-blank range, ''will not deter us from completing our mission'' in Iraq. But the bold blow at the heart of the U.S. presence here clearly rattled U.S. confidence that it is defeating Iraq's shadowy insurgents.

Wolfowitz Escapes Missile Attack in Baghdad
BBC, 26 October 2003
EXCERPT: Visiting US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has escaped unhurt after a rocket attack on his hotel in Baghdad. Up to eight rockets were fired at the Hotel al-Rashid, one of the most heavily guarded sites in the Iraqi capital.
SEE ALSO: Attack Shows Growing Sophistication (Guardian)
SEE ALSO: Cheney's Alternate Reality: U.S. Troops Winning Over Iraqis (AP)

Iraq Civil War: A Full-Scale Sunni-Shia Conflict?
By Martin Asser
BBC News, 26 October 2003
EXCERPT: ...The question is, are the ingredients in place to spiral in full-scale Sunni-Shia conflict? This nightmare scenario has already become a realistic possibility in parts of Shia-dominated southern Iraq. But if the conflict develops further in the mixed suburbs of Baghdad, Washington's plans to put Iraq back on the road to recovery may be heading for their biggest setback yet.

So much for those scary mushroom clouds!
Another Lie Debunked: Search Finds No Nuclear Threat in Iraq
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post, 26 October 2003
EXCERPT: According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
SEE ALSO: Congressman McDermott's Message: Bush Lied (SPI)

Looting Iraq by Executive Order
By Stephen Kerr
ZNet, 25 October 2003
EXCERPT: George W. Bush is a thief. On May 22, 2003 President Bush issued Executive Order 13303, ³Protecting the Development Fund for Iraq." This order invoked the "National Emergency Act" to effectively seize Iraqi oil and oil revenues, ostensibly to ensure they are spent on ³Iraqi reconstruction." But that¹s not the way this Order has been used, or the funds spent.

Bush Is Not Welcome (and Loathed) In Britain
By Roy Hattersley
Guardian (UK), 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: It is easy enough to identify what is in it for the president. At the very beginning of the American electoral cycle, he is under attack from the Democrats (and some Republicans) for turning some friendly nations against the US. His critics also accuse him of being an insular cornball who had never left home territory before he was elected and could not remember the names of the leaders of major allied countries. Does anyone doubt that film clips from the state dinner at Buckingham Palace will appear in his television campaign commercials? Tony Blair, on the other hand, has nothing to gain and everything to lose from the visit. He may not have noticed it, but President Bush is regarded in Britain with something approaching contempt. He has achieved the unusual feat of being simultaneously sinister and ridiculous, and he is regarded as the rich kid who grew up arrogant and inarticulate. But it is his role in making the war in Iraq inevitable that makes him unwelcome here.

Pentagon Repositioning for Decades-long War on Terror
MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer
AP, 25 October 2003
EXCERPT: Privately, administration officials have said for months that they see the anti-terrorism fight as a decades-long struggle similar to the Cold War that dominated the second half of the 20th century. A private memo from Rumsfeld to his top aides brought the issue once again to the public's eye last week. ...Pentagon planners are considering moving some of the 116,000 troops under the U.S. European Command away from their Cold War bases in Western Europe and into former Warsaw Pact countries closer to the Middle East.

Battle Looms Over Whether Iraq Threat was Oversold
By PAUL KORING
From Saturday's Globe and Mail , 25 October 2003
EXCERPT: A bitter partisan battle is brewing over where to lay the blame for grossly misjudging the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq: with the White House or with the spies.
At stake is whether the U.S. public, Congress and allies abroad were misled into backing U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq, as Democratic presidential contenders contend.

Pentagon Wants 'Mini-Nukes' to Fight Terrorists
By Julian Coman
The Telegraph, 26 October 2003
EXCERPT: Influential advisers at the Pentagon are backing the development of a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons - so-called mini-nukes - in a controversial report to be published this autumn. The document, entitled Future Strategic Strike Force, has been produced by the Defence Science Board, which has a Pentagon brief to "transform the nation's armed forces to meet the demands placed on them by a changing world order". The DSB's findings envisage a revamped nuclear arsenal made up of small-scale missiles whose explosive impact would be easier to control and could be targeted at smaller aggressive states. The most radical part of the report argues for a move away from the Cold War view of nuclear arms as catastrophic weapons of last resort. The document is believed to have the strong backing of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, who last week called for a "bolder" approach to national security in a leaked Pentagon memo. A month ago the Senate eased restrictions on nuclear tests at the military's Nevada site, where no new test has taken place since 1992.

Israelis Blow Up Gaza Buildings Near Isolated Settlement
By JAMES BENNET
New York Times, 27 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Israeli Army blew up three vacant apartment buildings in the Gaza Strip on Sunday near a settlement where a Palestinian gunman killed three soldiers early Friday, as a debate sharpened in Israel over whether the isolated settlement was worth keeping.

24-26 October 2003

Militarism and moral decay
William Pfaff: Is America Copying Israel's Mistakes?
William Pfaff IHT
International Herald Tribune, 25 October 2003
EXCERPT: The power of the weak lies in a people's acceptance of suffering. The weakness of the strong is that a disproportionate use of force against the weak eventually corrupts their own society. The recent air attacks against the Palestinians in Gaza, using helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter aircraft and producing the inevitable "collateral damage," have actually been a demonstration of Israeli weakness. The attacks led nowhere that the majority of Israel's society wants to go. The daily newspaper Maariv described the message they delivered: "Israel has gone mad."

Iraq Pledge Drive Nets $19 Billion, $37 Billion Short of Needed Funds
CBS/AP, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: Nudged by the United States, donors came through Friday with pledges big and small for Iraq but were falling short of the estimated $56 billion needed to rebuild the country. "All of us are here today to make a strategic investment in hope," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates from 77 countries. "Now is the time for all of us to be generous with money, with training, with opportunity." Midway through, countries and international lenders had pledged about $19 billion in grants and loans, on top of the $20 billion promised by Washington. While pledges were still being made, the conference seemed sure to fall short of the $56 billion the World Bank estimates Iraq needs over the next four years. Meanwhile, two GIs were killed and four wounded in a mortar attack near the northern city of Samarra. Another soldier was killed north of Baghdad, 13 troops were wounded in Mosul, and other soldiers may have been hurt in Fallujah.

On High-Speed Trip, Bush Glimpses a Perception Gap
By DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: Minutes after President Bush finished an hourlong meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face. "Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?" he asked, shaking his head. ...Mr. Bush, in his exchange with reporters on Air Force One, expressed some regret that he did not have the time to explain himself better.

Tell this to the Tibetans...
Bush Says China is Peaceful and Works for Freedom
White House Press Release, 23 October 2003
President Bush in his addresses to the Australian Parliament said, "We see a China that is stable and prosperous -- a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people."

Bush Heckled in Australian Parliament
By Tom Raum
AP, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: Heckled inside and outside Australia's Parliament, President Bush offered a pointed answer to those who say the war with Iraq wasn't worth fighting. "Who can possibly think that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) still in power?" Bush asked Thursday as he wrapped up a six-nation lobbying campaign to reinvigorate the war on terrorism among Asian and Pacific allies.... During Bush's speech, two Green Party senators jumped to their feet and shouted war protests at Bush. They were ordered removed from the chamber but sat and refused to leave.

Threat From Saddam Hussein Was Overstated
Inquiry Faults Intelligence on Iraq
By Dana Priest
Washington Post, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing a blistering report on prewar intelligence on Iraq that is critical of CIA Director George J. Tenet and other intelligence officials for overstating the weapons and terrorism case against Saddam Hussein, according to congressional officials. The committee staff was surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write key intelligence documents -- in particular the Oct. 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- summarizing Iraq's capabilities and intentions, according to Republican and Democratic sources. Staff members interviewed more than 100 people who collected and analyzed the intelligence used to back up statements about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities, and its possible links to terrorist groups.

Remembering Those Lost for Iraqi Oil
22 October 2003
EXCERPT: Herewith is the latest list of American soldiers killed in Iraq. The Pentagon stresses that they were killed in "Operation Iraqi Freedom." We are giving Iraqis the freedom to kill us. This list of 13 is for less than two weeks, ending Oct. 21. As I fail to find these names in other public prints, I run them here on the notion that if they have died for your country, the least we all should do is read them and perhaps even remember some of them.

Chomsky: Cuba in the Crosshairs
By Noam Chomsky
ZNet, 24 October 2003
EXCERPT:  In his new book, Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance, Noam Chomsky continues his powerful analysis of state violence and state terror, reminding us that "terror" isn't primarily what small stateless bands of fanatics deliver to large and powerful states. Rather, as Chomsky argues, history is, in a sense, a history of state terror and the United States has long been a practitioner of the form. One of the United States' favorite targets has been Cuba, which for nearly half a century has been the victim of an unrelenting campaign of U.S. state terrorism. The world experienced "the most dangerous moment in human history" during the Cuban missile crisis. For Cuba, that most dangerous moment actually began soon after Fidel Castro's guerrilla forces overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and never really ended. Now that the Bush administration, pursuing its "war against terrorism," has once again elevated Cuba into America's cross-hairs as a newly anointed member of the Axis of Evil, this excerpt from Chomsky's new book which first appeared on TomDispatch.com seems especially relevant.

Bolivian Leader's Ouster Seen as Warning on U.S. Drug Policy
By LARRY ROHTER
New York Times, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: "The U.S. insistence on coca eradication was at the core of Sánchez de Lozada's problem," said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian scholar who is director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami. Dr. Gamarra and others point to events in Bolivia as a warning that United States drug policy may sow still wider instability in the region, where anti-American sentiment is building with the failure of economic reforms that Washington has helped encourage here.

23 October 2003

Dying for a McDonald's in Iraq
By Herbert Docena
Asia Times, 23 October 2003
EXCERPT: In London on October 13, an investors' conference entitled "Doing Business in Iraq: Kickstarting the Private Sector" was agog with reports that McDonald's, among other corporations, may begin selling burgers and fries in Iraq by next year. Attracting up to 145 multinational prospectors, the London conference was held less than a month after the United States announced its economic masterplan for Iraq, a blueprint which The Economist heralded as a "capitalist dream" that fulfills the "wish list of international investors".

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in Secret Nuke Pact
Washington Times, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on "nuclear cooperation" that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.

Sleeping With the Enemy: The Love Affair of Bush and Osama
By Brendan O'Neill
Spiked, 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: Why don't President Bush and Osama bin Laden just get a room? Judging from events over the weekend, they need each other as much as they despise each other. The latest crackly tape issued by bin Laden (if it's him) confirms that al-Qaeda has no independent programme or war aims, but merely feeds off Western fears. And Bush's response - 'the bin Laden tape [shows] this is still a dangerous world' - suggests that his administration will leap on any squeak from the man on the mountain to justify the war on terror. B&B are more and more like a parasitical double act.

General Boykin's Satanic Convergence
By Bill Berkowitz
Working For Change, 22 October 2003
EXCERPTS: Is it a plot by the "leftist media" to discredit President George W. Bush as FrontPageMagazine.com's Lowell Ponte claims? Is it much ado about nothing, as the conservative Media Research Center's crack team of media-watchers would have you believe? Why get riled up over remarks a lieutenant general made to churches full of fellow believers?... The real problem is that our main protagonist, Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, the former commander of Army Special Forces is, as NBC News reported, currently operating as part of a secretive new Pentagon unit aiming "to coordinate intelligence on terrorists and help hunt down Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets." In other words, he is in a very sensitive government position, one that renders continued fulminations about Satan, and selling the war on terrorism as a war against Christians as preposterous. Why do they hate us? Because the US is a Christian Nation, Boykin says frequently and confidently.

Israel Dismisses U.N. Vote, Continues Building Apartheid Wall
By Jason Keyser
Associated Press, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: Israel rejected an overwhelming call by the United Nations to dismantle a massive barrier being built in the West Bank, with a top official dismissing the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday as hostile to the Jewish state. "The fence will continue to be built," said Vice Premier Ehud Olmert. Israel says the wall is needed to keep suicide bombers out of the country. The Palestinians say Israel is using the barrier as a pretext to take Palestinian land.
SEE ALSO: Israeli Soldiers Inherit Second-Hand U.S. Underwear (AFP)
SEE ALSO: Is Arafat Dying for Peace? (Haaretz)

Bolivian Leader's Ouster Seen as Warning on U.S. Drug Policy
By LARRY ROHTER
New York Times, 22 October 2003
EXCERPT: On a visit to the White House last year, President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada told President Bush that he would push ahead with a plan to eradicate coca but that he needed more money to ease the impact on farmers. Otherwise, the Bolivian president's advisers recalled him as saying, "I may be back here in a year, this time seeking political asylum." Mr. Bush was amused, Bolivian officials recounted, told his visitor that all heads of state had tough problems and wished him good luck. Now Mr. Sánchez de Lozada, Washington's most stalwart ally in South America, is living in exile in the United States after being toppled last week by a popular uprising, a potentially crippling blow to Washington's anti-drug policy in the Andean region.

22 October 2003

U.S. Fails to Investigate Iraqi Civilian Deaths
Human Rights Watch, 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: The U.S. military is failing to conduct proper investigations into civilian deaths resulting from the excessive or indiscriminate use of force in Baghdad, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today. The 56-page report, Hearts and Minds: Post-War Civilian Casualties in Baghdad by U.S. Forces, confirms twenty deaths in the Iraqi capital alone between May 1 and September 30. In total, Human Rights Watch collected credible reports of 94 civilian deaths in Baghdad, involving questionable legal circumstances that warrant investigation. This number does not include civilians wounded by U.S. troops. The precise number of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. soldiers since the end of major military operations is unknown, and the U.S. military told Human Rights Watch that it keeps no statistics on civilian deaths.
SEE ALSO: The Human Rights Watch Report (HRW)

Bush Threatens to Veto Iraq Money
By Alan Fram
AP, 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: The 277-139 vote was nonbinding, but it highlighted a restiveness over Bush's insistence that U.S. rebuilding aid to Iraq be a grant, not a loan. House-Senate bargainers hope to produce a compromise $87 billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan next week, and GOP leaders in both chambers say they intend to drop Senate-passed language making half the rebuilding aid a loan. The vote came the same day the White House threatened for the first time to veto the overall bill if the loan language survives. By underscoring Bush's opposition to loans, the veto threat could make it easier for congressional Republican leaders to nail down enough votes to help the president prevail.

U.N.: Israel Must 'Stop and Reverse' Construction of Apartheid Fence
Guardian (UK), 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: The UN General Assembly approved late on Tuesday a resolution demanding that Israel halt construction of a barrier cutting the Jewish state off from Palestinian West Bank lands. The vote was 144 in favor, 4 against, including the United States and Israel, and 12 abstentions.

US: No Royal Welcome for Bush in London
By CDeliso
Balkanalysis.com, 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: Tony Blair is clearly batting a thousand. After everything that has gone down with Iraq- the cabinet resignations, the intelligence embarrassments, the David Kelly affair, the protests- he has the bright idea of inviting George W. to London for an “official state visit.” ...The word is that his staff in Washington was dismayed when the Brits announced there would be no ceremonial procession down the Mall with QE2.

21 October 2003

Bush Got It Wrong on Indonesia, Says Official
By Dana Priest
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: President George Bush tripped up when he said last week that the United States was ready to "go forward with" a new package of military training programs with Indonesia, a White House official has said. Mr Bush, whose speech caught US officials by surprise, said on Indonesian television that new military programs could take place because Indonesia had co-operated in an investigation into the killing of two US citizens last year in the eastern Indonesia province of Papua. But several White House officials say no new programs are planned or have been approved, contrary to what Mr Bush's statement implied.

Occupation Fuels Resistance: Interview with Tariq Ali
By Anthony Arnove
ZNet and Socialist Worker, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: If the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had been real, rather than imaginary, the U.S. would never have invaded. And it's worth repeating that outside the United States, nobody believes that there were any links between the Iraqis and al-Qaeda. The state of ignorance within the U.S. population is, I guess, a tribute to the three information monkeys--the networks and Fox TV--whose motto appears to be: see no truth, hear no truth, speak no truth. How can there be a vigilant and alert citizenry (surely a key prerequisite even for capitalist democracy) in these conditions of officially inspired ignorance?
SEE ALSO: Kurds' Faith in New Iraq Fading Fast (Guardian)

Cracks in the 'coalition of the bribed'
Turkey Cools Toward Iraq Role
BBC, 18 October 2003
EXCERPT: Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he may reverse a decision to send troops to Iraq if Iraqis continue to oppose the idea. Turkey's parliament had voted in favour of sending troops to Iraq at the request of the US, but the Iraqi Governing Council responded with firm opposition to the presence of troops from surrounding nations. "If the Iraqi people say: 'We don't want anybody,' then there's nothing else we can do. If wanted, we'll go, if not wanted, we won't go. We haven't made a definite decision," Mr Erdogan said on Saturday. Meanwhile, Bulgarian and Polish coalition troops arrived to secure a tense area near a cleric's house in the Shia holy city of Karbala after a firefight killed three US soldiers on Thursday.

Eat And Drink: Sharon's Shameful Feast
By Amir Oren
Haaretz, 21 October 2003
EXCERPT: The feast hosted on Sunday by Ariel Sharon - for himself and the 39 members of his Knesset faction - was one of the most shameful spectacles beheld since he entered office. It was a spectacle that, along with other signs, foretold the impending end of his government.
SEE ALSO: Sesame Street to Work for Middle East Peace (Guardian)

Corkscrew Over Baghdad
Iraq’s main airport looks pretty, and remains pretty darn empty
By Rod Nordland
Newsweek, 27 October Issue
EXCERPT: The United States is hoping that a new U.N. resolution, which authorizes a multinational force and sets some guidelines for fostering a democratic government in Iraq, will help spur international action to rebuild the country. But the key for progress, everyone agrees, is better security. And nothing in Iraq is as emblematic of the Coalition’s successes and failures than Baghdad International Airport.

20 October 2003

Always too little, too late
U.S. Set to Cede Part of Control Over Aid to Iraq
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
New York Times, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: Under pressure from potential donors, the Bush administration will allow a new agency to determine how to spend billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance for Iraq, administration and international aid officials say. The new agency, to be independent of the American occupation, will be run by the World Bank and the United Nations. They are to announce the change at a donor conference in Madrid later this week. The change effectively establishes some of the international control over Iraq that the United States opposed in the drafting of the United Nations Security Council resolution that passed on Thursday. That resolution referred to two previously established agencies devised to ensure that all aid would be monitored and audited.

Sharon Renews Threat to Oust Arafat; Raids in Gaza
Reuters, 20 October 2003
By Matt Spetalnick and Nidal al-Mughrabi
JERUSALEM/GAZA (Reuters) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Monday renewed Israel's threat to "remove" Yasser Arafat, just hours after Israeli warplanes and helicopters killed two militants and a bystander in air strikes in Gaza. Despite that, Sharon said in a policy speech he remained committed to a U.S.-backed Middle East "road map" and saw a real chance for progress toward a peace settlement with the Palestinians in coming months.

It works in America...
Bush Evokes Fear of Terror and Nukes During Asia Trip
By Howard LaFranchi
Christian Science Monitor, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: President Bush takes part in an Asian economic summit in Bangkok Monday, but there - as on the rest of his eight-day, six-country Asia trip - his emphasis will be on terrorism, security, and weapons proliferation. The president's focus represents both a new direction for relations with the region, and a tacit recognition that Asia presents many of the gravest security threats on the globe.
SEE ALSO: Why Are Osama Tapes So Conveniently Timed for Bush? (CBS)

Eight Marines Charged With Abusing Prisoners in Iraq
By Maxim Zniazkov
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), 20 October 2003
EXCERPTS: The US military has charged eight Marine reservists, including two officers, with brutal treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war that may have resulted in a man's death.... It is the second time in about three months US troops have been accused of brutality and abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The homicide and other charges were filed at Camp Pendleton in California on Thursday, but no date has been set for a court martial.

A must-read, two-part look at torture in the 'War on Terror'
The Persuaders: Moral Dilemmas in Interrogating al-Qaeda
By Mark Bowden
Guardian (UK), 20 October 2003
EXCERPT: These days, we hear a lot about America's overpowering military technology; about the professionalism of its warriors; about the sophistication of its weaponry, eavesdropping and telemetry, but right now the most vital weapon in its arsenal may well be the art of interrogation. To counter an enemy who relies on stealth and surprise, the most valuable tool is information, and often the only source of that information is the enemy himself. Men, like Sheikh Mohammed, who have been taken alive in this war, are classic candidates for the most cunning practices of this dark art. Intellectual, sophisticated, deeply religious and well trained, they present a perfect challenge for the interrogator. Getting at the information they possess could allow us to thwart major attacks, unravel their organisation, and save thousands of lives. They and their situation pose one of the strongest arguments in modern times for the use of torture.

Bush's Fantasies Guide Failure to Negotiate with North Korea
By Leon V. Sigal
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
November/December 2003 Issue
EXCERPT: Japan, Russia, China, and South Korea - nearly everyone is willing, if not anxious, to talk with North Korea - everyone, that is, except for the United States. "North Korea is developing nuclear arms and missile technology," reports Leon V. Sigal, "but Bush is doing nothing effective to stop it." Instead, the administration hopes the North will collapse.
SEE ALSO: Bush Rules Out North Korea Peace Pact (SMH)
SEE ALSO: Bush Taking New Approach to North Korea (NYT)

U.S. Still World Leader in Arms Sales
Agence France-Presse, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: The United States holds a 40.3 per cent market share in arms sales, raking in $10.241 billion from sales in 2002, according to the IISS annual report The Military Balance 2003-2004, on arms around the world.

Israel Used Excessive Force in Rafah
Haaretz Editorial, 20 October 2003
EXCERPT:...There is nothing in the justification of Israel's position that can sweepingly justify the military activity underway on the ground - neither its dimensions nor the character of the operation, which appears to be violent and arbitrary. So far, the operation has led to the deaths of two children, aged 8 and 12, and apparently other innocents, as well. The operation has destroyed the homes of hundreds of people, who unluckily lived along the border and their homes were searched by soldiers looking for the tunnels. In some cases, homes were demolished because tunnels were indeed found under them. But in other cases, it's been reported, multi-storey buildings were toppled for no reason.
SEE ALSO: Islamic Voices for Human Rights (Tikkun)

18-19 October 2003

Bremer's Plan Is No Marshall Plan
Susan E. Rice, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy and Governance Studies
The Brookings Institution, 16 October 2003
EXCERPT: The hallmark of the Marshall Plan was the requirement that European countries come together to determine their reconstruction priorities and devise a common plan for meeting them. Remember George C. Marshall's words in 1947: "It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so." The goal, in other words, was not just to spend aid dollars but to provide an incentive for former adversaries to form partnerships that could endure after U.S. assistance had ended. As a result, Europe followed the road of cooperation all the way to the European Union, leaving behind centuries of war.

Stretching the Evidence
Michael E. O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution
South China Morning Post, October 11, 2003
EXCERPT: All that said, we should call a spade a spade—Mr Kay's report hurts the Bush administration and the United States. The demonstrable lack of an imminent threat means that, at a minimum, President George W. Bush did not have to be in such a hurry to wage war almost unilaterally. The opinion of the international community deserved to be heard—and it was not. As a result, international law has suffered, the legitimacy of the war has been degraded, and the postwar effort is requiring far more troops and money from the US than it might have otherwise. Most of all, the image of the US as a fair-minded country that leads in security policy without ignoring the wishes of its friends, allies and neutral countries has suffered greatly. There are, however, several points to make. ...the Bush administration made three main mistakes, at least some of them deliberate, which went beyond these commonly shared errors. First, it suggested a more imminent chemical and biological threat than the evidence warranted. Second, it exaggerated the state of Iraq's nuclear programme. It took questionable