23 April 2004

Debtor Nation: US Kept Afloat by Enormous Foreign Lending
By William Greider
The Nation, 22 April 2004
EXCERPT: The backstory for this election year lacks the urgency of war or of defeating George W. Bush but focuses on a most fateful question: When will this hemorrhaging debtor nation be compelled to pull back from profligate consumption and resign its role as "buyer of last resort" for the global economy? The smart money assumes such a momentous reckoning probably won't occur in time to disrupt Bush's re-election campaign, but it may well become the dominating crisis in the next presidential term, whoever is elected. At that point, the United States will lose its aura of unilateral superiority, and globalization will be forced to undergo wrenching change. The American economy, in other words, is in much deeper trouble than most people realize.

Bush Claims Workers Win as Administration Moves to Deny Overtime Pay to Millions
By Matt Bivens
The Nation, 22 April 2004
EXCERPT: It's easy to say "workers win" -- and the short Labor Department press release does so again and again, in a shrill effort to convince someone. But consider just that America's unions (workers) oppose the changes -- while groups representing employers have been publicly salivating for them. That alone should tell you which way the money flow is headed: Out of workers' pockets, and into The Man's. In fact, that's the subtext of even the Labor Department's lame little press release: It turns out workers were suffering "confusion" about their overtime rights and that this was "generating wasteful class action litigation." The press release quotes Secretary Chao as saying, "With the ŒFairPay' rule"-- yes, they've even focus-grouped up another catchily misleading label, a la "Healthy Forests" or "Clear Skies" -- "With the ŒFairPay' rule, we are restoring overtime to what it was intended to be: fair pay for workers, instead of a lawsuit lottery." While we're still scratching our heads, wondering if frivolous overtime- pay-related law suits are really such a national burden, the press release moves on to another big triumph and mocks the existing overtime rules: "Under the 50-year-old regulations, only workers earning less than $8,060 annually were guaranteed overtime." Now maybe there is some sort of ignored legalistic-hogwashestic sense in which that is true. But c'mon: how many Americans get denied overtime on grounds that they earn more than $8,000 a year? Exactly how grateful are we supposed to be to the Bush Administration for solving this non-existent problem?

EEO Commission to Allow Insurance Cuts for Retired Employees
By ROBERT PEAR
New York Times, 23 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted Thursday to allow employers to reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they become eligible for Medicare at age 65. The agency approved a final rule saying that such cuts do not violate the civil rights law banning age discrimination. The vote was 3 to 1, with Republicans lining up in favor of the rule and a Democrat opposing it. Employers and some labor unions supported the change, saying it would help preserve coverage for early retirees. But AARP, which represents millions of Americans age 50 and older, strenuously objected. The new rule creates a potentially explosive political issue, because it will create anxiety for many of the 12 million Medicare beneficiaries who also receive health benefits from their former employers.

Science Group Says U.S. Budget Plan Would Harm Research
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: The nation's largest general science group said Thursday that the Bush administration's proposed budget for the next five years could cut research financing at 21 of the 24 federal agencies that engage in it. Among fields that would most likely be hurt, the organization said, are physics, medicine, oceanography, astronomy, geology, chemistry, psychology, biology, climatology, anthropology, ecology, mathematics, archaeology, meteorology, sociology and energy research.

Condoleezza's Crimes
The esteemed Dr. Rice revealed that she is as stupid as anyone in the White House- with the possible exception of George.
The Black Commentator, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: Although the 9/11 Commission will not lay a glove on her, Condoleezza Rice is finished as a Black political asset of the White Man’s (War) Party. Colin Powell, a much smarter and cagier opportunist, will likely escape this administration still clutching his devalued aura, having hoarded some small measure of political capital for himself. This is not true for Condoleezza Rice. Her complete and abject identification with her master leaves Rice with nothing of her own to claim. “Don’t write her political epitaph yet,” says commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson. If Hutchinson means that Rice will always have a job with the Bush family (she served the father, too) or with Chevron-Texaco Oil (where she worked between Bushes), then we agree. Rice’s selfless renderings to the white and wealthy have earned her a lifetime of…more of the same. Should she crack under the weight of her own and her masters’ lies – as sometimes seems imminent – there is a commodious attic in one of the Bush domiciles where “Condi” can be safely stored. However, gone are the heady days when rich rightwing society floated cocktail dreams of Condoleezza for the Senate or Vice President in 2004, and even Condi for President in ’08. "Hollywood couldn't come up with a candidate as good as she is," said California GOP Chairman Shawn Steele, back in May 2001. "She's emerging as the most popular and most admired woman in America right now." Rice has since rumpled in the heat, no longer Best In Show, so to speak. ...We know that Rice was, by virtue of her position, the person most culpable for dismissing the threat from al-Qaida: "I asked, on January 24 in writing to Condi, urgently for a meeting on cabinet level – the principal's committee – to review the [anti-terror] plan and I was told I can't have that. It had to go to the deputies. They had a principals meeting on September 4. Contrast that with the principal's meeting on Iraq, on February 1. So what was urgent for them was Iraq. Al-Qaida was not important to them." – Former anti-terror czar Richard Clark, The Guardian.
And, thanks to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and others, we know that Rice and the rest of the oil-slicks at the White House chose to spend their pre-9/11 quality time studying petro-maps of Iraq. [BWUSA italics]

Pentagon Angered by Photos of War Dead
By Randall Chase
Associated Press, 23 April 2004
EXCERPT: A Web site published dozens of photographs of American war dead arriving at the nation's largest military mortuary, prompting the Pentagon to order an information clampdown Thursday. The photographs were released last week to First Amendment activist Russ Kick, who had filed a Freedom of Information Act request to receive the images. Air Force officials initially denied the request but decided to release the photos after Kick appealed their decision. After Kick posted more than 350 photographs on his Web site, the Defense Department barred the further release of the photographs to media outlets.
SEE ALSO:
Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken
By BILL CARTER
New York Times, 23 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Pentagon's ban on making images of dead soldiers' homecomings at military bases public was briefly relaxed yesterday, as hundreds of photographs of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base were released on the Internet by a Web site dedicated to combating government secrecy. The Web site, the Memory Hole (http://www.thememoryhole.org/), had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware, the destination for most of the bodies. The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command's decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.
SEE ALSO: The Somber Task of Honoring the Fallen (Seattle Times)

The President May be Pre-Programmed, Which is Why the Media Can't Be
By Russ Baker
TomPaine.com, 22 April 2004
EXCERPT: Has this immature president spawned a sudden maturation of his inquisitors? Recent evidence indicates just that. And we can only hope that this growth spurt continues. Since the day George Bush walked into the White House, he's been the beneficiary of an overly respectful press corps that seems to have assumed that Bush's obvious limitations required a considerable degree of tolerance. Yet at the president's recent‹and rare‹prime-time press conference, reporters startled those of us resigned to yet another silly exercise in mutually self-serving faux engagement. One after another, they asked questions that had pop and verve, and when the president did not answer, they essentially followed up on each others' questions. Perhaps global crisis‹and the sight of a steady stream of American body bags ‹has finally granted nervous newsniks the cover they need against the claim that a rigorous skeptic is a biased liberal.

On Earth Day, EPA Plots to Weaken Clean Air Laws
The Daily Mis-Lead, 22 April 2004
EXCERPT: On Earth Day 2002, President Bush said that "we should do more at the federal level" to deal with air pollution1. But today on Earth Day, the Bush Administration has invited oil executives to a meeting with Environmental Protection Agency officials to discuss reducing air pollution standards. Instead of proposing higher fuel efficiency standards or conservation measures to deal with high gas prices, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Bush Administration is meeting with oil executives to consider a plan to reduce pollution standards for gasoline2. The plan, which would permit more dangerous sulfur toxins in the air, would cut only a nickel off the price of a gallon of gas - and not in every market. Meanwhile, sulfur levels in the air would be permitted to rise, increasing smog and potentially raising the incidence of serious health problems.

I'm John Kerry and I Approved This Fantasy Message
By Matthew Miller
Washington Monthly, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: It's hard to pick which piece of White House re-election propaganda most insults our intelligence - there's so much to choose from! There's President Bush's "compassion" hoax - that is, pretending to care about those in need yet looking the other way while (say) a record 44 million Americans go without health coverage. There's the deficit hoax - that is, pitching us on the absurd notion that Bush is fiscally responsible even as he's squandered record surpluses and is racking up the biggest deficits in history. But the winner (at least for now - the night is still young!) has to be the ad Bush is running in 18 swing states to "persuade" Americans that John Kerry doesn't support our troops in Iraq.

22 April 2004

Americans Pessimistic On Terror War
AP-Ipsos Poll in NYT, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: Half of those surveyed in the AP-Ipsos poll said they have concerns that terrorists may be winning, and a fifth of those polled felt strongly that is the case. ``Terrorists are winning the war for the hearts and minds of the people in the Mideast,'' said Christine Wyatt, a 52-year-old church deacon in Clarkston, Mich. More than 30 months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, two-thirds of Americans acknowledge some concern that terrorists may be recruiting faster than the United States can keep up, according to the poll, conducted for AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs. A third of those polled feel strongly this is the case; another third say they have at least some worries. ``I think we're twitching on the edge of Armageddon; a lot of people I work with feel the same way,'' said Michael Miller, a 49-year-old software tester from Las Cruces, N.M. He rejected the idea that terrorists are winning the fight, but he added, ``They're not losing it, either.'' Fears about an attack against this country remain high. Two-thirds in the poll said it was likely terrorists would strike before the November elections. And one-third said it was likely there would be an attack at one of the political conventions this summer. Fears about the war on terrorism may be fueled by growing worries about the conflict in Iraq, which has been described by the Bush administration as a front line of the war on terror. The number of those who think the military action in Iraq has increased the long-term risk of terrorism in the United States have increased to 54 percent now, up from 40 percent in December, the poll found. The people who say the Bush administration made the right decision to go to war in Iraq, 48 percent, are now about even with those who think the administration made a mistake, 49 percent. In December, two-thirds said the administration made the right decision.

Bush holds 2.5 million military personnel hostage to an otherwise questionable policy...
Unwavering Support of Bush War Policies Linked to Support of Troops
NPR's Morning Edition, 22 April 2004
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) talk about Bush administration policies and the concerns of their constituents. Both senators have been interviewed on Morning Edition periodically, since they started their freshman terms in the Senate early last year. Hear Sen. Pryor sound clip.

Supreme Court Hears the Case of Guantánamo
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
New York Times, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Supreme Court appeared distinctly unreceptive Tuesday to the Bush administration's argument that the federal courthouse doors must remain closed to the foreign detainees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. In the first of three cases this month on the right to judicial review of those deemed enemy combatants, most justices seemed to regard the World War II-era precedent that is the cornerstone of the administration's strategy as ambiguous, irrelevant or even counter to the administration's position.

This missing nuclear materials thing: it's contagious!
Highly Radioactive Fuel Rods Missing at Vermont Nuke Plant
By Wilson Ring
Associated Press, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: Two pieces of a highly radioactive fuel rod are missing from a Vermont nuclear plant, and engineers planned to search onsite for the nuclear material, officials said Wednesday. The fuel rod was removed in 1979 from the Vermont Yankee reactor, which is currently shut down for refueling and maintenance. Remote-control cameras will be used to search a spent fuel pool on the property, officials said. "We do not think there is a threat to the public at this point. The great probability is this material is still somewhere in the pool," said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan. But Sheehan said it was possible the spent fuel was mixed in with a shipment of low-level nuclear waste and ended up at a repository in South Carolina, or a facility in Washington state. He said it was also possible it was taken to a nuclear testing facility run by General Electric, which designed the plant. The material would be fatal to anyone who came in contact with it without being properly shielded, Sheehan said. Spent nuclear fuel also could be used by terrorists to construct so-called dirty bombs that would spread deadly radiation with conventional explosives.
REVISITED: UN Nuclear Watchdog Says Material, Buildings Gone Missing in Iraq (AFP)

What Colin Powell Saw but Didn't Say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian, 22 April 2004
EXCERPT: "History? We won't know," George Bush tells Bob Woodward. "We'll all be dead." But in his book, Plan of Attack, Woodward's facts move the past from the shadows, adding significant new documentation to the story of the rush to war in Iraq. The serious constitutional issues and governmental abuses, the methods and even the continuity of some personnel that Woodward catalogues evoke memories of the Reagan Iran-contra scandal. That involved a network of aides outsourcing US foreign policy to circumvent the separation of powers - selling missiles to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan contras. The Iraq war was conceived by the president and his war cabinet in an apparent effort to evade constitutional checks and balances. In Iran-contra, the national security council, CIA and Pentagon were stealthily exploited from within; in Iraq, they were abused from the top. When the Iran-contra scandal was revealed, the Reagan administration was placed into receivership by the old Republican establishment. Neoconservatives and adventurers, criminal or not, were purged, from Elliott Abrams to Richard Perle. Now they are at the centre of power.

Bush Fails History...Jefferson Predicted Iraq
By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon thought they could bomb Vietnam into accepting democracy. George W. Bush thinks he can do it with Iraq. But the first American president to consider how best to grow democracies - Thomas Jefferson - had some very different thoughts on the issue. LBJ and Bush would have done well to listen to his thoughtful words in a letter he wrote on February 14, 1815, to his old friend in France, the Marquis de Lafayette. Discussing the French Revolution, the Terror that followed, and the reign of Napoleon, Jefferson noted that building democracy is an organic process: The democracy movement in the colonies had been fermenting for a century prior to Jefferson's birth. "A full measure of liberty is not now perhaps to be expected by your nation," Jefferson wrote, about the democracy movement within France, "nor am I confident they are prepared to preserve it. More than a generation will be requisite, under the administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in the general mass of the people, and their habituation to an independent security of person and property, before they will be capable of estimating the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred adherence to the principles on which it rests for preservation." He added that it's nearly impossible to force democracy on a people, and the consequences of trying could be disastrous. "Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes, with an unprepared people, a tyranny still, of the many, the few, or the one."

Scientists Rebut Administration Response to Report on Its Abuse of Scientific Integrity
BushGreenWatch, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a point-by-point rebuttal yesterday to an April 2 White House statement defending the Bush Administration against claims of widespread manipulation of science and egregious conflicts of interest in policymaking. The White House statement, issued by John H. Marburger, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, came in response to a February 18 UCS report, Scientific Integrity in Policymaking, signed by 62 of the nation's preeminent scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates. But the Marburger statement, according to UCS, lacked any substantive arguments, included inaccurate statements, and sidestepped several important issues. "The White House document fails to refute the serious allegations that the Bush Administration has engaged in activities that undermine scientific integrity in policy making," concludes the 13-page UCS analysis. "It is unfortunate that the administration is not taking the concerns of the scientific community seriously, as these issues have significant consequences for the public's health and well-being."
SEE ALSO: Analysis of White House Claims (Union of Concerned Scientists)

Kerry Highly Praised in Military Records
By Nedra Pickler
Associated Press, 22 April 2004
EXCERPT: Records of John Kerry's Vietnam War service released Wednesday show a highly praised naval officer who volunteered for a dangerous assignment and at one point was "unofficially credited with 20 enemy killed in action.'' With conservative critics questioning his service, the Democratic presidential candidate posted more than 120 pages of military records on his campaign Web site. Several describe him as a gutsy commander and detail some of the actions that won him three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star.
SEE ALSO: Bush Campaign Takes Heinz Contributions but Slams Kerry over His Wife's Connection to the Company (AP)
SEE ALSO: BushWhackedUSA: The Blog
SEE ALSO: White House Reveals Bush's Top-Secret AWOL Mission (BushWhackedUSA)

Emerging plutocracy...
Wealthy Fill Openings In Top Colleges
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: At prestigious universities around the country, from flagship state colleges to the Ivy League, more and more students from upper-income families are edging out those from the middle class, according to university data. The change is fast becoming one of the biggest issues in higher education.

Pentagon Deleted Rumsfeld Comment
Remark to Saudi About War's Certainty Is Not in Internet Transcript of Interview
By Mike Allen
Washington Post, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq. At issue was a passage in Woodward's "Plan of Attack," an account published this week of Bush's decision making about the war, quoting Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January 2003 that he could "take that to the bank" that the invasion would happen. The comment came in a key moment in the run-up to the war, when Rumsfeld and other officials were briefing Bandar on a military plan to attack and invade Iraq, and pointing to a top-secret map that showed how the war plan would unfold. The book reports that the meeting with Bandar was held on Jan. 11, 2003, in Vice President Cheney's West Wing office. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended. Pentagon officials omitted the discussion of the meeting from a transcript of the Woodward interview that they posted on the Defense Department's Web site Monday. Rumsfeld told reporters at a briefing yesterday that he may have used the phrase "take that to the bank" but that no final decision had been made to go to war.

Books: Plan of Attack
Interview of Bob Woodward
Washington Post, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: "Plan of Attack," the newest book from Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward, chronicles a turning point in history as President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launch a preemptive attack on Iraq, toppling Saddam Hussein and taking over the country. From in-depth interviews and documents, Woodward provides an authoritative narrative of the administration's actions over two years and examines the causes and consequences of the most controversial war since Vietnam. What emerges is an astonishingly intimate portrait of the President, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, other members of the war council and the White House staff, as well as key foreign leaders ranging from British Prime Minister Blair to Russian President Putin.
SEE ALSO: That Woodward Magic (Washington Post)
SEE ALSO: AUDIO LINK  Journalist Bob Woodward
NPR's Fresh Air, 21 April 2004
SEE ALSO: AUDIO LINK Woodward on Bush's Plan of Attack, NPR Morning Edition
SEE ALSO: AUDIO LINK  Linguist Geoff Nunberg & 'Blogging' NPR's Fresh Air, 21 April 2004

Turning Point
George Bush's global holy war threatens our Presidency—and perhaps the future of our nation
by Sydney H. Schanberg
Village Voice, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: Who can dispute that Americans of all political and personal beliefs can now see that the nation is at a turning point in its history. It is hard to think otherwise. The president has led us into a war of civilizations and cultures. He says he is guided in all decisions by "the Almighty." He has done nothing that would give us reason to doubt that he truly believe this in his bones. Eerie, is it not, that the Al Qaeda killers who follow Osama bin Laden and seek to destroy the United States claim they have God on their side, too. Is this an argument for moral equivalence? Absolutely not. Moreover, moral equivalency is not the grave issue before the American citizenry today. The state of our presidency—and perhaps the future of our country—is. The president, who was led to born-again religion by Texas evangelists some years ago, after a wayward youth, spoke again of the will of God at his recent speech-cum-press conference. Referring to the war in Iraq, he said, "[F]reedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world." Then he added: "And, as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation" to carry out the Lord's mission.

21 April 2004

War May Require More Money Soon
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: Intense combat in Iraq is chewing up military hardware and consuming money at an unexpectedly rapid rate -- depleting military coffers, straining defense contractors and putting pressure on Bush administration officials to seek a major boost in war funding long before they had hoped. Since Congress approved an $87 billion defense request last year, the administration has steadfastly maintained that military forces in Iraq will be sufficiently funded until early next year. President Bush's budget request for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 included no money for Iraqi operations, and his budget director, Joshua B. Bolten, said no request would come until January at the earliest. But military officials, defense contractors and members of Congress say that worsening U.S. fortunes in Iraq have dramatically changed the equation and more money will be needed soon. This comes as lawmakers, returning from their spring break, voice unease about the mounting violence and what they say is the lack of a clearly enunciated strategy for victory.

Patriot Act, Strong-Armed Through Congress, Needs Wholesale Changes
By Iqbal Hossain
Salt Lake Tribune, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: The extraordinarily complicated act was agreed to in late October 2001 even though many lawmakers had not read the final version. In the wee hours of the morning of Oct. 24, the House leadership replaced a compromise version of the bill, arrived at after long negotiation between Democrats and Republicans on that chamber's judiciary committee, with a sweeping piece of legislation that weighed in at almost 350 pages. Lawmakers voted later that morning.
    Now many regret the haste. Don Young, the powerful Republican representative from Alaska, has said, "It was stupid . . . it was what you call 'emotional voting' because we didn't follow through, we didn't study it." For instance, in what many consider to be the most telling example of the law's problem provisions, Section 215 permits the FBI to obtain special court orders from a secret intelligence court for the production of a huge array of business, personal and medical records, under dramatically more lenient standards than before. Attorney General John Ashcroft testified before Congress that this could be used to obtain educational records, e-mail, and even genetic information.
    As a professor of criminology, I know that information like this can be crucial to effective law enforcement. But here's the problem: The provision does not require criminal probable cause, nor does it even require a showing of probable cause to believe that the subject of the court order is acting as an "agent of a foreign power," the pre-Patriot standard. Rather, agents seeking these court orders simply need assert that the request is relevant to an ongoing intelligence or terrorism investigation. The judge presumably then has no grounds to deny the application.
    Accordingly, Section 215 court orders do not require the FBI to have any specific information that the person investigated is engaged in any wrongdoing, let alone terrorism. Finally, such investigative tools come with a blanket gag order, meaning that a librarian, for example, who is approached by the FBI to produce the list of everyone who has borrowed a Quran over the past three weeks, cannot tell anybody, not even a lawyer.
   Another revealing problem with the Patriot Act is Section 213, which expands federal access to so-called "sneak and peek," or delayed-notification, search warrants. Prior to October 2001, the government could make use of such warrants -- which allowed agents to enter your home, search your belongings and peruse the contents of your computer hard drive without telling you for weeks or months -- as long as they could show to a judge that notice would endanger evidence, lives, or create a risk of flight.
    The Patriot Act, however, put this power in statute and added a catch-all justification for delaying notice: if it would unduly delay a trial or have another adverse result, which any prosecutor worth his salt could easily argue. While, at first blush, this might seem appropriate, I can tell you that, coming from a place like Bangladesh, when the government makes extraordinary powers ordinary, it endangers democracy.
    In response to concerns such as these, conservative Republican Sen. Larry Craig from Idaho and liberal Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois have introduced the Security and Freedom Ensured (SAFE) Act of 2003. The act would bring the new powers granted to the Department of Justice in the Patriot Act back in line with the Constitution by adding modest new judicial review and other reasonable checks on abuse. It is a necessary first step toward bringing the counterterrorism law back in line with our principles and our Constitution.
    In the aftermath of 9-11, the Bush administration was quick with rhetoric such as, "We will not let the terrorists change our way of life." However, if we keep the Patriot Act in its current form, without modest and necessary revisions and improvements, that is exactly what they will have succeeded in doing.
SEE ALSO: USA Patriot Act (ALCU)
SEE ALSO:
Patriot Act Blasted
Katrina Irwin
WROC-TV, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Patriot Act has been used to search businesses and homes in the Rochester area. Many who have seen it work first-hand say it gives police too much leeway. News 8 Now's Katrina Irwin reports on why they want Congress to let the Patriot Act run out. "I feel, and my clients feel same way, they're being deprived of certain rights that they would have...the Patriot Act just takes this away. It gives the government the opportunity and the right to go in and do whatever they want. And I'm sure that all of us would object to that," said defense attorney Rudy LePore. LePore represents the Yemeni businessmen raided by the FBI last December. His clients still haven't been charged with anything and he says that is made possible by the Patriot Act. "They can come in, take all your books and records and then do what they want with them, without any advanced notice. It seems that they're picking on particular group of people," said LePore.
SEE ALSO: Local Group Condemns Patriot Act (Capital News 9)

Yale Locks Up Bush's Homeland Security Spending
Michael Hann
The Guardian, 21 April 2004
EXCERPT: You might have expected New York City to have been pampered by Washington since 9/11. If so, you would be wrong, wrote Jack Newfield in the April edition of the Nation, the voice of US liberalism. Despite being the city most at risk of terrorist attacks, New York received just $5.87 for each resident in homeland security funding. In per capita terms, it comes 49th out of the 50 cities that receive anti-terrorist funding.
"Compare that with $35.80 for Pittsburgh," wrote Newfield. "But then, [the US homeland security secretary] Tom Ridge was governor of Pennsylvania. Or look at Florida, where Jeb Bush is governor. Miami gets $52.82 per person ... What's the biggest recipient of any US city, at $77.92 per person? New Haven, Connecticut. Is Yale a high-priority target because both Bushes are alumni?"

Study Urges New Strategy for Safeguarding the Sea
By FELICITY BARRINGER
New York Times, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: "Our oceans and coasts are in serious trouble," the commission's chairman, Adm. James D. Watkins, a former chief of naval operations, said at a news conference here today. The existing management system, which spreads responsibility across what he called "a Byzantine patchwork" of federal and state agencies and local fishing councils, "is simply not up to the task" of preventing degradation, Admiral Watkins said. The goal of the governmental restructuring that he called for would be to use what he called "ecosystem-based management" and to abandon the current practice of assessing the prospects and perils of each species or habitat individually. The report also recommended doubling the current federal research spending on oceans and establishing an Ocean Policy Trust Fund, financed with up to $4 billion annually drawn from royalties from Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas exploration and exploitation. Going against the conservative grain at both the local and international levels, the report recommended that the powerful local and regional fisheries management councils be forced to follow the guidance of their sister scientific and statistical councils on fishing limits and called on the Congress and the Bush administration to end the country's 22-year refusal to officially join the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. ...John Adams, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a major environmental group, welcomed the report and in an interview would not dwell on any differences he had with specific recommendations. "The overall message," he said, "is that there's a crisis out there and it's a very important crisis because we're losing a food supply and a huge economic base for this country, and unless we get to it quickly this will start to disappear very quickly."

Perils of the Dead Center
by Roger K. Smith
Common Dreams, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: It’s traditional in presidential politics for Democratic candidates to tack toward the center once they’ve secured the party’s nomination. In the current election year, however, this conventional strategy may prove unwise or even disastrous for Senator John Kerry. ...Like most Bush opponents, I find Ralph Nader’s decision to enter the ‘04 race distressingly tone-deaf. Bush/Cheney have by now proven demonstrably different from Clinton/Gore in numerous respects, weakening Nader’s contention that the two parties are all but indistinguishable. If he wanted to, Kerry could probably bump him from the race with a few tactful but forthright statements, perhaps some artfully-plagiarized lines from Nader’s speeches, a few campaign promises. I’m hoping he’ll try, since he needs all 2.9 million of those votes. But I’m not holding my breath. Instead of courting progressive voters, I fear Kerry may actually drive many of them back to Nader with his centrist strategy. If this happens, again, he’ll have nobody to blame but himself. The $200 million GOP machine will not be defeated by a lukewarm lesser-of-two-evils. This year of all years, we need a candidate who is not a Republicrat.

His Masters House; Colin Powell, the Soldier Sell-Out
By Sheila Samples
OpEdNews.com, 17 April 2004
EXCERPT: Colin Luther Powell is a good soldier. Few know just how good, because Powell is a walking dichotomy -- very adept at showing only his illuminated side to moonstruck supporters. Americans who so generously bestow political capital upon Powell are either unaware of, or do not believe, the deadly murkiness of his dark side. They see Powell striding confidently across the international landscape -- compassionate, moderate, diplomatic -- issuing gentle, tongue-clucking "warnings" to those who resist the gift of U.S. hegemony. They fail to note the chaos and the tangle of bodies that inevitably pile up behind Powell in whatever country he approaches with outstretched hand... Americans are not only blind, they appear to be deaf to those who chronicle Powell's evolution from a cunning eager-to-please young officer on a military fast track to a cold-blooded unrepentant shock-and-awe executioner. What Powell has done -- is doing -- for those he serves is public record. Why he would do these things was put into powerful perspective last year by singer Harry Belafonte, who pointed out http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/10/15/belafonte.powell/ that Powell, whose initial stance on policies is to be admired, always "sells out" when pressured. "There's an old saying," Belafonte said, "In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and there were those slaves that lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master...exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him."

Negroponte, a Torturer's Friend
by Matthew Rothschild
Progressive Magazine, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: Bush's announcement that he intends to appoint John Negroponte to be the U.S. ambassador to Iraq should appall anyone who respects human rights. Negroponte, currently U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., was U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s and was intimately involved with Reagan's dirty war against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Reagan waged much of that illegal contra war from Honduras, and Negroponte was his point man. According to a detailed investigation the Baltimore Sun did in 1995, Negroponte covered up some of the most grotesque human rights abuses imaginable. The CIA organized, trained, and financed an army unit called Battalion 316, the paper said. Its specialty was torture. And it kidnapped, tortured, and killed hundreds of Hondurans, the Sun reported. It "used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." The U.S. embassy in Honduras knew about the human rights abuses but did not want this embarrassing information to become public, the paper said. "Determined to avoid questions in Congress, U.S. officials in Honduras concealed evidence of human rights abuses," the Sun reported. Negroponte has denied involvement, and prior to his confirmation by the Senate for his U.N. post, he testified, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."

20 April 2004

Well, Ideally...
Bob Woodward's Bush is no idealist -- just an incompetent.
By Michael Tomasky
The American Prospect, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: ...My overwhelming reaction to the 60 Minutes segment on Bob Woodward's new book and the reports and leaks about the book over the weekend is that Woodward's account shows a man who just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to do this job. This may not strike some readers as a newsflash, I know, but Woodward does shed some new light on the question. Bush took this country in a radically new foreign-policy direction without really thinking through the consequences of his actions; without reckoning in a serious way with the question "What if we're wrong?"; without seeking the input of aides who might have disagreed or painted a more complex picture than the one he wanted painted for him. It's a profoundly irresponsible way to govern. What his defenders will continue to call his "idealism" -- the belief that God put him in the Oval Office to spread liberty's bounty across the globe and so on -- is in fact a rather shocking shallowness. It's fine and indeed admirable for a world leader to speak this way, to aspire to greatness and fairness for his nation and for the world; Tony Blair did so in the run-up to the war, and his pro-war speeches were considerably more convincing than Bush's. But clearly, Bush actually believes this and looks at global geopolitics this way. This, too, might be fine, if it were balanced by more hard-headed and skeptical assessments, but Bush seems to have embraced it as a totalizing explanation. And as such, it has barred other interpretations of world events at the door. Even this might be fine, if the consequences had not been so tragic. But once Bush transformed himself in his mind into God's messenger of liberty, things like the State Department's multi-volume report on post-war Iraq -- a report that predicted many of the tragedies that have come to pass -- became irrelevant. What was the research of mere mortals next to the fiery inscriptions of God, emblazoned across his welcoming mind?

Which Powell Is Which?
New York Times, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: Which Powell Is Which? Colin Powell was never your average secretary of state. He was the larger-than-life general turned statesman who coined a doctrine of warfare and was spoken of seriously, even longingly, as a potential candidate for president. But he also was the faithful soldier who prized loyalty, sometimes too much, and had an overly refined sense of the governmental feeding chain. The question is, which one became secretary of state? ...What we seem to have once again with Mr. Powell is a desire to have it both ways, to be seen as a loyal member of the Bush team, but also as a wise man who knew all along that the Iraq war would be a mistake. If the Woodward version is correct, Mr. Powell should have spoken up more than a year ago. He had, in a way, prepared all his life to oppose the Iraq policy. Like most soldiers, he'd always been reluctant to go to war, and the doctrine that bears his name is one that aims to restrict the country from any foreign adventure taken without overwhelming commitment — say, by an administration that was planning to launch an invasion and cut taxes at the same time. Mr. Powell, who apprenticed in the vicious parlor wars of the Reagan White House, has always played the spin game well. If the Woodward book is the version of inside-the-White-House history that Mr. Powell wanted people to believe, it has done nothing to burnish his reputation. Knowing that Mr. Powell thought the invasion was a bad idea doesn't make him look better — it makes his inaction puzzling and disappointing. It's an article of faith in Washington that Mr. Powell would not serve in a second Bush administration. The lasting impression may be this sense of disappointment in the secretary he could have been.

Bush Officials Deny Money Was Diverted for Iraq War
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and CARL HULSE
New York Times, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush administration on Monday denied a report in a new book that it secretly diverted money intended for the effort to prevent terrorism in 2002 to prepare for an invasion of Iraq. The book, "Plan of Attack," by Bob Woodward, asserted that President Bush left Congress largely in the dark when he approved $700-million worth of projects in July 2002 to prepare for the possibility of military action against Iraq. Democrats, in response to the assertions, raised questions about whether the administration had violated, at a minimum, the spirit of the laws providing money for battling terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. ..."Congress, which is supposed to control the purse strings, had no real knowledge or involvement, had not even been notified that the Pentagon wanted to reprogram money," Mr. Woodward wrote. The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, said the allegation that money was diverted, if proven, would illustrate a pattern on the part of the administration. "Reports that the Bush administration may have improperly diverted money appropriated for the effort to prevent terrorism in Afghanistan to begin preparations for the military campaign against Iraq are consistent with other examples of the administration's failure to deal openly with Congress," she said in a statement issued Monday evening. "The war against Iraq was conceived in secret, planned in secret, and may have been at least partly financed in secret," she said. "These reports make clear that Congress must be very careful in how much discretion it gives the administration over the use of funds in Afghanistan or Iraq." But many of the details about the money involved, and whether the administration had kept Congress properly informed, remained sketchy on Monday evening. The senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, called the report by Mr. Woodward "disturbing," but noted that lawmakers had given the administration "unprecedented flexibility" to spend the money on the basis that it would keep Congress informed.

Questions of Interest
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: For many years, advocates of tax cuts have insisted that the normal laws of supply and demand don't apply to the bond market, and that government borrowing — unlike borrowing by families or businesses — doesn't affect interest rates. But there's no argument among serious, nonideological economists. For example, a textbook by Gregory Mankiw, now the president's chief economist, declares — in italics — that "when the government reduces national saving by running a budget deficit, the interest rate rises."  The Congressional Budget Office estimates this year's structural budget deficit — what the deficit would be if cyclical factors like a depressed economy went away — at 3.9 percent of G.D.P. That's almost twice the average during the past 20 years. Standard estimates say this should push up 10-year interest rates by around one percentage point. Finally, there's the upside risk. As I've pointed out before, the twin U.S. budget and trade deficits would set alarm bells ringing if we were a third world country. For now, America gets the benefit of the doubt, but if financial markets decide that we have turned into a banana republic, the sky's the limit for interest rates. Now for the obvious point: many American families and businesses will be in big trouble if interest rates really do go as high as I'm suggesting. That's why the I.M.F. is urging the Fed to get the word out.

Guantánamo Cases Go to Supreme Court
Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: The US supreme court will intervene for the first time today in the detention of more than 600 prisoners at the Guantánamo naval base, taking up a case that could impose the first ground rules on the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror. Today's case is the first of three challenges to the administration's sweeping powers over the hundreds of men and boys held for more than two years without charge or access to lawyers at the US base in Cuba following the invasion of Afghanistan.

Congress to Open Hearings on Iraq Policy
By PAULINE JELINEK Associated Press Writer
AP, 19 April 2004
EXCERPT: Doubts about Bush administration policy in Iraq - past, present and future - take center stage at the Capitol with the start of hearings Tuesday. With casualties mounting and increased fears the United States lacks an effective plan for success, lawmakers are debating how America got into the dangerous predicament and how it will get out. "Time is rapidly running out on getting it right in Iraq," Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said recently. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he remains "steadfastly optimistic," adding, "We'll see our way through this." But worry about events in Iraq crosses party lines. Iraq is the topic before three committees this week. In three days of hearings beginning Tuesday, the Foreign Relations Committee looks at how U.S. occupation forces will transfer political power June 30 to an as-yet unnamed Iraqi government. Also set to start Tuesday are two days of hearings on the military part of the effort. Top Pentagon officials are testifying first before the Senate Armed Services Committee, then the House counterpart.

Kerry Hits Bush 'Sweetheart' Ties with Saudis
By Patricia Wilson
Reuters, 19 April 2004
EXCERPT: Democrat John Kerry on Monday voiced unwavering support for special U.S. ties with Israel and vowed to end "sweetheart relationships" with Arab countries like Saudi Arabia that he said funded terror. Courting the Jewish vote in Florida, the state at the center of the disputed 2000 election, the presumptive Democratic nominee cited a report that President Bush and his senior advisers made "a secret White House deal" with the Saudis to deliver lower gas prices. "Last night ... it was reported that in the Oval Office discussion around whether to invade Iraq that the president, the vice president (Dick Cheney), the secretary of defense (Donald Rumsfeld) made a deal with Saudi Arabia that would deliver lower gas prices," Kerry told a town hall meeting in Lake Worth. "But here's the catch," he said. "The American people would have to wait until the election, until November of 2004."
SEE ALSO: Kerry Accuses Bush of 'Secret Deal' With Saudis on Oil (NYT)
SEE ALSO:
Saudis Say Won't Use Oil to Influence U.S. Election
By Adam Entous and Tom Doggett
Reuters, 19 April 2004
EXCERPT: Saudi Arabia said Monday it will not use oil prices to try to sway the U.S. presidential election, denying an allegation that the kingdom would cut petroleum prices before November to boost President Bush's re-election bid. Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said in a television interview on Sunday that Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, promised Bush the Saudis would cut oil prices before November. Woodward, author of a new book on Bush's preparations for the Iraq war "Plan of Attack," said Prince Bandar pledged the Saudis would try to fine-tune oil prices to prime the U.S. economy for November's presidential election, a move they understood would favor Bush.

An I.R.S. Promotion for Bush at Tax Time
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
New York Times, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: As the deadline for filing tax returns approached, news releases from the Internal Revenue Service included a little something extra, a sentence promoting the administration's tax policies that said, "America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the president's policies are doing, or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation." ...The sentence about President Bush's tax policies showed up on four April 9 news releases that were labeled "April 15th Tax Day Reminders": "Treasury and I.R.S. Work To Make Paying Taxes a Little Easier," "The 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief Plans Will Impact Income Tax Returns Filed," "Millions of Individuals and Families Are Benefiting From Tax Relief Plan" and "Tax Relief Reinvigorated the U.S. Economy and Is Driving Job Creation."

Nader Asks for Antiwar Vote and Urges Iraq Pullout Date
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
New York Times, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: Ralph Nader made an explicit appeal on Monday for votes from the antiwar movement and called for the United States to announce a firm date for the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. Mr. Nader, running for president as an independent, said that President Bush was a "messianic militarist" and that Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the probable Democratic presidential nominee, was "stuck in the Iraq quagmire the way Bush is." Speaking at a breakfast meeting with reporters, Mr. Nader said he was the only reasonable choice for "the peace movement in this country." Mr. Nader said that between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush, Mr. Kerry was preferable because "he would slow the deterioration of the country," but that the "difference is not significantly sufficient." He said he would like to meet soon with Mr. Kerry — an occasion the senator has said he would welcome — and hoped the two of them could agree on "collaborative positions" in areas like the environment, health insurance, corporate crime and taxes.

Pentagon to Award $25 Bln in Contracts
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
Reuters, 19 April 2004
EXCERPT: The Pentagon is poised to award defense contracts valued at over $25 billion in the next few months, including a $6 billion deal to build the Army's next spy plane expected in early May. Top U.S. defense firms are vying for major military jobs such as building a new U.S. Navy ship, a joint missile and a satellite communications system -- all of which focus on joint use by military services, communications and intelligence operations. Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank, said the new weapons programs "are mostly about transforming the military by creating a networked force that does business in completely different ways."

Cheney Was Unwavering in Desire to Go to War
Tension Between Vice President and Powell Grew Deeper as Both Tried to Guide Bush's Decision
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post, 20 April 2004
EXCERPT: On April 10, 2003, Ken Adelman, a Reagan administration official and supporter of the Iraq war, published an op-ed article in The Washington Post headlined, " 'Cakewalk' Revisited," more or less gloating over what appeared to be the quick victory there, and reminding readers that 14 months earlier he had written that war would be a "cakewalk." He chastised those who had predicted disaster. "Taking first prize among the many frightful forecasters" was Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser in the first Bush administration. Adelman wrote that his own confidence came from having worked for Donald H. Rumsfeld three times and "from knowing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz for so many years."

19 April 2004

"No one could have imagined..."
NORAD Had Drills of Jets as Weapons
By Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri
USA TODAY, 19 April 2004
EXCERPT:  In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.
In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say. NORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred. It said the scenarios outlined were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide exercises. "Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft," the statement said. "These exercises tested track detection and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures." A White House spokesman said Sunday that the Bush administration was not aware of the NORAD exercises. But the exercises using real aircraft show that at least one part of the government thought the possibility of such attacks, though unlikely, merited scrutiny.

US Government Has Turned a Blind Eye When Big Business Has Supported the Enemy
By Torcuil Crichton
Sunday Herald Online, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush’s beleaguered administration makes much of cracking down on home-grown support of al-Qaeda and other terrorists. But it is now facing pressure to expand the search beyond individuals to businesses — especially mining or oil companies that operate in politically unstable parts of the world. This follows allegations that militant islamic group Abu Sayyaf was one of several Philippine groups, some with links to al-Qaeda, that were paid £1 million for protection by a small American mining company, Echo Bay Mines. Abu Sayyaf, which more often earns money by kidnapping for ransom, was implicated in the major bomb plot thwarted a fortnight ago in Manila. Echo Bay executives in Denver knew about the blood money, claims Allan Laird, former manager at the company’s Kingking gold mines on the island of Mindanao. The one-time engineer, a Bush voter in 2000, says he informed the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice last May and was brushed off. The allegations are reported in an article in the May-June issue of Sierra magazine, operated by America’s oldest and largest environmental group, the Sierra Club. Founded by John Muir, the organisation has long been engaged in a struggle with the mining industry. “My company was dealing directly with terrorists,” said Laird, 62, in an interview with the ABC television programme Nightline on Thursday. “We should not be supporting terrorism under the guise of corporate security.” Former Echo Bay chairman Richard LeClerc, now retired in Las Vegas, dismisses Laird as vengeful because he was laid off last year. But if accurate, Laird’s tale points to a blind spot in the war on terror, further bungling by US law enforcement and more than a little hypocrisy. After inquires by ABC News, the US Justice Department did a U-turn on Thursday and announced that it will investigate Laird’s accusations. Two Democratic Congressmen, Ed Markey and Mark Udall, are calling for a congressional probe.

How the “NewsHour” Changed History
By Norman Solomon
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, 16 April 2004
EXCERPT: When the anchor of public television’s main news program goes out of his way to tell viewers that he’s setting the record straight about a recent historic event, the people watching are apt to assume that they’re getting accurate information. But with war intensifying in Iraq, a bizarre episode raises some very troubling concerns about the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Here’s what happened:
During a panel discussion April 7 on the NewsHour, while battles raged in close to a dozen Iraqi cities, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel referred to the American authorities’ closure of a newspaper that had served as a megaphone for the anti-occupation Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr. “The immediate problem we have to remember is we started this...with the aggressive policies towards Sadr that came from us, shutting down his press,” Col. Sam Gardiner said.
The program’s anchor spoke next.
Jim Lehrer: “The reason we shut down his press is because it was calling for violence and anti-American--”
Col. Gardiner: “Sure.”
Lehrer: “I just want to get that on the record.”
But Lehrer’s comment-- ostensibly setting the record straight-- was at odds with the available factual record about Sadr’s newspaper. In sync with other news accounts, the New York Times had reported two days earlier that “the paper did not print any calls for attacks.” ...Journalists should scrutinize U.S. government spin, not contribute to it. Here we have what some people believe to be the nation’s most credible news program compounding a factual error by refusing to make a correction. First-rate journalists change history. But not this way.

Kerry Campaign
Kerry Says Bush `Arrogance' Risks Other Nations' Help
Bloomberg, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said President George W. Bush's international policies have been ``arrogant'' and may keep other countries from working with the U.S. in future. Appearing on NBC's ``Meet The Press,'' the four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts said he would take the ``poison out of'' U.S. international policies and would seek more foreign assistance in Iraq. He also said he supports sending more troops to Iraq if needed. ``It's important to understand why so many countries are unwilling to come to the table now,'' Kerry, 60, said. ``It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air to reestablish credibility in the rest of the world.'' ...Bush, 57, said Friday that he supports the idea of a UN- selected interim government taking power in Iraq on June 30. Lakhdar Brahimi, the special UN envoy in Iraq, is proposing a temporary government to run the nation until elections are held. Kerry said that's still not enough. ``Finally, George Bush is doing what I and others have recommended for some time,'' Kerry said. ``In effect, he's transferred to the UN the decision about what government we'll turn it over to -- but he's not transferring the real power.'' ...Kerry said the Bush administration continues to anger world leaders around the country by its policy of awarding prime reconstruction contracts in the Arab nation only to countries that aided the invasion. ``If the Defense Department issues a memorandum and it says `any country that was not with us -- don't bother applying for reconstruction in Iraq,' now that's a heck of way to invite'' countries, he said. ``Our diplomacy has been about as arrogant and ineffective as anything I have ever seen and I think if you ask people all around the world, I think that is exactly what they would tell you,'' Kerry said.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. Needs International Help to Rebuild Iraq, Kerry Says
Bloomberg, 17 April 2004
EXCERPT: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said President George W. Bush has not presented a ``winning strategy'' for eventual peace in Iraq, and repeated calls for international assistance in the war-torn country. ``The failure of the administration to internationalize the conflict has lost us time, momentum and credibility -- and made America less safe,'' Kerry said in this party's weekly radio address. ``Our stubborn, unilateral policy in Iraq has steadily drifted -- from tragedy to tragedy.''  The Massachusetts senator said the Bush administration has not been honest about the hardships of the war. International support can only be obtained if the U.S. removes the ```Made in America' label from the Iraqi occupation,'' Kerry said. The United Nations must authorize a civilian partner that helps Iraq hold elections and restore their services, he said.

Bush Letter Cites 'Crusade' Against Terrorism
Reuters in FindLaw.com, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: Years after President Bush set off alarm bells in the Muslim world by referring to his war against terrorism as a "crusade," the word that Arabs equate with Christian brutality has resurfaced in a Bush campaign fund-raising letter, officials acknowledged on Sunday. The March 3 letter, which Bush-Cheney Campaign Chairman Marc Racicot sent to new campaign charter members in Florida, lauded the Republican president for "leading a global crusade against terrorism" while citing evidence of Bush's "strong, steady leadership during difficult times." However, the word "crusade" recalls a historical trauma for the Muslim world, which was besieged by Christian crusaders from Europe during the Middle Ages. In the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Bush caused an uproar by telling reporters: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." Faced with worldwide consternation over the remark, the White House later said Bush regretted his use of the term.

Now Can We Talk About Health Care?
By HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
New York Times, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: ...many of the systemic problems we have struggled with for decades -- like high costs and the uninsured -- are simply getting worse. In 1993, the critics predicted that if the Clinton administration's universal health care coverage plan became law, costs would go through the roof. ''Hospitals will have to close,'' they said, ''Families will lose their choice of doctors. Bureaucrats will deny medically necessary care.''  They were half-right. All that has happened. They were just wrong about the reason. In 1993, there were 37 million uninsured Americans. In the late 90's, the situation improved slightly, largely because of the improved economy and the passage of the Children's Health Insurance Program. But now some 43.6 million Americans are uninsured, and the vast majority of them are in working families. While employer-sponsored insurance remains a major source of coverage for workers, it is becoming less accessible and affordable for spouses, dependents and retirees. In 1993, 46 percent of companies with 500 or more employees offered some type of retiree health benefit. That declined to 29 percent in 2001. When you think about the new economy and worker mobility, it's no wonder employers are dropping retiree health benefits. You can only wonder how many yet-to-retire workers are next. ...If we do not fix the problems of the present, we are doomed to live with the consequences in the future. As someone who tried to promote comprehensive health care reform a decade ago and decided to push for incremental changes in the years since, I still believe America needs sensible, wide-ranging reform that leads to quality health care coverage available to all Americans at an affordable cost. The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us.

Pentagon, Justice Department Sparred Over US 'Enemy Combatants'
AFP via SpaceWar.com, 19 April 2004
EXCERPT: After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon sparred with the US Justice Department over how to handle US citizens with suspected ties to al-Qaeda, Newsweek reported in its issue due out Monday. In September 2002, as Yemeni-born men from Lackawanna, New York, were being accused of training at an Afghan camp affiliated to Osama bin Laden, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued the men should be treated as "enemy combatants," the weekly magazine reported. "They are the enemy, and they're right here in the country," Cheney said, according to a participant in the debate over how to treat the suspects, Newsweek reported. The men should be thrown into a military brig with no right to trial or even to see a lawyer, Cheney and Pentagon argued, while Attorney General John Ashcroft contended that he could prosecute them for providing material support to al-Qaeda. The men pleaded guilty to that charge last year. The debate over treatment of Americans with suspected ties to al-Qaeda became so heated that there were shouting matches inside the White House, Newsweek reported. US officials have settled on informal rules to decide whether a detained US citizen should be thrown into a brig or brought to trial, the magazine said. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Americans can be held as enemy combatants next week.

Dreaming of George: Optimism Then, Optimism Now
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 17 April 2004
EXCERPT: Our President, son of George, spends three-plus-plus years running as fast as he can from his father's presidency. He plays an endless, oedipal game of opposites, twisting and turning to avoid his father's fate. Red meat to the right. Fundaments to the fundamentals. Sharon to the Jewish vote. Well, you know the story. And in the end, having been named George, he nonetheless finds himself impaled on the spear of George World -- the owner like his father of a one-term presidency, thanks to a faded war, a fading economy, and a sense that the man is simply not in touch with reality.

Bush lobotomized by a Python...
Invade Iraq? It's a No-Brainer
By Terry Jones
Guardian (UK), 19 April 2004
EXCERPT: Everyone agrees that President George Bush's lobotomy has been a tremendous success. Dick Cheney, the vice-president, declared that he was fully satisfied with it from his point of view. "Without the lobotomy," Mr Cheney told the American Academy of Neurology, "it might have proved difficult to persuade the president to start wars all around the world without any good pretext. But the removal of those parts of the brain associated with understanding the outcome of one's actions has enabled the president to function fully and without hesitation. Even when it is clear that disaster is around the corner, as it is currently in Iraq, the chief executive is able to go on TV and announce that everything is on course and that he has no intention of changing tactics that have already proved disastrous. I would like to commend the surgeons, nurses and all involved with the operation," said Mr Cheney.
SEE ALSO: Bush's New Title: Incurious George (Reuters)
SEE ALSO: Anti-Bush Sentiment Busts Out All Over (Globe & Mail)

Dude, Where's My Retirement?
The White House's two-front assault on retirement benefits.
By Dr. Christian Weller
TomPaine.com, 16 April 2004
EXCERPT: Will you have enough money for retirement? Once taken for granted, the certainty that benefits promised to you will actually exist when you retire is now in question. The good news is that Social Security can pay full benefits for almost four decades. This is a guarantee that private benefits don't offer. The recession decimated 401(k)s and traditional pensions, and‹what¹s worse‹as health care costs soar, many employers are making retiree health insurance more expensive for future retirees. To top it all off, the Bush administration has, whenever given the choice, moved toward eliminating the government's promise of retirement benefits‹most recently by threatening to veto a bill that would offer much-needed relief for traditional pension plans. This is the bad news. If the administration continues down this path, many more retirees will not have enough money for retiremen.

Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
New York Times, 19 April 2004
EXCERPT: The continuing violence and mounting casualties in Iraq have given new strength to the traditional conservative doubts about using American military power to remake other countries and about the potential for Western-style democracy without a Western cultural foundation. In in the eyes of many conservatives, the Iraqi resistance has discredited the more hawkish neoconservatives — a group closely identified with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard. Considered descendants of a group of mostly Jewish intellectuals who switched from the political left to the right at the height of the cold war, the neoconservatives are defined largely by their conviction that American military power can be a force for good in the world. They championed the invasion of Iraq as a way to turn that country into a bastion of democracy in the Middle East. "In late May of last year, we neoconservatives were hailed as great visionaries," said Kenneth R. Weinstein, chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, a center of neoconservative thinking. "Now we are embattled, both within the conservative movement and in the battle over postwar planning.

17-18 April 2004

Woodward Describes How a Dysfunctional, Delusional Administration Went to War
By William Hamilton
Washington Post
EXCERPTS: The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. ...Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was the pressure from advocates of war inside the administration. Vice President Cheney, whom Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force," led that group and had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a "fever" about removing Hussein by force. ...By early January 2003, Bush had made up his mind to take military action against Iraq, according to the book. But Bush was so concerned that the government of his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, might fall because of his support for Bush that he delayed the war's start until March 19 here (March 20 in Iraq) because Blair asked him to seek a second resolution from the United Nations. ...Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that became so strained Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms. Cheney engaged in a bitter and eventually winning struggle over Iraq with Powell, an opponent of war who believed Cheney was obsessively trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact. Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's "Gestapo" office -- had established what amounted to a separate government. The vice president, for his part, believed Powell was mainly concerned with his own popularity and told friends at a dinner he hosted a year ago celebrating the outcome of the war that Powell was a problem and "always had major reservations about what we were trying to do." ...On Nov. 21, 2001, 72 days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Bush directed Rumsfeld to begin planning for war with Iraq. "Let's get started on this," Bush recalled saying. "And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to." He also asked, Could this be done on a basis that would not be terribly noticeable? ...Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead." The president told Woodward he was cooperating on his book because he wanted the story of how the United States had gone to war in Iraq to be told. He said it would be a blueprint of historical significance that "will enable other leaders, if they feel like they have to go to war, to spare innocent citizens and their lives. But the news of this, in my judgment," Bush added, "the big news out of this isn't how George W. makes decisions. To me the big news is America has changed how you fight and win war, and therefore makes it easier to keep the peace in the long run. And that's the historical significance of this book, as far as I'm concerned." ...Bush's critics have questioned whether he and his administration were focused on Iraq rather than terrorism when they took office early in 2001 and even after the Sept. 11 attacks. Former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill and former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke have made that charge in recently published memoirs. According to "Plan of Attack," it was Cheney who was particularly focused on Iraq before the terrorist attacks.

9/11 Files Show Warnings Were Urgent and Persistent
By David Johnston and Jim Dwyer
New York Times, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: Earlier this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: in a calm voice, Ms. Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats. At first, however, Ms. Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, `Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that that it wasn't air-rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking." For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after two weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government. The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration. While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings ‹ including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country ‹ had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month earlier....
In the first eight months of the Bush administration , the commission found, the president and his advisers received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood. The most dramatic came in the Aug. 6 memo presented in an intelligence briefing the White House says Mr. Bush requested. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the memo was declassified earlier this month under pressure from the commission. After referring to a British tip in 1998 that Islamic fundamentalists wanted to hijack a plane, the memo goes on to warn: "Nevertheless, F.B.I. information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks."

Still Unready
Washington Post, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: "We as a government are not optimally configured to deal with the terrorist threat," said John O. Brennan, the head of the Terrorist Threat Information Center, a new entity that's supposed to coordinate intelligence about terrorism. Mr. Tenet estimated that "it will take us another five years to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs." The commission staff, describing Mr. Tenet's efforts to oversee "a community of loosely associated agencies and departmental offices that lacked the incentives to cooperate, collaborate and share information," concluded, "A question remains: Who is in charge of intelligence?" Its assessment of the FBI was similarly worrisome: despite huge changes since Sept. 11, the staff found serious shortcomings in technology, information-sharing, the use of analysts and the like. "Many current officials told us the FBI still does not know what information is in its files," the staff said at one point in its report. At another, "We found there is no national strategy for sharing information to counter terrorism." The harder question is what changes would improve the situation.

The Truth About 'the Wall'
By Jamie S. Gorelick
Washington Post, 18 April 2004
EXCERPT: At last week's hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft, facing criticism, asserted that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents" and that I built that wall through a March 1995 memo. This is simply not true. ...In a nutshell, that law, as the courts read it, said intelligence investigators could conduct electronic surveillance in the United States against foreign targets under a more lenient standard than is required in ordinary criminal cases, but only if the "primary purpose" of the surveillance were foreign intelligence rather than a criminal prosecution. ...according to the FISA Court of Review, it was the justice departments under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 1980s that began to read the statute as limiting the department's ability to obtain FISA orders if it intended to bring a criminal prosecution. The practice of prohibiting prosecutors from directing intelligence investigations was first put in place in those years as well. Then, in July 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno issued written guidelines that spelled out the steps FBI intelligence agents and criminal investigators and prosecutors needed to follow when sharing information. The point was to preserve the ability of prosecutors to use information collected by intelligence agents. Third, Mr. Ashcroft's own deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, formally reaffirmed the 1995 guidelines in an Aug. 6, 2001, memo addressed to the FBI and the Justice Department. Ashcroft has charged that the guidelines hampered the department's ability to pursue terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in August 2001, but his own department had endorsed those guidelines at the pivotal time. Fourth, the memo I wrote in March 1995 -- which concerns information-sharing in two particular cases, including the original World Trade Center bombing -- permits freer coordination between intelligence and criminal investigators than was subsequently permitted by the 1995 guidelines or the 2001 Thompson memo. The purpose of my memo was to resolve a problem presented to me: facilitating investigations on both the intelligence side and criminal side at the same time. My memo directed agents on both sides to share information -- and, in particular, directed one agent to work on both the criminal and intelligence investigations -- to ensure the flow of information "over the wall."

Oh well, enough said...
Kerry Campaign Plots a Shift to the Right to Attract Republicans
By Jodi Wilgoren
New York Times, 17 April 2004
EXCERPT: Declaring that he is "not a redistribution Democrat," Senator John Kerry told a group of wealthy and well-connected supporters on Thursday that he would soon start an aggressive campaign to define himself as a centrist, in hopes of peeling moderate Republicans from President Bush. Tacitly acknowledging his vulnerability to harsh portrayals in a barrage of Mr. Bush's advertisements over the past month, Mr. Kerry urged Democrats at a $25,000-a-plate breakfast at the "21" Club in Manhattan to help him paint his own portrait. He promised to begin "a positive affirmative advertising campaign" in "the next days," although his aides said there were no specific plans or timetables. "A lot of people still don't really know who I am," Mr. Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts Democrat who has everything but the official title of presidential nominee, told the audience of 100 people. "The level of communication that we still need to undertake here is enormous." Most reporters were barred from the event, which netted $2.5 million for the Democratic National Committee. A transcript of Mr. Kerry's remarks circulated by a journalist allowed in to represent reporters who travel with the campaign showed a candidate keenly aware of the need to define himself before his opponent beats him to it. Mr. Kerry said he would cite his bipartisan credentials and pitch himself as a fiscal conservative to counter the Bush campaign's portrait of him as a waffling tax-and-spend liberal. "We've got to reach out," Mr. Kerry said. "There are so many Republicans who have said to me: 'You know, for the first time in my life, I'm going to vote for a Democrat. I'm ready to switch over.' "
SEE ALSO: Bush, Kerry TV Ad Spending Rises to $90M (AP)
SEE ALSO: Ordinary People Can Ensure the Fairness of the 2004 Election (TP)

Leading Republican Blasts Bush's Anti-environmental Policies
BushGreenWatch, 16 April 2004
EXCERPT: Russell Train, a lifelong Republican who played a key role in forging environmental policy under Presidents Nixon and Ford, charges in his recently published memoirs that the current Republican Administration not only lacks leadership on crucial environmental issues, it fails to grasp the "long-term implications" of its bias toward the energy industry. "The George W. Bush Administration appears to view most issues as either black or white -- that, for example, environmental protection and energy supply are mutually exclusive objectives," writes Train, in Politics, Pollution and Pandas: An Environmental Memoir (Island Press, December 2003). "Such simplistic approaches may lend themselves to good sound bites or to easy political communication, but they do not serve us well in terms of developing effective solutions to the all-too-real problems that face this country and the world."
SEE ALSO: Feinstein: Fatal Errors: Bush May be the Only One Who Can't Think of His Mistakes (TomPaine)

Who Really Pays Taxes in America?
By Cheryl Woodard
Common Dreams, 16 April 2004
EXCERPT: Recent news articles about skyrocketing tax fraud and corporate tax dodging have prompted a high level of public concern about the overall fairness and effectiveness of our current tax system. AskQuestions.org ­ an online news site that addresses issues raised by public demand ­ released a report today on "Who Really Pays Taxes in America?" Drawn primarily from government statistics, the report describes not only how the tax burden has shifted from corporations to private citizens over the past 20 years, but also a disturbing new twist: the richest American households pay about 30 percent less tax--which includes federal, state, and local taxes combined--than middle-income households pay. And the public apparently understands what's going on: an AP poll released Tuesday reports that 49 percent of Americans believe their taxes have gone up, not down, as a result of the Bush tax cuts, consider all the new local and state taxes imposed in response to withering Federal grants to the states. And new CNN/Money Magazine poll reports that, "60% of Americans said the Bush tax cut did not personally help them." In his proposed budget for 2005, President Bush cuts another $6 billion in federal aide to states, even though 30 states already face shortfalls totaling about $40 billion next year and more cutbacks in state spending are inevitable, as well as more increases in local taxes. While there are no national statistics that add up the costs, anecdotal evidence is clear. One California couple received a $100 tax refund from President Bush for 2003, but paid $515 in new local taxes. A self-employed man living in Nassau County, NY got a $300 tax rebate last year, but his property taxes went up $2,250. While honest taxpayers deal with their growing burden, the independent IRS Oversight Board reported that tax fraud is $311 billion dollars per year--more than federal spending on Medicare in 2003 and greater than the gross revenues of either Walmart or General Electric.
SEE ALSO: Joblessness in America Just Got a Face (TP)
SEE ALSO: Taxpayers Paying for Polluters' Cleanup (BGW)

Wal-Mart, a Nation Unto Itself
By Steven Greenhouse
New York Times, 17 April 2004
EXCERPT: Indeed, with $256 billion in annual sales and 20 million shoppers visiting its stores each day, Wal-Mart has greater reach and influence than any retailer in history. ... Wal-Mart has created a very different model from General Motors, he added, noting that G.M. helped build the world's most affluent middle class by paying wages far above the average and by providing generous health and pension plans. Mr. Lichtenstein said G.M.'s wage pattern spurred other companies to raise compensation levels, while Wal-Mart's relatively low wages and benefits ‹ its workers average less than $18,000 a year ‹ were doing just the opposite. The company's pay scale and hard-nosed labor practices, said Simon Head, a fellow at the Century Foundation and author of "The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age" (Oxford University Press, 2003) mean that "Wal-Mart is certainly a template of 21st-century capitalism, but a capitalism that increasingly resembles a capitalism of 100 years ago." He added, "It combines the extremely dynamic use of technology with a very authoritarian and ruthless managerial culture."

Undoing the Latches: Recognizing the Gates Around Us
By Mickey Z
ZNet, 16 April 2004
EXCERPT: In his brilliant book, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson writes: "I was told by some New Zealand sheep farmers that sometimes a particularly smart lamb will learn to undo the latch of a gate, evidently not an uncommon skill, and the sheep farmer then worries that the lamb might teach his less clever companions to do the same." Masson asked a group of farmers, "What do you with sheep who can undo the latch?" "We shoot them," came the reply, "so they can't pass on their knowledge." "Others nodded in agreement," Masson continued. "They all had anecdotes about particularly intelligent sheep who were shot as a reward for their cleverness." While this excerpt stands alone as a telling indictment of human behavior in general and the treatment of animals in particular, it additionally reminds one how important it is to not only undo the latches on the gates that keep our minds imprisoned...but to pass on that knowledge. Of course, those who have learned to undo the latches in human society are "rewarded for their cleverness," too. Deported (Emma Goldman), murdered Gestapo-style (Fred Hampton), framed and imprisoned (Leonard Peltier)...the tactics vary, but in America, these tactics are typically more subtle than overt terror. "If you come from the more privileged classes, if you're a white middle-class person, then the chances that you are going to be subjected to literal state terror are very slight," says Noam Chomsky. "It could happen, but it's slight. What will happen is that you'll be marginalized, excluded. Instead of becoming part of the privileged elite, you'll be driving a taxi cab. It's not torture, but very few people are going to select that option, if they have a choice. And the ones who do select it will never be heard from again. Therefore they are not part of the indoctrination system. They don't make it. It could be worse, but it's enough to discipline people." To a point, it certainly is more than enough to discipline people...but even the most conditioned of societies can be pushed too far and that's when the latches get undone, the knowledge passed on, and the gates fly open.

Karl's Regrets....
Kevin Drum,
Washington Monthly, 17 April 2004
EXCERPT:
Re: Mission not accomplished? (Article in YahooNews)

President Bush's top political adviser said this week he regretted the use of a "Mission Accomplished" banner as a backdrop for the president's landing on an aircraft carrier last May to mark the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

"I wish the banner was not up there," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "I'll acknowledge the fact that it has become one of those convenient symbols."

Pathetic. No acknowledgment that anything in the real world has gone wrong, only that a bit of symbolism didn't pan out the way he hoped. Karl Rove and Karen Hughes never had any idea what the war was all about. To them it was apparently just an opportunity to put up some bunting and shoot some campaign videos, and Karl's only regret is that the campaign videos haven't worked out. America deserves better than these puerile hacks. We really, really do.

Warriors for Hire
Salon.com via Brookings Institution, 16 April 2004
EXCERPT: Introduction: In Iraq, employees of private military firms are accounting for a growing share of the force and the casualties. Peter Singer writes that this "coalition of the billing" rather than of the "willing" cuts to the heart of the most troubling questions about the Bush administration's handling of the war. [From the article] ...The Bush administration was unwilling to enlist serious assistance from the United Nations or from most of our NATO allies, but thanks to the PMFs (Private Military Forces) that employ private soldiers of more than 30 nationalities, it has been able to assemble an international coalition of sorts in Iraq. But it is more a "coalition of the billing" than of the "willing." Indeed, there are more private military contractors on the ground in Iraq than troops from any one ally, including Britain. One single company, Global Risks, has a reported 1,100 employees in Iraq, including 500 Nepalese Ghurka troops and 500 Fijian soldiers, ranking it sixth among troop donors.
Read Part 1:  Outsourcing the War
Part 2: Outsourcing the War

Are Taxes Exceptionally Concentrated At The Top?
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: This analysis examines a Treasury release which states that high-income people pay most of the income tax and that the Bush tax cuts have increased further the share of the income tax they pay.
Down Load HTML | 7pp. PDF

16 April 2004

Roberts Contradicts Frist on Clarke
By Alexander Bolton
The Hill 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s testimony before a joint congressional panel on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks did not contradict his later testimony before a presidentially appointed commission. Roberts’s comments to The Hill contradict a stinging condemnation of Clarke by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) on the Senate floor after Clarke accused President Bush of failing to take Osama bin Laden seriously before Sept. 11. Roberts said Frist did not consult him before making his floor speech, which has been criticized by Democrats. Roberts’s words make perjury charges against Clarke highly unlikely.

Wisconsin Military Families Protest Extension
By ROBERT IMRIE Associated Press Writer
AP, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: After waiting a year for their loved ones to come home, relatives of a Wisconsin National Guard unit received a double shock in the past week: One of its soldiers was killed in Iraq, and the rest had their tour of duty extended four months. Some families of soldiers in the Guard's 32nd Military Police Company are responding with an Internet campaign to urge President Bush and members of Congress to intervene to bring back the company's 160 soldiers, who had been scheduled to return from Iraq by early next month. "We are not anti-war," said Linda Aber, whose 22-year-old daughter, Kelli, is in the unit. "We feel it is unfair at this point. Mentally, we feel they are spent. ...We're trying to put some pressure on politicians to help." Aber, 44, of Madison, helped create the Web site, which includes elected officials' phone numbers.

Private Army Seeking Political Advice in D.C.
By Jonathan E. Kaplan
The Hill, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: Blackwater USA, a private security company contracted by the Coalitional Provisional Authority (CPA) to protect its personnel in Iraq, has tapped the Alexander Strategy Group to help shape the company’s response after four employees were murdered by a mob in Fallujah last month. Blackwater encountered more problems when eight of its contractors, along with U.S. Marines and Salvadoran troops, fought hundreds of Iraqi insurgents in Najaf. Unable to communicate with U.S. military forces, the Blackwater officials sent in their own helicopters, which CPA Chief Administrator Paul Bremer uses for transport, to resupply ammunition and rescue a wounded Marine. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate GOP Conference, arranged a meeting with Blackwater executives and three key Senate Republicans — Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (Alaska), Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (Va.) and George Allen (Va.) — to discuss problems facing Blackwater.

On Open Government
John Podesta
Center for American Progress, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush has led the most secretive administration in modern memory, blocking open debate over issues of critical importance to all Americans. Now more than ever, we need an engaged and alert public, ready to confront the challenges before us. Instead, the Bush administration has sought to avoid accountability by keeping the public in the dark. The Center for American Progress is part of a new coalition, OpenTheGovernment.org, which today released a report identifying the "Ten Most Wanted Documents" that are being withheld from the public. Topping this list is the administration's refusal to declassify 28 pages from Congress' report on pre-9/11 intelligence failures. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, estimated that "95 percent of that information could be declassified" without harming national security. Nonetheless, the administration has continued to stonewall, reportedly because the report contains information embarrassing to Saudi Arabia, which the administration has sought to protect.

Attention Must Be Paid
Katrina vanden Heuvel
The Nation, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: Upward mobility is one of our democracy's great strengths. In George Bush's America, however, opportunity is being steadily eroded. To understand this anti-worker economy, just begin with the minimum wage. Currently, the federal minimum wage is a paltry $5.15 an hour. It has remained unchanged since 1997. In a family of three, the breadwinner earns $10,712 in annual income, which is almost $5,000 below the federal poverty level. When Washington State raised its minimum wage in 1998 to $7.16 an hour, many full-time workers with families were still living in poverty. Republicans in Congress couldn't care less about this crisis. Callous, imperious and anti-worker, the Republican Senate leadership recently refused to even vote on a modest minimum wage increase, which could have helped offset the hardships imposed by declining wages and record job losses. When it comes to the struggle to increase the minimum wage and deal with the crisis of poverty in the US, the Senate has essentially become a "non-functioning institution," to quote Senator Edward Kennedy. A second force driving this train are the glaring inequities in America's tax system--injustices that have further eroded workers' prospects. David Cay Johnston, who covers the tax system for the New York Times, has demonstrated that in recent decades, a growing portion of the tax burden has shifted to working- and middle-class families while the wealthiest Americans have paid fewer taxes.
SEE ALSO:
Minimum Wage Hike
Senate GOP seeks to neutralize key election-year issue
By Bob Cusack
The Hill, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: Senate Republicans are crafting legislation that would raise the hourly minimum wage by more than a dollar, in an attempt to take a hot-button election-year issue off the table. The Senate GOP package would be coupled with business-friendly measures to help industry swallow a phased-in $1.10 increase in the nation’s minimum wage.

Bush Makes Three Mistakes While Trying to Recall One
Reuters, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: While struggling unsuccessfully this week to think of a single mistake he has made since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush committed three factual errors about weapons finds in Libya, the White House said on Wednesday. Bush, long known for his grammatical conundrums and confusing phraseology, told reporters twice during Tuesday's prime-time news conference that 50 tons of mustard gas were discovered at a turkey farm in Libya. On the second occasion, he was responding to a reporter who asked him to identify the biggest mistake he had made since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He could not. But as he searched for an answer, the Republican president reaffirmed his decision to invade Iraq and said weapons of mass destruction may still lie hidden there. "They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm," said Bush, referring to Libya's voluntary disclosure of weapons in March. The next day, the White House said the accurate figure for the Libyan mustard gas was 23.6 metric tons, or 26 short tons, not 50 tons. Moreover, the substance was found at different locations across Libya, not at a turkey farm. And observers did not find mustard gas on the farm at all, but rather unfilled chemical munitions, the White House acknowledged.
SEE ALSO: President Bush: No Apologies, No Mistakes and No Plan (Center for American Progress)

A Scary Performance, and a Signal for Slaughter
Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: George Bush's press conference on April 13 was a scary performance.
Not because his second sentence was ungrammatical: "This has been tough weeks in that country."
Not because he pronounced "instigated" as "instikated" in his fourth sentence.
Not because he said Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of State.
Not because of his foolish comment that before 9/11 "we assumed oceans would protect us." (Ever since the Russians built their first ICBMs fifty years ago, the oceans haven't protected us.)
Not because he said of the August 6 briefing, "Frankly, I didn't think it was anything new"!
Not because he said that even if he had known beforehand that Iraq did not have WMD stockpiles, he still would have gone to war against Saddam Hussein.
Not because he had no coherent answer as to why Dick Cheney must hold his hand when he testifies to the 9/11 commission.
Not because he said that no one in his Administration had "any indication that bin Laden might hijack an airplane and run it into a building," when in fact, at the Genoa G-8 summit, there were precautions taken against incoming airplanes as missiles.
And not because he repeatedly refused to take a shred of personal responsibility for allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen on his watch.
No, his performance was scary because he plunged the United States deeper into a no-win war in Iraq.
SEE ALSO: White House Press Corps Falls Down (Progressive)

Why the Right's Wrong On Taxes
by Matthew Miller
Center for American Progress, 14 April 2004
EXCERPT: Conservatives love to cite facts like these: The top 5 percent of taxpayers pay over half of federal income taxes; the top 1 percent pay more than a third all by themselves; and the bottom 80 percent of earners together pay less than 20 percent. If these facts are all you carry in your head (and all that the people you spend time with all day carry in their heads), then it's obvious that Ayn Rand was right: We're a nation of freeloaders who enjoy the blessings of liberty thanks to a handful of generous giants. But this is not the full picture. Any fairminded person should want to know two other things: What percent of total income do these different slices of earners actually earn, and what share of total federal taxes, not just income taxes, do they pay? The conservative worldview inexplicably ignores the payroll tax (as well as excise taxes on things like liquor) that take their biggest bite, proportionally, from lower-income Americans.

First Women's Faith-Based Prison Opens
By BRENDAN FARRINGTON
AP, 15 April 2004
EXCERPT: The nation's first faith-based prison for women opened in a Tampa-area detention center Wednesday, nearly five months after a similar program began for men. About 300 female prisoners will be confined at the Hillsborough Correctional Institution, all volunteers who agreed to participate in a program combining vocational classes with worship. Alia Faraj, a spokeswoman for Gov. Jeb Bush, said the new state prison creates "an environment that allows and encourages personal growth, self-reflection and character development."

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