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1-15 February 2005

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By repeatedly shilling for whatever the Bush administration wants, he [Greenspan] has betrayed the trust placed in Fed chairmen, and deserves to be treated as just another partisan hack.
Three-Card Maestro
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 18 February 2005
Alan Greenspan just did it again. Four years ago, the Fed chairman lent crucial political support to the Bush tax cuts. He didn't specifically endorse the administration's plan, and if you read his testimony carefully, it contained caveats and cautions. But that didn't matter; the headlines trumpeted Mr. Greenspan's support, and legislation whose prospects had previously seemed dubious sailed through Congress. On Wednesday Mr. Greenspan endorsed Social Security privatization. But there's a difference between 2001 and 2005. In 2001, Mr. Greenspan offered a convoluted, implausible justification for supporting everything the Bush administration wanted. This time, he offered no justification at all.
In 2001, some readers may recall, Mr. Greenspan argued that we needed to cut taxes to prevent the federal government from running excessively large surpluses. Even at the time it seemed obvious from his tortured logic that he was looking for some excuse, any excuse, to help out a Republican administration. His lack of sincerity was confirmed when projected surpluses turned into large deficits, and he nonetheless supported even more tax cuts.
This week, Mr. Greenspan offered no excuse for supporting privatization. In fact, he agreed with two of the main critiques of the administration's plan: that it would do nothing to improve the Social Security system's finances, and that it would lead to a dangerous increase in debt. Yet he still came out in favor of the idea.
Let me make a detour here. The way privatizers link the long-run financing of Social Security with the case for private accounts parallels the three-card-monte technique the Bush administration used to link terrorism to the Iraq war. Speeches about Iraq invariably included references to 9/11, leading much of the public to believe that invading Iraq somehow meant taking the war to the terrorists. When pressed, war supporters would admit they lacked evidence of any significant links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone any Iraqi role in 9/11 - yet in their next sentence it would be 9/11 and Saddam, together again. Similarly, calls for privatization invariably begin with ominous warnings about Social Security's financial future. When pressed, administration officials admit that private accounts would do nothing to improve that financial future. Yet in the next sentence, they once again link privatization to the problem posed by an aging population.
And so it was with Mr. Greenspan. He painted a dark (and seriously exaggerated) picture of the demographic problem, and said that what we need is a "fully funded" system. He then conceded that Bush-style privatization would do nothing to improve the system's funding.
But privatization "as a general model," he said, "has in it the seeds of developing full funding by its very nature." Nice metaphor, but what does it mean? Clearly, he was trying to create the impression of links where none exist.
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Student Loan Math
 Washington Post, 17 February 2005
For too long, the arguments about student loans have been clouded by a phony dichotomy between the supposedly "free market" government-guaranteed loans and the "big government" direct loan program. In fact, the government-guaranteed loans are a form of corporate welfare. Maybe it's time to change the rules and make sure that more of the student loan money goes to students, not banks.
Forest Service Becoming Rogue Agency
Forty-Four Recent Court Rulings Find Environmental Lawbreaking
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, 17 February 2005
The U.S. Forest Service lost 44 court cases during the past two years in which the agency was found guilty of violating environmental laws by a federal court, according to an internal memo released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The rate of adverse court findings has been steadily growing with each passing year of the Bush Administration. The list of 44 cases, covering the period 2003 and 2004 fiscal years, is limited to cases where the court found both that the Forest Service violated the law and that its position could not be “substantially justified.” In those instances, the agency was ordered to pay the attorney fees of the environmental group bringing the lawsuit. As a result, the Forest Service made payments to environmental groups totaling $2.2 million over the last two years. “More than once every two weeks, the Forest Service is found by a federal judge to be violating the very laws it is supposed to be enforcing,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “The Forest Service is becoming a rogue agency.”
"You have this voracious appetite of business interests who think this is the year and who know they have the president on their side..."
Quick, Early Gains Embolden Business Lobby
By STEPHEN LABATON
NYT, 18 February 2005
These are heady days on Capitol Hill for business lobbyists. Just as the House of Representatives was completing work on one measure sought by some of the most powerful business lobbyists - which would sharply restrict class-action lawsuits brought against companies - the Senate began work on a second measure, to overhaul the bankruptcy system. It has long been sought by major banks, credit card companies and retailers and has its strongest chance of quick passage in years. It now heads to the Senate floor as soon as the members return from their recess in early March. After suffering numerous setbacks in President Bush's first term, business lobbyists now say they have the wind at their backs. The class-action bill, for example, was approved on Thursday in the House by a vote of 279 to 149, after languishing in Congress for years. Its passage is a significant victory for businesses ranging from auto, drug and gun makers to home builders and tobacco companies. President Bush intends to sign it on Friday. The measure, supported by 229 of the 230 voting Republicans and 50 Democrats, is the president's first big victory in his effort to rewrite the tort laws. It came after the United States Chamber of Commerce and another group it founded had spent $168 million over the last five years lobbying for overhaul of the civil liability system. ...In addition to completing bankruptcy legislation, the groups face their biggest test over two other tort revisions. One would sharply limit damage awards in medical malpractice lawsuits. Another would overhaul the way courts dispose of asbestos cases, but that has become bogged down in negotiations among trial lawyers, unions, manufacturers and insurers. The Senate has also begun working early on a measure supported by manufacturers and opposed by environmentalists that would set new emissions standards for three major pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury.
Censorship of the Media Creating Insidious Chill on Free Expression on our Airwaves
by US Rep. Bernie Sanders
The following is a 2/16/2005 floor statement by Rep. Bernard Sanders in opposition to The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act 2005:
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this legislation.
Mr. Speaker, I think we can all agree that we do not want our children exposed to obscenity on the public airwaves. That goes without saying. As someone who last year voted in favor of similar legislation, I am increasingly alarmed by the culture of censorship that seems to be developing in this country, and I will not be voting for this bill today. This censorship is being conducted by the corporate owners of our increasingly consolidated, less diverse media. And it is being done by the government. This result is an insidious chill on free expression on our airwaves. There are a lot of people in Congress who talk about freedom, freedom and freedom but, apparently, they do not really believe that the American people should have the "freedom" to make the choice about what they listen to on radio or watch on TV. There are a lot of people in Congress who talk about the intrusive role of "government regulators," but today they want government regulators to tell radio and TV stations what they can air. I disagree with that. A vote for this bill today will make America a less free society.
2 Top G.O.P. Lawmakers Buck Bush on Social Security
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and ROBIN TONER
NYT, 18 February 2005
The Republican majority leader in the House expressed opposition on Thursday to the idea of increasing or eliminating the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax, deflating President Bush's first effort to promote bipartisan trust over how to address the retirement system's projected financial troubles. The majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, said subjecting more earnings to the payroll tax amounted to a tax increase and was unacceptable. His comments came a day after the publication of newspaper interviews in which Mr. Bush left open the possibility of lifting the earnings cap as part of a plan to put Social Security on permanently sound footing. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert joined Mr. DeLay in distancing House Republicans from the idea. Their quick and negative reaction underscored the difficulty the administration is having in moving forward with its plan to overhaul Social Security, the issue Mr. Bush has put at the top of his domestic agenda and made a test of his political clout. Acknowledging that he has yet to gain much momentum, Mr. Bush said at a news conference at the White House that his plan was "going nowhere" unless he could convince Congress and the American people that there was a problem that must be addressed now.
Face it...public television is too liberal
Conservatives and Rivals Press a Struggling PBS
By JOHN TIERNEY and JACQUES STEINBERG
NYT, 17 February 2005
It was no accident that PBS found itself turning to Elmo, the popular "Sesame Street" character, to lobby on Capitol Hill this week. There were not many options. Public television is suffering from an identity crisis, executives inside the Public Broadcasting Service and outsiders say, and it goes far deeper than the announcement by Pat Mitchell that she would step down next year as the beleaguered network's president.
...Corporate underwriters have been less willing to finance PBS programs, which has left the network increasingly dependent on Washington, where Republicans criticize its programming as elitist and liberal. ..."The thing to remember with public broadcasting is that everything is steered by the money," the executive said. "What used to be a unique thing is now in this competitive environment and has to do whatever it can to survive, which means bending in a way it used to never bend."
...PBS is also being criticized by others, like Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and a longtime advocate of more money for public television. "I'm concerned that PBS is so desperate for funding and support from the Republican-dominated Congress that they're willing to sell their legacy," Mr. Chester said. "They could forgo their historic mandate to do cutting-edge programming and replace it with Bush-administration-friendly educational content."
Secretary On the Offensive
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post, 17 February 2005
With the Bush administration asking Congress this month to write checks for half a trillion dollars for the Pentagon, you might think the secretary of defense would set an accommodating posture on Capitol Hill. But, to paraphrase Rumsfeld's remark in December about the Army, you go to budget hearings with the defense secretary you have, not the defense secretary you might want or wish to have at a later time. And Donald Rumsfeld doesn't do accommodating very well. Asked about the number of insurgents in Iraq, Rumsfeld replied: "I am not going to give you a number." Did he care to voice an opinion on efforts by U.S. pilots to seek damages from their imprisonment in Iraq? "I don't." Could he comment on what basing agreements he might seek in Iraq? "I can't." How about the widely publicized cuts to programs for veterans? "I'm not familiar with the cuts you're referring to." How long will the war last? "There's never been a war that was predictable as to length, casualty or cost in the history of mankind." Rumsfeld's blunt manner was seen as refreshing four years ago, but these are different times. A few prominent Republican legislators have called for Rumsfeld's resignation, over his resistance to increased troop strength in Iraq, his perceived disparagement of the armed forces in December and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. Yesterday, GOP lawmakers greeted him with doubts on a variety of matters including war spending, death payments and veterans' benefits.
GOP ethics purge continues
Democrats Criticize Removal of 2 Staff Members
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 17 February 2005
Two senior staff members of the House ethics committee are being removed from their jobs by the new chairman, drawing criticism from Democrats and others who said the changes reflected continued retaliation for actions taken last year against the majority leader, Tom DeLay. The committee chairman, Representative Doc Hastings of Washington, has decided not to retain John Vargo, staff director and chief counsel of the panel responsible for enforcing House rules, along with Paul Lewis, spokesman for the panel, which admonished Mr. DeLay last year in three instances. Ed Cassidy, chief of staff to Mr. Hastings, said the chairman was following the standard practice of choosing new senior staff members to "ensure that a new chairman and the entire committee staff can work together cooperatively, confidentially and productively." "Anyone suggesting these decisions were made for partisan reasons is flat-out wrong," Mr. Cassidy said. But Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said the move appeared to be retribution after a decision by Republicans to oust the previous chairman and two other Republican members of the panel who acted against Mr. DeLay of Texas. House Republicans also changed the rules to make it harder to initiate an ethics inquiry. "This latest decision to remove nonpartisan staff shows that the Republican leadership is simply not interested in having a credible ethics process," Mr. Hoyer said. The two staff members had been with the committee since the late 1990's and had worked under previous Republican chairmen, including Representative Joel Hefley of Colorado, who was replaced last month at the direction of Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.
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WHAAP'd Out
When it comes to accountability and accounting, the White House is making Corporate America look good
By Allan Sloan
Newsweek Online, 15 February 2005
We're in our fourth year of post-Enron corporate scandals, with no end in sight. Barely a month goes by without a new scandal, or a new trial from an old scandal. But there's good news to report for business—on the public relations front, that is. It's that Congress and the White House have managed the seemingly impossible: When it comes to accountability and accounting, they're making corporate America look good. ...it looks like there will be no penalty at all assessed on the White House for last week's budget numbers, which seem to have been drawn up in fantasyland.
In fact, the White House crunches numbers in such a unique way that it takes a new accounting method to describe them. Corporations report numbers based on GAAP: generally accepted accounting principles. But the numbers crunchers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. use WHAAP: White House accepted accounting principles. Under these rules, numbers are presented in the most favorable—or least unfavorable—way.
Some examples. In 2001, the Bushies used WHAAP to declare that their tax cuts would cost $1.3 trillion over 10 years. That number, though, assumed that the cuts would expire in their 10th year. No one thought that would happen, but the stated cost stuck anyway. They played a similar game to low-ball the cost of the 2003 cuts, by assuming all sorts of tax cut phase-ins and phase-outs.
WHAAP works on the spending side, too. In 2003, you may recall, Bush pitched his prescription drug plan as costing $400 billion over 10 years. Last week, though, even the fuzzy-math crew at the White House showed a 10-year cost of $720 billion. That's an 80 percent increase. Look a few years out, and $1 trillion looms.
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Bush's Barberini Faun
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 17 February 2005
I am very impressed with James Guckert, a k a Jeff Gannon.
How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts .com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com, get to question the president of the United States? Who knew that a hotmilitarystud wanting to meetlocalmen could so easily get to be face2face with the commander in chief? It's hard to believe the White House could hit rock bottom on credibility again, but it has, in a bizarre maelstrom that plays like a dark comedy. How does it credential a man with a double life and a secret past?
Biblical literalists expected to deny findings...
Homo Sapiens Gets a Lot Older in a New Analysis of Fossils
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
NYT, 17 February 2005
Scientists have determined that human fossils found in Ethiopia in 1967 are 195,000 years old, 65,000 years older than first thought. The revised date, they said, makes the skulls and bones the earliest known remains of modern Homo sapiens. The research reinforces the theories of an African origin for modern humans, and the earlier date gives the species more time to have evolved the cultural attributes that probably supported its spread out of Africa to Asia and Europe. The new date appears to be near the early boundary for modern human emergence, as suggested in recent genetic studies. The findings were announced yesterday by a research team led by Dr. Ian McDougall of the Australian National University in Canberra and are being described in detail in today's issue of the journal Nature. Dr. McDougall, a geologist, and his colleagues reported that a re-examination of the sediments in which the fossils of two individuals were found and the use of more reliable dating methods showed that they lived 195,000 years ago, give or take 5,000 years, "making them the earliest well-dated anatomically modern humans yet described."
Biblical Politics
An upcoming Supreme Court case on the Ten Commandments could give the Dems a chance to reconnect to the faithful
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek, 17 February 2005
It’s a red-letter day for the lucky politician who gets to “defend” the Ten Commandments. He’s Greg Abbott, the 46-year-old attorney general of Texas and protégé of George W. Bush. The Department of Justice knows a PR bonanza when it sees one; it has requested time to help protect the Texas-Moses axis. Perhaps newly confirmed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who served on the Texas Supreme Court with Abbott, will want to join his Texas colleague on this legal Mount Sinai.
Why am I bothering to tell you about the case of Van Orden v. Perry? Because it’s the kind of cultural skirmish that illuminates larger matters: the strengths and weaknesses of the Republican Party as it enters the rococo phase of the Bush years, and the route the Democrats might follow to get out of the desert they’ve been wandering in lo these many years since the ’60s. ...By now there isn’t a living American who doesn’t know that the GOP has prospered as the tribune of red state, Bible Belt culture. This alliance—arguably the most fundamental fact about American politics in the last 40 years—was first forged when Barry Goldwater (ironically, pretty much of a libertarian himself) took the Deep South out of LBJ’s Democratic Party in 1964.
This historical arc reached its zenith in South Carolina in 2000, when Bush won the GOP primary there in part by declaring that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. The remark caused gasps in press row and was laughed at by the usual suspects, but most Americans probably thought Bush was stating the obvious. This is, quite simply, a God-fearing and Bible-reading (or at least Bible-respecting) nation. And it has been that way from the beginning. For decades, the GOP piled up easy points by simply invoking our own history.
But that tactic may have reached the limits of its usefulness. For one, we’ve all been reminded—by the horror of 9/11 if nothing else—that we have a heritage of faith and a never-ending need for spiritual sustenance. That message is no longer the exclusive province of “faith-based” Republicans in politics. For another, the GOP has raised sectarian expectations that no secular—that is, constitutional—administration can satisfy and still pass muster in the courts.
Symbolic gestures—court cases about the Ten Commandments—aren’t enough to mollify this crowd. Disgruntled evangelicals are complaining that the Bush White House hasn’t done nearly as much as it had promised to do by way of funneling federal cash to “faith-based” charities around the country. The harder these groups push, the more they risk creating a backlash— from blue-state secularists, of course, but also from faith traditions competing with each other for the holy pork, not to mention flocks who view the government as evil.
What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us
Bush administration hid 2001 terror warnings until after 2004 election
Robert Scheer
Working for Change, 15 February 2005
Would George W. Bush have been reelected president if the public understood how much responsibility his administration bears for allowing the 9/11 attacks to succeed?
The answer is unknowable and, at this date, moot. Yet it was appalling to learn last week that the White House suppressed until after the election a damning report that exposes the administration as woefully incompetent if not criminally negligent. Belatedly declassified excerpts from still-secret sections of the 9/11 commission report, which focus on the failure of the Federal Aviation Administration to heed multiple warnings that Al Qaeda terrorists were planning to hijack planes as suicide weapons, make clear that this tragedy could have been avoided. For the last three years, administration apologists have tried to make the FAA the scapegoat for the 9/11 attacks. But it is the president who ultimately is responsible for national security, not a defanged agency that is beholden to the industry it allegedly monitors. The terrible fact is that the administration took none of the steps that would have put the protection of human life ahead of a diverse set of economic and political interests, which included not offending our friends the Saudis and not hurting the share prices of airline corporations.
Bush's Sex Scandal
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 16 February 2005
I'm sorry to report a sex scandal in the heart of the Bush administration. Worse, it doesn't involve private behavior, but public conduct. You see, for all the carnage in President Bush's budget, one program is being showered with additional cash - almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It's "abstinence only" sex education, and the best research suggests that it will cost far more lives than the Clinton administration's much more notorious sex scandal. Mr. Bush means well. But "abstinence only" is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There's a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins - it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS.
Look, I'm all for abstinence education. I support the booming abstinence industry as it peddles panties and boxers decorated with stop signs (at www.abstinence.net), and "Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date" T-shirts. Abstinence education is great because it helps counteract the peer pressure that often leaves teenagers with broken hearts - and broken health. For that reason, almost all sex-ed classes in America already encourage abstinence. But abstinence-only education isn't primarily about promoting abstinence - it's about blindly refusing to teach contraception. To get federal funds, for example, abstinence-only programs are typically barred by law from discussing condoms or other forms of contraception - except to describe how they can fail. So kids in these programs go all through high school without learning anything but abstinence, even though more than 60 percent of American teenagers have sex before age 18.
Jailing of Reporters in C.I.A. Leak Case Is Upheld by Judges
By ADAM LIPTAK
NYT, 16 February 2005
Two reporters who have refused to name their sources to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer should be jailed for contempt, a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington ruled yesterday. The panel held that the reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, may have witnessed a federal crime - the disclosure by government officials of the officer's identity. The First Amendment, the panel ruled, does not give reporters the right to refuse to cooperate with grand juries investigating such crimes. The panel cited a 1972 Supreme Court decision, Branzburg v. Hayes, in which a reporter was ordered to testify about witnessing the production of illegal drugs. In yesterday's opinion, the panel said the Supreme Court's "transparent and forceful" reasoning applied to the two reporters before the appeals court. "In language as relevant to the alleged illegal disclosure of the identity of covert agents as it was to the alleged illegal processing of hashish," Judge David B. Sentelle wrote for the panel, "the Court stated that it could not 'seriously entertain the notion that the First Amendment protects the newsman's agreement to conceal the criminal conduct of his source, or evidence thereof, on the theory that it is better to write about a crime than to do something about it.' "  But the judges disagreed about whether evolving legal standards reflected in lower court decisions and state statutes might provide a separate, nonconstitutional basis for protection to reporters in some circumstances, under a so-called common law privilege. That dispute, however, was of no immediate help to Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper, as all three judges agreed that the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, had demonstrated a need for the information that would overcome whatever protection was available. The reporters will ask the full appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to hear the case, their lawyers said. Should that fail, they will ask the Supreme Court to review it. Those steps could take weeks or months, said Catherine J. Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times Company.
How to Get Straight to the People: Control the Message, Stage the Event
by Ken Herman
Palm Beach Post, 14 February 2005
For Team Bush, the communications goal is to get around national media the GOP believes stand between the president and the people. "We need your help to get the president's message past the liberal media filter and directly to the American people," Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said in a recent fund-raising e-mail. From how the message is delivered, to who is in the audience to hear it, to who gets to ask questions about it, the White House goal is control. It's a critical effort for a president who must get Americans to give him a listen about proposed overhauls of basic institutions such as Social Security, health care and taxes. The tactics include public events, sometimes called "conversations," sometimes called "forums" and sometimes called "town hall meetings" featuring Bush. Last Thursday, Bush held a "Town Hall on Strengthening Social Security" in Raleigh, N.C., and a "Conversation on Strengthening Social Security" in Blue Bell, Penn. His barnstorming tour on the topic hits Portsmouth, N.H., on Tuesday. Regardless of the name, such events are always the same: Bush as congenial host with hand-picked on-stage guests with stories to prove the president's point. Careful staging of events and control of message are tactics that have been on the upswing since President Reagan made it something of an art, according to Martha Kumar, a Towson University professor who studies presidential communication. In addition to orchestrating the on-stage portion of the events, there is evidence that the White House works to control the live audience. Presidential appearances are "ticketed events," with ticket distribution controlled by local officials and organizations.
Corporations Painted in Red and Blue
S.F. man politicizes purchasing power
by Joe Garofoli
San Francisco Chronicle via Common Dreams, 15 February 2005
Having taken a beating at the ballot box, the left is redirecting its post-election energy at corporate boardrooms. Anti-corporate campaigns have been around for decades, but this fight-the- power generation is going about it with a little more finesse. For one, activists shy away from the term "boycott." Too negative. "People are sick of that whiny sort of demeanor," said Craig Minowa, an environmental scientist who helps create campaigns for the Organic Consumers Association, a public interest advocacy group. "In the '60s it was down with this, down with that. Now, people want a more positive message." Among the new wave is North Beach resident Raven Brooks, co-founder of BuyBlue.org. He tells consumers which companies are "blue" (Democratic) or "red" (Republican) -- depending on the contributions of its political action committees and top officers -- and then redirects red shoppers to bluer competitors. "We're not telling people to boycott the companies -- we're just giving them information on how to shift their money," Brooks said. In the coming months, everyone from environmentalists to organic food advocates will supplement their political lobbying with a heftier dose of consumer outrage funneled through "corporate responsibility campaigns."
Big Bush Donor Was Promised Ambassadorship
by Sharon Theimer
AP via Common Dreams, 15 February 2005
A big Republican donor goes to his governor and senator, saying he was told by President Bush's chief fund-raiser he'd be getting a plum ambassadorial appointment but it wasn't delivered. The senator takes his case right to the top of the White House.
Employment Growing, But Labor Slack Remains
Economic Policy Institute, 14 February 2005
The nation’s payrolls increased by 146,000 last month, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.2%, its lowest level since September 2001, according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The decline in the unemployment rate was, however, due to a fall in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) from 66.0% to 65.8%, the lowest LFPR since May 1988 and 1.5 percentage points below its most recent peak in April 2000. Given today’s adult population, this translates into 3.4 million fewer persons in the job market. Since only active jobseekers are counted in the official unemployment rate, this long slide in the LFPR has artificially depressed the jobless rate, which would be higher if some of those who left the job market were actively looking for work.
As of last month, payroll levels have finally surpassed their pre-recession peak. In February 2001—the month before the recession was declared to have begun—payrolls stood at 132,546,000. Thanks in part to revisions which added 161,000 to the December job count, payrolls stood at 132,573,000 last month, 27,000 jobs above the last peak. (Note, however, that this is due to the growth of government employment; private sector employment remains 703,000 jobs below its pre-recession level).
As shown in the chart, this is the longest slump of this sort on record. On average, it has taken 21 months to surpass the prior employment peak after a recession. In this case it took 46 months.* As the chart reveals, the employment peak of the early 1990s jobless recovery was regained in 31 months, more than a year sooner compared to the current case...
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Inflation-Adjusted Wages Fell in 2004 Despite Job Growth
The good news is that employment grew in 2004; the bad news is that the rate of wage growth fell.
Job Watch, 4 February 2005
The year 2004 was the first since 1999 that saw job growth in every single month, and it was also the first year since 2000 that the jobless rate declined. Yet the labor market remained relatively slack, and despite the reversal of job losses, there was little labor market pressure on employers to raise wages. Thus, as the chart below reveals, wages grew more slowly in 2004 than in the previous year. In fact, the 2.1% growth rate for nominal hourly earnings in 2004 is the lowest in the history of this wage series, which began in 1964 (the series is for production, non-supervisory workers, the 80% of the workforce who are either blue-collar manufacturing workers or non-managers in services).
Hastert: Public Not Sold on Social Security Plans
`You can't jam change down the American people's throat,' speaker says
By Jill Zuckman
Chicago Tribune, 11 February 2005
Despite President Bush's intensive public campaign to revamp Social Security, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Thursday that voters are not yet persuaded that the retirement program is in crisis or that it needs a dramatic overhaul to save it. As Bush travels the country promoting his plan, Hastert cautioned in his first extensive interview on the president's top domestic priority that much selling needs to be done and a hard fight in Congress lies ahead, because "you can't jam change down the American people's throat." Hastert (R-Ill.) said he thinks Bush is doing a good job, but he also said it would be difficult to tackle the issue without Democrats' participation and that it would take the House and the Senate "to be able to lift this load." Hastert said he is open to combining Social Security reform with tax legislation to spur the economy, but he declined to specify what sort of tax changes he would like to see. He said the road to reform could be a lengthy one, taking as much as two years. "Now I have said to the president, I've said it to all of his advisers, and I've said to all of our folks, `Look it, you can't jam change down the American people's throat unless they perceive there really is a problem, that there's something there that isn't going to work 12 or 14 years from now, and it's going to be a catastrophe when we reach that point,"' Hastert said. He said voters need to understand that "if we do some common sense things today, we can fix that." Eventually, he said, the American people have to make that choice before Congress can go forward.
No Mullah Left Behind
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
13 February 2005
The Wall Street Journal ran a very, very alarming article from Iran on its front page last Tuesday. The article explained how the mullahs in Tehran - who are now swimming in cash thanks to soaring oil prices - rather than begging foreign investors to come into Iran, are now shunning some of them. The article related how a Turkish mobile-phone operator, which had signed a deal with the Iranian government to launch Iran's first privately owned cellphone network, had the contract frozen by the mullahs in the Iranian Parliament because they were worried it might help the Turks and their foreign partners spy on Iran. The Journal quoted Ali Ansari, an Iran specialist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, as saying that for 10 years analysts had been writing about Iran's need for economic reform. "In actual fact, the scenario is worse now," said Mr. Ansari. "They have all this money with the high oil price, and they don't need to do anything about reforming the economy." Indeed, The Journal added, the conservative mullahs are feeling even more emboldened to argue that with high oil prices, Iran doesn't need Western investment capital and should feel "free to pursue its nuclear power program without interference." This is a perfect example of the Bush energy policy at work, and the Bush energy policy is: "No Mullah Left Behind." By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that? ...The president's priorities are totally nuts.
A Personal Burden
Chile switched to a privatized pension system nearly 25 years ago, and millions of workers still fall through the cracks
By Marla Dickerson
LA Times, 13 February 2005
Weary from decades of working nights and weekends at a public hospital, nursing assistant Inelia Pardo Acevedo recently retired. But the 64-year-old plans to look for a part-time job to pad the nest egg in her personal retirement account. The $225 a month she draws under Chile's privatized system doesn't stretch far. And what galls her is that colleagues who stuck with traditional pension plans get three times as much, guaranteed for the rest of their lives. The government "painted this wonderful picture of private accounts," Pardo said. "They fooled me. They fooled us all."
As the Social Security debate heats up in the United States, many are looking south to Chile, where nearly a quarter century of experience with privatization hasn't settled the question of how to best construct an old-age safety net. In 1981, Chile scrapped a pay-as-you-go system similar to the one in the U.S., in which the contributions of active workers were used to pay pensions of existing retirees. Instead, many Chileans began funneling 10% of their wages into professionally managed private accounts that allowed them to invest in stocks and bonds. Nearly two dozen nations, including Britain, Argentina, Sweden and Singapore, have since adopted some version of Chile's plan. President Bush has lauded it as "a great example" of why Americans should be allowed to divert a portion of their Social Security contributions to personal accounts.
SEE ALSO:
Hastert Cautions Bush About Social Security Plan
By Mike Allen
Washington Post, 12 February 2005
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has warned the White House that voters are not yet ready to accept fundamental changes to Social Security as wary Republicans are cautioning the president to be as vague as possible about his plan.
Democrats Elect Dean as Committee Chairman
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 13 February 2005
Howard Dean, once a grass-roots outsider, rode to an easy victory on Saturday to become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee with support from hundreds of party insiders and operatives he carefully cultivated during an uphill two-month campaign. "If you'd told me a year ago I'd be standing here doing this as your choice for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, I would not have believed you, and neither would have a lot of other people," Dr. Dean told a cheering Democratic crowd in Washington. He was elected by a voice vote shortly before noon without opposition. In his first speech as head of the party and at a later news conference, Dr. Dean presented his vision of a Democratic return to power, accusing Republicans of "fiscal recklessness" and saying the Democrats had a record of balancing budgets. Leaving aside some of his more controversial liberal social views, he portrayed Democrats as the party most committed to national security and barely mentioned the Iraq war, which he opposed. He criticized President Bush's budget, saying that it "brings Enron-style accounting to the nation's capital, and it demonstrates once again what Americans, all Americans, are now beginning to see: you cannot trust Republicans with your money."
SEE ALSO:
Dean Takes the Helm of His Struggling Party
Without the backing of key Democratic leaders, the former presidential candidate is elected unanimously to lead the national committee.
By Mark Z. Barabak
LA Times, 13 February 2005
Senate's New Math May Aid Stalled Judicial Nominees
By NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 13 February 2005
When the battle over judicial nominations resumes in the next few weeks, President Bush may have a good chance of winning confirmation for some of his previously blocked candidates, Democrats and Republicans said this week. Mr. Bush, who was regularly stymied in his first term by Senate Democrats, who blocked 10 of his appeals court choices by filibuster, comes to the fight this time with a larger Republican majority in the Senate and what many see as an increased opportunity to get some of those same nominees confirmed. One reason for that view is that the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Arlen Specter, has been quietly building a strategy that could break the logjam over judicial nominations.
Libertarian and conservative voices remain silent
Bush's Class-War Budget
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 11 February 2005
It may sound shrill to describe President Bush as someone who takes food from the mouths of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends. Yet his latest budget proposal is top-down class warfare in action. And it offers the Democrats an opportunity, if they're willing to take it. First, the facts: the budget proposal really does take food from the mouths of babes. One of the proposed spending cuts would make it harder for working families with children to receive food stamps, terminating aid for about 300,000 people. Another would deny child care assistance to about 300,000 children, again in low-income working families. And the budget really does shower largesse on millionaires even as it punishes the needy. For example, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities informs us that even as the administration demands spending cuts, it will proceed with the phaseout of two little-known tax provisions - originally put in place under the first President George Bush - that limit deductions and exemptions for high-income households. More than half of the benefits from this backdoor tax cut would go to people with incomes of more than a million dollars; 97 percent would go to people with incomes exceeding $200,000. It so happens that the number of taxpayers with more than $1 million in annual income is about the same as the number of people who would have their food stamps cut off under the Bush proposal. But it costs a lot more to give a millionaire a break than to put food on a low-income family's table: eliminating limits on deductions and exemptions would give taxpayers with incomes over $1 million an average tax cut of more than $19,000. It's like that all the way through. On one side, the budget calls for program cuts that are small change compared with the budget deficit, yet will harm hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Americans. On the other side, it calls for making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and for new tax breaks for the affluent in the form of tax-sheltered accounts and more liberal rules for deductions. The question is whether the relentless mean-spiritedness of this budget finally awakens the public to the true cost of Mr. Bush's tax policy. ...Here's a comparison: the Bush budget proposal would cut domestic discretionary spending, adjusted for inflation, by 16 percent over the next five years. That would mean savage cuts in education, health care, veterans' benefits and environmental protection. Yet these cuts would save only about $66 billion per year, about one-sixth of the budget deficit. On the other side, a rollback of Mr. Bush's cuts in tax rates for high-income brackets, on capital gains and on dividend income would yield more than $120 billion per year in extra revenue - eliminating almost a third of the budget deficit - yet have hardly any effect on middle-income families. (Estimates from the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution show that such a rollback would cost families with incomes between $25,000 and $80,000 an average of $156.)
Rightwing anti-intellectualism decried by Nobel laureates as well as 'lab rats'
U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings
More than 200 Fish and Wildlife researchers cite cases where conclusions were reversed to weaken protections and favor business, a survey finds.
By Julie Cart
LA Times , February 2005
More than 200 scientists employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they have been directed to alter official findings to lessen protections for plants and animals, a survey released Wednesday says. The survey of the agency's scientific staff of 1,400 had a 30% response rate and was conducted jointly by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. A division of the Department of the Interior, the Fish and Wildlife Service is charged with determining which animals and plants should be placed on the endangered species list and designating areas where such species need to be protected. More than half of the biologists and other researchers who responded to the survey said they knew of cases in which commercial interests, including timber, grazing, development and energy companies, had applied political pressure to reverse scientific conclusions deemed harmful to their business.
Lawyer Is Guilty of Aiding Terror
By JULIA PRESTON
NYT, 11 February 2005
Lynne F. Stewart, an outspoken lawyer known for representing a long list of unpopular defendants, was convicted yesterday by a federal jury in Manhattan of aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a terrorist client.  In a startlingly sweeping verdict, Ms. Stewart was convicted on all five counts of providing material aid to terrorism and of lying to the government when she pledged to obey federal rules that barred her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, from communicating with his followers. Her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, were also convicted of all the charges against them. The verdict was a major victory for Justice Department prosecutors in one of the country's most important terror cases since the Sept. 11 attacks. Ms. Stewart's April 2002 indictment was announced in Washington by John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, and the verdict was hailed yesterday by his successor, Alberto R. Gonzales. The convictions "send a clear, unmistakable message that this department will pursue both those who carry out acts of terrorism and those who assist them with their murderous goals," Mr. Gonzales said.  ...Afterward, Ms. Stewart said she was stunned and vowed to appeal the verdict. She called the trial a government assault on the practice of law. "I see myself as being a symbol of what people rail against when they say our civil liberties are eroded," she said to a small cluster of her supporters outside the federal district courthouse. "I hope this will be a wake-up call to all the citizens of this country, that you can't lock up the lawyers, you can't tell the lawyers how to do their jobs." "I will fight on, I'm not giving up," she promised defiantly. "I know I committed no crime. I know what I did was right." But then her voice wavered and tears came to her eyes.  Ms. Stewart, who is 65, faces up to 30 years in jail. The judge, John G. Koeltl, set her sentencing for July 15. Because she was convicted of a felony, she will be immediately disbarred. She remains free on bail, but cannot travel outside New York State.  Although Judge Koeltl reminded the jurors repeatedly that Osama bin Laden and the World Trade Center attacks were not at issue, images of the Qaeda leader and remembrances of the destruction he wrought pervaded the trial, which took place in a courthouse a few blocks from ground zero.
FBI and Pentagon joyfully castrate CIA
F.B.I.'s Recruiting of Spies Causes Rift With C.I.A.
By DAVID JOHNSTON and DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 11 February 2005
An ambitious new effort by the F.B.I. to recruit foreigners in the United States and use them as spies overseas has created new frictions with the Central Intelligence Agency, which views the bureau's actions as a serious encroachment on the agency's traditional primacy in intelligence gathering, senior government officials said. The rift reflects the fundamental changes sweeping through American intelligence agencies as the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., as well as elements of the Defense Department, face increasing pressures to improve their intelligence capabilities in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks. All three agencies are still struggling to grapple with the transformation in the threats facing the United States since the end of the cold war and are due to report to the White House next week on their plans to improve counterterrorism efforts. In a departure from past practice, the F.B.I. wants to manage the foreigners it recruits under the new program after they return to their home countries. The C.I.A. wants to maintain its lead role in recruiting and managing these sources. The transformation of the F.B.I. into an agency that collects intelligence overseas is causing unease within the C.I.A., where officials question whether the F.B.I. has the expertise to play that role. Among the particular sources of friction in the last year have been several episodes in which senior intelligence officials said the F.B.I. failed to inform the C.I.A. fully about its relationships with intelligence sources overseas or practiced poor tradecraft in its dealing with them.
Secrecy used to avoid political accountability
Critics Want Full Report of 9/11 Panel
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 11 February 2005
The Bush administration came under pressure on Thursday to make public the full classified version of a report from the 9/11 commission that is critical of the government's failure to heed aviation threats before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Former members of the commission, victims' families, open-government advocates and a leading Democrat called on the administration to release the entire report on aviation problems surrounding the attacks. The commission completed the report in August, and commission members said the administration blocked their efforts to release the report. The administration delivered a declassified version of the report to the National Archives two weeks ago with numerous deletions of material it considered too sensitive for the public to see. Commissioners from the 9/11 panel said they believed that the entire report should be public.
'Free Enterprise' -- March to eliminate consumer influence gains momentum
Senate Approves Measure to Curb Big Class Actions
By STEPHEN LABATON
NYT, 11 February 2005
Handing President Bush a significant victory, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a measure on Thursday that would sharply limit the ability of people to file class-action lawsuits against companies.The measure, adopted 72 to 26, now heads to the House of Representatives, where Republican leaders say it will be approved next week and sent to the White House for Mr. Bush's signature. The measure would prohibit state courts from hearing many kinds of cases they now consider, transferring them to federal courts. Experts say many cases will wind up not being brought because federal judges have been constrained by a series of legal precedents from considering large class actions that involve varying laws of different states. The legislation also makes it more difficult for class-action lawsuits to be settled by payments of coupons for goods and services instead of cash by the defendants, a practice that has been heavily criticized by Democrats and Republicans. The measure does not affect pending cases. Mr. Bush issued a statement praising the vote, his first legislative victory of his second term. ...It could have an especially significant effect on cases involving accusations of defective products, like drugs and cars; plaintiffs in such cases have had success in bringing large class actions in state courts. Automakers and drug makers have worked for years with manufacturers and insurers to press Congress to adopt the bill. The business groups have asserted that the legislation is necessary to curtail frivolous litigation that benefits lawyers more than plaintiffs. They have said it is important to eliminate the unfair practice of lawyers' shopping for state courts that were more favorable to plaintiffs. ...the measure has been attacked by civil rights organizations, labor groups, consumer organizations, many state prosecutors and environmental groups, who say it would sharply curtail important cases and provide new protections for unscrupulous companies. Many federal and state judges and state lawmakers have also criticized the bill, saying it would strip states of an important role in judging such contests and could add a considerable number of cases to already burdened federal dockets. "This bill is one of the most unfair, anticonsumer proposals to come before the Senate in years," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader. "It slams the courthouse doors on a wide range of injured plaintiffs. It turns federalism upside down by preventing state courts from hearing state law claims. And it limits corporate accountability at a time of rampant corporate scandals." In the vote on Thursday, 18 Democrats joined 53 Republicans and the lone Senate independent, James M. Jeffords of Vermont, in supporting the measure. Democrats cast all 26 dissenting votes. Two Republicans, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and John Sununu of New Hampshire, did not vote. Republicans say they hope the vote will provide momentum for two other major bills overhauling the tort law system, one on asbestos litigation, the other on curbs on medical malpractice lawsuits. Critics of these bills say that part of the effort by the White House is to attack trial lawyers, a vital financial base of support for the Democratic Party. They have also said that like Social Security and the war in Iraq, tort law problems have been exaggerated by the Bush administration, and that proposed solutions go much further than necessary.
9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 10 February 2005
In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission. But aviation officials were "lulled into a false sense of security," and "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures," the commission report concluded. The report discloses that the Federal Aviation Administration, despite being focused on risks of hijackings overseas, warned airports in the spring of 2001 that if "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable." The report takes the F.A.A. to task for failing to pursue domestic security measures that could conceivably have altered the events of Sept. 11, 2001, like toughening airport screening procedures for weapons or expanding the use of on-flight air marshals. The report, completed last August, said officials appeared more concerned with reducing airline congestion, lessening delays, and easing airlines' financial woes than deterring a terrorist attack. The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members who say it provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system. The administration provided both the classified report and a declassified, 120-page version to the National Archives two weeks ago and, even with heavy redactions in some areas, the declassified version provides the firmest evidence to date about the warnings that aviation officials received concerning the threat of an attack on airliners and the failure to take steps to deter it. Among other things, the report says that leaders of the F.A.A. received 52 intelligence reports from their security branch that mentioned Mr. bin Laden or Al Qaeda from April to Sept. 10, 2001. That represented half of all the intelligence summaries in that time.
Conservatives concentrate federal power
House Likely to OK Migrant Restrictions
White House support adds impetus to a bill to bar driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, limit asylum claims and close a border fence gap.
By Mary Curtius
LA Times, 10 February 2005
A bill aimed at blocking states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants appeared headed for passage today in the House of Representatives, aided by a strong endorsement from the White House and broad support within the Republican majority. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the bill's prime sponsor, portrayed the legislation — which would also restrict asylum claims and complete a controversial border fence between San Diego and Tijuana — as a matter of national security.  "It seeks to prevent another 9/11-type terrorist attack by disrupting terrorist travel," he said on the House floor Wednesday. The White House concurred, saying in a policy statement issued hours before debate began that the bill would "strengthen the ability of the United States to protect against terrorist entry into and activities within the United States." But immigration advocates, groups supporting civil and privacy rights, and state government organizations oppose the bill. They say it would make it harder for those fleeing persecution to seek asylum in this country and would endanger public safety and national security by denying driver's licenses to millions of illegal immigrants. The bill's fate in the Senate is unclear. If presented as a stand-alone bill, its passage is not assured; but its provisions are likely to be attached to must-pass legislation in that chamber. If enacted into law, the bill would kill efforts in California to allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses. ...
Pentagon Inquiry Is Said to Confirm Muslims' Accounts of Sexual Tactics at Guantanamo
By Carol D. Leonnig and Dana Priest
Washington Post, 10 February 2005
Female interrogators repeatedly used sexually suggestive tactics to try to humiliate and pry information from devout Muslim men held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a military investigation not yet public and newly declassified accounts from detainees. The prisoners have told their lawyers, who compiled the accounts, that female interrogators regularly violated Muslim taboos about sex and contact with women. The women rubbed their bodies against the men, wore skimpy clothes in front of them, made sexually explicit remarks and touched them provocatively, at least eight detainees said in documents or through their attorneys. A wide-ranging Pentagon investigation, which has not yet been released, generally confirms the detainees' allegations, according to a senior Defense Department official familiar with the report. While isolated accounts of such tactics have emerged in recent weeks, the new allegations and the findings of the Pentagon investigation indicate that sexually oriented tactics may have been part of the fabric of Guantanamo interrogations, especially in 2003. The inquiry uncovered numerous instances in which female interrogators, using dye, pretended to spread menstrual blood on Muslim men, the official said. Separately, in court papers and public statements, three detainees say that women smeared them with blood. The military investigation of U.S. detention and interrogation practices worldwide, led by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, confirmed one case in which an Army interrogator took off her uniform top and paraded around in a tight T-shirt to make a Guantanamo detainee uncomfortable, and other cases in which interrogators touched the detainees suggestively, the senior Pentagon official said. ...In previous documents, detainees have complained of physical abuse, including routine beatings, painful shackling, and exposure to extremes of hot and cold. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted then that detainees were treated "humanely," and Pentagon officials said terrorists were trained to fabricate torture allegations. Some of the accounts resemble the sexual aspects of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib. Photographs that became public last year showed a servicewoman there holding naked prisoners on a leash and posing next to a pile of naked prisoners.
Blog Reveals Involvement of White House Shill in Outing of Valerie Plame
DailyKos.com, 9 February 2005
Jeff Gannon was planted by the administration to disseminate their talking points unfettered by any journalism ethics or investigation shortly after the Iraq war, when the failure to find WMDs was becoming apparent. He became incredibly useful in L'Affaire Plame to continue to push the dual stories that a) Plame's name was already common knowledge and therefore `outing' her was not a crime and b) to continue to help discredit the CIA and Wilson. Based on the evidence, I believe the 2002 CIA memo was leaked to Gannon when Novak became unusable and when the `mainstream' reporters with CIA contacts were not pushing the WH's preferred story line. They needed cover, and they got it. And as is evidenced by his remarkable access to Scott McClellan and President Bush in the White House press room, to this day, he was rewarded handsomely... And it continues as business as usual... until today when he became expendable and `resigned' from Talon News.
Don't tell anyone, but its not just Bush...
Some Bush Foes Vote Yet Again, With Their Feet: Canada or Bust
By RICK LYMAN
NYT, 8 February 2005
Christopher Key knows exactly what he would be giving up if he left Bellingham, Wash. "It's the sort of place Norman Rockwell would paint, where everyone watches out for everyone else and we have block parties every year," said Mr. Key, a 56-year-old Vietnam War veteran and former magazine editor who lists Francis Scott Key among his ancestors.
But leave it he intends to do, and as soon as he can. His house is on the market, and he is busily seeking work across the border in Canada. For him, the re-election of President Bush was the last straw. "I love the United States," he said as he stood on the Vancouver waterfront, staring toward the Coast Mountains, which was lost in a gray shroud. "I fought for it in Vietnam. It's a wrenching decision to think about leaving. But America is turning into a country very different from the one I grew up believing in."
In the Niagara of liberal angst just after Mr. Bush's victory on Nov. 2, the Canadian government's immigration Web site reported an increase in inquiries from the United States to about 115,000 a day from 20,000. After three months, memories of the election have begun to recede. There has been an inauguration, even a State of the Union address. Yet immigration lawyers say that Americans are not just making inquiries and that more are pursuing a move above the 49th parallel, fed up with a country they see drifting persistently to the right and abandoning the principles of tolerance, compassion and peaceful idealism they felt once defined the nation. America is in no danger of emptying out. But even a small loss of residents, many of whom cite a deep sense of political despair, is a significant event in the life of a nation that thinks of itself as a place to escape to.
..."The number of U.S. citizens who are actually submitting Canadian immigration papers and making concrete plans is about three or four times higher than normal," said Linda Mark, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver. Other immigration lawyers in Toronto, Montreal and Halifax said they had noticed a similar uptick, though most put the rise at closer to threefold. "We're still not talking about a huge movement of people," said David Cohen, an immigration lawyer in Montreal. "In 2003, the last year where full statistics are available, there were something like 6,000 U.S. citizens who received permanent resident status in Canada. So even if we do go up threefold this year, we're only talking about 18,000 people."

New White House Estimate Lifts Drug Benefit Cost to $720 Billion
 By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 8 February 2005
The Bush administration offered a new estimate of the cost of the Medicare drug benefit on Tuesday, saying it would cost $720 billion in the next 10 years. That is much more than the $400 billion Congress assumed when it passed legislation creating the benefit in late 2003. But administration officials said the numbers were not comparable. The original estimate was for the years 2004 to 2013. The new estimate covers the period from 2006, when the drug benefit becomes available, to 2015. The higher figure, which provides the first glimpse of the true cost of the drug benefit, could touch off a political uproar in Congress, where conservative Republicans were already expressing alarm about the costs of Medicare, including the drug benefit. In a recent interview, the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, said he wanted to "put the brakes on the growth of entitlements" and take a close look at the new Medicare law. "Since it was sold as a $400 billion program, that's what we should keep it at," Mr. Gregg said. Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, asked about the issue on Tuesday when Treasury Secretary John W. Snow was testifying before the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Snow said he did not have detailed figures at hand. Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said later that the drug benefit would cost $720 billion from 2006 to 2015.
Retirement Turns Into a Rest Stop as Benefits Dwindle
By EDUARDO PORTER and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
NYT, 9 February 2005
As numerous companies across the country withdraw retiree medical and dental benefits while others switch to less generous retirement plans, many aging workers who had expected to ease comfortably out of the labor force in their 50's and early 60's are discovering that they do not have the financial resources to support themselves in retirement. As a result, a lot more of them are returning to work. Since the mid-1990's, older people have become the fastest-growing portion of the work force. The Labor Department projects that workers over 55 will make up 19.1 percent of the labor force by 2012, up from 14.3 percent in 2002. Until recently, most economists said that older people were being lured back into the labor force largely because of opportunities growing out of the vibrant economy of the 1990's. But these days, they say, many such Americans are being drawn to work out of necessity rather than choice. As the nation gears up for a fundamental debate over the future of Social Security, these circumstances hint at potential changes in the federal program that supports more than 40 million elderly Americans.
Madison Avenue sells radical conservatism
US Government Ratchets Up PR Budget
By Holly Yeager in Washington
Financial Times, 7 February 2005
The US government's bill for public relations does not compare with what it spends on big-ticket items such as nuclear submarines and presidential helicopters.
But the costs have been creeping upward - a sign that politics is being conducted in a new way, in which the message of the day can be delivered by ever-increasing means.
The federal government spent $88.2m on contracts with public relations agencies last year, according to a report last month by congressional Democrats. That is up from $39m in 2000.
The payments have drawn criticism since the disclosure that Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, had received $241,000 from the Department of Education to promote the administration's "No Child Left Behind" initiative in television and radio appearances. Other such payments have recently ome to light, including $21,500 from the Department of Health and Human Services to a syndicated columnist to promote the president's pro-marriage proposals.
"Presidents have found it more effective to try to sell administration policies on Capitol Hill by combining an outside game with an inside game," says Anthony Corrado, a government professor at Colby College in Maine.
That strategy, of campaign directly to the public while also working inside the Washington Beltway, is especially useful in the current political environment, in which partisan feelings run high and few in either political party are eager to negotiate, he said.
Such a "permanent campaign" often includes the use of cabinet secretaries to travel around the country, boasting of administration's accomplishments and laying the groundwork for a new agenda.
But, as the Democrats' report makes clear, the public relations spending is not limited to high-profile agenda items such as the president's plans for education and marriage.
Over the past 4 years, 38 federal agencies had contracts with major PR firms. The top five spenders on public relations over that period were the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ($94m), the National Institutes of Health ($57m), the Minerals Management Service ($22m), the Centers for Disease Control ($21m), and the Health Resources and Services Administration ($13m).
The bulk of that spending went to four large firms -- Ketchum Communications, the Matthews Media Group, Fleishmann Hillard, and Porter Novelli - according to the report. And it was the PR firms who, at times, passed the federal money on to journalists such as Mr Williams. ...While government spending on public relations is not new, "It has become much more sophisticated in this administration," says Mr Corrado. [READ: DECEPTIVE]
Spearing the Beast
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 8 February 2005
President Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.
Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits - income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong - would be nearly eliminated.
Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a "clawback": in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.
Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances - something the administration has finally admitted - there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.
Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.
Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."
By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.
Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.
The attempt to "jab a spear" through Social Security complements the strategy of "starve the beast," long advocated by right-wing intellectuals: cut taxes, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse for cuts in social spending. The spearing doesn't seem to be going too well at the moment, but the starving was on full display in the budget released yesterday.
To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards - in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's.
Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes - and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels.
You might think, given these facts, that a plan to reduce the deficit would include major efforts to increase revenue, starting with a rollback of recent huge tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, the budget contains new upper-income tax breaks.
Any deficit reduction will come from spending cuts. Many of those cuts won't make it through Congress, but Mr. Bush may well succeed in imposing cuts in child care assistance and food stamps for low-income workers. He may also succeed in severely squeezing Medicaid - the only one of the three great social insurance programs specifically intended for the poor and near-poor, and therefore the most politically vulnerable.
All of this explains why it's foolish to imagine some sort of widely acceptable compromise with Mr. Bush about Social Security. Moderates and liberals want to preserve the America F.D.R. built. Mr. Bush and the ideological movement he leads, although they may use F.D.R.'s image in ads, want to destroy it.
Just another rouge state?
US Nuclear Upgrade May Violate Test Ban
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Independent (UK), 8 February 2005
As it accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, America is preparing to upgrade and renew parts of its own ageing nuclear arsenal. Critics believe the upgrades could lead the US to breach the treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons.
Since the project will probably involve replacing technology that originated in the Sixties, watchdogs are concerned the US might be inclined to test the newer systems and, therefore, breach the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Of more concern to watchdogs is President George Bush's dedication to developing a new breed of "bunker-buster" nuclear weapon, designed to penetrate toughened underground defences. Critics say the plan reveals the administration's hypocrisy and undermines international efforts to persuade other countries not to develop weapons.
Last week, it was revealed that the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had sent the Department of Energy a memo requesting that it set aside funds to resume a study to examine the development of a bunker-buster bomb. The study had been halted last year after Congress removed its funding.
Back from Iraq - and Suddenly Out on the Streets
Social service agencies say the number of homeless vets is rising, in part because of high housing costs and gaps in pay.
By Alexandra Marks
Christian Science Monitor, 8 February 2005
Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are now showing up in the nation's homeless shelters.
While the numbers are still small, they're steadily rising, and raising alarms in both the homeless and veterans' communities. The concern is that these returning veterans - some of whom can't find jobs after leaving the military, others of whom are still struggling psychologically with the war - may be just the beginning of an influx of new veterans in need. Currently, there are 150,000 troops in Iraq and 16,000 in Afghanistan. More than 130,000 have already served and returned home. So far, dozens of them, like Herold Noel, a married father of three, have found themselves sleeping on the streets, on friends' couches, or in their cars within weeks of returning home. Two years ago, Black Veterans for Social Justice (BVSJ) in the borough of Brooklyn, saw only a handful of recent returnees. Now the group is aiding more than 100 Iraq veterans, 30 of whom are homeless.
"It's horrible to put your life on the line and then come back home to nothing, that's what I came home to: nothing. I didn't know where to go or where to turn," says Mr. Noel. "I thought I was alone, but I found out there are a whole lot of other soldiers in the same situation. Now I want people to know what's really going on."
After the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of veterans came home to a hostile culture that offered little gratitude and inadequate services, particularly to deal with the stresses of war. As a result, tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans still struggle with homelessness and drug addiction.
The Right's Attack on Public Pensions
LA Times, 7 February 2005
The governor has proposed privatizing government pension plans and replacing them with individual 401(k)-style private accounts. His proposal strikes at the power of public pension funds, which have used their financial clout to protect the retirement savings of 2 million Californians — teachers, police officers and other public servants.
Why this proposal then? Because for the right-wing ideologues behind his plan, the issue is not saving money. It is about draining public pension funds of their clout.
As recent news reports explain, the driving force behind the proposed pension ban is the same crew of "anti-tax advocates, free-market enthusiasts and Wall Street interests" that is pushing President Bush's Social Security privatization plan. They include Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, and Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund. They see the governor's proposal as "one of our highest priorities," and the governor agrees. "This is a national battle," he told reporters as he laid out his plans to collect millions of dollars from wealthy out-of-state political contributors.
Across the country, the governor's ideological soul mates are targeting public pension funds for elimination because those funds — with the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California State Teachers' Retirement System at the forefront — have stood up for ordinary investors against the rampant corporate abuses.
"Just 115 people control $1 trillion in these funds," Norquist said. "We want to take that power and destroy it." What bothers him and others is that these funds have rallied other institutional investors to protect the market from abuses and fraud and to support such corporate reforms as linking executive pay to performance, requiring auditor independence, separating stock analysis from investment banking at financial firms, ending insider trading at mutual funds and opening corporate board elections to shareholders.
... In pursuing corporate reform, the pension funds are operating not just in their own self-defense. They are also giving a powerful voice in the boardrooms to the interests of millions of families that have invested their savings in the markets.
That's why the governor and his right-wing ideologues have targeted the pension funds: not because the funds have strayed, but because they are leading the fight on behalf of ordinary shareholders to put transparency and accountability back into American capitalism.
The Year of Living Indecently
FRANK RICH
NYT, 6 February 2005
Public television is now so fearful of crossing its government patrons that it is flirting with self-immolation. Having disowned lesbians in the children's show "Postcards From Buster" and stripped suspect language from "Prime Suspect" on "Masterpiece Theater," PBS is editing its Feb. 23 broadcast of "Dirty War," the HBO-BBC film about a terrorist attack, to remove a glimpse of female nudity in a scene depicting nuclear detoxification. Next thing you know they'll be snipping lascivious flesh out of a documentary about Auschwitz.
This repressive cultural environment was officially ratified on Nov. 2, when Ms. Jackson's breast pulled off its greatest coup of all: the re-election of President Bush. Or so it was decreed by the media horde that retroactively declared "moral values" the campaign's decisive issue and the Super Bowl the blue states' Waterloo. The political bosses of "family" organizations, well aware that TV's collective wisdom becomes reality whether true or not, have been emboldened ever since. They are spending their political capital like drunken sailors, redoubling their demands that the Bush administration marginalize gay people, stamp out sex education and turn pop culture into a continuous loop of "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."
States See Growing Campaign to Change Redistricting Laws
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NYT, 7 February 2005
The politically charged methods that states use to draw Congressional districts are under attack by citizens groups, state legislators and the governor of California, all of whom are concerned that increasingly sophisticated map-drawing has created a class of entrenched incumbents, stifled electoral competition and caused governmental gridlock.
U.S. Redesigning Atomic Weapons
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NYT, 7 February 2005
Worried that the nation's aging nuclear arsenal is increasingly fragile, American scientists have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives, federal officials and private experts say. The officials say the program could help shrink the arsenal and the high cost of its maintenance. But critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and could possibly ignite a new arms race.
The Emperor's New Hump
The New York Times killed a story that could have changed the election—because it could have changed the election
 By Dave Lindorff
FAIR's Extra! January/February 2005 issue
In the weeks leading up to the November 2 election, the New York Times was abuzz with excitement. Besides the election itself, the paper’s reporters were hard at work on two hot investigative projects, each of which could have a major impact on the outcome of the tight presidential race.
One week before Election Day, the Times (10/25/04) ran a hard-hitting and controversial exposé of the Al-Qaqaa ammunition dump—identified by U.N. inspectors before the war as containing 400 tons of special high-density explosives useful for aircraft bombings and as triggers for nuclear devices, but left unguarded and available to insurgents by U.S. forces after the invasion.
On Thursday, just three days after that first exposé, the paper was set to run a second, perhaps more explosive piece, exposing how George W. Bush had worn an electronic cueing device in his ear and probably cheated during the presidential debates.
That the story hadn’t gotten more serious treatment in the mainstream press was largely thanks to a well-organized media effort by the Bush White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign to label those who attempted to investigate the bulge as "conspiracy buffs" (Washington Post, 10/9/04). In an era of pinched budgets and an equally pinched notion of the role of the Fourth Estate, the fact that the Kerry camp was offering no comment on the matter—perhaps for fear of earning a "conspiracy buff" label for the candidate himself—may also have made reporters skittish. Jeffrey Klein, a founding editor of Mother Jones magazine, told Mother Jones (online edition, 10/30/04) he had called a number of contacts at leading news organizations across the country, and was told that unless the Kerry campaign raised the issue, they couldn’t pursue it.
"Totally off base"
The Times’ effort to get to the bottom of the matter through a serious investigation seemed to be a striking exception. That investigation, however, despite extensive reporting over several weeks by three Times reporters, never ran. Now, like the mythic weapons of mass destruction that were the raison d’etre for the Iraq War, the Times is thus far claiming that the Bush Bulgegate story never existed in the first place.
Referring to a FAIR press release (11/5/04) about the spiked story, Village Voice press critic Jarrett Murphy wrote (11/16/04), "A Times reporter alleged to have worked on such a piece says FAIR was totally off base: The paper never pursued the story."
Murphy told Extra! that his source at the nation’s self-proclaimed paper of record—whom he would not identify—told him the information about the bulge seen under Bush’s jacket during the debates, provided by a senior astronomer and photo imaging specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, had been tossed onto the "nutpile," and was never researched further.
In fact, several sources, including a journalist at the Times, have told Extra! that the paper put a good deal of effort into this important story about presidential competence and integrity; they claim that a story was written, edited and scheduled to run on several different days, before senior editors finally axed it at the last minute on Wednesday evening, October 27. A Times journalist, who said that Times staffers were "pretty upset" about the killing of the story, claims the senior editors felt Thursday was "too close" to the election to run such a piece. Emails from the Times to the NASA scientist corroborate these sources’ accounts.
Bush Budget Calls for Cuts in Health Services
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 5 February 2005
President Bush's budget for 2006 cuts spending for a wide range of public health programs, including several to protect the nation against bioterrorist attacks and to respond to medical emergencies, budget documents show. Faced with constraints on spending caused by record budget deficits and the demands of the war in Iraq, administration officials said on Friday that they had increased the budget for some health programs but cut many others, including some that address urgent health care needs. ...The documents show, for example, that Mr. Bush would cut spending for several programs that deal with epidemics, chronic diseases and obesity. His plan would also cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 9 percent, to $6.9 billion, the documents show. ...But the administration is proposing to increase the Pentagon budget by 4.8 percent, to $419.3 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, according to Defense Department budget documents obtained by The New York Times. That sum does not include the costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running about $5 billion a month. ...Mr. Bush requests money to expand a national stockpile of vaccines and antibiotics. But the public health emergency fund of the centers, which helps state and local agencies prepare for bioterror attacks, would be cut 12.6 percent... ...A Public Health Service program for "chronic disease prevention and health promotion" would be cut by 6.5 percent, to $841 million in 2006. The program finances efforts to prevent and control obesity, which federal health officials say has reached epidemic proportions. The president's budget would also eliminate a block grant that provides $131 million for preventive health services. Under federal law, the money is used to "address urgent health problems," which vary from state to state. ...The budget for training nurses, dentists and other health professionals would be cut 64 percent, to $160.5 million in 2006. The president would cut $100 million, or 33 percent, from a $301 million program that trains doctors at children's hospitals. Mr. Bush seeks a $38 million increase in programs promoting sexual abstinence, which would bring the total to $192.5 million in 2006, an increase of more than 50 percent since 2004.
Memo Gives New Details on Workings of Bush's Social Security Plan
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
NYT, 5 February 2005
Under the plan President Bush outlined Wednesday night in his State of the Union Message, retirees' traditional Social Security benefits would be reduced if they had diverted some of their tax money into private investment accounts, according to a memorandum that the chief actuary of the Social Security system sent to the White House on the day of the president's address.
Mystery Non-Admittance List May Trace to Bush Advance Team
By Mary Jo Almquist
The Forum, 5 February 2005
The whodunit mystery surrounding the do-not-admit list for President Bush's Fargo visit still hasn't been solved, but clues uncovered Friday indicate a worker with the White House advance team may have been the culprit. This comes just one day after spokesmen for the White House and North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven said the list was the result of "an overzealous volunteer." ...Fargo City Commissioner Linda Coates [said] "The enigmatic local volunteer is typically blamed for these types of heavy-handed moves," she said. "Impossible to trace and leaves the administration staff completely off the hook."
Every 'soldier blog' should be asked the question: has the DoD paid you to keep this blog? -- Agonist
Pentagon Sites: Journalism or Propaganda?
Barbara Starr and Larry Shaughnessy
CNN, 5 February 2005
 The U.S. Department of Defense plans to add more sites on the Internet to provide information to a global audience -- but critics question whether the Pentagon is violating President Bush's pledge not to pay journalists to promote his policies.
...Rosenstiel said there is a reason why rules exist to separate journalism from government information. "Anytime that the government has to assure you, 'Believe me, take my word for it, I'm telling you nothing but the truth,' you know you should be worried," he said.
He's Fought for His Views, Now His Job
The Colorado professor under fire for remarks about Sept. 11 victims is used to controversy.
By David Kelly
LA Times, 5 February 2005
Ward L. Churchill has been angry for years, shaking a clenched fist at American power from the streets of Denver and the lecterns of academia. He has compared his country to Nazi Germany and urged the hanging of "war criminals" like Henry Kissinger, President Clinton and Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State whom he called "that malignant toad." Most of all, he has been a firm believer in karma: What America sows, it shall surely reap. "Payback," he said. "Can be a real mother." For years, the radical views of the gray-haired professor in the dark glasses were heard mostly by his students at the University of Colorado at Boulder and his fellow travelers on the far left. That all changed two weeks ago, when a paper surfaced that Churchill had written comparing victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to Nazis.
Now he's fighting for his academic life. Churchill has resigned as chairman of the ethnic studies department, but remains a professor. The university board of regents is investigating whether he should be fired, the governor wants him dismissed, the state Legislature has condemned him. And Indian groups are calling him a fraud, saying he's not a Native American, as he has said. The controversy flared when Churchill, 57, was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., on Native American prison issues. Before the lecture, a paper he wrote after the Sept. 11 attacks, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," was unearthed by Hamilton academics. In it, Churchill argued that America deserved what happened Sept. 11 and had gotten off "very, very cheap."
SEE ALSO:
Ward Churchill's Statement
WorldNetDaily.com, 3  February 2005
Read what controversial professor says about 9-11 uproar
The following is a statement issued Jan. 31 by University of Colorado Prof. Ward Churchill, responding to controversy about comments regarding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
   In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.
* The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.
* I am not a "defender"of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable."
* This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King's April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."
* In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we" had decided it was "worth the cost." I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.
* Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as "Nazis." What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.
* It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage." If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.
* It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.
* The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-11-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.
* These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.
Manager of Biggest Bond Fund Criticizes Social Security Plan
CNN/Money, 4 February 2005
Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond fund, is criticizing President Bush's plan to privatize part of Social Security. Gross, managing director at Pimco, called the argument about the solvency of Social Security "silly" and said it was an example of the president not focusing on more important issues, such as the budget deficit. The president's argument for individual Social Security accounts is meant "to promote an agenda that has little to do with seniors and more to do with Bush, his ownership society, and ultimately his domestic legacy alongside the likes of Ronald Reagan and FDR," Gross wrote in comments posted on Pimco's Web site. "Without a blockbuster of a program in his second term it is unlikely that Bush can go very far in the history books on the back of a paltry 3 or 4 percentage point tax cut for the rich," Gross wrote. "Presto!" he continued. "We now have partial privatization of Social Security heading the agenda upon which the president intends to spend his well-advertised political capital." But while the president says that will help fix Social Security, "the problem has more to do with demographics than the lack of ownership," Gross wrote. Gross argued that it will take more than individual Social Security accounts to correct a projected shortfall and suggested the government should focus on cutting the budget deficit instead.
Continuing saga of Bush v. Science...
E.P.A. Accused of a Predetermined Finding on Mercury
By FELICITY BARRINGER
NYT, 4 February 2005
The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general charged on Thursday that the agency's senior management instructed staff members to arrive at a predetermined conclusion favoring industry when they prepared a proposed rule last year to reduce the amount of mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants. Mercury, which can damage the neurological development of fetuses and young children, has been found in increasingly high concentrations in fish in rivers and streams in the United States.  The inspector general's report, citing anonymous agency staff members and internal e-mail messages, said the technological and scientific analysis by the agency was "compromised" to keep cleanup costs down for the utility industry. The goal of senior management, the report said, was to allow the agency to say that the utility industry could do just as good a job through complying with the Bush administration's "Clear Skies" legislation as it could by installing costly equipment that a stringent mercury-control rule would require.
SEE ALSO:
Global Warming: Scientists Reveal Timetable
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Correspondent
Independent (UK),3 February 2005
A detailed timetable of the destruction and distress that global warming is likely to cause the world was unveiled yesterday. It pulls together for the first time the projected impacts on ecosystems and wildlife, food production, water resources and economies across the earth, for given rises in global temperature expected during the next hundred years. The resultant picture gives the most wide-ranging impression yet of the bewildering array of destructive effects that climate change is expected to exert on different regions, from the mountains of Europe and the rainforests of the Amazon to the coral reefs of the tropics. Produced through a synthesis of a wide range of recent academic studies, it was presented as a paper yesterday to the international conference on climate change being held at the UK Met Office headquarters in Exeter by the author Bill Hare, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany's leading global warming research institute.
Gambling With Your Retirement
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 4 February 2005
A few weeks ago I tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial adviser told you that you wouldn't have enough money when you retire - but you shouldn't save more. Instead, you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for capital gains. Before President Bush's big speech, a background briefing by a "senior administration official" made it clear that the plan calls for exactly the "borrow, speculate and hope" strategy I described - not just for the system as a whole, but for each individual. ...Do you believe that we should replace America's most successful government program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no financial adviser would recommend? Do you believe that we should do this even though it will do nothing to improve the program's finances? If so, George Bush has a deal for you.
Pentagon Still Failing to Protect the Troops
By Edward M. Kennedy and Brian and Alma Hart
Boston Globe, 3 February 2005
Though media attention quickly fades, the problem isn't going away, and neither are the casualties. We've heard from soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital who filled their Humvees with sandbags to protect themselves, only to lose their right legs because the one area that couldn't be protected was under the brake pedal and accelerator. Many soldiers hung flak vests inside their Humvee cab to provide greater protection than the thin canvas sides and tops on the standard vehicle. Families across the country have told heartbreaking stories of similar desperation to many members of Congress, expressing their righteous outrage that their sons and daughters had been reduced to scavenging in local dumps for what they called "hillbilly armor" to try to save their lives.
In congressional hearings, we repeatedly asked about ordering additional armored vehicles and adding protective armor to existing equipment. Generals, industry leaders, soldiers, Marines, and military families all told us that the need for greater protection was obvious, but the Pentagon procurement practices failed to respond by issuing timely purchase orders for such production. Month after month, the orders were not placed although the funds were available. Rumsfeld's comment that "you go to war with the Army you have" was particularly outrageous because he had had so many months to get it right. It's as if the same mentality that predicted the war would be a cakewalk expected the insurgency to collapse tomorrow, and that it would be a waste of funds to beef up production lines to obtain additional armor. The result has been an unconscionable waste of lives. Wilson's question and the heartfelt cheers of the troops that greeted it catalyzed the concern felt across the country. Responding to the public outcry, the Pentagon raised production by 20 percent a month -- but still did not increase the overall number of up-armored Humvees ordered. Consequently at the end of May, the manufacturing plants will wind down, unless additional orders are placed. We are deeply concerned that without timely additional purchase orders, our soldiers and Marines will still not get the armor they need in this grim conflict.
Anyone consider psychiatric counseling too?
Marine General Counseled for Comments
YahooNews!, 3 February 2005
The commandant of the Marine Corps said Thursday he has counseled a senior subordinate for saying publicly, "It's fun to shoot some people."  Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, an infantry officer who has commanded Marines in both Afghanistan and Iraq (news - web sites), made the comments Tuesday while speaking to a forum in San Diego about strategies for the war on terror. Mattis is the commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va. According to an audio recording of Mattis' remarks, he said, "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis continued. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."
Four TV Networks Reject ‘Controversial’ Ad Defending Medical Lawsuits
New Standard, 3 February 2005
Four major television networks turned down an ad critical of President Bush’s policy of backing insurance companies in their quest to restrict lawsuits against doctors who commit errors that harm or kill patients, according to the ad’s sponsor, the consumer advocacy group USAction. CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox all said the ads did not meet corporate policies on avoiding controversial advertising, but CNN okayed the spot for airing in association with Bush’s Wednesday night state of the union address. In response to the rejections, the special interest watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The group is asking the FCC to investigate network policies on accepting ads deemed "controversial," pointing out what CREW sees as inconsistencies in network policies. "The networks have run ads advocating limits on asbestos lawsuits*," CREW said in a press statement, "and CBS ran an ad criticizing former President Bill Clinton's terrorism policies." The rejected ad features a man who says his son died of injuries sustained during birth due to medical malpractice and who opposes proposed limits on the rights of patients and their families to sue doctors for harm caused during treatment.
Despite Poor Civil Liberties Record, DHS Nominee Questioned Mildly
by Kari Lydersen
NewStandard, 3 February 2005
Though civil liberties advocates have plenty of questions for Michael Chertoff before he is approved as the next Homeland Security chief, the US senators who questioned him for less than 4 hours chose to leave most out. While President Bush's initial nominee for director of the Homeland Security Department withdrew himself from consideration amidst questions over numerous scandals, civil libertarians say the administration's new pick to head the department raises other serious concerns. Michael Chertoff, Bush's new nominee to replace outgoing Secretary Tom Ridge, faced a congressional hearing today, as lawmakers questioned him on plans for security budget priorities, labor relations within the department, and other issues surrounding protection of national security. Senators also asked Chertoff about his commitment to balancing national security concerns with protecting civil liberties and about his prior involvement in designing post-September 11 detention and interrogation policies.
Bush Federal Energy Regulatory Commission refused to consider any action back in 2001
Tapes Show Enron Arranged Plant Shutdown
By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYT, 4 February 2005
In the midst of the California energy troubles in early 2001, when power plants were under a federal order to deliver a full output of electricity, the Enron Corporation arranged to take a plant off-line on the same day that California was hit by rolling blackouts, according to audiotapes of company traders released here on Thursday. ...Previous tapes released by the district last summer showed Enron officials joking about how they were "stealing" more than a $1 million a day from California and fleecing "Grandma Millie" while bringing Enron record profits.
Go ahead, Screw your grandchildren!
On Social Security, the President Says to Throw the Kids Overboard.
By Chris Suellentrop
Slate, 3 February 2005
In his State of the Union address, President Bush claimed, for the first time during his presidency, to be asking Americans to sacrifice. The man who told the country, and the government, that the patriotic way to respond to 9/11 was to spend lots of money now says he wants the nation to be more penurious. Think of the children, Bush said, "on issue after issue," but especially with regard to Social Security. The president painted his plan to alter the Social Security system as a grand bargain in which the current generation of older Americans, like parents saving for their children's college tuition, would forgo some small benefit so that the next generation could reap huge rewards.
Sounds terrific. Except what Bush proposed is actually the exact opposite: His plan would allow the current generation of retirees and near-retirees to keep the current system, the one where they receive far more money than they put in during their lifetimes, while requiring the next generation to subsist on their own earnings for retirement. This isn't the equivalent of parents saving for Johnny's 529 plan. This is Mom and Dad asking Johnny to invest part of his allowance so that they won't have to bother with paying for college. You could call Bush's idea the Screw Your Grandchildren Act.
Yet more from the Ministry of Propaganda
 Shill in the White House Press Corp Under Scrutiny
 By Charlie Savage and Alan Wirzbicki
Boston Globe, 2 February 2005
The Bush administration has provided White House media credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic background, asks softball questions to the president and his spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official press releases as original news articles on his website. Jeff Gannon calls himself the White House correspondent for TalonNews.com, a website that says it is "committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our readers." It is operated by a Texas-based Republican Party delegate and political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com, a website that touts itself as "bringing the conservative message to America." Called on last week by President Bush at a press conference, Gannon attacked Democratic Senate leaders and called them "divorced from reality." During the presidential campaign, when called on by Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Gannon linked Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Jane Fonda and questioned why anyone would dispute Bush's National Guard service. Now, the question of how Gannon gets into White House press conferences is coming under intense scrutiny from critics who contend that Gannon is not a journalist but rather a White House tool to soften media coverage of Bush. The issue was raised by a media watchdog group and picked up by Internet bloggers, who linked Gannon's presence in White House briefings to recent controversies over whether the administration manipulates the flow of information to the public.
Bush Social Security Phase Out 'Dangerous' and 'Immoral'
Kansas City Star, 3 February 2005
Bracing for an epic battle over the future of Social Security, congressional Democratic leaders described the plan unveiled Wednesday night by President Bush as “dangerous” and “immoral.” “There's a lot we can do to improve America's retirement security,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in his response to the president's State of the Union address. “But it's wrong to replace the guaranteed benefit that Americans have earned with a guaranteed benefit cut of 40 percent or more.” Reid said that Bush's plan was “Social Security roulette.” He added that the White House pledge to allow younger workers to divert a part of their Social Security taxes into private accounts, yet pay all promised benefits to those age 55 and older, would force the government to borrow at least $2 trillion. “That's an immoral burden to place on the backs of the next generation,” Reid said. Turning to the main foreign policy question facing the nation, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California said that Bush failed to offer a “clear plan” for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. “The United States cannot stay in Iraq indefinitely and continue to be viewed as an occupying force,” Pelosi said. “Neither should we slip out the back door, falsely declaring victory but leaving chaos.” Pelosi also declared that Bush has “failed to put together a comprehensive plan to protect America from terrorism.” She said the United States still has “gaps in our security” that were exploited by those who struck on Sept. 11, 2001.
SEE ALSO:
What America is Saying About Social Security Benefits
Center for American Progress, 2 February 2005
Social Security is one of the most successful government programs. It has consistently provided a safety net for seniors so that retirees are able to support themselves through their retirement and pay for food, housing, and medical costs. By helping to support the elderly and vulnerable among us, Social Security provides Americans with the guarantee of security for life. And these benefits are not just for senior citizens; Social Security also provides a crucial means of support for disabled workers and their families and to the spouses and children of deceased workers. Below is a sample of what citizens across America are saying about their Social Security benefits.
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 Sequel to 'Pee Wee's Big Adventure'
 Mr. Bush's Two Big Ideas
NYT, 3 February 2005
While Mr. Bush rightly pointed to the training of "more capable Iraqi security forces" as crucial for an American military withdrawal, it is absolutely not enough. All the indigenous police and soldiers Iraq can muster will be useless unless members of the new government are prepared to work - and risk their own political capital - to create a state that recognizes the rights and needs of all its citizens. Mr. Bush's argument that this is a bad time to set a timetable for withdrawal obscures the very immediate need to set goals, and to make it clear to the Iraqis that the continued presence of American forces depends on their meeting those goals. His speech was yet another feel-good paean to freedom and democracy that did little to show the American people an exit strategy for United States troops, or to show the Iraqis what we expect from them next.
On the domestic front, Mr. Bush talked a lot last night about Social Security without ever saying much beyond the fact that he wants to see it privatized - a word the president no longer uses because polls showed that the American people reacted badly to the concept. Mr. Bush now likes the term "wise and effective reform." Like his rhetoric, his proposals for Social Security continue to stress the vague and glossy.
The "reform" described by the president last night addressed the major criticisms that have been showered on the privatization plan by promising that none of the bad things would happen: no big fees, no risk from market swings, no risk that retirees would outlive their money and no fiscally irresponsible borrowing. He offered little explanation, however, of how he would accomplish all these fixes, and the new information that he did provide was unconvincing. The hostile - and unusually vocal - reaction from parts of his audience suggested the problems he will have when the program comes to Congress.
If it isn't really 'insurance,' what is it?
Researchers Say 50% of Filing Caused by Medical Bills; Most Who File are Insured Middle Class.
Reuters via Money, 2 February 2005
Half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by soaring medical bills and most people sent into debt by illness are middle-class workers with health insurance, researchers said Wednesday. The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, estimated that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans every year, if both debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children, are counted. "Our study is frightening. Unless you're Bill Gates you're just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who led the study. "Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick. Health insurance offered little protection." ..."About half cited medical causes, which indicates that 1.9 to 2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy," they wrote. "Among those whose illnesses led to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs averaged $11,854 since the start of illness; 75.7 percent had insurance at the onset of illness." The average bankrupt person surveyed had spent $13,460 on co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services if they had private insurance. People with no insurance spent an average of $10,893 for such out-of-pocket expenses.
SEE ALSO:
Insured Go Broke, Study Says
By Jennifer Heldt Powell
Boston Hearald, 2 February 2005
Think health insurance will protect you from bankruptcy? Think again. A Harvard study shows that half of all bankruptcies are related to medical bills, and many of those filing for bankruptcy had insurance, at least at the start of their illness. Some lost their coverage because they couldn't work, while others found they couldn't cover an accumulation of co-pays, deductibles and uncovered expenses, said Harvard professor Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, one of the study's main authors. ``Even the best coverage can leave you vulnerable,'' she said. The study, appearing on the journal Health Affairs' Web site today, shows that half of the 700,000 household bankruptcies in 2001 were the result of health bills. Nearly two-thirds of the people in the study had health insurance, but one-third lost their coverage when they lost their jobs. ``It doesn't do you too much good to have employer-paid health insurance if you're too sick to work,'' Woolhandler said. Of concern, she said, was that many families were bankrupted by medical expenses below the thresholds of increasingly popular high-deductible plans. Out-of-pocket expenses ranged on average from $10,893 to $18,500 depending on whether the patient had insurance.
The Fed Reaches All the Way Into Your Wallet
KTRE-TV, 3 February 2005
If the rates on your credit cards have been going up, you might want to blame Alan Greenspan. The Federal Reserve's steady increases in interest rates have been matched by increases in the prime lending rate, as well as the rates on variable-rate credit cards that are based on the prime. Jim Chessen is the chief economist for the American Bankers Association, and he explains that when the Fed raises rates, banks follow. He says that's the "natural procedure," because the Fed's goal is to raise the price of credit in the economy, to slow it down. According to Lowcards-dot-com, a site that compares credit card rates, if you have a variable-rate card with a nine-thousand-dollar balance, each quarter-point rate hike from the Fed adds as much as 50 dollars to your annual interest charges.
New Chairman for House Ethics Panel
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 3 February 2005
House Republicans on Wednesday replaced the ethics committee chairman who presided over cases that led last year to admonishments of Representative Tom DeLay, the majority leader, selecting a Washington State lawmaker with ties to the leadership as the new head of the panel. ...Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, who reappointed the Democratic members of the evenly divided ethics committee, characterized the removal of Mr. Hefley as a purge. "By ousting Mr. Hefley as chairman of the ethics committee and replacing him with a party loyalist, the Republican leadership is sending a chilling message to members who value upholding the highest ethical standard over partisan loyalty," Ms. Pelosi said. ...Mr. Hefley had said that under his interpretation of the rules he was eligible to lead the panel for this Congress without a special waiver because he served a partial session of Congress. Mr. Hastert could have sought a waiver, as he has done for some other committee chairmen. Mr. Hefley had been anticipating the decision to remove him.
Dominance on GOP Agenda
Depriving Democrats of Voters and Money is Among White House Policies' Other Aims.
By Peter Wallsten and Warren Vieth
LA Times, 2 February 2005
As the nation's trial lawyers again funneled tens of millions of dollars to Democrats and their causes in the last election, Republicans were crafting a strategy to choke off that money for future campaigns.
President Bush's agenda for the next four years, much of which he will highlight in his State of the Union address tonight, includes many proposals that would not only change public policy but, the GOP hopes, achieve an ambitious political goal: Stripping money and voters from the Democratic Party and cementing Republican dominance for years after he leaves office.
One of the clearest examples is an effort to limit jury awards in lawsuits against doctors and businesses. The caps might not only discourage "frivolous" lawsuits, as Bush argues, but also deprive trial lawyers of income from damage awards that they could then give to Democrats.
"If we could succeed in getting some form of tort reform passed — medical malpractice reform or any of part of that — it would go a long ways toward … taking away the muscle, the financial muscle that they have," said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who ousted Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle last fall despite a heavy flood of trial lawyer money backing the Democrat.
On issue after issue, the White House is staking out positions that achieve a policy goal while expanding the GOP's appeal to new voters or undermining the Democrats' ability to compete. Interviews with Bush advisors, a recent memo drafted by a senior White House strategist and a speech last month by the Republican Party's new chairman show that the political advantages are very much part of the calculation.
Bush's plan to alter Social Security, for example, would allow younger workers to divert some of their payroll taxes into privately owned retirement accounts. GOP strategists hope it would also foster a new "investor class" that would vote Republican.
Republican support for free trade undermines labor unions which, like trial lawyers, are a bedrock of the Democratic Party, strategists say.
The president's faith-based initiative, which encourages government funding for religious social service agencies, and his opposition to legalizing same-sex marriage are popular with socially conservative African Americans, who have for decades leaned Democratic but are increasingly viewed as potential GOP voters.
Many black parents, whose children attend struggling public schools, also agree with Republicans' support for school vouchers. And Bush's call to revamp the nation's immigration laws makes the party more appealing to Latinos, another traditionally Democratic group.
"Are we doing it because it creates more Republicans? Or are we doing it because it's the right thing to do, and by the way, it also happens to create more Republicans?" asked Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a frequent advisor to Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor. "It's both."
"Every one of the ideas for the most part has merits on its own, so … they're defensible," said Stephen Moore, a conservative activist who plans to raise $10 million this year to advertise on behalf of Bush's Social Security plans. "But I think, altogether, this was devised as a Karl Rove grand plan to cement in place a Republican governing coalition that could last for a generation or more."
The pursuit of larger political goals by presidents is nothing new. Advisors to President Clinton once hoped his plan to overhaul healthcare delivery would draw voters to the Democratic Party.
But GOP strategists say the difference this time is the sheer scope of Bush's political ambitions and his willingness to push sweeping ideological changes. The party is aiming for a 21st century political realignment comparable to the Democratic domination spurred by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Bush often refers to his agenda as building an "ownership society," a phrase that strategists compare in political terms to the New Deal: a package of programs that builds loyalty among voters for generations. While Roosevelt expanded the role of government in lifting seniors and workers out of poverty, Bush's domestic agenda stresses the creation of personal wealth and individual responsibility, pure Republican ideology.
...Bush and his aides rarely reveal the political underpinnings of their policy agenda. But their ambitions were evident last month, when a memo by a senior White House strategist concerning the emerging Social Security plan was leaked to the media. The memo, written by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, put the stakes in grand political terms, saying there would be enduring benefits for Republicans if the president's plans succeeded and Democrats came out of the debate as the "party of the past."
SEE ALSO:
State of the Union 2004: Claims, Promises and Proposals
American Progress Takes a Look Back at Bush's 2002, 2003 and 2004 speeches
Center for American Progress, 31 January 2005
Dean Emerging as Likely Chief for Democrats
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 2 February 2005
Howard Dean emerged Tuesday as the almost assured new leader of the Democratic National Committee, as one of his main rivals quit the race and Democrats streamed to announce their support of a man whose presidential campaign collapsed one year ago. Dr. Dean's dominance was secured after Martin Frost, a former representative from Texas, whom many Democrats viewed as the institutional counterpart to Dr. Dean, dropped out after failing - in what had become an increasingly long-shot effort - to win support from national labor unions. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. announced instead that it would remain neutral, freeing its affiliate members to do what they wanted, which proved in many cases to be boarding the Dean train. "It's a fait accompli, it's over: Dean's going to be it," said Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who runs the umbrella political organization for all the unions in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Actually, the final word rests with the 447 members of the Democratic National Committee, who will vote on Feb. 12 in Washington on a successor to Terry McAuliffe. And Dr. Dean faces a last obstacle, the candidacy of Donnie Fowler Jr., a Democratic operative from South Carolina. Fowler aides said they hoped to benefit from the appearance of this as a two-man race with an opponent with a history of sometimes unorthodox political behavior. Still, they acknowledged that the possibility of a real competition was dimming.
Health Secretary Calls for Medicaid Changes
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 2 February 2005
Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, called Tuesday for sweeping changes in Medicaid that would cut payments for prescription drugs and give states new power to reduce or reconfigure benefits for millions of low-income people. In his first speech as secretary, Mr. Leavitt also said it should be more difficult for elderly people to qualify for Medicaid by transferring assets to their children. "Medicaid must not become an inheritance protection plan," Mr. Leavitt said at a convention of health care executives here. "Right now, many older Americans take advantage of Medicaid loopholes to become eligible for Medicaid by giving away assets to their children. There is a whole industry that actually helps people shift costs to the taxpayer." Medicaid helps pay the bills for two-thirds of the 1.6 million people in nursing homes in the United States. Mr. Leavitt said President Bush wanted to join Congress in an effort to rein in the cost of Medicaid, the nation's largest health insurance program. Medicaid spending has shot up 63 percent in the last five years. Federal and state outlays now total more than $300 billion a year. Anticipating the proposals by the Bush administration, many governors have banded together in a bipartisan effort to stave off restrictions on federal Medicaid spending. In a letter to Congress in December, the National Governors Association said it was unacceptable to shift federal costs to the states as part of a deficit-reduction strategy. Meanwhile, some governors, including George E. Pataki of New York, have turned to Medicaid in trying to address their own budget pressures. Some states have dropped recipients, set strict limits on spending and reduced benefits.
Infighting Cited at Homeland Security
Squabbles Blamed for Reducing Effectiveness
By John Mintz
Washington Post, 2 February 2005
As its leadership changes for the first time, the Department of Homeland Security remains hampered by personality conflicts, bureaucratic bottlenecks and an atmosphere of demoralization, undermining its ability to protect the nation against terrorist attack, according to current and former administration officials and independent experts.
Much of President's Address to Focus on Social Security
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
NYT, 2 February 2005
President Bush will use his State of the Union address on Wednesday night to begin setting out details of his plan for overhauling Social Security, but will stick largely to generalities when it comes to the politically painful subject of cuts in benefits, administration officials and Republicans who have been briefed on the speech said Tuesday. The White House said Mr. Bush's speech would be split roughly equally between foreign policy and domestic issues. The big themes, officials said, would be how to build on the successes of the democratic elections in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories and Iraq, and the need to modernize domestic programs, foremost among them Social Security.
SEE ALSO:
A Spoonful of Sugar
NYT, 1 February 2005
In tomorrow's State of the Union speech, President Bush will no doubt escalate his campaign to replace Social Security with private retirement accounts. We don't know exactly what he'll say, but we're willing to bet that he won't say "private accounts," even though privatization is exactly what he's calling for, and exactly how he and other administration officials have described their scheme hundreds of times before. But the polls and focus groups that Mr. Bush says he ignores show that the public doesn't like to hear the word "private" when the topic is Social Security. So the administration now scrupulously uses the label "personal accounts," and in a 104-page book on selling the plan, it urges Congressional Republicans to do the same.
4 Networks Reject Ad Opposing Bush on Lawsuits
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 1 February 2005
An advocacy group, USAction, said on Monday that four television networks had turned down its request to run an advertisement opposing President Bush's effort to clamp down on medical malpractice lawsuits. The group wanted to run the spots just before Mr. Bush's State of the Union address on Wednesday. But networks said the advertisement violated their standards for advertising on controversial issues.
Gonzales Fails to Unite
By MARIA ECHAVESTE
NY Daily News, 30 January 2005
When one of the nation's most respected Latino civil rights organizations, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, cannot support the nomination, it is evident that at least some Latino leaders are willing to look beyond mere ethnicity. MALDEF was not alone. The entire Congressional Hispanic Caucus sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the nomination. The Republicans will argue that the opposition is purely partisan. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the Bush administration should and has been commended for the number of high-ranking Hispanics serving the President. And Hispanics of both political parties eagerly await the first appointment of a Hispanic to the Supreme Court. But being Hispanic will not be enough to gain the widespread support from the Latino community for either that anticipated nomination or the one now before the Senate.
   
  International   
New Data Point to Man-Made Global Warming, Severe Climate Change
By Seth Borenstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 18 February 2005
New measurements from the world's oceans, announced Thursday, give the most compelling evidence yet that man-made global warming is under way and hint at a more dramatic and sudden climate change in the future. Two different sets of ocean readings presented at the annual meeting of the prestigious American Association for the Advance of Science solidify the scientific underpinnings of global warming and point to an increased chance for a much-feared side effect that was popularized and fictionalized in last year's movie "The Day After Tomorrow," in which global warming triggers a new ice age in the Northern Hemisphere. ...Seven million temperature readings and 2 million salinity readings collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created the best "fingerprint" of man-made global warming ever, Scripps' Barnett said. From 1969 to 1999, surface ocean temperatures rose about two-thirds of a degree Fahrenheit, while temperatures hundreds of feet deeper hadn't warmed as much. The readings are nearly exactly what computer models of global warming say they should be, Barnett said. If the global warming were the result of natural variability or increased sun activity, the temperature and salinity changes would be very different from the ones seen in the NOAA data, Barnett said. "The evidence really is overwhelming," Barnett said.
Clash Over 'Kurdish Veto' Looms in Iraq
Assyrian International News Agency, 18 February 2005
A law promulgated during the US-led occupation of Iraq, which governs how the country's new constitution is to be written, has been largely rejected by members of the United Iraqi Alliance, which has a majority of seats in the new parliament. The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), which was brought into force last March by former US administrator Paul Bremer, was originally intended to head off a political crisis by, in effect, granting Iraq's Kurdish population a veto over the new constitution. But while it solved a short term problem, the inclusion of the so-called "Kurdish veto" clause in the TAL seems set to cause a new crisis, as both Shia and Sunni Arabs say they now hope the new parliament will simply cancel it, before debate over the constitution starts in earnest. Many Alliance members, including Ibrahim Ja'aferi, widely believed to be the leading candidate for prime minister, have said the law must be either amended or scrapped altogether. Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Sahgeer, a high ranking Shia cleric and Alliance member, said of the veto: "Of course this is unacceptable. There is no such thing as a democracy in which the minority decides, and the majority plays no role." The Alliance is dominated by Shia religious parties, which follow the word of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's highest ranking Shia cleric.
Veteran of Dirty Wars Wins Lead US Spy Role
Written off by many after his role in Central America, John Negroponte's revived career hits a new high
Duncan Campbell
The Guardian, 18 February 2005
John Negroponte's nomination by President Bush yesterday to be his chief of intelligence represents the pinnacle of rehabilitation for a man who, for many people, will always be associated with US involvement in the "dirty wars" in Central America in the 1980s.
While Mr Bush has restored to office other figures from that period of American history, none has been promoted to the same extent as the former ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, the UN and Iraq.
...he is tainted by his time between 1981 and 1985 in Honduras, a country that was being used as a launchpad for the illegal US-backed war waged by the contras against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Honduran military was accused of taking part in torture and extra-judicial killings. Had Mr Negroponte reported this to the US Congress, military aid to the country could have been suspended and their cooperation in the war on the Sandinistas might thus have ended.
The Baltimore Sun re-investigated the US actions there in 1995. One former Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the paper that the attitude of Mr Negroponte and other US officials at the time was "one of tolerance and silence". "They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed."
In extraordinary rendition there are no rules.
Our Friends, the Torturers
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 18 February 2005
The United States has long purported to be outraged over Syria's bad behavior, the latest flash point being the possible Syrian involvement in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. From the U.S. perspective, Syria is led by a gangster regime that has, among other things, sponsored terrorism, aided the insurgency in Iraq and engaged in torture. So here's the question. If Syria is such a bad actor - and it is - why would the Bush administration seize a Canadian citizen at Kennedy Airport in New York, put him on an executive jet, fly him in shackles to the Middle East and then hand him over to the Syrians, who promptly tortured him? The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.
Iraqi Kurds Detail Demands for a Degree of Autonomy
By EDWARD WONG
NYT, 18 February 2005
Kurdish autonomy is expected to be one of the most divisive issues during the drafting of the new constitution, alongside the debate over the role of Islam in the new Iraq. The Kurds' demands are already alarming Iraq's Arabs, particularly the majority Shiites, and raising tensions with neighboring countries, where governments are trying to suppress Kurdish separatist movements within their own borders. In interviews, top Kurdish leaders like Mr. Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, set out a list of demands that are more far-reaching than the Kurds have articulated in the past:
¶They want the ownership of any natural resources, including oilfields, and the power to determine how the revenues are split with the central government.
¶They want authority over the formidable militia called the pesh merga, estimated at up to 100,000 members, in defiance of the American goal of dismantling ethnic and sectarian armies. The pesh merga would be under nominal national oversight, but actual control would remain with regional commanders. No other armed forces would be allowed to enter Kurdistan without permission from Kurdish officials.
¶They want power to appoint officials to work in and operate ministries in Kurdistan, which would parallel those in Baghdad. These would include the ministries that oversee security and the economy.
¶They want authority over fiscal policy, including oversight of taxes and the power to decide how much tax revenue goes to Baghdad. The national government would make monetary policy but would not be able to raise revenue from Kurdistan without the agreement of Kurdish officials.
Moreover, the region's borders would be changed, in the Kurds' vision. The "green line" that defines the boundary between the Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq would be officially pushed south, to take in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, the city of Khanaqin and the area of Sinjar. Kurdish leaders argue that this would just reestablish historic borders where Mr. Hussein had drastically altered the demographics by displacing Kurds with Arab settlers. "It must be clear in the constitution what is for the Kurds and what is for the Iraqi government," said Fouad Hussein, an influential independent Kurdish politician.
SEE ALSO:
An Election That Sharpened Iraq's Fault Lines
By Dilip Hiro
TomDispatch.com, 17 February 2005
An apt headline, summarizing the results of the elections to Iraq's 275-representative-strong National Assembly on January 30, would be: "No surprises, no upsets."
Given a large voter turnout in the Shiite majority areas and an even a larger one in the Kurdistan region, it was widely predicted that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated alliances would top the polls. They did. As expected, due to the widespread Sunni boycott of the election, the only Sunni-dominated list that managed to win any seats garnered just five -- one-eleventh of the seats that the Sunnis should have won. Overall, the poll has exposed and sharpened the sectarian and ethnic fault lines in Iraqi society. At the same time, bolstered by a popular mandate, the new government seems set on a collision course with the American occupiers regarding the presence of foreign troops in Iraq. Each of the three major communities has come to nurture a different scenario for the post-Saddam era. Shorn of their long-held power and yet not reconciled to powerlessness, Sunni leaders are still in disarray, focusing merely on expelling the Americans from their country. For minority Kurds, ethnically and linguistically set apart from Arabs, post-Saddam Iraq holds the promise of a sovereign state of Kurdistan with the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as its capital.
Iraq Must Unify Or Face 'Disaster,' Premier Warns
Allawi Sees Threat of Iran Influence
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post, 18 February 2005
Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has warned that unless Iraq takes steps toward national reconciliation -- "not by words but by deeds" -- the country faces disaster, and he said he feared that Iraq could fall under the sway of neighboring Iran and an austere form of Islamic government that would derail efforts to foster democracy.
In a 40-minute interview Wednesday in his office, Allawi also said he would consider moving to another Arab country after his eight-month tenure ends, if he felt that the next government would not ensure his security. "If the objective of national unity is missed, if the objective of national reconciliation is overlooked, then this will definitely spell out disaster," the 60-year-old former exile said. "If the right decisions are not taken, yes, the country could really head into severe problems," Allawi warned at another point in the interview. "I wouldn't put it now at the level of a civil war, but it could be heading really toward severe turbulence." The remarks by Allawi came nearly three weeks after his party placed a distant third in elections for Iraq's 275-member parliament. Despite aggressive television advertising, the power of incumbency and a campaign that portrayed him as both a law-and-order candidate and the secular alternative to Iraq's religious parties, Allawi's slate secured just 14 percent of the vote, or 40 seats, far behind the 140 seats won by a largely Shiite Muslim coalition backed by the country's most influential religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
[Allawi] ...was shadowed by a widely held perception that he was the Americans' man in Iraq, and his recruitment of former Baathists into the security services angered some Shiite factions, who derided the policy as "re-Baathification."
U.S. officials have cautioned against ruling out a prominent future role for Allawi, who is now perhaps the most recognizable political figure in the country. "I get the sense the gentleman is still very anxious to play a part," one U.S. official said.
Historic Kyoto Treaty Inked Without the World's Biggest Polluter the US
AFP via Common Dreams, 17 February 2005
The Kyoto Protocol, the landmark treaty requiring cuts in gas emissions which cause global warming, is now in effect with the support of 141 nations but not of the world's biggest polluter the United States. The 34 industrialized countries which have ratified the treaty are legally bound to slash output of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent before 2012, with targets set for each nation based on their 1990 levels. The treaty was reached in this ancient Japanese capital in 1997 amid fear that the rise in global temperatures could eventually lead to droughts and the extinction of some species. "We sincerely welcome that the framework in which the world will cooperate to stop global warming has finally come into effect," Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said. The United States pulled out of Kyoto in 2001 in one of President George W. Bush's first acts in office, saying it would hurt the US economy.
Intelligence Officials Cite Wide Terror Threats
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 17 February 2005
New intelligence information strongly suggests that Al Qaeda has considered infiltrating the United States through the Mexican border, top government officials told Congress on Wednesday. In a wide-ranging assessment of threats to American security, including those posed by Iran and North Korea, the officials also said intelligence indicated that terrorist organizations remained intent on obtaining and using devastating weapons against the United States. "It may only be a matter of time before Al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons," Porter J. Goss, the new director of central intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee. The warnings from Mr. Goss and other top officials came as part of a stark presentation that described terrorism as the top threat to the United States despite what they described as successes in the last year. Mr. Goss said that the war in Iraq had served as a useful recruiting tool for Islamic extremists, and that both the low Sunni Muslim turnout in elections there and the violence that followed demonstrated that the insurgency remained a serious threat. He warned that anti-American extremists who survive the war were likely to emerge with a high level of skills and experience, and could move on to build new terrorist cells in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries.
U.S. Tensions With Syria Escalate
White House Weighs Punitive Economic and Political Measures
By Robin Wright and Peter Baker
Washington Post, 17 February 2005
After decades of tension with Syria, the Bush administration intensified its search yesterday for punitive actions -- from freezing assets to tightening diplomatic isolation -- to force Damascus to withdraw troops from Lebanon, end support for terrorism and block assistance to the Iraqi insurgency through Syria. The United States is now using the world furor over the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri to generate momentum against the regime of President Bashar Assad. Before flying to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Margaret Scobey relayed a stern message yesterday to Foreign Minister Farouk Charaa.
'Rogue States' Join Forces to Confront America
By Roland Watson
Washington piles on the pressure after assasination as Iran and Syria form a common front
Times Online, 17 February 2005
IRAN and Syria announced a common front against the United States yesterday as Washington ratcheted up its pressure on two of the countries highest on its list of rogue states. “We are ready to help Syria on all grounds to confront threats,” Mohammad Reza Aref, the Iranian VicePresident, said after meeting Naji al-Otari, the Syrian Prime Minister, in Tehran. “This meeting, which takes place at this sensitive time, is important, especially because Syria and Iran face several challenges and it is necessary to build a common front,” Mr al-Otari said. Neither country elaborated on what the common front would entail, though Iranian state television said that Tehran would share with Syria its experience of dealing with sanctions. But the two countries, positioned on either side of Iraq, have enormous capacity to deepen the chaos in that country, cause further trouble in Lebanon and sponsor terrorist attacks abroad. The White House responded by sharply reminding both states that they had “international obligations and needed to abide by the commitments they have made to the international community”.
Kidnapped Italian begs 'Please help me' on video
From Stephen Farrell in Baghdad
Times Online, 17 February 2005
Rocking back and forth and pleading for help, a kidnapped Italian journalist appeared on a video recording in Baghdad yesterday calling on foreign troops to leave Iraq.
The grainy footage was the first news of Giuliana Sgrena since the 56-year-old reporter was seized by gunmen near Baghdad University on February 4. Looking exhausted and urging the Italian Government to withdraw its 3,000 soldiers from the country, Signora Sgrena spoke in Italian and French during her brief appearance. “I ask the Italian Government, the Italian people struggling against the occupation, I ask my husband, please help me,” she said, sitting before a plain white background with the words ‘Mujahidin Without Border’ in Arabic on the tape. “You must do all you can to end the occupation. I’m counting on you, you can help me. Nobody should come to Iraq at this time, not even journalists. Nobody.” Signora Sgrena disappeared while interviewing refugees from Fallujah displaced by the US assault on the city last year.
US Gloss Masks Nerves Over Iraq
By Jonathan Beale
BBC, 16 February 2005
The official White House reaction to the Iraqi election result has been nothing but positive. President George W Bush has praised the 8.5 million Iraqis who "defied terrorists and went to the polls", adding that the US and its allies could all "take pride" in making the elections possible. The US state department hailed the result as "a positive and significant accomplishment". But it also signalled the underlying worries at the low turnout among the country's Sunni Muslim minority, encouraging those Iraqis who were not elected or who did not take part to remain part of the political process. The positives that the US administration is taking out of the elections is that they took place on schedule without major incident - that the turnout was reasonable, and that the Shia Muslim majority has been making conciliatory noises towards the other parties.
Blow for Allawi
But there is no getting away from the fact that this is not the outcome President Bush would have wanted in an ideal world. For a start the US administration would have liked interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's coalition to have done better than receive under 14% of the vote. He was the man handpicked by the US and UN officials to lead the interim government.
He was the man more in tune with more liberal Western views. The 48% vote for the Shia slate - the United Iraqi Alliance - has deprived it of an overall majority. But it is clearly going to have a major say in the shape of the new government and the constitution.
Root Causes of Terrorism Ignored
by Andy Harris
Seattle Post-Intelligencer via Common Dreams, 15 February 2005
The Bush administration's proposed fiscal year budget places a "Supersize Me" order for defense spending. While national defense is a top priority following 9/11, the proposed budget would waste billions of dollars on unneeded weapons systems, such as the F-22 fighter and DDX destroyer, which are designed for Cold War, large-scale confrontations that we no longer face. By contrast, the budget stints non-military security programs such as securing loose nuclear materials, promoting nuclear non-proliferation programs, enhancing port and border security, protecting nuclear reactors and chemical plants and adequately funding first responders (fire, police and public health facilities). At least two-thirds of the nation's fire departments are understaffed, according to the National Fire Protection Association, which also estimates that 75,000-85,000 additional personnel are needed to prepare for terrorist attacks. The International Association of Chiefs of Police said that federal cuts "have left the nation more vulnerable than ever to public safety threats." A study by the Trust for America's Health, a private organization headed by former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker, reports that most states still do not have statewide bioterrorism response plans. As called for in the 9/11 commission report, the United States needs "a preventive strategy that is as much, or more, political as it is military." The FY 2006 budget does not reflect that need. "Long-term success (in the struggle against terrorism) demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy and homeland defense." A more effective strategy against terrorism would focus on: winning the struggle of ideas, investing in education and development in Islamic nations, defusing sources of Islamic hatred toward the United States by changing our policies in the region, bolstering efforts to cut off terrorist financing and investing in energy independence by developing sustainable energy.
AUDIO/VIDEO LINK
Shocking and Awful: A Grassroots Response to War and Occupation
DemocracyNow!, 15 February 2005
As President Bush requests $80 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we play an excerpt from a new 13-part series produced by Deep Dish TV featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and Larry Everest. It is narrated by David Barsamian. [includes rush transcript]
A new documentary about the war and occupation of Iraq has been released. Deep Dish TV has collected and produced thirteen programs, which are being distributed to communities all over the United States on Free Speech TV and on community access channels. The documentary series is titled, "Shocking and Awful: A Grassroots Response to War and Occupation." It is produced entirely by independent video activists.
We are joined by the coordinator of Shocking and Awful, Brian Drolet. He is a long time Community TV activist with Deep Dish Television.
Brian Drolet, long time Community TV activist with Deep Dish Television. He is the co-coordinator of the documentary series "Shocking and Awful: A Grassroots Response to War and Occupation."
Excerpt from "Shocking and Awful: A Grassroots Response to War and Occupation" featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and Larry Everest. It is narrated by David Barsamian.
Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision
By Robin Wright
Washington Post, 14 February 2005
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.
But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.
Iran Rejects Key EU Offer in Nuclear Talks
Atta Kenare
AFP via Trukish Press, 13 February 2005
 Iran rejected a European offer aimed at limiting its nuclear fuel activities and warned the United States against "playing with fire" in an increasingly bellicose standoff between Tehran and the West. Foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi insisted Iran would not give up construction of a heavy-water reactor, which can be used to make nuclear weapons material, in exchange for a light-water reactor offered by the Europeans.
Pentagon Covers Up Failure to Train and Recruit Local Security Forces
Police and army numbers falling far short of projections as post-election violence surges and wait for results drags on
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington, Kim Sengupta in Basra, and Raymond Whitaker in London
The Independent, 13 February 2005
Training of Iraq's security forces, crucial to any exit strategy for Britain and the US, is going so badly that the Pentagon has stopped giving figures for the number of combat-ready indigenous troops, The Independent on Sunday has learned. Instead, only figures for troops "on hand" are issued. The small number of soldiers, national guardsmen and police capable of operating against the country's bloody insurgency is concealed in an overall total of Iraqis in uniform, which includes raw recruits and police who have gone on duty after as little as three weeks' training. In some cases they have no weapons, body armour or even documents to show they are in the police. The resulting confusion over numbers has allowed the US administration to claim that it is half-way to meeting the target of training almost 270,000 Iraqi forces, including around 52,000 troops and 135,000 Iraqi policemen. The reality, according to experts, is that there may be as few as 5,000 troops who could be considered combat ready. The gap between troops "on hand" and the overall target for fully trained and equipped security forces has actually widened in recent months, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington- based think-tank. Between October and November last year, just before the Pentagon quietly stopped giving figures for fully trained troops, the shortfall more than doubled, from 69,400 to 159,000. At current levels, the targets would not be met until next year.
Despite Record of Atrocities, U.S. Moves to Normalize Ties with Indonesia Military
by Jim Lobe
Common Dreams, 11 February 2005
U.S. human rights groups are expressing concern over reports that the Bush administration is preparing to renew the Indonesian armed forces' eligibility to participate in a key training program despite continuing reports of abuses committed by the army in the tsunami-devastated province of Aceh. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly told key lawmakers last week that she will soon "certify" that the armed forces, called the TNI, is cooperating fully in the investigation of the 2002 murder of two U.S. schoolteachers in West Papua in 2002. Under U.S. law, that certification is the sole condition that must be met in order for Jakarta to qualify for US$600,000 for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program from which it was suspended in 1992. But human rights groups and others that have followed the case say that a certification is not justified and that, in any event, the military's human rights record, particularly in Aceh and West Papua, has not improved enough to reward the TNI with what is widely regarded as a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" from Washington. "The amount of money for IMET may be small, but it has symbolic importance," said John Miller, spokesperson for the East Timor Action Network (ETAN). "The Indonesian military will view any restoration of IMET as an endorsement of business as usual, (which) has been nothing less than brutal human rights violations and impunity for crimes against humanity."
U.S. Uses Drones to Probe Iran For Arms
Surveillance Flights Are Sent From Iraq
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post, 13 February 2005
The Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly a year to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, according to three U.S. officials with detailed knowledge of the secret effort. The small, pilotless planes, penetrating Iranian airspace from U.S. military facilities in Iraq, use radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather information that is not accessible by satellites, the officials said. The aerial espionage is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack and is also employed as a tool for intimidation.
Iran Nixes Demand to Stop Building Reactor
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
AP via LA Times, 13 February 2005
Iran rejected a European demand to stop building a heavy water nuclear reactor in return for a light-water reactor Sunday, hardening Iran's position on a key part of its nuclear facilities that critics claim is part of a weapons program. Iran has given indications in the past that it will insist on keeping its heavy water nuclear reactor, but Sunday's announcement is its clearest statement yet of its nuclear plans. It underscored the unresolved differences between Iranian and European negotiators, who are continuing their talks over Iran's nuclear program even as the United States escalates its criticism of Iran. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi also said Iran plans to become a major nuclear fuel supplier in 15 years, part of a program that Iran says is for peaceful domestic energy purposes. "We intend to turn into an important and a major player in the nuclear fuel supply market in the next 15 years because there will be (an) energy shortage in the future," Asefi said. Separately, The Washington Post reported Sunday that the United States has been flying unmanned surveillance drones over Iran since last year to look for evidence of nuclear weapons programs and probe the country's air defenses. Asefi rejected a proposal by European negotiators to stop building a 40 megawatt heavy water nuclear reactor near Arak, in central Iran, in return for a light-water reactor. Iran says it has gone a long way in developing the Arak facility.
Iraqi Insurgents Step Up Attacks After Elections
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 13 February 2005
A suicide car bomber killed at least 17 Iraqis at the entrance of a hospital south of Baghdad, and a judge who had investigated crimes in Saddam Hussein's government was gunned down outside his home in Basra by masked men riding a motorcycle, as Iraq's insurgency continued to intensify since elections two weeks ago. From Monday to Saturday, bombers and gunmen have left at least 108 people dead. The attacks have been at or near a Shiite mosque, a hospital, police facilities, a bakery in a Shiite neighborhood and in front of Iraqis' houses. Many security concerns are now focused on the approaching Shiite holy day of Ashura, which falls on Feb. 19. One American government analysis noted that last year more than 180 people were killed during the Ashura celebrations in a series of attacks, and warned that this year insurgents would try to blend in with the pilgrims, dressing in traditional black robes to conceal weaponry.
Iraqi Exile Sees His Prospects on Rise Again
By DEXTER FILKINS
NYT, 13 February 2005
Nine months ago, American soldiers pulled up to Ahmad Chalabi's compound here to help raid and ransack the place, marking a dramatic break between the Bush administration and the Iraqi exile who, more than anyone else outside the American government, helped make the case for the invasion of Iraq. Earlier this week, as dusk settled on the capital, a line of Humvees and American trucks returned, this time bearing one of the American Embassy's most important diplomats, Robert Ford. The purpose of Mr. Ford's visit was to assess what the next Iraqi government, perhaps with Mr. Chalabi in a senior post, was planning for the future. After two hours of discussion, Mr. Ford and his retinue of armed guards and armored cars departed. Mr. Chalabi could barely contain his delight. "At least there is dialogue," he said with a small smile. An American official here described the meeting with Mr. Chalabi as "routine," the latest of several, and similar to many that the Americans are holding with influential Iraqi leaders as the results of the Jan. 30 elections come into focus. Still, the conversation highlighted a substantial change in chemistry between Mr. Chalabi and the American government, which raided his compound last May on suspicion that he had passed top-secret information to the Iranian government. Mr. Chalabi denied the charge. But more than anything, the visit by the American diplomat demonstrated the change in Mr. Chalabi's political fortunes in his native land. Vilified in the United States as the man who fed exaggerated reports of Saddam's weaponry to intelligence agencies, and often listed as one of the most unpopular people in Iraq, Mr. Chalabi is now all but assured a seat in the National Assembly. Over the past several days he has begun maneuvering to become the country's prime minister. ...The political resurrection of Mr. Chalabi was made possible by both fate and by his own determination. In Washington, his most bitter rivals, the former C.I.A. director George Tenet and the former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, have departed. As the Islamic-minded politicians in Iraq have moved closer to power, Mr. Chalabi, who is Western educated, secular and fluent in English, has seen his usefulness in Washington ascend again.
North Koreans Say They Hold Nuclear Arms
By JAMES BROOKE and DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 11 February 2005
North Korea declared publicly on Thursday for the first time that it possessed nuclear weapons and would refuse to return to disarmament talks. That left China, the United States and its allies to debate whether diplomacy could still persuade the North Koreans to give up the nuclear option. American officials played down the importance of the declaration, while acknowledging that they were surprised by the announcement; they and Asian officials had believed North Korea was about to return to the negotiating table after a hiatus of eight months. ...But the administration's message seemed mixed. While Ms. Rice and the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the United States would simply follow the same course of trying to lure the North back into talks, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld gave public voice to the administration's growing concern. ...Several current and former administration officials, declining to speak for attribution, said the announcement would be very likely to bolster some arguments in the administration that Washington should press to cut off North Korea's remaining trade and financial flows, in hopes of squeezing the country and perhaps destabilizing the government of President Kim Jong Il. Vice President Dick Cheney "has always argued that 'time is not on our side,' " said one former senior official who argued for deepened engagement with North Korea. "Kim's just made life easier for the hard-liners." ...But in Thursday's statement, North Korea zeroed in on Ms. Rice's testimony last month in her Senate confirmation hearings, in which she lumped North Korea together with five other dictatorships, calling them "outposts of tyranny." North Korea's statement said, "The true intention of the second-term Bush administration is not only to further its policy to isolate and stifle the D.P.R.K. pursued by the first-term office, but to escalate it." North Korea's formal name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
From the land of 'Moral Values'
Torture, American Style
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 11 February 2005
Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet." In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan." Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.  The title of Ms. Mayer's article is "Outsourcing Torture." It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary rendition." This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings. Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?
SEE ALSO:
Torture by Proxy
New Yorker, Issue of 2005-02-14 and 21
This week in the magazine and here online, Jane Mayer writes about the use by the United States of "extraordinary rendition," the practice of sending terrorism suspects to other countries, where they may be interrogated and tortured on America's behalf. Here, she talks about torture and the war on terror with Amy Davidson.
Big Pharma not entirely in control...in Canada
Senator Says F.D.A. Asked Canada Not to Suspend Drug
By GARDINER HARRIS and BENEDICT CAREY
NYT, 11 February 2005
A day after Canadian officials suspended the use of a hyperactivity drug amid reports of deaths associated with its use, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa contended that United States health officials had asked the Canadian regulators not to do so. Senator Grassley, a Republican, said on Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration had made the request of Canadian health officials because the F.D.A. could not handle another "drug safety crisis." Mr. Grassley said he was basing his contentions on reports from whistle-blowers within the agency. Critics have accused agency officials of being too cozy with drug makers and of being slower than their counterparts in other nations to acknowledge drug-safety problems. The controversy is also bound to fuel a long-running battle over whether drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are overprescribed to children, and whether the drugs' longterm risks have been adequately explored. More than 700,000 Americans use Adderall and its extended release counterpart, Adderall XR. Shire sold $759 million of Adderall products in the United States last year and $10 million in Canada. In the letter Thursday to the F.D.A., Mr. Grassley wrote that reports given to his staff suggested that the agency was not acting with scientific integrity. "Unfortunately, such allegations raise additional concerns about the culture at the F.D.A.," he wrote.
AUDIO/VIDEO LINK
Noam Chomsky: U.S. Might Face "Ultimate Nightmare" in Middle East Where Shiites Control Most of World's Oil
Democracy Now!, 9 November 2005
North Korea Says It Has Nuclear Weapons and Rejects Talks
AP in NYT, 10 February 2005
North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear arms and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks any time soon, saying it needs the weapons as protection against an increasingly hostile United States. The communist state's pronouncement dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea's nuclear program through six-nation talks. ``We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North),'' the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency. ...U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington would consult allies before responding.
Iraq's Insurgency Likely to Continue for Years, Official Says
BY LIZ SLY
Chicago Tribune via Kasas City Star, 9 February 2005
Iraq's insurgency will last many years, a senior U.S. official in Baghdad predicted Wednesday, tempering expectations that the success of the recent election would help end the violence that still threatens to undermine Iraq's journey toward democracy. "I think it's going to take quite a number of years. I do not see any early end," the official said, in a sober assessment of the likely impact of the election on an insurgency fueled largely by Sunni resentment of the political process. ..."The most optimistic scenario is that you have on the one hand a set of political developments that increasingly convince Sunnis that they can live successfully and be reasonably well protected ... not as an oppressed minority," he said. "And militarily you put more and more pressure on - and then it will still take years." "It is political and military. They are not alternatives," he added.
Suicide Bomber Kills 21 in Iraq
By JAMIE TARABAY
Newsday.com, 8 February 2005
A suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of a crowd of army recruits Tuesday, killing 21 other people in the deadliest attack in Baghdad since last week's election and highlighting a recent shift by insurgents to use human bombs instead of cars. Insurgents are strapping explosives on the bodies of volunteers to penetrate the network of blast walls, checkpoints and other security measures designed to block vehicle bombs. Several such attackers tried to disrupt voting in Baghdad on election day but were unable to get into polling stations. On Monday, a suicide bomber walked into a crowd of Iraqi policemen in the northern city of Mosul and detonated explosives, killing 12 of them. Iraqi authorities initially said the Baghdad recruiting center was attacked by mortar fire, but witnesses reported only a single explosion and the U.S. military said the blast was caused by a suicide bomber on foot. Attacks have steadily risen since the Jan. 30 elections, when a massive U.S. and Iraqi security operation prevented insurgents from disrupting the vote. Those measures, including a ban on most private vehicles, closing the borders and an extended curfew, were relaxed soon afterward.
EU to End Embargo on China Arms Sales, Rebuffing Rice
Bloomberg.com, 9 February 2005
The European Union said it is going ahead with plans to lift its 15-year-old embargo on arms sales to China, rebuffing a plea by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. ``The European Union is moving to lift the arms embargo,'' European Commission President Jose Barroso said at a news conference with Rice in Brussels today. ``The European Union cannot be accused of rushing into this.'' Barroso said the 25-nation EU will consult the U.S. over a code of conduct governing future weapons sales to prevent what the U.S. regards as sensitive technologies from falling into Chinese hands. U.S. opposition to the lifting of the embargo, imposed after China crushed the pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989, underscores the trans-Atlantic tensions that remain after Rice's week-long fence-mending trip to Europe. ...Differences over China and a looming confrontation with Iran over its nuclear-weapons ambitions will also cloud U.S. President George W. Bush's meetings in Brussels Feb. 22 with leaders of the EU and NATO.
Law of Unintended Consequences
Careful what you wish for in Iraq.
Robert Scheer
LA Times, 8 February 2005
In a heightened display of saber rattling, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been saying nasty things about Iran's "unelected mullahs." This is apparently so we'll be able to tell the difference between the theocracy in place in Tehran and the one coalescing in Baghdad. Although things are looking slightly brighter for Iraq after its debut election, it is still not clear why the United States has spent incalculable fortunes in human life, taxpayer money and international goodwill to break Iraq and then remake it in the image of our avowed "axis of evil" enemy next door. In his State of the Union address, Bush denounced Iran as "the world's primary state sponsor of terrorism." At the same time, he celebrated an Iraqi election that handed power to Shiite ayatollahs who were sponsored for decades by their co-religionists in Iran and who share much of Tehran's vision of religion and politics. Does this make sense to anybody outside of the White House? The final returns from the Iraqi election are not in, but it seems clear that the slate headed by the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution is going to have a clear majority in the new constitutional assembly. This is a classic example of how, in the real world, there is a lot more gray than an administration that sees everything in black and white wants to admit. After all, Rice can call Iran's hyper-conservative religious leaders "loathsome," and Cheney can claim, paternally, that the United States knows many "responsible Iraqis," but the fact is that deeply religious Shiites with strong ties to each other will be in control in both Iraq and Iran. ...What we are witnessing here is a startling application of the law of unintended consequences: A U.S. president who is intent on breaching the wall between church and state in his own country on issues such as birth control and the "sanctity of marriage" has now used the world's most powerful military to pave the way for a new Muslim theocracy in the heart of the Arab world. Furthermore, Bush has unwittingly strengthened the hand of Iran, a nation allegedly developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting global terrorism.
...Bottom line, though, is that the Shiite ayatollahs have held the keys to Baghdad since Hussein's predominantly Sunni military regime was dismantled after the invasion. They successfully demanded an election in the midst of a Sunni insurgency and boycott, and they won it. Washington has crashed against the limits of foreign military power as an instrument for crafting a culture of freedom for another people. It does not help that our motives are corrupted by a rapacious thirst for petroleum, our vision blurred by an insufferable ignorance of the complexity of local cultures and our presumption exaggerated by the effrontery of our own leader's claims to the wisdom of God.
Bush Bites His Tongue
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT. 8 February 2005
There are two words the Bush administration doesn't want you to think about: North Korea. That's because the most dangerous failure of U.S. policy these days is in North Korea. President Bush has been startlingly passive as North Korea has begun churning out nuclear weapons like hot cakes. The dangers were underscored with last week's reports that the uranium in Libya's former nuclear program may have come from North Korea. Indeed, Mr. Bush seems to recognize that his policy has failed - that's why he isn't talking much about North Korea now, at least publicly, and why (as reported in The Times today) he sent an emissary to talk last week with the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, about how to tame North Korea. North Korea is particularly awkward for Mr. Bush to discuss publicly because, as best we know, it didn't make a single nuclear weapon during Bill Clinton's eight years in office (although it did begin a separate, and secret, track to produce uranium weapons; it hasn't produced any yet but may eventually). In contrast, the administration now acknowledges that North Korea extracted enough plutonium in the last two years for about half a dozen nuclear weapons.
...this is a regime that is not just menacing, but monstrous. Mr. Bush is right to regard it with loathing. But U.S. policy on North Korea for the last four years has only strengthened Mr. Kim and allowed him to expand his nuclear arsenal severalfold. The risk is that Mr. Bush will respond to the failure of his first term's policy by adopting an even harder line in the coming months, seeking Security Council sanctions (he won't get them) and ultimately imposing some kind of naval quarantine. That would only strengthen Mr. Kim's grip on power, as well as risk a war on the Korean peninsula. A Pentagon study in the 1990's predicted that such a war could kill one million people. In short, our mishandling of North Korea has been appalling - and it may soon get worse.
Five steps to avoid another neo-con disaster...
Let's Not Make the Same Mistakes in Iran
By David Kay
Washington Post, 7 February 2005
One year ago I told the Senate Armed Services Committee that I had concluded "we were almost all wrong" at the time of the Iraq war about that country's activities with regard to weapons of mass destruction -- and never more wrong than in the assessment that Iraq had a resurgent program on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. I testified about what I saw as the major reasons we got it so wrong, and I urged the establishment of an independent commission to examine this failure and begin the long-overdue process of adjusting our intelligence capabilities to the new national security environment we face. It is an environment dominated by too-easy access to weapons of mass destruction capabilities and to the means of concealing such capabilities from international inspection and national intelligence agencies.
A year later we are still awaiting the independent commission's report. The discussion of intelligence reform has focused on reordering and adding structure on top of an eroded intelligence foundation. And now we hear the drumrolls again, this time announcing an accelerating nuclear weapons program in Iran.
There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war. The International Atomic Energy Agency has announced that while Iran now admits having concealed for 18 years nuclear activities that should have been reported to the IAEA, it is has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Iran says it is now cooperating fully with international inspections, and it denies having anything but a peaceful nuclear energy program.
...Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran would be a grave danger to the world. That is not what is in doubt. What is in doubt is the ability to the U.S. government to honestly assess Iran's nuclear status and to craft a set of measures that will cope with that threat short of military action by the United States or Israel.
Evidence mounts: Iraq War counter productive to war on terror
Iraq: Spinning Off Arab Terrorists?
Counterterror experts from 50 countries met in Saudi Arabia to discuss how to combat emerging threats.
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Christian Science Monitor, 8 February 2005
The lessons of Afghanistan are not lost on counterterrorism experts and Arab government officials here.
As the insurgency continues in Iraq, the risk is that the country becomes a regional training ground for terrorists - as Afghanistan was in the 1990s - creating newly radicalized and experienced jihadis who return home to cause trouble in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. In fact, there's evidence it's already happened in Kuwait. In the past month, the tiny Gulf state has been rocked by a series of shootouts with Muslim militants, some of whom learned their craft by working alongside Iraqi insurgents. "We found during the interrogations that about four of the suspects had learned how to make explosives in Iraq," says Col. Khaled al-Isaimi, who heads the Kuwaiti delegation at a four-day global counterterrorism conference which ends Tuesday in Riyadh. Some 40 terror suspects have been handed over to Kuwaiti prosecutors in the past month. Saudi security expert Nawaf Obaid agrees that Arab fighters returning to Saudi Arabia from Iraq is an issue.
SEE ALSO:
AUDIO LINK
Scott Ritter on the Weekend Interview Show
Two Parts, 22 January and 5 February 2005
In 1998, Scott Ritter resigned from the United Nations weapons inspection team and has been the most outspoken critic of US policy towards Baghdad. He has argued that the inspection team, UNSCOM, was a nest of US spies and that Iraq was disarmed long ago. But he first made the headlines in 1997, when as a senior UNSCOM member he was accused by Iraq of being an American spy himself. He is the author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America, and Endgame : Solving the Iraq Problem -- Once and For All. Ritter, currently a consultant, resides with his family in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
Animosity toward Bush/US lingers...
Rumsfeld to Discourage NATO Interference
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
AP in San Francisco Chronicle, 7 February 2005
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, traveling to France this week, will press NATO countries to reduce political interference in the alliance's operations, an issue that U.S. officials contend has hampered NATO efforts in Kosovo and Iraq. In some cases, the political leadership of individual NATO countries have ordered their officers and soldiers, assigned to NATO units and headquarters, not to take part in operations carried out by NATO as a whole. Rumsfeld will make his case to eliminate these "national caveats" on the use of alliance forces at a NATO defense minister's meeting in Nice, a senior U.S. defense official said Monday, discussing the upcoming conference only on the condition of anonymity.
SEE ALSO:
Canada Still Refuses to Send Troops to Iraq
By ALLISON DUNFIELD
Globe and Mail, 7 February 2005
Canadian troops will not be sent into Iraq, Prime Minister Paul Martin said Monday, despite reports that soldiers could be sent to help train the Iraqi military as part of the country's reconstruction efforts. "We refused to send Canadian troops to Iraq two years ago. That decision stands. Canadian troops will not be going to Iraq," the Prime Minister told the House of Commons Monday. He was responding to a line of questioning from the NDP on information that Canada could be formally requested by the U.S. government to send 40 troops to Iraq as part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization force to help train Iraqi troops. Mr. Martin reiterated what his Foreign Minister, Pierre Pettigrew, said over the weekend — that the troops will not land on Iraq soil. However, they may participate in reconstruction efforts by participating in NATO efforts outside Iraq.
No Returns
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
NYT Magazine, 6 February 2005
...it is not the lack of democracy that produced jihadist movements, nor will the creation of democracies quell them. To the extent that President Bush's new policy is turned into action, the jihadists may well take it as further provocative American meddling, similar to the reaction to the president's earlier attempt at reform in the region, the Greater Middle East Initiative, which was dead on arrival. President Bush's democracy-promotion policy will be appropriate and laudable at the right time in the right nations, but it is not the cure for terrorism and may divert us from efforts needed to rout Al Qaeda and reduce our vulnerabilities at home. The president is right that resentment is growing and that it is breeding terrorism, but it is chiefly resentment of us, not of the absence of democracy. The 9/11 Commission had a proposal similar to the president's, but more on point: a battle of ideas to persuade more Muslims that jihadist terrorism is a perversion of Islam. Most Middle East experts agree, however, that any American hand in the battle of ideas will, for now, be counterproductive. For many in the Islamic world, the United States is still associated with such acts as having made the 250,000 person city of Falluja uninhabitable. Because of the enormous resentment of the United States government in the Islamic world, documented in numerous opinion polls, we will have to look to nongovernmental organizations and other nations to lead the battle of ideas.
Shia Coalition Split Over Choice of Iraq Premier
By Steve Negus in Baghdad
Financial Times, 7 February 2005
Divisions emerged at the weekend in a Shia coalition that appears to have swept the vote in the January 30 elections, with the two main parties each putting forward a candidate for Iraq prime minister.
SEE ALSO:
Shia and Kurds Poised to Dominate Iraqi Government
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Independent (UK), 8 February 2005
Negotiations between the successful parties in the Iraqi election will start shortly and are likely to produce a national unity government dominated by the Shia and the Kurds, according to Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister. In a jubilant mood in the wake of the elections, having vigorously opposed their postponement, Mr Zebari said: "We must not squander this wonderful historic victory. If we do not get it right, the consequences will be devastating." Though he did not say explicitly that the interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, was bound to lose his job, Mr Zebari believes the number of candidates for the post of prime minister in the new government has narrowed to two. Those are Ibrahim Jaafari of Dawa, the Shia party, who is currently vice-president, and Adel Abdul Mehdi, the Finance Minister, of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
SEE ALSO:
Sistani Begins on his True Agenda
By Ehsan Ahrari
Asia Times, 8 February 2005
As expected, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) is emerging as the dominant party, making its chief mentor and spiritual adviser, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the clear winner of the Iraqi elections of January 30 (see Note below). Only US President George W Bush and his tight-lipped advisers know whether this is the beginning of the United States' nightmare in Iraq. Sistani never had any doubts about what he wanted: use the much-cherished democracy of the US invaders to enable his people - the Shi'ites - to emerge as governors of Iraq, after years of being marginalized by the minority Sunnis. The most dominant question is how Islamic the emerging government of Iraq is likely to be.
The US may not have any problem with Islam as a religion; there is no doubt, however, that the entire notion of "Islamic government" has never been an acceptable proposition in Washington. That was true in Afghanistan after the dismantlement of the Taliban regime, and it has been true in Iraq. US presidents, starting from Jimmy Carter, know only too well how chaotic a system can be created under the rubric of "Islamic government". The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 was the beginning of Washington's nightmare. If Carter had to identify one reason why he remained a one-term president, he would readily state: the Islamic Revolution of Iran, under which the US was humiliated by the Islamic cadres of the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Islamic government is once again emerging as an issue of utmost concern for another president, except this time he, Bush, might be the direct reason for the materialization of an Islamic government in Iraq.
CIA to Detail Cold War Ties to Former Nazis
Reuters via LA Times, 7 February 2005
The CIA, under pressure from Congress, has agreed in principle to release new documents detailing its ties to former Nazis who aided U.S. Cold War espionage against the Soviet Union, officials said Sunday. Facing demands for public testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, CIA officials have conceded that records on former Nazis who have not been accused of war crimes, including members of the German SS, should be subject to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, the officials said. "This means the information we thought would come out when we wrote the law will now come out," said Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), who co-wrote the disclosure legislation.
U.S. Officials Say a Theocratic Iraq Is Unlikely
By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 7 February 2005
The Bush administration sought Sunday to allay concerns that a Shiite religious state could emerge in Iraq as a result of last weekend's elections. Speaking on television news programs on Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, opposed direct cleric involvement in daily governing, and that most Iraqis rejected an Iranian-style theocracy. We have a great deal of confidence in where they're headed," Mr. Cheney said on "Fox News Sunday."
Rebel Attacks in Iraqi Cities Kill More Than 20
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 7 January 2005
Two separate suicide attacks took the lives of 28 people today as insurgents continued the violence.
Fifteen people died and 16 were wounded when a suicide car bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi civilians lining up to join the Iraqi police in Baquba, north of Baghdad, a police official said.
In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a hospital compound among a crowd of police officers, killing 13 policemen and wounding 7, a police official said. Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, has been the scene of daily rebel attacks and clashes with American troops and Iraqi security forces. Violence has increased since an insurgent uprigins in November drove out nearly all of the city‚s police force. Today's violence follows the kidnapping by gunmen of four Egyptian contractors on Sunday outside their residence in Baghdad, and the death of an American soldier north of the capital by a roadside bombing that wounded two others.
Divine Dictates?
by David Domke
Baltimore Sun, 6 February 2005
...scholar R. Scott Appleby declared in 2003 that the administration's omnipresent emphasis on freedom and liberty functions as the centerpiece for "a theological version of Manifest Destiny." Unfortunately, this new version of Manifest Destiny differs little from the original: Any who do not willingly adopt the supposedly universal norms and values of Protestant conservatives are vanquished. The result, by implication in the president's rhetoric, is that the administration has transformed Mr. Bush's policy of "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" to "Either you are with us, or you are against God." Such a view is indistinguishable from that of the terrorists we are fighting. One is hard pressed to see how the perspective of Osama bin Laden - that he and his followers are delivering God's wishes for the United States - is much different from Mr. Bush's perspective that the United States is delivering God's wishes to the Taliban or the Iraqis. Clearly, flying airplanes into buildings in order to kill innocent people is an indefensible immoral activity. So too, some charge, is an unprovoked pre-emptive invasion of another nation. In both instances, the aggression manifested in a form that was available to the leaders. And that isn't freedom and liberty, no matter how many times you use the words or link them to God.
Training Iraqis: the Facts
By Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Washington Post, 6 February 2005
Before we can begin to responsibly disengage from Iraq, two conditions must be met. First, an elected Iraqi government and constitution considered legitimate by the country's main factions must emerge. Second, that government must develop the capacity to provide law and order, deliver basic services and, most important, defeat the insurgency. Last Sunday's elections were an important step toward meeting the first condition, but they did little to advance the second. During Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's confirmation, much was made of the dueling numbers she and I advanced regarding Iraq's security forces. Rice said there are about 125,000 trained Iraqi security forces. I maintained that the real number was between 4,000 and 18,000. What explains the discrepancy? By one measure the Bush administration is right: As of today, there are about 136,000 "trained and equipped" Iraqis. But that measure is meaningless. Indeed, a year ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld boasted of 210,000 Iraqis in uniform and called it "an amazing accomplishment." We should focus on real standards, not raw numbers. The real standard is straightforward: Can an Iraqi soldier or policeman do what we ask American soldiers to do -- provide law and order, protect the infrastructure, defend the borders and, above all, defeat the insurgency? There are nowhere near 136,000 Iraqis capable of accomplishing these goals. Here are the facts:...
U.S. Condoned Iraq Oil Smuggling
Trade was an open secret in administration, U.N.
From Elise Labott and Phil Hirschkorn
CNN, 4 February 2005
Iraq may have earned as much as $13.6 billion from the oil sales.
Documents obtained by CNN reveal the United States knew about, and even condoned, embargo-breaking oil sales by Saddam Hussein's regime, and did so to shore up alliances with Iraq's neighbors.
...Estimates of how much revenue Iraq earned from these tolerated side sales of its oil to Jordan and Turkey, as well as to Syria and Egypt, range from $5.7 billion to $13.6 billion.
...Rep. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, one of five panels probing the oil-for-food program, told CNN the United States was "complicit in undermining" the U.N. sanctions on Iraq. "How is it that you stand on a moral footing to go after the U.N. when they're responsible for 15 percent maybe of the ill-gotten gains, and we were part and complicit of him getting 85 percent of the money?" Menendez asked. "Where was our voice on the committee that was overseeing this on the Security Council? The reality is that we were either silent or complicit, and that is fundamentally wrong."
Former State Department diplomat Walker said, "It was almost a 'don't ask, don't tell' kind of policy. It was accepted in the Security Council. No one challenged it." John Ruggie, a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said U.S. diplomats focused on assuring U.N.-approved shipments to Iraq were free of military components, and the United States felt Jordan and Turkey needed to be compensated for the adverse impact of the sanctions. Ruggie said, "The secretary of state of the United States said each and every year that those illegal sales were in the national security interest of the United States. So it wasn't just that the U.S. was looking the other way."

Cozying Up to Condi
A new era of good feeling for the United States and Europe? Don't count on it.
By Michael Meyer
Newsweek, 14 February issue
Ironically, the erstwhile transatlantic partners are likely to view these developments quite differently. The Bush administration will see them as further evidence that events are finally going its way in Iraq, and that the Europeans are at long last falling into line. For the Europeans, it will be just the opposite. When it comes to their stand on the war, Schröder and Chirac feel every bit as vindicated as President Bush. They are drawing a line between past and future. The war was a mistake, as events have proved, their thinking goes. Yet Iraq is nonetheless making steps and deserves help. They will provide it. But as far as the Europeans are concerned, theirs is a parallel effort—not supporting the United States, but aiding Iraq, independently of America. That, in a nutshell, is Iraq's legacy. And what an irony. To borrow Washington's own phraseology, this time it's Europe engaging in an alliance of convenience, a temporary coalition of the willing. Condoleezza Rice, like her boss, may talk of mending ties. But bridging the transatlantic gap will take a lot more than just that.
Many Iraqi Troops Not Fully Trained, U.S. Officials Say
By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 4 February 2005
Less than a third of the 136,000 members of Iraqi security forces that the Pentagon says are trained and equipped can be sent to tackle the most challenging missions in the country, and Iraqi Army units are suffering severe troop shortages, two top Pentagon officials told a Senate panel on Thursday. Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about 40,000 of Iraq's forces "can go anywhere in the country and take on almost any threat," but he quickly added that the remaining forces were useful in less demanding jobs, like police work in relatively stable southern Iraq.
SEE ALSO:
Iraq Army 'Intimidated by Rebels' (BBC)
Rice Talks Language of Diplomacy - But it has Alarming Echoes
By Julian Coman, Colin Brown and Rupert Cornwell
The Independent (UK). 5 February 2005
On Iraq 'We're going to seek a peaceful solution to this. We think one is possible' - 20 October 2002
On Iran 'The question [of a military strike] is simply not on the agenda at this point in time. We have diplomatic means to do this'
- Yesterday
 She refused to utter the words "regime change". She declined to be drawn on future military adventures. But what Condoleezza Rice, the new US Secretary of State, did say yesterday in London was that Iranian "behaviour, internally and externally, is out of step with the direction and desires of the international community". Asked directly whether the US planned an attack on Iran, Ms Rice said: "The question is simply not on the agenda at this point in time. We have diplomatic missions to do this." It was an answer that had a familiar ring. ...Ms Rice said after her talks: "Let me state quite clearly what we hope to achieve concerning the Iranian regime. We have complete unity of purpose on a number of areas. First of all that Iran engages in activities that are destabilising to the region, particularly when it comes to support for terrorism.
"Secondly we are completely united in our view that Iran should not use the cover of civilian nuclear development to sustain a programme that could lead to a nuclear weapon.
"The Iranians ought to take the opportunity that's being presented to them to show that they are living up to their international obligations. "Thirdly we are united in our view that the Iranian regime should have transparent relations with its neighbours in Afghanistan and Iraq.Fourthly we have all been concerned about the abysmal human rights record of the Iranian regime."
U.S. 'In for a Shock'
In early election results, Shiite cleric's alliance trouncing Washington's favorite
- Borzou Daragahi
San Francisco Chronicle, 4 February 2005
Partial results from Sunday's election suggest that U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's coalition is being roundly defeated by a list with the backing of Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, diminishing Allawi's chances of retaining his post in the next government. Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of the Constitutional Monarchy Party, likened the vote outcome to a "Sistani tsunami" that would shake the nation. "Americans are in for a shock," he said, adding that one day they would realize, "We've got 150,000 troops here protecting a country that's extremely friendly to Iran, and training their troops." The partial totals so far show the Iraqi List headed by Allawi, a secular Shiite and onetime CIA protege, trailed far behind with only 18 percent of the votes, despite an aggressive television ad campaign waged with U.S. aid. A lopsided majority of votes, 72 percent, went to the United Iraqi Alliance list, topped by a Shiite cleric who lived in Iran for many years and whose Sciri party has close ties to Iran's clerical regime. More than a third of the alliance's vote came from Baghdad, the cosmopolitan capital where Allawi had been expected to fare well. Although the results are only from Baghdad and five southern provinces where the Shiite parties were expected to score strongly, and from only 10 percent of the country's 5,216 polling stations, the scale of the alliance's vote underscored the probability of a historic shift in the Shiites' favor from decades of Sunni minority rule in Iraq.
Fresh Attacks Kill 21 Iraqis, 2 U.S. Troops
Also, militant video shows apparent slaying of 7 hostages
MSNBC News, 5 February 2005
Insurgents launched fresh attacks, killing 21 Iraqis and two U.S. soldiers, while Iraqi militant group Army of Ansar al-Sunna said it shot dead seven abducted Iraqi National Guards and posted an Internet video of the killings on Saturday. Meantime, partial returns from the historic elections showed a Shiite alliance with ties to Iran rolling up a strong lead over pro-U.S. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Iraq Media Coverage: Too Much Stenography, Not Enough Curiosity
by Norman Solomon
Common Dreams, 3 February 2005
Curiosity may occasionally kill a cat. But lack of curiosity is apt to terminate journalism with extreme prejudice.
"We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out," President Bush said in his State of the Union address. "We are in Iraq to achieve a result: A country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors and able to defend itself."
President Johnson said the same thing about the escalating war in Vietnam. His rhetoric was typical on Jan. 12, 1966: "We fight for the principle of self determination -- that the people of South Vietnam should be able to choose their own course, choose it in free elections without violence, without terror, and without fear."
Anyone who keeps an eye on mainstream news is up to speed on the latest presidential spin. But the reporters who tell us what the president wants us to hear should go beyond stenography to note historic echoes and point out basic contradictions.
A couple of days before the voting in Iraq, the lead story on the front page of the New York Times -- summing up the newspaper's exclusive interview with President Bush -- had reported his assertion "that he would withdraw American forces from Iraq if the new government that is elected on Sunday asked him to do so, but that he expected Iraq's first democratically elected leaders would want the troops to remain."
Logically, the president's statement should have set off warning buzzers -- along the lines of "What's wrong with this picture?" For instance: Public opinion polls in Iraq are consistently showing that most Iraqis want U.S. troops to quickly withdraw from their country. Yet Bush asserted that the Iraqi election would be democratic -- even while he expressed confidence that the resulting government would defy the desires of most Iraqi people on the matter of whether American military forces should remain.
The Future of Iraq and U.S. Occupation
by Noam Chomsky
Common Dreams, 3 February 2005
The following is an except from a presentation by Noam Chomsky on January 26th at a forum sponsored by the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, NM to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the International Relations Center:
Let’s just imagine what the policies might be of an independent Iraq, independent, sovereign Iraq, let’s say more or less democratic. What are the policies likely to be? Well there’s going to be a Shiite majority, so they’ll have some significant influence over policy. The first thing they’ll do is reestablish relations with Iran. Now they don’t particularly like Iran, but they don’t want to go to war with them so they’ll move toward what was happening already even under Saddam, that is, restoring some sort of friendly relations with Iran. That’s the last thing the United States wants.
Rice Says U.S. Won't Aid Europe on Plans for Incentives to Iran
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN, ELAINE SCIOLINO and DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 4 February 2005
Less than a day after President Bush declared he was "working with European allies" to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States would continue to rebuff European requests to participate directly in offering incentives for Iran to drop what is suspected of being a nuclear arms program.
Officials Back Away from Early Estimates of Iraqi Voter Turnout
Everyone is delighted that so many Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, but do the two turnout numbers routinely cited by the press -- 8 million and 57% -- have any basis in reality? And was the outpouring of voters in Sunni areas really "surprisingly strong"?
By Greg Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Updated 3 February 2005
Everyone, of course, is thrilled that so many Iraqis turned out to vote, in the face of threats and intimidation, on Sunday. But in hailing, and at times gushing, over the turnout, has the American media (as it did two years ago in the hyping of Saddam's WMDs) forgotten core journalistic principles in regard to fact-checking and weighing partisan assertions? It appears so. For days, the press repeated, as gospel, assertions offered by an election official that 8 million Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, an impressive 57% turnout rate. I questioned those figures as early as last Sunday, and offered the detailed analysis below on Wednesday. Now, John Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times report in Friday's paper that Iraqi election officials have quietly "backtracked, saying that the 8 million estimate had been reached hastily on the basis of telephone reports from polling stations across the country and that the figure could change."
Iraq Security Forces Only 30% Trained
By Eric Schmitt
NYT via IHT, 4 February 2005
Pentagon aides also say Baghdad army lacks troops, highlighting U.S. challenge
Fewer than 30 percent of the 136,000 Iraqi security forces whom the Pentagon has said were trained and equipped are fully capable of conducting a broad range of independent missions in Iraq, and Iraqi Army units are suffering severe troop shortages, two top Pentagon officials told a Senate panel on Thursday. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that only about 40,000 of Iraq's security forces "can go anywhere and do anything," but he said that the remaining troops could also be useful. He also said that American military commanders now suspected that the 79,000 Iraqi police officers and other Iraqi Ministry forces on official government rolls might not be as capable as Iraqi officials have asserted. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told senators that Iraqi Army units had absentee rates of up to 40 percent at any given time because many new Iraqi soldiers had failed to return to duty after going home on leave. At the hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, read an e-mail message from a Marine colonel who said Iraqi commanders in his area inflated their official troop levels and pocketed the extra budgeted monies. In one Iraq unit of 134 soldiers that the colonel noted, she said, 37 troops returned after being paid and going on leave. It's a different culture and it's difficult for us to understand," Myers said when asked to explain the problems...
Allawi Faces Defeat as Iraqi Cleric's Team Leads the Polls
By Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad
Independent (UK), 4 February 2005
The coalition of Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi interim Prime Minister appointed by the Americans, is heading for election defeat at the hands of a list backed by the country's senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, partial results released yesterday indicate. The results from Baghdad - where Mr Allawi was expected to do well - show the one-time CIA protégé with only 140,364 votes compared to 350,069 for the alliance, which is headed by a Shia cleric who lived in Iran for many years. Among the mostly five Shia provinces tallied so far, the alliance's lead is even wider. It has 1.1 million of the 1.6 million votes counted at 10 per cent of polling centres in the capital and the Shia south. Mr Allawi's list was second with 360,500.
SEE ALSO:
Shiite Coalition Takes a Big Lead in Early Vote Count in Iraq (NYT)
Top Shiites Push for an Islamic constitution
Large Vote Turnout Boosts Aspirations of Religious Coalition
Thanassis Cambanis
San Francisco Chronicle, 2 February 2005
Some of Iraq's top Shiite clerics, emboldened by a huge Shiite turnout for their coalition of religious parties in Iraq's elections, have begun advocating an Islamic constitution. The turnout for the top-finishing electoral list, a coalition of Islamist parties supported by the Shiite clerical establishment, has convinced leading clerics in Najaf that religious parties will have a majority in the National Assembly that will write Iraq's next constitution, several of them said. The clerics of Najaf who orchestrated the Shiite coalition say they expect a constitutional debate between hard-line Islamists, who want Quranic law to be the constitution's primary source, and moderate Muslims who want a milder form of religious law. This debate, they say, will dwarf any challenge from secular parties. Some members of the United Iraqi Alliance, the slate that includes Shiite political parties as well as independent Shiite figures, said they were not in favor of an all-clerical government. The list was put together at the behest of the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose tacit endorsement was crucial in rallying voters. ...The leadership of the new elected government remains up in the air, but U. S. officials are counting on Islamists who oppose a direct role for clerics in government to prevail. The officials say Iraq's Shiite clergy has supported democratic principles, including elections, and shown political restraint since the fall of Hussein's regime.
Halliburton Doing Business With the 'Axis of Evil'
By Jefferson Morley
Washington Post, 3 February 2005
The award for oddest geopolitical couple of 2005 goes to the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Houston-based Halliburton. You might not think that a charter member of President Bush's "axis of evil" could enlist the oil-services firm once run by Vice President Cheney to bolster its bargaining position with an international community intent on curbing its nuclear ambitions. But that is apparently what happened last month. The story began on Jan. 9 when the Iran News ran a Reuters story reporting that Halliburton "has won a tender to drill a huge Iranian gas field." The deal to develop two sections of Iran's South Pars gas field promises significant economic benefits. "The project includes onshore and offshore sections and its initial phase is to become operational by the first quarter of 2007," said the Tehran-based news site. The total output of the phases will reportedly produce 50 million cubic meters per day of treated natural gas for domestic use and 80,000 barrels of gas liquids per day for export.
Iran-Contra Figure to Lead Democracy Efforts Abroad
Washington Post 3 February 2005
Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty in 1991 to withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair, was promoted to deputy national security adviser to President Bush. Abrams, who previously was in charge of Middle East affairs, will be responsible for pushing Bush's strategy for advancing democracy. The White House also announced yesterday that Faryar Shirzad, a deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, will take on added responsibilities for humanitarian affairs, stabilization and reconstruction efforts. Prior to joining the NSC staff, Shirzad was assistant secretary for import administration at the Commerce Department. Before that, he was the lead coordinator of international trade policy for the Bush-Cheney transition team. The White House had earlier tapped J.D. Crouch, the U.S. ambassador to Romania, for the No. 2 job at the National Security Council, under national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. Abrams has served as special assistant to the president and senior director for Near East and North African affairs since December 2002. He will continue work on Israeli-Palestinian affairs in concert with Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Abrams's 1991 plea stemmed from the congressional inquiry into the Iran-contra affair during President Ronald Reagan's administration. On Oct. 10, 1986, Abrams, then a State Department employee, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he did not know that Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North was directing illegal arms sales to Iran and diverting the proceeds to assist the Nicaraguan contras. Abrams was pardoned by Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush.
Iraqi Prime Minister Predicts Insurgents Will be Defeated Within Months
ROBERT H. REID
AP in SF Chronicle, February 2, 2005
Iraq's interim prime minister declared Wednesday that the success of the national elections had dealt a major blow to the insurgents -- who have not carried out a major attack since the balloting -- and he predicted they will be defeated within months. But a major Sunni clerical group declared that Sunday's elections "lack legitimacy" because many Sunni Arabs did not participate, saying the new government would have no mandate to guide the nation's future.
Four Out of 10 Desert New Security Force When Under Fire
By Jack Fairweather
Telegraph (UK), 2 February 2005
Col Ahmed Ibrahim, an officer in the new Iraqi army, should be taking the fight to insurgents in the northern town of Mosul.
Instead he sits in an almost empty barracks at a United States Army base, mourning the desertion of most of his men. The future of Iraq's security rests upon the shoulders of men such as Col Ibrahim, but so far the country's security forces have performed disastrously whenever confronted with determined insurgent activity.
Following Sunday's election, the focus is now on training enough men in uniform to allow the American and British armed forces to begin leaving. Coalition commanders admit that, among the 125,000 policemen and soldiers trained so far, the rate of desertion is as high as 40 per cent.
The desertions are not evenly distributed around the country, with forces in the British-controlled south and Kurdish north performing well. But crucially, where the insurgency is strongest in the Sunni heartlands, Iraqi security forces have failed to stand firm.
For Col Ibrahim, a former Ba'athist officer, a few days in early November were enough to send his unit packing. Insurgents, on the run from the US assault of Fallujah, stormed police stations in Mosul and ransacked a recently built $90 million (£48 million) army base where Col Ibrahim's men were to be based.
Seven hundred of his men left their units, and Mosul's police force completely disbanded. There were similar mass desertions last April during a nationwide revolt. "My men were scared away by the violence," said the colonel. American commanders choose to focus on the positive aspects of rebuilding Iraq's security forces.
Bush 'Iraq Test' alive and well
US 'Blackballs' Briton
By James Bone
TimesOnLine, 3 February 2005
The United States has “blackballed” a top British official at the United Nations to stop him becoming the organisation’s Middle East peace envoy because he upset Washington over Iraq, diplomats said yesterday. Sir Kieran Prendergast, the UN’s long serving politicial supremo, was the leading candidate to replace the Norwegian mediator Terje Roed-Larsen at a crucial juncture in Israel/ Palestinian peace efforts. Before becoming UN under-secretary-general for political affairs in 1997, Sir Kieran had served as Britain’s ambassador to Turkey and as head of chancery in the British Embassy in Israel. At the UN, he resisted US pressure to increase the organisation’s presence in Iraq.
A New Standard for the Use of Force?
 by Lawrence J. Korb
 Center for American Progress, 2 February 2005
REVIEW OF: Barnett, Thomas P. M. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Putnam, 2004. 320pp. $26.95
This review can be found in the Naval War College Review, Winter 2005, Vol. 58, #1.
As a consequence of the framework he has developed, Barnett is also an unabashed supporter of Bush’s preemption doctrine when it comes to dealing with actors and regimes in the Gap. There are two problems with his approach. First, it confuses preemption with preventive war. It is not only legal under international law but moral for a nation to take preemptive military action when it has what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld calls “elegant intelligence” about an imminent threat. But this is not what the United States did in Iraq. President Bush has stated repeatedly that Iraq was not an imminent threat, yet he waged a preventive war against what he claimed was “a grave and gathering danger.” If this is the new standard for the use of force against members of the Gap, what is to prevent India from waging a preventive war against Pakistan? Or Russia against Georgia?
Second, while Barnett concedes that the traditional strategies of containment and deterrence will work against other Core states, he argues that it will not work against members of the Gap. Yet Barnett fails to recognize that while nonstate actors like al-Qa’ida cannot be deterred, even the most evil regimes in the Gap can be deterred, because their rulers wish to remain in power. The recent report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence demonstrates that Iraq was contained and that the sanctions and American and British military pressure helped to destroy Saddam’s military machine and his capacity to produce conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz testified, the cost of containing Saddam amounted to $2.5 billion a year. At the time of this writing the Bush administration has spent $144 billion in Iraq, without making us safer.
Unlike the Bush administration, Barnett does not appear to have learned that the doctrine of launching preemptive strikes against established states in the Gap died in Iraq. Barnett wants to launch a preventive war against North Korea. According to his analysis, Kim Jong Il has become “globalization’s enemy number one following Saddam Hussein’s demise and must be removed from power.” He believes that Bush’s reelection means that such action is inevitable.
Finally, Barnett’s analysis falls into the trap of thinking that terrorists in the Gap attack the West for what it is and what it thinks. However, as demonstrated in the book Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror by Anonymous (a twenty-three-year CIA veteran), America is hated and attacked for what it does—that is, the policies it pursues that impact the Islamic world, such as its support for apostate, corrupt, and tyrannical Muslim governments. He notes that “the Islamic World is not so offended by our democratic system of politics, guaranties of personal rights and civil liberties, and separation of church and state that it is willing to wage war against overwhelming odds to stop America from voting, speaking freely, and praying or not, as they wish.”
Because of these failings, Barnett’s global transaction strategy will not gain the support of the American people or its allies that containment did. Rather, the global transaction strategy is in reality an updated version of the domino theory, which led the United States to believe that if it did not intervene to prevent South Vietnam from becoming communist, all of Southeast Asia would become part of the Soviet empire.
LANGUAGE CONTROL....
We already know all about the GOP's language strategy for their Social Security plans: at first it was "privatization," but that didn't poll well. So they changed it to "private accounts," but that didn't poll well either. So now it's "personal accounts."
With that out of the way, they're ready to move on: Rick Santorum now says he wants to ditch the idea of "transitional costs" — that's the multiple trillions of dollars that privatization would add in either taxes or higher deficits — and instead favors the term "prepaying." Orwell marches on.
I should add that I'm not bothered that Republicans are doing this. All political parties try to control language in ways favorable to their own causes. What bothers me is that so many reporters are buying into this despite the fact that Republicans have been so open about what they're doing. It's one thing to get rolled, but it's quite another to go along without a whimper when you know you're getting rolled. Wise up, folks.
          --Kevin Drum, Political Animal, Washington Monthly
Saddam Without a Moustache
Why the US Will Not Leave Iraq
by Pepe Escobar
Asia times,1 February 2005
The White House, the Pentagon and the neo-conservatives were forced - by Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's brilliant brinkmanship - to accept these elections, in which a Shi'ite victory is assured. For many Iraqis, Sunni and Shi'ite, Washington's endgame is not withdrawal, but finding the right proxy government: only the naive may believe that an imperial power would voluntarily abandon the dream scenario of a cluster of military bases planted over virtually unlimited reserves of oil. Washington doesn't even try to disguise it, and in Baghdad, US-appointed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is widely referred to as either "the man from the Americans" or "Saddam without a moustache". In these elections, where security was extremely tight - many candidates dared not appear in public for fear of being shot - Allawi benefited from three exclusive assets: name recognition; protection by 1,000 heavily armed guards; and US-sponsored saturation television exposure (although most Iraqis have no electricity at the moment). His campaign slogan was "A strong leader for a strong country". Allawi is a secular Shi'ite, but as a former Ba'athist, he also appeals to moderate Sunnis. Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad suggest that the newly elected National Assembly and new government will be very similar to Allawi's: a mix of religious and secular parties, all of them led by former exiles. A "Sunni parliamentary quota" is almost inevitable, for two reasons: Sunni voter turnout was low; and Sunnis must be represented in the drafting of the new constitution. It's important to remember that the assembly itself will not write the new constitution; instead, it will supervise the drafting committee. So it's imperative that Sunnis are part of the committee, otherwise the constitution may be shot down in the four Iraqi provinces with a Sunni-majority when it is submitted for a referendum next September.
...If the US stays, the resistance will become even bloodier. In the unlikely possibility of the US leaving soon, this could open the way to civil war and a balkanization of Iraq. If the US leaves following a negotiated timetable, an elected Shi'ite government in Iraq will be more than empowered - a terrifying prospect for its undemocratic Sunni Arab neighbors. As the Sunni resistance will inevitably become bloodier, balkanization is arguably the preferred Washington strategy - as is widely feared in the Sunni triangle. Sunnis mention the Central Intelligence Agency for promoting suspicious bombings; Shi'ite militias used in the leveling of Fallujah; peshmerga (paramilitaries) used to fight Arabs in Mosul; and the possibility of the Badr Brigades being called back. In a civil war, the Americans would divide Iraq in three parts - the juicy ones attributed to US corporations, the rotten ones controlled by warlords. Just like in a previous "movie", liberated Afghanistan.
Now, U.S. Must Get Out of Iraq's Way
After the excellent election news, it's time for Bush to plan a pullout
by Robert Scheer
LA Times, 1 February 2005
The election in Iraq, though flawed, is terrific news. Any time a people get to use the ballot box instead of guns to make history, they, and the rest of the world, benefit immensely. That more than 60% of those eligible are estimated to have voted despite the dreadful conditions in war-torn Iraq is a testament to the enormous courage humans so often display under extreme duress. It appears, too, that the election will be something of a rebuke to those who preach a toxic blend of fundamentalism and nihilist violence, as was the case in last month's Palestinian election. But the test now, in both occupied regions, is whether the will of the voters will be allowed to be more than a symbolic gesture.
Tests Said to Tie Deal on Uranium to North Korea
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
NYT, 2 February 2005
Scientific tests have led American intelligence agencies and government scientists to conclude with near certainty that North Korea sold processed uranium to Libya, bolstering earlier indications that the reclusive state exported sensitive fuel for atomic weapons, according to officials with access to the intelligence. The determination, which has circulated among senior government officials in recent weeks, has touched off a hunt to determine if North Korea has also sold uranium to other countries, including Iran and Syria. So far, there is no evidence that such additional transactions took place. Nonetheless, the conclusion about Libya, which is contained in a classified briefing that has been described to The New York Times, could alter Washington's debate about the assessment of the North Korean nuclear threat. In the past, some administration officials have argued that there is time to find a diplomatic solution because there was no evidence that the government of Kim Jung Il was spreading its atomic technology abroad. Nine months ago, international inspectors came up with the first evidence that the North may have provided Libya with nearly two tons of uranium hexaflouride, the material that can be fed into nuclear centrifuges and enriched into bomb fuel. Libya surrendered its huge cask of the highly toxic material to the United States when it dismantled its nuclear program last year. Now, intelligence officials say, extensive testing conducted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee over the last several months has concluded that the material did not originate in Pakistan or other suspect countries, and one official said that "with a certainty of 90 percent or better, this stuff's from North Korea." It is unclear if there are any dissenting views in the government, though some outside experts have accused the administration of overstating intelligence on North Korea. Officials cautioned that the analysis of the uranium had been hampered by the fact that the United States has no sample of known North Korean uranium for comparison with the Libya material. The study was done by eliminating other possible sources of uranium, a result that is less certain than the nuclear equivalent of matching DNA samples. One recently retired Pentagon official who has long experience dealing with North Korea said the new finding was "huge, because it changes the whole equation with the North." "It suggests we don't have time to sit around and wait for the outcome of negotiations," he said. "It's a scary conclusion because you don't know who else they may have sold to."
A Victory for the Shia
By PATRICK COCKBURN
CounterPunch, 31 January 2005
Not since the war which overthrew Saddam Hussein had there been such a gap between the reality of politics in Iraq and the picture presented by the US and British governments. The poll yesterday was portrayed as if Washington and London had finally been able to reach their goal of delivering democracy to Iraqis. In fact the US postponed elections to a distant future after the invasion of 2003. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein had been so swift that the American administration thought it could rule Iraq directly with little Iraqi involvement. But in the autumn of 2003 the US made two unpleasant discoveries: The guerrilla attacks in Sunni districts of Iraq were increasing by the day. They were supposedly confined to "the Sunni triangle", a description with a comfortingly limited ring to it, but in reality an area larger than Britain. ...The reason there was a poll yesterday was that the US, facing an increasingly intensive war against the five million Sunni, dared not provoke revolt by the 15 to 16 million Shia. The price the US paid was to have an election in which the Shia would show that they are a majority of Iraqis. But will the election yesterday involve a real transfer of power to the Shia? Last June, Iraqi sovereignty was supposedly transferred to the US-appointed interim government of Iyad Allawi. The change was largely a mirage.
The Iraq Election: First Impressions
by Juan Cole
History News Network via Common Dreams, 31 January 2005
I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan. ...Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did. So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections. With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed "election." Iraq is an armed camp.
SEE ALSO:
The Shiite Earthquake
With non-Sunni Muslims poised to take power for the first time, a new Iraq is being born. Will it survive its infancy?
By Juan Cole
Salon, 1 February 2005
An Election to Anoint an Occupation
Had it Been Held in Zimbabwe, the West Would Have Denounced it
by Salim Lone
The Guardian, 31 January 2005
Tony Blair and George Bush were quick to characterise yesterday's election as a triumph of democracy over terror. Bush declared it a "resounding success", while Blair asserted that "The force of freedom was felt throughout Iraq". And yet the election fell so completely short of accepted electoral standards that had it been held in, say, Zimbabwe or Syria, Britain and America would have been the first to denounce it.
Resolution Urging Withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Iraq Introduced in House of Representatives
Institute for Public Accuracy, 26 January 2005
Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) plans to introduce a congressional resolution today in the U.S. House of Representatives calling on President Bush to begin the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Woolsey, who is in her seventh term in the House, told the Institute for Public Accuracy: "Removing some 130,000 soldiers from Iraq immediately is not logistically feasible, but we must take the first steps. We should not abandon Iraq; there is still a critical role for the United States in providing the development aid that can help create a civil society, support education and rebuild Iraq's economic infrastructure. But the military option is clearly not working. It is truly time to support the troops, by bringing them home as soon as realistically possible."
Occupation Thwarts Democracy
by John Nichols
The Nation, 29 January 2005
Under pressure from the Bush Administration, political parties campaigning in this weekend's so-called "election" in Iraq did not proposed timetables for the withdrawal of US troops from their homeland. This constraint upon the debate effectively denied the Iraqi people an honest choice. Polls suggest that the majority of Iraqis favor the quick withdrawal of US forces, yet the voters of that battered land were cheated out of a campaign that could have allowed them to send a clear signal of opposition to the occupation. Despite this disconnect, when the voting was done, Administration aides declared a victory in President's Bush's crusade for "liberty." And thus was born the latest lie of an Administration that has built its arguments for the invasion and occupation of Iraq on a foundation of petty deception and gross deceit. That democracy has been denied in Iraq is beyond question. The charade of an election, played out against a backdrop of violence so unchecked that a substantial portion of the electorate-- particularly Sunni Muslims--avoided the polls for reasons of personal safety, featuring candidates who dared not speak their names and characterized by a debate so stilted that the electorate did not know who or what it is electing. Now that this farce of an "election" in Iraq is done, the fight for democracy should move from Baghdad to Washington. It is in the US Capitol that members of Congress, if they are serious about spreading democracy abroad and strengthening it at home, need to begin advocating for the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
A Brief Guide to the Iraqi Elections
Jo Wilding
Electronic Iraq, 29 January 2005
1. Iraqis are voting not for a party or an individual but for a list.
2. Iraqi people have no opportunity to elect their president or prime minister.
3. None of the elected members of the National Assembly will represent a locality.
4. Large areas of the country are not expected to be able to vote.
5. The rules for polling and who can or can't be a candidate were set, essentially, by the US.
6. Expat voters are expected to decide the result.
7. Certain parties and individuals have also been funded by the US.
8. Whoever wins, the occupation will go on.
9. The new government is already bound.
10. Iraq has no free press.
11. The Iraqi people fought for this election.
Elections Are Not Democracy
The United States has essentially stopped trying to build a democratic order in Iraq, and is simply trying to gain stability and legitimacy
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek, 7 February issue
No matter what the violence, the elections are an important step forward, for Iraq and for the Middle East. But it is also true, alas, that no matter how the voting turns out, the prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq are increasingly grim. Unless there is a major change in course, Iraq is on track to become another corrupt, oil-rich quasi-democracy, like Russia and Nigeria.
SEE ALSO:
Confusion Surrounds Iraq Poll Turnout
Aljazeera.net, 30 January 2005
Confusion surrounds turnout statistics in Iraq's election, with the country's election commission backtracking on a statement that 72% had voted and top politicians insisting the turnout was high. The commission said its initial tally had been little more than a guess based on local estimates.
SEE ALSO:
A Sealed, Silent City Awaits Voting Day With Hope and Fear
Mood in Baghdad Splits Along Religious Lines
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Washington Post, 30 January 2005
'Up to 15' Troops Killed in Hercules Crash
By Helen McCormack and Kim Sengupta in Basra
Independent (UK), 31 January 2005
As many as 15 military personnel were feared dead in what threatened to be the biggest single loss of British life since the conflict in Iraq began after an RAF transport aircraft crashed north of Baghdad yesterday. Wreckage from the C-130 Hercules scattered over a wide area when it came down without warning en route from Baghdad to the city of Balad, which houses one of the largest US airbases in Iraq.
2 Killed at U.S. Embassy as Iraqis Prepare to Vote
By DEXTER FILKINS
NYT, 29 January 2005
An insurgent-fired rocket hit the United States Embassy today, killing two Americans and wounding five, and heightening fears of further attacks intended to intimidate the millions of Iraqis expected to cast ballots on Sunday. The rocket struck a building connected to the Republican Palace, an annex to the American Embassy, at 8 p.m., officials said. The strike seemed intended to score a propaganda victory for the insurgents, who have vowed to wreck the elections and kill those who take part. Insurgents regularly fire mortar shells and rockets into the Green Zone, the heavily fortified area that holds the embassy, but the shells usually miss. One of the dead was a civilian and the other was a member of the armed forces, embassy officials said.
Condi Rice: Misrule of Law
The new secretary of state, the president's confidante, plays by his code of justice
by Nat Hentoff
Village Voice, 28 January 2005
...the new secretary of state will defer to, of all people, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales—the orchestrator of the administration's torture memos—to make sure that American prisoners are not subject to some of the following techniques that have been reported by troubled FBI agents in Guantánamo, along with concerned counter-intelligence officers: attaching electrodes to private parts; chaining hands and feet in a fetal position for long periods of time without food and water; inserting lighted cigarettes into ears; and prolonged, severe beatings, among other persuasions. Whether Rice defines these as torture or not, they have been used on prisoners under direct American custody. Moreover, no one knows what fiercely insistent techniques are perpetrated in the CIA's own secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and ships at sea.

What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day
by Joan Chittister
National Catholic Reporter via Common Dreams, 28 January 2005
Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." But that was not their lead story. The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat. A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood. No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here. I found myself closing my eyes over and over again as I stared at the story, maybe to crush the tears forming there, maybe in the hope that the whole scene would simply disappear. But no, like the photo of a naked little girl bathed in napalm and running down a road in Vietnam served to crystallize the situation there for the rest of the world, I knew that this picture of a screaming, angry, helpless, orphaned child could do the same.
Excerpt from Bush's Inaugural Address:
We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
U.S. Plans to Ease Offensive and Transfer Some Troops to Train Iraqi Units
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 2 February 2005
Pentagon officials and military commanders in Iraq, buoyed by the success at holding insurgents at bay on Sunday, now plan to take a calculated risk and pull American troops from the combat mission that helped bolster voter turnout to deploy them instead as advisers and trainers for Iraqi military units. Commanders say they plan to offset any loss of combat power by putting forward the Iraqi units they are training. "It will be a process of 'train-fight-train,' " one officer said. While military commanders noted the risk of taking American troops from the offensive mission and assigning them the training job, officials also warned of a related risk to Iraqi forces, in what one official called "the rush to failure." A senior Bush administration official said American commanders would press new Iraqi units to assume more security duties, but not before they were ready. "You have to get them in the fight," the official said. "We won't put them in harm's way unnecessarily. But we're willing to assume the risk that we'll have setbacks." Some American lawmakers also express concern that trainers will face new threats. "They'll be more vulnerable to attack by insurgents," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat and former 82nd Airborne Division officer who visited Iraq recently. Meanwhile, a debate is under way over how to handle long-term training for Iraq's nonmilitary forces, including police officers and border patrol guards. Senior Army officers are working out details of how to fill and organize the adviser positions. Classified assessments prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld project no significant decrease in the American troop presence through early 2006, Pentagon officials and military officers said. The assessments were based on the military's latest analysis of insurgent strength and the time required to field Iraqi security forces.

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COMMENTARY

Inherit the Windbags
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 3 February 2005

Do male nipples prove evolution?
Not at all, according to a Web site for a planned Creation Museum devoted to showing that the Bible is literally true.
Nipples may be biologically de trop for men, an "expert" on the site notes, but that doesn't mean they resulted from natural selection. They could just as well be a decorating feature of the Creator's (like a hood ornament). Who are we to question His designs, since we cannot presume to comprehend His mind?
The virtual tour of the museum, to be built in rural Kentucky, says its exhibits will explain many such mysteries, like the claim that T. rex lurked around Adam and Eve - "That's the terror that Adam's sin unleashed!" - and how "Noah and his family survive 371 days alone on an animal-filled boat" ("a real 'Survivor' story").
The philosophy of the Creation Museum, part of the "Answers in Genesis" ministry, is summed up this way: "The imprint of the Creator is all around us. And the Bible's clear - heaven and earth in six 24-hour days, earth before sun, birds before lizards. Other surprises are just around the corner. Adam and apes share the same birthday. The first man walked with dinosaurs and named them all! God's Word is true, or evolution is true. No millions of years. There's no room for compromise."

Personally, I've decided to stop evolving. No point, really. Evolution is so 20th century.

As with Iraq, President Bush has applied his doctrine of pre-emption on evolution, cutting it off before it can pose a threat to our well-being.
Ever since he observed during his 2000 campaign that "on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth," Mr. Bush has been reeling backward as fast as he can toward the Garden of Eden, which, if creationists are to be believed, was really "Jurassic Park."
Seeing the powerful role of evangelicals in getting Mr. Bush re-elected, teachers across the country are quietly ignoring evolution, even when the subject is in their curriculums.
Many teachers take the hint on evolution even without overt pressure, Cornelia Dean wrote this week in Science Times: "Teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests."
On eBay, you can even find replicas of the stickers that a Georgia county put on science textbooks to warn that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." Talk about sticker shock.
So much for the Tree of Knowledge. Mr. Bush gives us the Ficus of Faith.
I knew the president, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich wanted to wipe out the psychedelic "if it feels good do it" post-Vietnam 60's and go back to the black-and-white 50's - a meaner "Happy Days."
They wanted to yank us back in a time machine to a place before Vietnam was lost, free love was found, Roe v. Wade was enacted; they could roll back science to smother stem cells' promise. (Since it was reported last week that all human embryonic lines approved for federally financed research are tainted with a foreign molecule from mice, the administration can't even feign an interest in scientific progress. Who'd a-thunk that science's great hope would turn out to be Arnold Schwarzenegger?)

I misunderestimated this ambitious president. His social engineering schemes in the Middle East and America are breathtakingly brazen.

He doesn't just want to dismantle the 60's. He wants to dismantle the whole century - from the Scopes trial to Social Security. He can shred one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal and then go after other big safety-net Democratic programs, reversing the prevailing philosophy of many decades that our tax and social welfare systems should equalize the distribution of wealth, just a little bit. Barry Goldwater wouldn't have had the brass to take a jackhammer to that edifice.
The White House seems to think Social Security was corrupt from the moment it was enacted in 1935. It wants to replace it with private accounts that will fatten the wallets of stockbrokers and put the savings of Americans who didn't inherit vast fortunes at risk.
Mr. Bush and his crew not only want to scrap the New Deal. By weakening environmental and safety protections and trying to flatten the progressive income tax, they're trying to eradicate not just one Roosevelt but two, going after the progressive legacy of Theodore.
With their brutal assault on history and their sanctimonious manner, they give a whole new meaning to Teddy's philosophy of the presidency. Bully pulpit, indeed.

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Superficiality and Opportunism
Wilsonian and Neoconservative Myths
By GABRIEL KOLKO
CounterPunch, 29 January 2005

Innumerable commentators have made comparisons between President Woodrow Wilson's internationalism and his alleged missionary zeal with the ideas of the neoconservatives now so influential in the Bush Administration. But any analogies are essentially inaccurate and they all ignore the crucial historical context.

Wilson developed his ideas, with the help of Colonel Edward House, wholly as a direct response to Lenin's lofty and spectacularly successful rhetoric for a new internationalism to replace the folly of the nations that had brought on the First World War. Prior to the bolshevik challenge Wilson's notions on the international order and America's goals were largely economic-based on British free trade doctrine--and quite banal.

Both Wilson and Lenin developed their ambitious theories as a form of political propaganda to reach the masses over the heads of traditional rulers and win their allegiance, with conscious emphasis on brevity and simplicity.

Hence Wilson's 14 Points, which was extraordinarily brief-though longer than some of his advisers wanted- calling for self-determination and a radical departure from conventional power politics and the initiation of a new era of self-rule and democracy. Wilson's momentary non-conformity was based on expediency rather than conviction.

There is no Wilsoniam system based on a reasoned approach to the international order, but largely empty rhetoric intended to suit the political needs of the moment to counter the Bolshevik's charismatic appeals throughout Europe to the war-weary masses. Had there not been a Lenin there was scant possibility that Wilson would emerge in the image of an idealist ready to denounce prewar and wartime treaties enshrining imperialist acquisition.

This superficiality, based on sheer opportunism, is the only thing that binds so-called "Wilsonian" goals with the slogans now emanating from Washington. Both are irrelevant illusions. The crucial difference is that the context is entirely different and there is today no powerful and infuential internationalist ideology in existence, either in the United States or elsewhere.

The fact is that the Bush Administration cannot use Wilson's alleged idealism to justify its actions and that it is really wholly devoid of serious, realistic ideas. It has slogans and rhetoric, nothing more.

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White House Language Police

The Sacramento Bee

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