Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Geo-Greening by Example
How will future historians explain it? How will they possibly explain why President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in the face and chose instead to spend all his electoral capital on a futile effort to undo the New Deal, by partially privatizing Social Security? We are, quite simply, witnessing one of the greatest examples of misplaced priorities in the history of the U.S. presidency.
"Ah, Friedman, but you overstate the case." No, I understate it. Look at the opportunities our country is missing - and the risks we are assuming - by having a president and vice president who refuse to lift a finger to put together a "geo-green" strategy that would marry geopolitics, energy policy and environmentalism.
By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars and we are financing the jihadists - and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian mosques and charities that support them - through our gasoline purchases.
It's Not Your Father's America Any More
This country is becoming more unrecognizable with each passing day. The government, we've learned recently, now packages the news. It provides television stations with hundreds of video news releases made up to resemble actual news reports that give us predigested, Orwellian information designed to convince the public that everything in the nation is being well-managed.
Alongside this propaganda circus comes the added revelation that the presidential hops George W. Bush is taking around the country to peddle his case for dismantling Social Security are not conversations with local citizens -- as they are billed -- but carefully arranged events before prescreened audiences who hear presentations from panelists who've been, by the recent admission of one of them, repeatedly rehearsed on what to say.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security issues a doomsday scenario that details the anticipated consequences of a dozen possible terrorist attacks -- complete with body counts and economic damage estimates. The department insists it is not trying to scare the public, although how a report that one would hope would receive the most limited and controlled circulation gets "leaked" to the public is anybody's guess. It just happens, also, to fit well -- and not surprisingly -- with the antics of an administration that has turned promoting and exploiting public fear into an art form that Joseph Goebbels would envy.
The only thing worse than the government these days -- if such is possible -- are those portions of the populace to whom this government owes its allegiance.
Panel Ignored Evidence on Detainee
A military tribunal determined last fall that Murat Kurnaz, a German national seized in Pakistan in 2001, was a member of al Qaeda and an enemy combatant whom the government could detain indefinitely at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The three military officers on the panel, whose identities are kept secret, said in papers filed in federal court that they reached their conclusion based largely on classified evidence that was too sensitive to release to the public.
In fact, that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities.
In recently declassified portions of a January ruling, a federal judge criticized the military panel for ignoring the exculpatory information that dominates Kurnaz's file and for relying instead on a brief, unsupported memo filed shortly before Kurnaz's hearing by an unidentified government official.
Kurnaz has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since at least January 2002.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Agency's Web Site Out of Sync With Bush Plan
As President Bush and his allies travel the country to promote his Social Security plan, they say individual investment accounts are a no-brainer, bound to result in more money at retirement than workers could expect from Social Security.
But someone at the Social Security Administration did not get the word.
In a Q. and A. on the agency's Web site meant to explain the retirement program, there is this exchange, which has apparently been there for years:
"Question: I think I could do better if you let me invest the Social Security I pay into an individual retirement plan (I.R.A.) or some other investment plan. What do you think?"
"Answer: Maybe you could, but then again, maybe your investments wouldn't work out. Remember these facts:
* Your Social Security taxes pay for potential disability and survivors benefits as well as for retirement benefits.
* Social Security incorporates social goals - such as giving more protection to families and to low-income workers - that are not part of private pension plans; and
* Social Security benefits are adjusted yearly for increases in the cost of living - a feature not present in many private plans."
Police 'Showdown' Over Schiavo Averted
Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted - but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Miami Herald has learned.
Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.
For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called "a showdown."
In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.
"We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in," said a source with the local police.
"The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene," said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. "When the sheriff's department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off."
The incident,known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday's events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge's order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge's order whenever an agency appeals it.
Friday, March 25, 2005
The Era of Exploitation
President Bush has proposed more than $200 billion worth of cuts in domestic discretionary programs over the next five years, and cuts of $26 billion in entitlement programs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which analyzed the president's proposal, said:
"Figures in the budget show that child-care assistance would be ended for 300,000 low-income children by 2009. The food stamp cut would terminate food stamp aid for approximately 300,000 low-income people, most of whom are low-income working families with children. Reduced Medicaid funding most certainly would cause many states to cut their Medicaid programs, increasing the ranks of the uninsured."
Education funding would be cut beginning next year, and the cuts would grow larger in succeeding years. Food assistance for pregnant women, infants and children would be cut. Funding for H.I.V. and AIDS treatment would be cut by more than half a billion dollars over five years. Support for environmental protection programs would be sharply curtailed. And so on.
Conservatives insist the cuts are necessary to get the roaring federal budget deficit under control. But they have trouble keeping a straight face when they tell that story. Laden with tax cuts, the president's proposal will result in an increase, not a decrease, in the deficit. Shared sacrifice is anathema to the big-money crowd.
U.S. to Sell F-16 Jets to Pakistan
The United States has agreed to sell about two dozen sophisticated F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, a diplomatically sensitive move that rewards Pakistan for its help in fighting the war on terror, but has angered next-door rival India.
President Bush, who is spending holiday time at his Texas ranch, spoke on the phone Friday with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who told Bush of his ``great disappointment'' over the decision, Sanjaya Baru, the prime minister's spokesman said.
Singh said that sales to Pakistan would endanger security in the region, Baru said. New Delhi is worried that arming Pakistan with the advanced jet fighters would tilt the military balance in South Asia and could adversely affect the ongoing peace dialogue between India and Pakistan.
A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, linked the proposed sales of the planes, manufactured by Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin, directly to Musharraf's cooperation after the terror attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
The sale of F-16s will not change the overall balance of military power in the region and are vital to Pakistan's security as Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff prosecutes the war on terror, said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay
... It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto last weekend, and what's most scary about it is how little was heard from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to "try to undo the processes of a state court." But faced with McCarthyism in God's name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri Schiavo's brain.
...The president is on record as saying that the jury is still out on evolution, so perhaps it's no surprise that The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a three-year-old "religious rights" unit in the Justice Department that investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept evolution as "the central, unifying principle of biology." Cornelia Dean of The New York Times broke the story last weekend that some Imax theaters, even those in science centers, are now refusing to show documentaries like "Galápagos" or "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" because their references to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize some audiences. Soon such films will disappear along with biology textbooks that don't give equal time to creationism.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
DeLay, Deny and Demagogue
As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida state jurisdiction and moved to federal court, put it: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this vote."
A CBS News poll yesterday found that 82 percent of the public was opposed to Congress and the president intervening in this case; 74 percent thought it was all about politics.
The president, who couldn't be dragged outdoors to talk about the more than a hundred thousand people who died in the horrific tsunami, was willing to be dragged out of bed to sign a bill about one woman his base had fixated on. But with the new polls, the White House seemed to shrink back a bit.
The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly macabre as the movie "Weekend at Bernie's," with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own political agendas. Mr. DeLay, the poster child for ethical abuse, wanted to show that he is still a favorite of conservatives. Dr. Frist thinks he can ace out Jeb Bush to be 44, even though he has become a laughingstock by trying to rediagnose Ms. Schiavo's condition by video.
... Mr. DeLay moved yesterday to file a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court asking that Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube be restored while the federal court is deciding what to do. But as he exploits this one sad case, Mr. DeLay has voted to slash Medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to care for poor people in nursing homes, some on feeding tubes.
Mr. DeLay made his personal stake clear at a conference last Friday organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. He said that God had brought Terri Schiavo's struggle to the forefront "to help elevate the visibility of what's going on in America." He defined that as "attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others."
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Iraq action 'crime of aggression'
The Iraq war amounted to a "crime of aggression", the former deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office has said.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Patchwork of progress and perils in Iraq
"There are some positive developments," says Rachel Bronson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. But "in the context of the security situation it's hard to say it's going well."
By now, military planners had envisioned a US presence that was a fraction of the 150,000 troops currently in Iraq. Oil revenues and foreign business investment were expected to provide jobs and buoy the economy.
The US Agency for International Development says it has spent some $4.8 billion so far on reconstruction projects across Iraq. But restoring basic services and creating new jobs is proving problematic.
"Everything shuts down without law and order," Ms. Bronson says. "It doesn't matter if you have jobs if you can't get to those jobs."
Indeed, few US efforts are reaching into the country's most troubled areas. While restive Diyala has received aid to start its beekeeping and calf cooperatives, along with sewage improvements and assistance to local government, most projects are in relatively stable areas to the north and in some areas of the south, according to the latest US AID update.
U.S. Misled Allies About Nuclear Export
In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea (news - web sites), the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.
But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.
Pakistan's role as both the buyer and the seller was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington's partner in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders, according to the officials, who discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity. In addition, a North Korea-Pakistan transfer would not have been news to the U.S. allies, which have known of such transfers for years and viewed them as a business matter between sovereign states.
The Bush administration's approach, intended to isolate North Korea, instead left allies increasingly doubtful as they began to learn that the briefings omitted essential details about the transaction, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said in interviews. North Korea responded to public reports last month about the briefings by withdrawing from talks with its neighbors and the United States.
In an effort to repair the damage, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is traveling through East Asia this weekend trying to get the six-nation talks back on track. The impasse was expected to dominate talks today in Seoul and then Beijing, which wields the greatest influence with North Korea.
The new details follow a string of controversies concerning the Bush administration's use of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. In the run-up to the Iraq (news - web sites) invasion in March 2003, the White House offered a public case against Iraq that concealed dissent on nearly every element of intelligence and included interpretations unsupported by the evidence.
... The White House declined to offer an official to comment by name about the new details concerning Pakistan. A prepared response attributed to a senior administration official said that the U.S. government "has provided allies with an accurate account of North Korea's nuclear proliferation activities."
Although the briefings did not mention Pakistan by name, the official said they made it clear that the sale went through the illicit network operated by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, Abdel Qadeer Khan. But the briefings gave no indication that U.S. intelligence believes that the material had been bought by Pakistan and transferred there from North Korea in a container owned by the Pakistani government.
They also gave no indication that the uranium was then shipped via a Pakistani company to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and on to Libya. Those findings match assessments by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is investigating Libya separately. Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program in December 2003.
Since Pakistan became a key U.S. ally in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders, the administration has not held President Pervez Musharraf accountable for actions taken by Khan while he was a member of Musharraf's cabinet and in charge of nuclear cooperation for the government.
"The administration is giving Pakistan a free ride when they don't deserve it and hurting U.S. interests at the same time," said Charles L. Pritchard, who was the Bush administration's special envoy for the North Korea talks until August 2003.
"As our allies get the full picture, it doesn't help our credibility with them," he said.
Enron: Patron Saint of Bush's Fake News
look at the ongoing 60-stop "presidential roadshow" in which Mr. Bush has "conversations on Social Security" with "ordinary citizens" for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president's "town meeting" campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, "We ran through it five times before the president got there." Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration's pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, "American Idol"-style.
Like Enron's stockholders, American taxpayers pay for the production of such propaganda, even if its message, like that of the Enron show put on for visiting analysts, misrepresents and distorts the bottom line of the scheme that is being sold. We paid for last year's phony television news reports in which the faux reporter Karen Ryan "interviewed" administration officials who gave partially deceptive information hyping the Medicare prescription-drug program. We paid Armstrong Williams his $240,000 for delivering faux-journalistic analysis of the No Child Left Behind act.
The administration cycled the Ryan and Williams paychecks through the PR giant Ketchum Communications. Ketchum was also one of the companies hired to flack for Andersen, the now-defunct Enron accounting firm that shredded a ton of documents. We don't know what, if any, role Ketchum is playing in the White House's Social Security propaganda push, though we do know the company has received at least $97 million from the government, according to a Congressional report.
That $97 million may yet prove a mere down payment. The Times reported last weekend that the administration told executive-branch agencies simply to ignore a stern directive by the Congressional Government Accountability Office discouraging the use of "covert propaganda" like the Karen Ryan "news reports." In other words, the brakes are off, and before long, the government could have a larger budget for fake news than actual television news divisions have for real news. At last weekend's Gridiron dinner, Mr. Bush made a joke about how "most" of his good press on Social Security came from Armstrong Williams, and the Washington press corps yukked it up. The joke, however, is on them - and us.
Two Years After the War Began, A Growing Number of US Troops are Refusing to Return to Iraq
At the same time that Kevin Benderman's unit was called up for a second tour in Iraq with the Third Infantry Division, two soldiers tried to kill themselves and another had a relative shoot him in the leg. Seventeen went AWOL or ran off to Canada, and Sergeant Benderman, whose family has sent a son to every war since the American revolution, defied his genes and nine years of military training and followed his conscience.
As the division packed its gear to leave Fort Stewart, Sgt. Benderman applied for a discharge as a conscientious objector - an act seen as a betrayal by many in a military unit considered the heart of the US army, the "Walking Pride of Uncle Sam".
Two years ago today, the columns of the Third ID roared up from the Kuwaiti desert for the push towards Baghdad. When the city fell, the Marines controlled the neighborhoods on the east side of the Tigris and the Third ID had the west. It was, according to the army command, an occasion for pride.
Some of the men and women who were there remain unconvinced. Like Sgt. Benderman, who served six months in Iraq at the start of the war, they were scarred by their experience, and angry at being called again to combat so soon.
Afghanistan: 'One Huge US Jail'
Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it's a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it's owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won't scare away his new friends.
Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.
Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centers where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.
Tom DeLay
In a page one story a few years ago, The Washington Post described how K Street corporate influence-peddlers would shudder at the prospect of visiting his office because he would demand campaign contributions, while discussing their agendas, in too direct a manner. Companies like a little subtlety and indirection attached to their buying our national legislators. DeLay came across as an abrupt shakedown-artist, a cash-register political extortionist.
The Post's expose didn't make DeLay skip a beat. Soon thereafter, he was demanding from Washington's numerous trade associations that if they did not dump their managers, who were Democrats, and replace them with Republicans, they would not be very welcome when it came to give them a hearing. He got his way quite often on this unprecedented interference.
Like other arrogant politicians, before him, who became inebriated with their own power and capacity to corral large amounts of campaign riches and hand it out to expand their sway, DeLay outpaced them with his brazenness. He began to enrich his former staffers who would set up lobbying firms in Washington representing corporations that wanted DeLay to help give their lucrative clients more privileges and immunities, more government contracts and appointments at high levels in the Executive Branch.
DeLay became the House dictator, shutting down dissent, twisting or changing House rules to seal off the Democrats in House committees and conference committees with the Senate on crucial legislation. He finally dumped his own Republican Ethics Chair, Cong. Joel Hefley, after the evenly divided House Ethics Committee reprimanded DeLay on three occasions.
While stacking the Ethics Committee, he pushed through the House Republican Conference, a rule that the Party's congressional leaders could keep their leadership positions even if they were under indictment for a crime. The ensuing political uproar against DeLay led to a reversal of the rule, but he kept one intact that requires a vote by one Republican on the House Ethics Committee to initiate an investigation of an ethics violation charge.
Although DeLay has been caught taking junkets and campaign money in Washington that violate House rules or the campaign laws themselves, "The Hammer" is most worried about a Travis County District Attorney by the name of Ronnie Earle. Earle, a Democrat, who prosecutes Democrats, turned his attention to the DeLay crowd during the notorious Delay-led drive to take control of the state legislature and thereby redraw Congressional Districts to defeat six incumbent Democrats. DeLay believes that redistricting lets politicians pick the voters rather than reverse the process.
Big money was collected from corporations through a maze of routes that found their way into the 2002 state elections in Texas. Such corporate money cannot be spent in political campaigns in that state. Earle has already indicted eight corporations and three politicos described by the press as part of "DeLay's network in Washington, D.C."
More indictments are expected later this spring and DeLay fears he may be one of the indictees. His allies in the state legislature are trying to cut the D.A.'s budget or even enact legislation to take the case away from him. That would really generate a huge backlash.
Meanwhile, DeLay has asked fellow Republicans and admiring corporations, like R.J. Reynolds and Reliant Energy, to expand his legal defense fund. However, he has had to return some of the money that came from registered lobbyists because such contributions violate House ethics regulations.
As more incriminating evidence pours out from Washington to Texas, Cris Feldman, one of the plaintiff's attorneys in a civil case, told National Public Radio reporter Wade Goodwyn, "Tom DeLay was up to his eyeballs in it. It was Tom DeLay's people, all the way down to his daughter, helping to run Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (TRMPAC)."
Policy OKs First Strike to Protect US
Two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon has formally included in key strategic plans provisions for launching preemptive strikes against nations thought to pose a threat to the United States.
Respected global organizations seem to be viewed with suspicion. In describing the vulnerabilities of the United States, the document uses strong language to list international bodies - such as the International Court of Justice, created under a treaty that the United States has declined to sign - alongside terrorists.
The doctrine also now stipulates that the U.S. will use "active deterrence" in concert with its allies "if we can" but could act unilaterally otherwise, Defense officials said.
The changes codify the more assertive defense policy adopted by the Bush administration since the Sept. 11 attacks and are included in a "National Military Strategy" and "National Defense Strategy," reports that are part of a comprehensive review of military strategy conducted every four years.
"The president has the obligation to protect the country," said Douglas J. Feith, the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy. "And I don't think that there's anything in our Constitution that says that the president should not protect the country unless he gets some non-American's participation or approval of that."
Idiot
Pentagon managers use the strategic plan to guide such decisions as where to place bases, which bases to eliminate, what weapons to buy and where to position them. The heads of the United States' regional commands across the globe, in turn, use the strategy to prioritize spending and form strategies for eliminating threats in their regions.
"The potentially catastrophic impact of an attack against the United States, its allies and its interests may necessitate actions in self-defense to preempt adversaries before they can attack," the National Military Strategy states. A previous version, compiled in 1997, did not include plans for preemptive attacks.
Husband hits at bid to save coma wife
the lawyer for Michael Schiavo, who insists that his wife never wanted to be kept alive artificially, has accused the Washington politicians of 'acting like the Soviet Politburo'.
'I feel like the government has just trampled all over my personal life,' Schiavo said hours after nutrition to his 41-year-old wife was withdrawn for the third time since he began his fight with her family a decade ago.
'It is incomprehensible that a government can walk all over somebody's private judicial matter because of their own personal feelings. It is just horrible the way the government is acting. This is what Terri wanted. It is her wish.'
... The US Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to become involved in the case, but President George Bush and his brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida, have both spoken strongly in favour of saving Mrs Schiavo's life.
... 'Right now, murder is being committed against a defenceless American citizen,' DeLay said. 'Mrs Schiavo's life is being violently wrenched from her body in an act of medical terrorism. What is happening to her is not compassion, it is homicide.'
Other politicians, though, say that the intervention of Republicans was 'a flagrant abuse of power' and that subpoenas ordering Mr and Schiavo to an inquiry this week were unenforcable.
'Congress is turning the Schiavo family's personal tragedy into national political farce. The process was a perversion of democracy,' said Henry Waxman, a Democrat on the committee that issued the subpoenas.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions--Suspects Possibly Taken To Nations That Torture
MILAN -- A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn't been seen since.
Milan investigators, however, now appear to be close to identifying his kidnappers. Last month, officials showed up at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy and demanded records of any American planes that had flown into or out of the joint U.S.-Italian military installation around the time of the abduction. They also asked for logs of vehicles that had entered the base.
Italian authorities suspect the Egyptian was the target of a CIA-sponsored operation known as rendition, in which terrorism suspects are forcibly taken for interrogation to countries where torture is practiced.
The Italian probe is one of three official investigations that have surfaced in the past year into renditions believed to have taken place in Western Europe.
... The Bush administration has received backing for renditions from governments that have been criticized for their human rights records, including Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan, where many of the suspects are taken for interrogation. But the administration is getting a much different reception in Europe, where lawmakers and prosecutors are questioning whether the practice is a blatant violation of local sovereignty and human rights.
European Probes
Three official investigations have been initiated into renditions believed to have taken place in Western Europe.
ITALY - February 2003
A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was kidnapped in Milan, officials say. Italian investigators are pursuing the theory that covert agents -- possibly from the United States, Italy or Egypt -- were behind the abduction.
GERMANY - December 2003
A 41-year-old resident of Ulm, Germany, Khaled Masri, was detained during a vacation at the Macedonian border. He claims that he was flown to Kabul in January 2004, where he was held as a suspected terrorist, and that his captors spoke English with an American accent.
SWEDEN - December 2001
A parliamentary investigation has found that CIA agents wearing hoods orchestrated the seizure of two Egyptian nationals who were flown on a U.S.-registered airplane to Cairo. The men claim they were tortured in prison there.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
News or Public Relations? Under Bush, Lines Are Blurry
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public-relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Abuse in Secret
In clandestine prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and in detention facilities maintained by authoritarian allies such as Egypt, the CIA is holding dozens of detainees without any legal process, outside review, family notification or monitoring by the Red Cross and other human rights groups. In effect, these prisoners have "disappeared," like the domestic opponents of dictatorships that the State Department annually critiques in its human rights report. Many may have been tortured. As Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales confirmed in January, the administration has authorized CIA interrogators to subject these detainees to "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment banned by an international treaty that has been ratified by the United States.
Though the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison have received the most attention, what is known of the CIA's secret prisons indicates that abuses there have been far more serious. The agency's inspector general is reviewing at least half a dozen cases of criminal abuse -- the number is not publicly known -- including at least four deaths. On Thursday The Post's Dana Priest reported the previously unpublicized case of an Afghan detainee held in a secret facility known as the Salt Pit. The detainee died in 2002 after a CIA officer allegedly ordered Afghan guards to strip him naked, chain him to a concrete floor and leave him overnight without protection from severe cold. The prisoner was buried in an unmarked grave, without notice to his family; the CIA officer was promoted. Not a single regular CIA employee has been charged in an abuse case, nor has the agency offered Congress or the public any accounting of its behavior.
Despite this shocking record, Congress has abdicated its responsibility to oversee the agency and prevent it from violating fundamental American standards of decency. The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), have been resisting Democratic requests for an investigation of the CIA's handling of its secret detainees.
Attacking Iran: I Know It Sounds Crazy, But...
When a Special Forces platoon leader just back from Iraq matter-of-factly tells a close friend of mine, as happened last week, that he and his unit are now training their sights (literally) on Iran, we need to take that seriously. It provides us with a glimpse of reality as seen at ground level. For me, it brought to mind an unsolicited email I received from the father of a young soldier training at Fort Benning in the spring of 2002, soon after I wrote an op-ed discussing the timing of George W. Bush's decision to make war on Iraq. The father informed me that, during the spring of 2002, his son kept writing home saying his unit was training to go into Iraq. No, said the father; you mean Afghanistan... that's where the war is, not Iraq. In his next email, the son said, "No, Dad, they keep saying Iraq. I asked them and that's what they mean."
Now, apparently, they keep saying Iran; and that appears to be what they mean.
War on Terror May Breed More Terrorism, Experts Tell Madrid Summit
... the US military's detention of Islamic militants captured in Afghanistan as "prisoners of war" at Guantanamo Bay had exacerbated the threat of extremism.
"We have the Guantanamo effect. That is dealing with terror in such a way that it has an incubator effect. One has to examine the penal system's role in creating more terrorism," Juergensmeyer said.
Arguing that government should behave in a "counter intuitive way", he said military strikes in the aftermath of a terrorist attack were meant to appease voters. But they often played into the hands of extremists by helping them recruit more followers, he said.
Jerrold Post, a professor of psychiatry and international affairs at George Washington University, said "many terrorist acts are designed to provoke a societal backlash.
"Most strong counter terror attacks are for ensuring domestic voters that something is being done," he added. "But there is usually an increase in terrorism afterwards."
Louise Richardson, the dean of the Radcliff Institute at Harvard, said she opposed the US-led war "on Iraq precisely because I feared that it would have this effect.
"The US government has done a lot of things in response to terrorism that it may regret," she said.
"The over-arching message we want to share is that we need to ensure in our counter-terrorism strategy that our short-term efforts do not undermine our long-term objective."
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Bush's Spending Priorities Not in Line with Americans' - Poll
Given the chance to look at and make changes to the major areas of Bush's proposed discretionary budget for fiscal year 2006, which begins on Oct. 1, 2005, around two-thirds redirected money to reduce the budget deficit, said the poll released Monday by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
''The American public as a whole takes a fairly coherent position. They favor redirecting a portion of defense spending to deficit reduction and social spending and look for savings by cutting spending on large-scale Cold War style capabilities,'' said PIPA director Steven Kull.
Republican and Democratic poll participants alike would take the budget axe to spending on defense and on Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites), plowing more funds into education, job training, veterans, and reducing U.S. reliance on oil, the poll found.
The changes they would make would amount to a major redirecting of U.S. foreign and defense policy and reverse key social spending cuts proposed in the Bush administration's budget.
Of nearly 1,200 U.S. adults surveyed, 61 percent reallocated money to reducing the budget deficit. On average, they earmarked an additional $36 billion to cut the overhang. Democrats averaged $39.4 billion and Republicans $29.6 billion.
Defense spending received the deepest cut--an average of 31 percent or the equivalent of around $134 billion--with 65 percent of survey participants doing the cutting. The second largest area to be cut was the supplemental spending for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with two out of three respondents opting to cut the funding, by an average of $29.6 billion or 35 percent.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Heavily Armed Duo in No Position to Lay Down Law On Proliferation
Bush's strident insistence on Iran's treaty obligation glaringly omits the other side of the bargain made in the treaty, that the nuclear weapons states must progressively eliminate their armaments. Bush repeatedly and blatantly misrepresents the treaty, which is a two-way - not one-way - street. It provides that states which do not have nuclear weapons must never acquire them and that those which do have them must progressively get rid of them.
The treaty is reviewed every five years. At the last review conference, in 2000, the five acknowledged nuclear weapons states responded to the grave concern that they were not fulfilling their part of the bargain. They made a new promise that they would increase the tempo of their action to eliminate their nuclear weapons.
The Bush Administration has not only refused to adhere to its obligations under the treaty and the additional promise of 2000, but has now embarked on what is anathema under the treaty - the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons. These are the new, more compact, nukes the Administration says it needs for the so-called war on terrorism.
Bush Nominates Weapons Expert as Envoy to U.N.
The nomination brought strong praise from many Republicans and conservatives. "He's been our man at the State Department," said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, adding that he used to joke that Mr. Bolton was in charge of the department's "American desk."
Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, called Mr. Bolton an "outstanding candidate" for the United Nations job. Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, expressed caution, however.
"We need alliances, we need friends," he said of the United Nations, adding that while reforming the organization was important, "To go up there and kick the U.N. around doesn't get the job done."
Even within the Bush administration, some said they were surprised that Mr. Bolton, who only last fall angered a room full of diplomats when he spoke disdainfully of the European effort to negotiate with Iran, was picked for such a sensitive job.
While the diplomats and administration insiders who raised questions did so anonymously because of the sensitivity of the nomination, in the Senate, where he will have to be confirmed, Democrats publicly criticized the appointment. Some Republicans predicted that he might have difficulty winning confirmation.
"This is a disappointing choice and one that sends all the wrong signals," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.
Mr. Bolton, a former protégé of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, once said that "if the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference" and that "there's no such thing as the United Nations."
An aide to one ambassador at the United Nations Security Council said his boss considered the nomination "a disaster," but he added: "The real question is what is Bolton's mission. Does he come here to attack the institution, or does he really come here to help the U.N.?"
Terror Suspects Buying Firearms, U.S. Report Finds
At least 44 times from February 2004 to June, people whom the F.B.I. regards as known or suspected members of terrorist groups sought permission to buy or carry a gun, the investigation found.
In all but nine cases, the F.B.I. or state authorities who handled the requests allowed the applications to proceed because a check of the would-be buyer found no automatic disqualification like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or someone deemed "mentally defective," the report found.
In the four months after the formal study ended, the authorities received an additional 14 gun applications from terror suspects, and all but 2 of those were cleared to proceed, the investigation found. In all, officials approved 47 of 58 gun applications from terror suspects over a nine-month period last year, it found.
The gun buyers came up as positive matches on a classified internal F.B.I. watch list that includes thousands of terrorist suspects, many of whom are being monitored, trailed or sought for questioning as part of terrorism investigations into Islamic-based, militia-style and other groups, official said. G.A.O. investigators were not given access to the identities of the gun buyers because of those investigations.
Italian hostage accuses US of trying to kill her as thousands mourn her rescuer
The US military said the car approached the checkpoint on Friday night at speed and soldiers used hand and arm signals, flashing white lights and warning shots to try to get it to stop.
However, according to the daily Corriere della Sera, the Italian intelligence officer who drove the car and who survived the attack insisted they were travelling at just 40 to 50 kilometres an hour (25 to 30 mph).
He was quoted as saying: "All of a sudden, a searchlight went on. Immediately afterwards, the shots began. The fire lasted for at least 10 seconds."
The team that fetched Sgrena had been in direct contact by telephone with the prime minister's office in Rome, where Mr Berlusconi, senior intelligence officers and the editor of Sgrena's newspaper were all celebrating her release with champagne. Corriere della Sera said that, after screaming at the Americans to stop, the intelligence officer called up again. "The Americans have shot at us," he shouted. "Nicola is dead. I have a machine gun pointing at me."
Justice Unit Puts Its Focus on Faith
The Salvation Army was accused in a lawsuit of imposing a new religious litmus test on employees hired with millions of dollars in public funds.
When employees complained that they were being required to embrace Jesus Christ to keep their jobs, the Justice Department's civil rights division took the side of the Salvation Army.
Defending the right of an employer using public funds to discriminate is one of the more provocative steps taken by a little-known arm of the civil rights division and its special counsel for religious discrimination.
The Justice Department's religious-rights unit, established three years ago, has launched a quiet but ambitious effort aimed at rectifying what the Bush administration views as years of illegal discrimination against religious groups and their followers.
Many court decisions have affirmed the rights of individuals in the public sector not to have religious beliefs imposed on them — the Supreme Court ruling banning school-sponsored prayer in public schools among them. And courts have ruled that the rights of religious groups sometimes need protection too — upholding, for example, their right to have access to public buildings for meetings.
But the argument that a religious institution spending public funds has the right to require employees to embrace its beliefs — and that it will be backed by the Justice Department in doing so — has changed the debate. It is an argument the Bush administration is making in Congress as well as in the courts.
Central to the competing points of view are the protections afforded by the 1st Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The webpage of the Justice Department unit reads: "Religious liberty was central to the Founders' vision for America, and is the 'first freedom' listed in the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights. A critical component of religious liberty is the right of people of all faiths to participate fully in the benefits and privileges of society without facing discrimination based on their religion."
Saturday, March 05, 2005
US Attack Against Italians in Baghdad was Deliberate: Companion
The companion of freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena on Saturday leveled serious accusations at US troops who fired at her convoy as it was nearing Baghdad airport, saying the shooting had been deliberate.
"The Americans and Italians knew about (her) car coming," Pier Scolari said on leaving Rome's Celio military hospital where Sgrena is to undergo surgery following her return home.
"They were 700 meters (yards) from the airport, which means that they had passed all checkpoints."
The shooting late Friday was witnessed by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office which was on the phone with one of the secret service agents, said Scolari. "Then the US military silenced the cellphones," he charged.
"Giuliana had information, and the US military did not want her to survive," he added.
