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The Great Crime Spree of 2004 ...

12.31.04 (5:26 am) [edit]

[b]Rape, torture, murder, war crimes, and treason – your government at work [/b]

If 2003 was the year of the liars, as I opined last year, then 2004 was the year of the war criminals, starting with Time magazine's designated Man of the Year, criminal-in-chief George W. Bush. It was Bush who presided over the torture and abuse not only at Abu Ghraib but in U.S.-run dungeons from Guantanamo to Afghanistan – and spare me the cries of protest that he didn't know, and Abu Ghraib was an "isolated incident."

To begin with, he did know. Thanks to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the president's personal responsibility in this disgusting saga has been revealed, along with the existence of FBI internal memos and other material that cite a previously unknown Executive Order authorizing torture at Abu Ghraib and other prison facilities.

Bush, the Janus-faced ruler of an empire of hypocrites, loudly announces a "global democratic revolution" even as he whispers to subordinates that torture is okay: he's a liar and a criminal.

Lynndie England had her day in court: when will Bush have his?

Government, which supposedly exists to protect us from criminals, is itself a criminal organization, bigger, more destructive, and certainly better-funded than the Mafia, the Bloods, and the Crips. The essential criminality of government – not just the American government, but all government – is underscored by the news that agents of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who had knowledge of abuses were threatened by Special Operations personnel if they revealed the illegal activities taking place at Guantanamo.

Every once in a while liberals discover this truth, and are shocked – shocked! – that what they consider the instrument of human good could so easily become the source of so much evil. It's a rude awakening, and much needed: but it may not come in time. I fear it's too late to halt the political and moral degeneration of our old republic into a decadent and cynical imperial power, like pagan Rome, where torture was a common form of public entertainment.

In these days when "moral values" are said to motivate American politics, how is it that we have a president with the morals of the Marquis de Sade?

If Janet Jackson bares her breast, there's a national outcry – and the threat of government action. But if the Pentagon, with the full backing of the president, authorizes an orgy of sadism and, yes, systematic terrorism inflicted on the "liberated" people of Iraq – 10,000 of whom now languish in U.S. torture pens – there is … silence. The only action taken by the U.S. government has been to cover up the burgeoning scandal, with full congressional complicity.

What are we becoming: this, and – ugh! – this?

Follow the first link, and you find the story of two Iraqis stopped by the U.S. for being out after curfew, who were then taken to the Tigris river and forced to jump in – one drowned, the other survived. The irony here is that the victims are related to a prominent Iraqi blogger, lionized by the pro-war "blogosphere" for hailing the Americans as his "liberators" – but when Zeyad blogged the death of his cousin, rightly pointing out that this wasn't exactly the sort of behavior one expects from "liberators," he was quickly dropped and even denounced by the pro-war bloggers.

At the trial, lawyers for the four accused American soldiers argued that there was no proof the drowning ever occurred – this in spite of the offer of the family to exhume the body. All charges have been dropped against two of the accused, but two others face trial in the coming year.

The second link goes to a story about "consensual" sex between Pvt. Federico Daniel Merida and 19-year-old Falah Zaggam that ended in the murder of the latter by the former: Merida gave several versions of how the crime unfolded, first saying that the young Iraqi National Guard tried to rob him, later claiming the Iraqi "forced" him into sexual relations, and eventually taking the "gay panic" defense – admitting that the sex was consensual yet averring that he, Merida, then "snapped" and killed the kid by shooting him 11 times. Merida tried to cover it up by making it appear as if his victim had fired shots.

It looks like a sentence of 25 years in prison for Merida, which seems awfully light, but if I were the Iraqi insurgency, I would broadcast the following video and accompanying headline far and wide: GI sentenced to three years in death of Iraqi teen. After blowing up a truck and finding a badly wounded 16-year-old boy in it – who had nothing to do with the insurgents – Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne Jr. shot the kid to "put him out of his misery." Horne, 30, of Winston-Salem, N.C., "also received a reduction in rank to private, forfeiture of wages and a dishonorable discharge."

Three years – for murder? Is that how much an Iraqi life is worth?

Where are all the "pro-life" conservatives now?

If 2004 was a year of untrammeled American criminality, the worst crimes of our government may have been rhetorical: as the president's speechwriters are crafting soaring phrases hailing the arrival of "democracy" and "freedom" in Iraq, his lawyers are constructing legal arguments justifying the torture of Iraqis and other foreigners – and immunizing the president and his minions from prosecution.

No better pitch could be made by the insurgents than to cite the slap on the wrist meted out to Horne. They need only point to Abu Ghraib, the drowning of Zaydun Fadhil, and the numerous reports of torture and worse that are pouring out of Iraq in a veritable tsunami of moral degradation to underscore the religious imperative and moral necessity of the insurgency. It is not a hard argument to make to those whose homes have been bombed out of existence and who must endure the daily depredations of an occupying army.

Constantly reminded of their ongoing national and personal humiliation, young Iraqi men are naturally drawn to the resistance, which is growing exponentially – possibly beyond the ability of the occupation force, as presently constituted, to contain it. "More troops!" the War Party cries, and the chorus of criticism coming at this administration is loudest on the pro-war right. But the visibility and ubiquity of American troops is the insurgency's prime recruiting device: the latest strategic wisdom coming from many military experts is to lower the profile of the American occupation, and at least try to give the administration's Potemkin Village "democracy" in Iraq a thin veneer of credibility.

More troops mean more targets, without necessarily ensuring more order. Rummy, who's no dummy, knows this, as does the neocon mob calling for his head. The latter, however, are less concerned about keeping order in Iraq – "creative destruction" is more the neocon style – than they are about gathering American forces for the next war, which, in my opinion, is bound to take place in and around Syria, including Lebanon, and the Kurdish regions of Iraq.

Speaking of the Kurds, much is made of the Sunni-Shi'ite division in Iraq and how it's leading to civil war, but the really big problem, which has been largely put off so far, is what to do about the burning desire of most Kurds to strike out on their own. A petition demanding independence signed by 1.7 million Kurds – more than half the Kurdish population of northern Iraq– was recently delivered to the United Nations. Its arrival heralds a fresh crisis for the Americans, who have so far managed to keep their most enthusiastic supporters, the Kurdish peshmerga, from going off the reservation. But the Israelis, whose Kurdish incursions have been detailed by Seymour Hersh, may have other ideas.

(By the way, the news that some of the Guantanamo prisoners had been wrapped by their captors in the Israeli flag must provoke even the most doggedly incurious to ask where U.S. interrogators picked up a trick like that.)

In any case, this stirring of the Kurdish pot seems to be having repercussions on the home front – or, possibly, vice versa – in light of the FBI's recent take-down of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the epicenter of Israel's powerful lobby in the U.S., and long rated as one of the most powerful in Washington. After two raids on AIPAC's D.C. headquarters, and four subpoenas issued to top officials Israel's premier lobbyist accompanied by extensive "leaks" to the media, Israel's amen corner is reeling. Their crimes, including espionage – and, in my own view, treason – were uncovered in 2004, and it looks like 2005 is going to be the year of their comeuppance.

Oh yes, it was a banner year for criminality at the highest levels of government: look at Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who confessed to being a spy for Israel and was "flipped" by the FBI's counterintelligence unit. Franklin, who agreed to help ferret out his confederates in top policymaking positions, is at the center of a storm that has already done considerable damage to the once mighty AIPAC – and may yet give new meaning to the "special relationship" between the U.S. and its truculent ally.

Franklin was caught red-handed relating top secret government intelligence to Naor Gilon, the top political affairs officer at the Israeli embassy, at a lunch with two high-ranking AIPAC officials. Now we learn that, having been flipped, Franklin was on the phone to Richard Perle, Francis Brooke, and no doubt others intimately involved in the neocon-Chalabi intelligence network centered in the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans." Chalabi is accused of handing over vital U.S. secrets to Iran, and the Americans are beginning to ponder if perhaps they haven't been snookered, and not only by the Iranians.

How, one wonders, did Chalabi get his hands on U.S. signal intercepts, sensitive intelligence that only top U.S. policymakers could access? The FBI is wondering, too, and the Washington Post (Sept. 2) reports that AIPAC is the number-one suspect:

"FBI counterintelligence agents are investigating whether several Pentagon officials leaked classified information to Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to a law enforcement official and other people familiar with the case. … Initially, news reports revealed that the FBI was investigating whether Lawrence A. Franklin – a mid-level analyst specializing in Middle East issues in the Pentagon office of Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy – had passed a draft presidential directive on Iran to AIPAC, and whether the group had passed the information to Israel. AIPAC is an influential lobbying group with close ties to the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"The FBI probe is actually much broader, according to senior U.S. officials, and has been underway for at least two years. Several sources familiar with the case say the probe now extends to other Pentagon personnel who have a particular interest in assisting both Israel and Chalabi."

So the crime of treason is added to murder, torture, and other war crimes, including an extensive and ongoing cover-up: the year 2004 has been little more than one long, non-stop crime spree in the corridors of power.

What the Franklin case will show, I believe, is that the same cabal that lied us into war then turned around and stole our secrets, handing them over to Chalabi and Iran via AIPAC. A recent piece in The Forward by AIPAC-defender Edwin Black tries to portray the pursuit of AIPAC by law enforcement as the intelligence community's "war" on the neoconservatives: Black has repeatedly accused the head of the FBI's counterintelligence unit of "anti-Semitism," and apparently some of the principals in this case have a longstanding adversarial relationship. However, by Black's logic – which has led him to call for the release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard – any pursuit of AIPAC is, by definition, suspect. As to why AIPAC must be granted immunity from investigation, especially when it comes to such a serious charge as espionage, is not at all clear.

In any event, if 2003 was the year of the liar, and 2004 the year of the war criminal, then let 2005 be the year of justice. That is not a prediction, but only a hope. - http://www.antiwar.com/justin...

Tsunamis and Death-Toll Pornography (Bush Spends MORE on Inaugural Parties Than Disaster Aide!!!)

12.30.04 (8:33 am) [edit]

[b]Bush only spent a paltry $15 million in assistance for those millions of people whose lives have been destroyed by the Asian tsunami--[i] Then [/i]when embarrassed by European nations that gave more in disaster relief, he was forced to commit another $25 million!!! However, the corrupt Mad King George Bush is squandering an obscene $41 million on his lavish, extravagant inaugural parties, balls and dinners-- [i]more[/i] than any other president in history (even though Bush/Cheney recklessly have run-up the largest deficits in U.S. history & average Americans are worse off!!!)-- [i]And[/i], at a time U.S. troops & innocent Iraqi civilians are[i] dying and being injured & maimed [/i]in his illegal & immoral war in Iraq, [i]and[/i] hundreds of thousands of human beings are dying, ill and suffering in Asia as a result of the tsunami!!! Is Bushy-boy[i] really [/i]a "christian"??? Nope, he is a fascist, hypocritical crook ([i]and[/i] War Criminal) who should be [i]impeached[/i] for Crimes Against Humanity that [i]he & his neo-con regime [/i]committed in Iraq!!![/b]

As the number of casualties following the tsunamis that struck south-east Asia and parts of east Africa reaches the 60,000 mark, I find myself falling prey to one of the most unpleasant side-effects of 24-hour television and web news coverage: an addiction to death-toll pornography. Like a junkie who finds himself locked inside of a drug store, with uninterrupted access to CNN, the BBC and the web I have an inexhaustible supply of material to feed my self-destructive habit.

When the news of the catastrophe broke on Sunday, early estimates put the number of dead at around 5,000. By the end of Tuesday, that number had jumped to over 50,000. News anchors and reporters regularly updated the audience on the "latest" figures, and "news tickers" at the bottom of the screen flashed casualty numbers like so much stock market information or so many football scores.

As the numbers continue to grow, however, my humanity and compassion seem to diminish. Initial horror upon hearing the news has morphed into an urge to hear more updates and to see more video footage of massive waves washing away cars, hotels, boats, and, in case we forget, people. As the numbers rocket upward, I play a macabre guessing game. How high will the death count go? 100,000? 200,000? Could it be a quarter of a million? The numbers are so huge, and my experience with death on this scale (or any scale, for that matter) so minuscule, that I simply cannot comprehend what is going on, Statistics are the only thing I can lean on.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but my guess is that I am not alone in my occasional addiction to death-toll pornography. I consider myself to be a relatively critical person when it comes to the media, and yet, for some reason, I continue to kid myself that by watching hour after hour of news coverage from India, Thailand and Sri Lanka I am a "well-informed" person. In all honesty, I crossed that "well-informed" line a long time ago, and so I have come to the conclusion that I am watching the aftermath of this natural disaster for reasons other than pure information. It isn't entertainment, but it is a form of fascination that taps into a primal fear of death.

What jolted me out of my self-deception - and brought me to write this article -was something that I saw this morning on the BBC news. In the middle of some stock crisis footage from Thailand, there was a brief shot of the naked corpse of a young man hanging from the branch of a tree. The fact that I was sitting in my comfortable living room, drinking coffee, looking at a naked corpse in a tree convinced me that what I was watching was not news, but a perverted form of reality television. I wondered how I would feel if that naked boy had been a member of my family: his undignified death a passing spectacle for all the world to see over their mugs of morning coffee.

The bigger the number of victims, and the further away they live from us, of course, the easier it becomes to distance ourselves from what we are watching. We can accept video of hundreds of anonymous bodies washing up onto the shores of southern India, but would we accept video of the corpse of a young girl floating in a neighborhood swimming pool being shown on our local news? Through the news, we have become accustomed to seeing people in the developing world as victims: victims of war, victims of famine, victims of disease, and victims of natural disasters. In their eternal state of victim-hood, these people have had their right to individuality and dignity stripped, and thus their corpses are fair game for the evening news.

None of this is to say that this is not a story worthy of round-the-clock coverage, because it is. What I am suggesting, however, is that we should be thinking about the mode of the coverage: the obsession with death tolls (most of which are inaccurate anyway), the repetition of horrific footage, and close-up pictures of obviously grieving family members.

Coverage of the crisis is needed to alert the world to what is a massive humanitarian disaster, and showing death is a part of that. What is not needed, however, is coverage that panders to the dark, voyeuristic sides of our psyches.

[b]Christian Christensen is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey. He can be reached at bahcesehircc@yahoo.com.[/b] - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

Tsunamis and Death-Toll Pornography (Bush Spends MORE on Inaugural Parties Than Disaster Aide!!!)

12.30.04 (8:33 am) [edit]

Tsunamis and Death-Toll Pornography (Bush Spends MORE on Inaugural Parties Than Disaster Aide!!!)

12.30.04 (8:24 am) [edit]

Tsunamis and Death-Toll Pornography (Bush Spends MORE on Inaugural Parties Than Disaster Aide!!!)

12.30.04 (8:10 am) [edit]

Tsunamis and Death-Toll Pornography (Bush Spends MORE on Inaugural Parties Than Disaster Aide!!!)

12.30.04 (8:10 am) [edit]

Bush Foreign Policy: US Businesses Overseas Threatened by Rising Anti-Americanism

12.30.04 (8:01 am) [edit]

The Bush administration's foreign policy may be costing U.S. corporations business overseas--according to a new survey of 8,000 international consumers released this week by the Seattle-based Global Market Insite http://www.globalmarketinsite... (GMI) Inc.

Brands closely identified with the U.S., such as Marlboro cigarettes, America Online (AOL), McDonald's, American Airlines, and Exxon-Mobil are particularly at risk. GMI, an independent market research company, conducted the survey in eight countries December 10-12 with consumers over the internet.

One third of all consumers in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom said that U.S. foreign policy, particularly the "war on terror" and the occupation of Iraq, constituted their strongest impression of the United States.

Twenty percent of respondents in Europe and Canada said they consciously avoided buying U.S. products as a protest against those policies. That finding was consistent with a similar poll carried out by GMI three weeks after Bush's November election victory.

"Unfortunately, current American foreign policy is viewed by international consumers as a significant negative, when it used to be a positive," according to Dr. Mitchell Eggers, GMI's chief operating officer and chief pollster.

"Some American brands become closely connected to their country of origin and are quintessentially American," he added. "They represent the American lifestyle, innovation, power, leadership, and foreign policy."

Whether the U.S. foreign policy under Bush is affecting the sales of U.S. corporations overseas is being hotly debated by advertising and public relations firms, as well as the companies themselves. Last month, Kevin Roberts, chief executive of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, told the Financial Times that he believed consumers in Europe and Asia were becoming increasingly resistant to having "brand America rammed down their throats."

Simon Anholt, author of 'Brand America' has also predicted a consumer backlash against U.S. foreign policy. He recently told the British trade magazine, 'Marketing Week', that four more years of Bush's foreign policy could have grave consequences for U.S. companies' international market share.

"There have already been casual protest brands, such as Mecca Cola, which are primarily political," he told the weekly. "But things are now moving beyond that. For instances, German restaurants are beginning to refuse American Express cards. This is new territory."

Other analysts have been skeptical, arguing that recent declines in sales in France and Germany by McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Marlboro were due far more to other factors, including flagging economies in both countries or a simple failure by companies to adapt rapidly enough to consumer tastes.

But the new survey, as well as the one taken by GMI last month, suggests that the unpopularity of U.S. foreign policy may indeed be playing a role, at least for companies that are either strongly identified with the United States or that are perceived as having similar characteristics as its foreign policy.

"American companies are accused of aggressiveness and arrogance because they insist on imposing the American way of doing things on their international markets; they are inflexible," according to Allyson Stewart-Allen, co-author of 'Working With Americans,' a business best-seller published by Prentice Hall in 2002.

She argued that the more U.S. companies distance themselves from their U.S. identity, the better they will survive in the international marketplace. "U.S. companies abroad now need to focus on adding yet more value and repositioning their brands to consumers in the intensely competitive global village in which they compete"

"The more aligned they are with those customers--regardless of their U.S.-created DNA--they'll win." American companies need to focus on alignment with international markets and embrace their market differences and idiosyncrasies.

The survey cited 40 U.S.-based companies and asked consumers who said they were trying to avoid buying U.S. brands to rate each one of them by how closely they were identified with being "American," and whether or not they deliberately avoided buying their products.

The survey then plotted each company's position on a quadrant divided into "safe" and "insulated" squares at the bottom and "at risk" and "problem squares" at the top.

Those deemed "safe" or "insulated" generally were either not seen as particularly "American" (Visa, Kodak, Kleenex or Gillette), or they apparently lacked real competition (Microsoft, Heinz, and Disney).

Visa was the single best performer: only 17 percent of consumers identified as intending to avoid U.S. brands thought that it was "extremely American," and only 15 percent said they intended to boycott it. Fifty-four percent said they had used Visa at least once in the previous month.

"Problem" companies, on the other hand, included those which more than a third of boycotting consumers said they intended to avoid, and more than 40 percent of consumers said they considered to be "extremely American."

On that scale, Marlboro was found to be the most problematic. Sixty percent of respondents said they avoided the product, while two-thirds said they considered it to be "extremely American." Only McDonald's had a higher "American" score, at 73 percent, but only 42 percent of respondents said they avoided the Golden Arches.

In contrast to Visa's performance, 48 percent of boycotting consumers said they would definitely avoid using American Express; 64 percent said they thought the company was "extremely American," and only two percent reported using it during the previous month.

Other problem brands included Exxon-Mobil, AOL, American, Chevron Texaco, United Airlines, Budweiser, Chrysler, Barbie Doll, Starbucks, and General Motors.

The latest poll found that more than two thirds of European and Canadian consumers have had a negative change in their view of the United States as a result of U.S. foreign policy over the last three years. Nearly half believe that the war in Iraq was motivated by a desire to control oil supplies, while only 15 percent believed it was related to terrorism.

Nearly two thirds of European and Canadian consumers also said they believe U.S. foreign policy is guided primarily by self-interest and empire-building, while only 17 percent believe that the defense of freedom and democracy is its guiding principle.

Half of the entire sample said they distrusted U.S. companies, at least in part because of the U.S. foreign policy. Seventy-nine percent said they distrusted the U.S. government for the same reason, while 39 percent said they distrusted the American public. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Bush Foreign Policy: US Businesses Overseas Threatened by Rising Anti-Americanism

12.30.04 (8:01 am) [edit]

Talking politics and religion with Jesus

12.30.04 (7:54 am) [edit]

I ran into Jesus the other day, panhandling for quarters by the Cozy Bar on First Street.

We talked for maybe twenty minutes, about this and that, but mostly about how Christian "moral values" had swung the election to George Bush.

Oddly enough -- or perhaps not -- He didn't approve of what conservative evangelicals had done in His name.

"Remember how I resisted principalities and powers and knocked over the corrupt money changers' tables? Well, Bush is a total yes man for the very worst, most corrupt forces around. His whole policy is to bolt the moneychangers' tables to the floor, so no one can bring needed reform."

He offered me a swig from a Thunderbird bottle in a brown paper sack. I obliged, not wishing to refuse a Nazarene carpenter's hospitality.

"As for the Iraq war, I can't see how anything could be more wrong. He lied about the reasons for invading. There was no provocation or credible cause. It's illegal, immoral aggression, pure and simple. My heart cries for all those, on both sides, who are so needlessly suffering and dying."

I nodded in concurrence, shivering in the off-lake wind.

"Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in an oil grab that's grotesquely called 'liberation.' Those who profess to believe in me are turning a blind eye while instead trying to make monstrous sinners out of date-raped school girls who get abortions in their fearful desperation."

Then I asked what He thought about gays.

"Love is all there is. Love is what I'm about. And yet self-styled Christians want to prevent gays in long-term, loving relationships from getting married. They violate common decency and the last six words of the Pledge of Allegiance: 'with liberty and justice for all.' You should see the surprised looks on the faces of pious hypocrites when St. Peter turns them away at Heaven's gate!"

Just then a municipal bus sped past, bearing a side billboard reflecting our society's crass commercialization of Christmas.

"That's another thing that really gets my goat," Jesus said with deep lamentation permeating his tone. "My birthday is supposed to be about everyone embracing the core ideals of true Christianity: brotherhood, tolerance, communal sharing and caring, social justice, and actually achieving peace on earth. Instead, Wall Street and Madison Avenue have made it a time for selfishly coveting DVD players and digital cameras."

I muttered my agreement, hoping Christ didn't have the supernatural power to know I'd only recently been thinking how much I'd like to have one of those little 5 megapixel jobs that young woman in the TV ad uses to get a grab shot of Steven Tyler from Aerosmith.

Jesus got quiet and looked pensive.

I thought I saw a tear in His eye.

When He spoke again, it was about the growing numbers of poor people, including whole families, He sees every day in His travels. Plus the sick without any means to pay for cures.

"Bush gives huge tax breaks to the rich, and squanders billions on a dirty war. Meanwhile, the children of God go hungry..."

His voice trailed off and merged with the whistling wind.

I realized it was time for us to part, but first I asked if I could write a small Internet piece about our encounter.

He said it was okay, so long as I got His sentiments straight.

"Not that it really matters," He said. "Some folks will think you made the whole thing up. Others will believe I'm just a delusional wino. Nobody, least of all the Christians who get so worked up about separation of church and state, can envision me coming back as a derelict stumblebum."

"Or confiding to a goofy Finlander from Wisconsin," I responded.

Jesus laughed. I wondered how many souls had ever heard Jesus laugh.

"Hey, we're both wearing sandals! Where'd you get yours?"

"K-Mart," I replied. "How about you?"

"Jerusalem."

With that He waved goodbye, then disappeared into the darkness and swirling mist enshrouding the brooding hillside.

Me?

I walked away feeling warm and a just a bit tipsy, thinking maybe there's still some hope left in the world after all. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Talking politics and religion with Jesus

12.30.04 (7:54 am) [edit]

LYING KILLS!

12.19.04 (6:04 am) [edit]

On Monday of this week, both The New York Times and USA Today published anonymously sourced stories reporting that the Department of Defense was considering plunging deeply into the disinformation business.

"Such missions," said The Times, "could take the deceptive techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse an adversary and adopt them for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations."

The timing suggests these stories were leaked by people in the Pentagon trying to stop the military before it kills again -- or simply shoots itself in the foot. The idea suggests there are crazy people in the Department of Defense. Criminally insane, in this case.

By mission and nature, the military in a democracy exists in an alternate universe. President Richard Nixon, for one, brought as many officers into his White House as he could because they followed orders and kept their mouths shut.

Still, he was not surprised in 1972 when he learned that military liaison officers were emptying in-boxes and wastebaskets at night in the White House and taking the contents over to the Pentagon for surreptitious inspection. "You have to assume that the military serves itself," Nixon said to his civilians at the time. "They're watching you all the time."

Having less to hide than Nixon did, I doubt I've been watched very closely by anybody. But I have watched the military closely, and like many reporters of my generation I believe that officers lie as a matter of course -- about death counts, about weapons testing, about torture. They see themselves under siege by naive outsiders, distrusting the press to the point of considering reporters the enemy.

That view, which condones lies both casual and critical, tends to produce short-term gains and long-term disaster. It can be funny when you're there. Covering the covert wars of Central America in the 1980s, I stayed for a time at the Maya Hotel in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Each morning handsome and athletic young Americans with boots tied together by their laces flung over their shoulders would crowd into the elevator. "What are you doing here?" I would ask.

"Vacation, sir!" they would answer.

Sometimes it was not funny at all. In September of that year, 1983, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Paul Kelley, appeared before a congressional committee questioning the mission and safety of a Marine peacekeeping force in Beirut, Lebanon: "There is not a significant danger at this time to our Marines ... no evidence that any of the rocket or artillery fire has been specifically directed against Marines."

That was not true. The 1,200 Marines, training the Christian-led Lebanese armed forces, were being attacked constantly by Muslim militias. The reason Kelley was lying -- or was totally incompetent -- was to protect President Reagan's fiction that his men were not in a "hostile situation," which would have triggered provisions of the War Powers Act of 1973 and could have forced the commander in chief to withdraw the Marines within 60 days.

Ordered to pretend that they were not in a combat zone, those Marines were under rules of engagement prohibiting perimeter guards to have cartridge clips in their weapons. Four weeks after Kelley's appearance, a suicide bomber in a truck full of high explosives drove over and through those guards and blew up himself and his load in the lobby of American headquarters. Two hundred and forty-one Americans, most of them Marines, were killed.

Now someone is talking about lying not as a military defensive mechanism but as strategy, as policy. I could go on -- about Vietnam or about Baghdad -- but I hope the point is made. Lying kills.

In the end, it is the young men and women of the military who suffer. Theirs is not to question why -- although a couple of foot soldiers did last week in asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld why there was no armor on their vehicles. Higher-ups might have asked why there are not more troops on the ground there, but they have followed White House orders and kept their mouths shut.

For the historically minded, President Reagan's special representative to the Middle East, appointed just after the Beirut bombing, was the same Donald Rumsfeld. Though there are many who think the man is nuts, few consider him a criminal. But if he lets this go ahead, he will be judged as both -- and Americans in uniform will never be believed abroad or at home. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...%2Fucrr%2F20041217%2Fcm_u crr%2Flyingkills

LYING KILLS!

12.19.04 (6:04 am) [edit]

LYING KILLS!

12.19.04 (6:02 am) [edit]

LYING KILLS!

12.19.04 (6:02 am) [edit]

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S PROBLEMS

12.19.04 (5:58 am) [edit]

[b]It's back to the problems.[/b]

Recent events have once again proved the truism that it's easy to run for office, it's hard to govern -- especially when you're an arrogant fellow pursuing bad policies. For George W. Bush, knocking off John Kerry was a swagger on the beach compared to dealing with the real stuff. All Bush had to do was lie about Kerry, deride him, make promises he can't keep, talk tough, and mount an under-the-radar effort to motivate millions of fundamentalist Christian voters who (for some reason) obsess over gay marriage. That's nada compared to, say, winning the war in Iraq.

Once the election dust settled, the Bush gang looked like country-bumpkin first-termers. It botched the appointment of one of the most important Cabinet members: secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The Bush White House did this by racing ahead with Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner and a Rudy Giuliani crony. It's not only that Bush's vetters missed Kerik's nanny problem. They apparently did not even do a Nexis search on the guy.

Had they done so, they would have learned he was a nomination disaster waiting to happen. As New York City prisoner commissioner, he had diverted rebates from cigarette sales in prisons to an obscure foundation he ran. He had been entangled with a New Jersey construction firm with alleged mob ties. His leadership of the NYPD after 9/11 was dubbed "scandalous" by John Lehman, a Republican member of the independent 9/11 commission. He had been in charge of police training in Iraq -- hardly a triumph. He had an arrest warrant issued against him in conjunction with a civil legal dispute. He was sued, in separate cases, for retaliating against a corrections official who backed a Democrat and against others who were in disputes with a corrections official with whom he was allegedly having an extramarital affair. He had parlayed his political connections and received millions of dollars from a company that did business with the Department of Homeland Security. And there was more. He was lucky he had a nanny he could hide behind.

The Kerik blunder was not the White House's only Cabinet-level screwup. Bush officials sent clear signals they wanted Treasury Secretary John Snow to hit the road. Then Bush announced Snow was staying put. This was no way for a president to treat the head of his economic team. After all, this is the guy who has to come out before the press and the business community and perform an all-important task: fudge the numbers. Can he do so effectively if he's peeved?

Then Bush got caught tapping the phones of Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Come on. If you're going to play this game, do it well and don't be found out. Worse (for Bush), the taps produced nothing the White House could use to force ElBaradei out of his post. The Bushies consider him too soft on Iran, and some Bush aides have been angling for his ouster. But they are probably also mad at him because ElBaradei showed them up. Before the invasion of Iraq, ElBaradei and his weapons inspectors declared there were no indications that Saddam Hussein had been reviving his nuclear weapons program. Yet Bush, Dick Cheney and their posse had claimed Hussein had been "reconstituting" his nuclear program. Now it's clear the International Atomic Energy Agency was right and Bush was wrong. So the obvious response from Bush is, off with his head!

Bush is facing trouble in Iran. Military experts tell me there are few effective military options for the Bush hawks. The Iranian nuclear weapons program -- to the extent it exists -- is probably dispersed, based in civilian areas and located deep underground. It is no easy target. And Iran -- bigger and stronger than Iraq -- is not invasion material, especially when U.S. forces are stretched thin next door. So what's a saber-rattling pre-emptionist to do? Ditto for North Korea.

Meanwhile, Iraq is not getting any easier. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld became the administration's Bonehead Number One when he dismissed a soldier's question about the lack of armor for the troops. Throughout the election, the Bush campaign denied Kerry's charge that Bush had not provided enough armor for the troops. It's not too tough to spin reporters; it's more difficult to spin unprotected soldiers. And on the first anniversary of Saddam Hussein's capture -- remember when war backers hailed that development as the beginning of the end of the insurrection? -- eight U.S. Marines were killed in different battles in Iraq. In one piece of good news for Bush, this bad news was chronicled by the Washington Post in a brief story on Page A17. (Scott Peterson still rates more media attention than dead American GIs.) As the January elections approach, the security situation in Iraq appears to be worsening. And the six-mile stretch of highway from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the international airport remains too dangerous for U.S. officials to travel. Doom-and-gloom is the official position of the CIA. The agency's station chief in Baghdad sent a cable in late November -- which was leaked within two weeks -- that offered a bleak view, noting security in Iraq is likely to deteriorate further. Just in time for the elections. The intelligence reform bill passed by Congress will not be of much help.

Then there's Social Security. For some odd reason, Bush seems to be serious about his promise to partially privatize Social Security. That is, he's still talking about it after the election. There appears to be no way for Bush to enact such a scheme without racking up $2 trillion in transition costs. Bush's tax cuts for the rich are projected to yield trillions of dollars in national debt, yet this explosion of red ink never became a hot topic during the presidential campaign. Will another $2 trillion in Bush-created debt finally pose him political trouble? Perhaps. At the same time, the folks around him have started to hint that retirement benefits may have to drop by 6 percent, even after supposed gains from private accounts are added to the picture. So let's see: more debt, lower benefits. Sounds like a winner. No wonder several Senate Republicans have said they won't support any Social Security legislation unless it is also endorsed by Democrats. They want political cover. Yet the conservative House Republicans have expressed no interest in negotiating with their Democratic colleagues. Can Bush navigate the political land mines? I'd rather choke on a pretzel.

During the campaign, I happened to share a long airplane ride with one of Kerry's top advisers. Several hours into our conversation, he told me that every once in a while Kerry would ask him, "What the fuck are we going to do?" Kerry had in mind Iraq and a Kerry victory. Thanks to Ohio, he does not have the burden of devising an answer to his own query. But Bush does -- and not merely on Iraq. He's facing a boatload of ugly challenges and dilemmas. Democrats ought not to be too giddy about this, for Bush has demonstrated that when the going gets tough he is perfectly able to commit gigantic blunders with bad consequences for all and no punishment for him. But he is not going to be able to escape his problems by hitting the campaign trail. As an in-over-his-head president once said, "It's hard work." - http://www.laweekly.com/ink/0...

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S PROBLEMS

12.19.04 (5:56 am) [edit]

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S PROBLEMS

12.19.04 (5:56 am) [edit]

Corporate-Owned Bush Regime Threatens Success of 10-Year Wolf Recovery

12.19.04 (5:47 am) [edit]

Four weeks from now, January 12, marks the official 10-year anniversary for the return of the gray wolf to Yellowstone National Park. While the resurgence of a wolf population in the lower 48 states is an historic wildlife conservation success, Defenders of Wildlife http://www.defenders.org/ President Rodger Schlickeisen warned this week that the reintroduction campaign will be in jeopardy if the Bush administration has its way.

In a speech this week in Washington, DC, Schlickeisen described the many benefits of the campaign: not only the return of the gray wolf, but also ecological benefits, such as balancing the elk population and a consequent boom in willow and cottonwood tree growth. None of this would have been possible without the protections now being threatened by the Bush administration's Department of Interior.

The wolves have already been reclassified from endangered to threatened on the national level, which in some cases has entirely removed protections. The Bush administration is also pushing for still weaker federal management of the wolves, via a shift to the state level. Defenders has filed a lawsuit against reclassification on the grounds that the wolf population has not fully recovered, and that the rule precludes recovery in additional habitat suitable for wolves. [1]

In what Defenders calls an unscientific approach to wolf management, distinct regions are being designated in the U.S. without appropriate consideration being given to population goals for each region. For example, in the Northwest, population goals have been set for three states -- Idaho, Montana and Wyoming -- and six states are to be added to this new group without adjusting population goals for that region. In the Northeast, one recovery zone was created for the removal of protections even though no recovery efforts had been made in certain subsets of the Northeast recovery zone.

As Schlickeisen told BushGreenwatch, http://www.bushgreenwatch.org... "Wolves have made great progress in the last decade. Sadly, the Bush administration is rapidly becoming the wolf’s most dangerous predator. Its efforts to remove protections for the wolf, coupled with its unscientific approach to wolf management, pose the greatest threat today to the continued recovery of the wolf in this country."

Wolf protections are also being attacked on a second front. In the Bush administration's efforts to rewrite section 10J of the Endangered Species Act, control of the wolves would be turned over to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming before federal delisting, and federal protections would be weakened before recovery goals were met. [2]

Along with this policy move, state agencies would be allowed to kill wolves where there are declining elk populations, even if wolves are not proven to be the primary factor in the decline. People would also be allowed to kill wolves based only on personal beliefs that the wolves pose a threat to property. Defenders sees the Bush administration proposal as an opportunity for unnecessary killings and abuse of the rule. [3]

###

[b]SOURCES:[/b]

[1] Defenders of Wildlife http://www.defenders.org/ speech, Dec. 14, 2004.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.

Corporate-Owned Bush Regime Threatens Success of 10-Year Wolf Recovery

12.19.04 (5:45 am) [edit]

Corporate-Owned Bush Regime Threatens Success of 10-Year Wolf Recovery

12.19.04 (5:45 am) [edit]

Herr Fuhrer Bush Sticks It To Patriotic Americans (and U.S. Troops)!!!

12.18.04 (4:07 pm) [edit]

[b]The Three Stooges [/b]

Anybody who has any doubts that George Bush is a true believer in himself should finally be convinced by his awarding the Medal of Freedom to the three blunderers of the war in Iraq.

Gen. Tommy Franks allowed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to browbeat him into planning a war with fewer troops than were needed. He no doubt noted that when Gen. Eric Shinseki and the secretary of the Army publicly said many more troops were needed, they were gotten rid of. Shinseki was humiliated when the Pentagon announced his replacement a year and a half before he was due to step down. Secretary of the Army Thomas White was fired.

Today, there is no doubt that Shinseki and White were correct, but Franks, who sacrificed his professional judgment to Rumsfeld's ideological rigidity, gets the medal.

Then there's Paul Bremer. Nobody could have made more mistakes as head of the occupation than Bremer. He and Franks allowed the looting that proved disastrous. He fired all the civil servants who could have helped run the government, and he disbanded the army. All the problems we face today in Iraq stem directly from these blunders. But he gets the medal.

And finally there is George Tenet, the former CIA director. He failed to detect the attack on 9/11, and he padded the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to please the president. "It's a slam-dunk," he said. Sure. He makes a blunder of stupendous importance and gets the medal.

What should alarm people, but probably won't, is not the series of blunders in Iraq. Anyone and any administration can make mistakes. No one is infallible or omniscient. What should alarm people is the president's iron-tight refusal to acknowledge that any mistakes have been made. That's exactly what he was saying when he handed out those three medals: I have not made any mistakes whatsoever. Rumsfeld, Franks, Tenet and Bremer have made no mistakes. The only people who are wrong are people who disagree with me.

Such arrogance is characteristic of fanatics. I'm not suggesting that the president should agonize in public about his decisions. The public wants a leader with self-confidence. But this arrogance is present behind the scenes. All during the buildup to the war, people with advice to be cautious or even with professional judgments about what would be required were dismissed out of hand if their ideas conflicted with preconceived notions.

Apparently, when the president and his ideologues get an idea into their heads, they view any facts to the contrary as evidence of hostility and disloyalty. Nobody in recent history has been more arrogant and more wrong than the Bush administration has been in its dealing with Iraq.

Unfortunately, this same mind-set will be present in dealing with all of the problems and crises of the future. I recognize that Bush's partisans strongly disagree with me and are overjoyed by his re-election. Truly, I hope they are right, because if I am right, then we're in for more hatred, more death, more destruction and more economic hardship. Iraq was not a cakewalk, and neither will be Syria, Iran and North Korea. Furthermore, if Bush can't summon the courage to force the Israelis to get rid of all of their settlements in the West Bank, that fire will continue to burn, and as much as American politicians wish to deny it, that conflict is the fuel of terrorism.

When a leader makes it clear that he doesn't want anyone around who will tell him things he doesn't want to hear, he guarantees that he will be surrounded by sycophants and manipulators. Great leaders, whether military or civilian, do exactly the opposite. They surround themselves with smart people who aren't afraid to speak up during the decision-making process.

Humans succeed when they adapt to reality, and that involves taking into account feedback. Oh, this wasn't so; that didn't work, so now I have to adjust. People who take no notice of reality's feedback usually fail. They are like a ship sailing at full speed with no rudder and no radar.

Let us all pray that there is nothing but open sea in the path of Bush's second term.

[b]Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column three times a week for King Features, which is carried on Antiwar.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner[/b]. - http://www.antiwar.com/reese/...

Fooling The Reality-Based Environment???

12.18.04 (6:38 am) [edit]

[b]Fooling nature will prove more difficult than fooling American voters ...[/b]

"[i]The aide (a senior adviser to President Bush) said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do[/i]."
-- Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004.

This is the quote that now has some noted bloggers identifying themselves as, "Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community."

Of all the problems that arise from having an administration that chooses not to believe in reality, the ones most likely to have irretrievably disastrous consequences are environmental.

The Bush solution to global warming is to declare it does not exist. While this solves the problem for him in the short term, global warming is highly unlikely to be impressed by the news that we are now an empire and can change history.

Just lately, "history's actors" have made a couple of singular contributions to our future that we in the reality-based community will doubtless be studying for some time to come.

The first allows sewer operators to dump inadequately treated sewage into the nation's waterways. The Environmental Protection Agency (a name that becomes more ironic daily) currently requires sewer operators to fully treat their waste in all but the most extreme circumstances, like during a hurricane. The new plan will allow operators to dump sewage routinely any time it rains.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council: "For the last 50 years, standard sewage treatment has involved a two-step process: solids removal, and biological treatment to kill bacteria, viruses and parasites. The new policy allows facilities to routinely bypass the second step and to 'blend' partially treated sewage with fully treated wastewater before discharging it into the waterways."

NRDC predicts more Americans -- especially the elderly, very young and those with weakened immune systems -- will get sick and die. That's on account of the fact that bacteria, viruses and parasites are also part of the reality-based community and have no respect for history's actors or empires.

Next, in one of those under-the-radar moments so beloved of the Bushies, the Pentagon has simply exempted itself from environmental law. A new Department of Defense directive changes a Clinton-era order on "Environmental Security" by eliminating the following policies:

1. Reducing risk to human health and the environment by identifying, evaluating and, where necessary, remediating contamination resulting from past DoD activities.

2. Protecting, preserving and, when required, restoring and enhancing the quality of the environment.

3. Conserving and restoring, where necessary, the natural and cultural heritage represented on DoD installations within the United States.

There has been no public debate or congressional review of the new policy. The policy was written by the man who watched the looting of Baghdad and said, "Stuff happens."

To add to the global warming festivities now comes a new novel by Michael Crichton, who has made a fortune by scaring us about nonexistent threats -- the Japanese taking over the world, rampant sexual harassment by predatory females and dinosaurs recreated by insane scientists. This time, Crichton claims to be working against the fear-mongers, because the premise of his new novel is that global warming is much overrated and actually the product of a sinister group of villains -- the environmentalists. Enviros, by and large a pacific bunch of vegetarians and birders, must make unsatisfactory villains (I haven't read the book).

But in fact, the "villains" in global warming are not environmentalists, but scientists. They are the ones trying to "scare" us by making us aware of the problem, which is reality-based. Yet another study -- by 300 scientists with the International Arctic Science Committee --- finds:

1. Average winter temperatures in the Arctic are up by 4 to 7 degrees over the past 50 years and now projected to rise by 7 to 14 degrees over the next 100 years.

2. Polar ice during the summer is projected to decline by 50 percent by the end of this century.

3. Warming over Greenland will lead to substantial melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, contributing to global sea level rise at an increasing rate. Greenland's ice sheets contain enough water to raise the sea level by about 23 feet.

Scientists, a reality-based bunch of empiricists if ever there was one, are in no doubt about global warming. The only question is about how fast it's happening. And many of the small minority who argue it is coming slowly are themselves in the pay of oil companies and industry groups.

As Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." And that is not conspiracy-mongering. That is reality.

[b]Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let the Dogs In?[/b] - http://www.workingforchange.c...

Fooling The Reality-Based Environment???

12.18.04 (6:37 am) [edit]

Fooling The Reality-Based Environment???

12.18.04 (6:37 am) [edit]

Fooling The Reality-Based Environment???

12.18.04 (6:35 am) [edit]

Fooling God's Reality-Based World???

12.18.04 (6:35 am) [edit]

BUSHONOMICS: Still crazy after all these years

12.18.04 (6:29 am) [edit]

[b]Bush's tax cut didn't work, aren't working, won't work.[/b]

Not having listened to the entire thing, I can't say for sure that every single word uttered at the White House economic conference this past week was nonsensical. But I do know that when I tuned in Wednesday morning, it was only a matter of seconds before I was treated to a piece of pure hokum.

It was conservative economist Martin Feldstein giving his familiar spiel on taxes. Current tax rates, he said, "create bad incentives which slow down the rate of growth of the economy and hurt the standard of living." The point of Feldstein's lecture was that President Bush's tax cuts had made an enormous contribution to economic growth and, if we're not fully satisfied with the results, we ought to cut taxes yet again.

Feldstein's theory reflects the basic underpinning of Bush's economic agenda. The theory is that tax rates exert an enormous influence over people's (and especially rich people's) willingness to work hard and take risks. According to this view, countless potential entrepreneurs and innovators haven't bothered trying to get rich because of high taxes.

The corollary to this theory holds that tax cuts stimulate so much economic growth that they reduce tax revenue far less than conventional economists assume. Alas, the theory has failed every empirical test.

Feldstein's cohorts at the conference were polite enough not to bring up his influential prediction about the 2001 Bush tax cut. When Bush took office, if you recall, moderates prudently argued for using most of the $5.6-trillion-over-10-years budget surplus to pay down the national debt. Bush, however, insisted his tax cut was small enough that even afterward there would be enough left over to pay off the debt and keep a trillion-dollar "contingency fund."

To persuade skeptical tightwads, the administration trotted out Feldstein, who made essentially the same argument he made Wednesday. When tax rates go down, he explained, taxpayers "work harder and take more of their compensation in taxable form." Therefore, "the true cost of reducing the tax rates is likely to be substantially smaller than the costs projected in the official estimates."

As it turned out, the true cost ended up being substantially larger than the estimates. In fact, income tax revenues crashed through the floor, dropping to their lowest level as a percentage of the economy since 1942.

Frankly, it's amazing that anybody listened to Feldstein even then because he had made an equally bumbling prediction eight years before. In 1993, when Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate, Feldstein argued that because high-income workers are so sensitive to tax rates, they would dramatically change their behavior. Clinton's plan, he wrote, "reflects a fundamentally incorrect view of how taxes affect individual behavior." In another column, he thundered that "there is no possibility that the Clinton plan will produce the deficit reduction that it projects."

No possibility! Well, in case anybody has forgotten, the deficit actually dropped far more than anybody projected. Income tax revenue shot up through the ceiling. It's as if there was an actual invisible hand guiding the economy, and it grabbed Feldstein by the collar and screamed, "You're utterly, completely wrong, you fool!"

Feldstein's defenders would claim he just got unlucky twice in a row: Clinton's tax hike happened to precede a huge boom, and Bush's tax cut happened to coincide with a major slowdown. But revenue grew under Clinton and shrank under Bush, far more than could be accounted for by growth alone.

And, anyway, even if that excuse were right, it undermines Feldstein's point. Feldstein and his conservative allies argue that upper-bracket tax-rate levels are crucial to economic health. But history shows that, at the very least, many other factors have a greater effect on economic growth. So accepting large deficits for the sake of tax cuts makes no sense. This history also suggests that it's Feldstein who has a "fundamentally incorrect view of how taxes affect individual behavior."

And yet here is Feldstein today, dispensing his economic wisdom once again before the most powerful people in the country. Imagine if one man had designed the Titanic and the Hindenburg, and then was put in charge of the space program.

In a way, Feldstein's no worse than any of the other conservatives who made laughable claims on behalf of Bush's economic policies. That's exactly why the administration felt no shame in trotting him out once more. Anybody unprepared to make a fool of himself wouldn't appear at that conference in the first place. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

BUSHONOMICS: Still crazy after all these years

12.18.04 (6:28 am) [edit]

BUSHONOMICS: Still crazy after all these years

12.18.04 (6:28 am) [edit]

Buying into Failure ... Bushy-boy, Dicky-boy Cheney & their buddy Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay Style ...

12.18.04 (6:25 am) [edit]

As the Bush administration tries to persuade America to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k), we can learn a lot from other countries that have already gone down that road.

Information about other countries' experience with privatization isn't hard to find. For example, the Century Foundation, at www.tcf.org, provides a wide range of links.

Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets:

Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies.

It leaves many retirees in poverty.

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

These fees cut sharply into the returns individuals can expect on their accounts. In Britain, which has had a privatized system since the days of Margaret Thatcher, alarm over the large fees charged by some investment companies eventually led government regulators to impose a "charge cap." Even so, fees continue to take a large bite out of British retirement savings.

A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry.

Advocates insist that a privatized U.S. system can keep expenses much lower. It's true that costs will be low if investments are restricted to low-overhead index funds - that is, if government officials, not individuals, make the investment decisions. But if that's how the system works, the suggestions that workers will have control over their own money - two years ago, Cato renamed its Project on Social Security Privatization by replacing "privatization" with "choice" - are false advertising.

And if there are rules restricting workers to low-expense investments, investment industry lobbyists will try to get those rules overturned.

For the record, I don't think giving financial corporations a huge windfall is the main motive for privatization; it's mostly an ideological thing. But that windfall is a major reason Wall Street wants privatization, and everyone else should be very suspicious.

Then there's the issue of poverty among the elderly.

Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that it has yet to deliver on its promise to reduce government spending. More than 20 years after the system was created, the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because, as a Federal Reserve study puts it, the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension." In other words, privatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them.

The same thing is happening in Britain. Its Pensions Commission warns that those who think Mrs. Thatcher's privatization solved the pension problem are living in a "fool's paradise." A lot of additional government spending will be required to avoid the return of widespread poverty among the elderly - a problem that Britain, like the U.S., thought it had solved.

Britain's experience is directly relevant to the Bush administration's plans. If current hints are an indication, the final plan will probably claim to save money in the future by reducing guaranteed Social Security benefits. These savings will be an illusion: 20 years from now, an American version of Britain's commission will warn that big additional government spending is needed to avert a looming surge in poverty among retirees.

So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1...

Buying into Failure ... Bushy-boy, Dicky-boy Cheney & their buddy Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay Style ...

12.18.04 (6:24 am) [edit]

Buying into Failure ... Bushy-boy, Dicky-boy Cheney & their buddy Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay Style ...

12.18.04 (6:23 am) [edit]

[b]Jesus Christ condemned the rich who didn't prevent poverty more than he did anything else ...[/b]

As the Bush administration tries to persuade America to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k), we can learn a lot from other countries that have already gone down that road.

Information about other countries' experience with privatization isn't hard to find. For example, the Century Foundation, at www.tcf.org, provides a wide range of links.

Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets:

Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies.

It leaves many retirees in poverty.

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

These fees cut sharply into the returns individuals can expect on their accounts. In Britain, which has had a privatized system since the days of Margaret Thatcher, alarm over the large fees charged by some investment companies eventually led government regulators to impose a "charge cap." Even so, fees continue to take a large bite out of British retirement savings.

A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry.

Advocates insist that a privatized U.S. system can keep expenses much lower. It's true that costs will be low if investments are restricted to low-overhead index funds - that is, if government officials, not individuals, make the investment decisions. But if that's how the system works, the suggestions that workers will have control over their own money - two years ago, Cato renamed its Project on Social Security Privatization by replacing "privatization" with "choice" - are false advertising.

And if there are rules restricting workers to low-expense investments, investment industry lobbyists will try to get those rules overturned.

For the record, I don't think giving financial corporations a huge windfall is the main motive for privatization; it's mostly an ideological thing. But that windfall is a major reason Wall Street wants privatization, and everyone else should be very suspicious.

Then there's the issue of poverty among the elderly.

Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that it has yet to deliver on its promise to reduce government spending. More than 20 years after the system was created, the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because, as a Federal Reserve study puts it, the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension." In other words, privatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them.

The same thing is happening in Britain. Its Pensions Commission warns that those who think Mrs. Thatcher's privatization solved the pension problem are living in a "fool's paradise." A lot of additional government spending will be required to avoid the return of widespread poverty among the elderly - a problem that Britain, like the U.S., thought it had solved.

Britain's experience is directly relevant to the Bush administration's plans. If current hints are an indication, the final plan will probably claim to save money in the future by reducing guaranteed Social Security benefits. These savings will be an illusion: 20 years from now, an American version of Britain's commission will warn that big additional government spending is needed to avert a looming surge in poverty among retirees.

So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1...

Buying into Failure ... Bushy-boy, Dicky-boy Cheney & their buddy Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay Style ...

12.18.04 (6:22 am) [edit]

Corporate-owned Bush's Social Security Alarm is Just Another FlimFlam!

12.16.04 (6:19 am) [edit]

Here we go again. Yet another stage-managed "crisis" has arisen requiring the heroic intervention of George W. Bush, the action-figure president. This time, it's Social Security, the most successful government program in U.S. history, that has been singled out for the now-familiar Bush treatment. According to The Washington Post, Bush hopes to get his way "by essentially replicating the formula he used to reshape foreign policy in the first [term]. This includes creating a small, loyal and trustworthy team to press for broad changes largely dictated by the White House." In short, a team of ideologues and yes-men. First comes a propaganda barrage, a rhetorical shock-and-awe campaign to convince the American public of something that's manifestly untrue: that Social Security faces a funding crisis threatening its very existence.

In his weekly radio address, Bush argued that "while benefits for today's seniors are secure, the system is headed towards bankruptcy down the road. If we do not act soon, Social Security will not be there for our children and grandchildren."

Bankruptcy, the man said. Soon, he added.

By now, anybody who believes anything this president says about money shouldn't be allowed a bank account without an adult co-signer. The administration has a matchless track record of budgetary flimflams. Remember when White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was forced to walk the plank in 2002 for saying the Iraq war would cost $200 billion? Remember the economist at Health and Human Services threatened with firing if he revealed that actual cost estimates for Bush's Medicare drug benefit were $100 billion higher than the White House told Congress?

Well, the Social Security "crisis" is another one of those. Except that, unlike the federal budget, which is pretty abstract to most people, Social Security is something the vast majority have literally bet their lives on. Surely even Bush wouldn't mislead them about that?

Here's what the president told a joint session of Congress back on Feb. 27, 2001, when he was lobbying for the first round of "Save the Millionaires" tax cuts: "To make sure the retirement savings of America's seniors are not diverted to any other program, my budget protects all $2.6 trillion of the Social Security surplus for Social Security and Social Security alone."

Acolytes are now fanning out from all the tycoon-funded GOP "think tanks" in Washington amplifying Bush's scare talk: Social Security, they say, is a "pay as you go" system where today's workers fund today's retirees through payroll taxes. The insurmountable problem is supposed to be that an aging population is running short of workers to carry the load.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S. C., recently parroted the theme to CNN's Lou Dobbs. "Social Security is going bankrupt," he said. "It's coming apart at the seams. When I was born in 1955, there were 16 workers for every retiree. In about 15 years, there will be two workers for every retiree. Between 2011 and 2030, there will be a 65 percent increase in retirees and 8 percent increase in the work force. We're short of money to pay the benefits."

But Social Security quit being a "pay as you go" program in 1983, when the Reagan administration, heeding a commission headed by current Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, sharply raised payroll taxes in anticipation of impending demographic changes. Fact is, the Baby Boomers, a. k. a. the fabled "Woodstock generation," have already funded their own retirement. The hay is in the barn.

Indeed, the Social Security surplus continues to accumulate and will for another decade. According to a report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Social Security will be selffunding at least until 2052, when projected benefits would begin to exceed revenue by a mere 19 percent--more an easily managed actuarial problem than a crisis.

A privately run insurance company with the same profile would be considered flush with assets.

So what's the problem? Remember in 2001 when Bush argued that Clintonera budget surpluses belonged "to the American taxpayers--not to the government--and it should be returned to the people in the form of a tax cut"? He was wrong on both counts, economist Allen W. Smith writes in his pungent book," The Looting of Social Security": "The money did not belong to the government or the general public. It belonged to the Social Security trust fund and to the hard-working Americans whose payroll tax contributions created the Social Security surplus." But now, see, GOP thinkers argue that the surplus is purely theoretical, an "accounting trick," some say; government IOUs that needn't be paid. If so, then salaried workers have been the pigeons in a gigantic money-laundering scam since 1983, remitting payroll taxes that the Bush administration has diverted to fund rebates to his wealthiest supporters. Understand, too, that his proposed "reforms" begin with sheer make-believe.

[b]Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award[/b]. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Corporate-owned Bush's Social Security Alarm is Just Another FlimFlam!

12.16.04 (6:19 am) [edit]

Jesus Christ's Moral Values Would Be Condemned by Hypocrite Bush & His GOP Crooks!

12.16.04 (6:15 am) [edit]

What does the term "moral values" really mean?

Does it mean opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and "filth" in popular culture? Or does it mean sticking up for social and economic justice?

Sex and economics always seem to be the divide on morality. There will always be people who fit into H.L. Mencken's definition of puritanism: "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." But the people who go into conniptions over sex don't seem to be as upset when you point out to them that the gap between rich and poor in the United States is now the widest it has been since the 1920s.

The question that needs to be asked is whether we allow "moral values" to be defined as concern about taking care of those that Jesus called "the least of my brothers" or merely concern about all things gonadal?

I come down on the side of the former. I am no longer a practicing Catholic, but I was profoundly influenced by the church's clear advocacy of social justice. Perhaps I was lucky to have been part of the church during the years immediately after Vatican II when Catholicism was at its most vibrant, and lucky to have been in a parish where the priests weren't hard-line conservatives. But I don't recall ever hearing anything from Leviticus at Sunday Mass. and very little of the wiggier books of the Old Testament. It was the New Testament that was emphasized. It was things like Chapter 25 of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and the words Jesus said in describing how God would ultimately judge us, that ultimately stuck with me:

"For I was hungry and you gave me food...I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. ... Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these, my brothers, you have done it for me."

The New Testament is filled with examples of Jesus talking about economic justice and how the most important ethical/religious test is how we treat the least of our brothers. I don't think Jesus would be too happy looking at George W. Bush's America.

Remember during the 2000 campaign when Bush said Jesus Christ was his chief political influence? When you look at the things Bush has done as president, you can see how empty that claim is.

It was Jesus who said that "it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" and deemed "the love of money" as "the root of all evil."

It was Jesus who tossed the moneychangers out of the temple, and flatly said that one "cannot serve both God and Mammon."

It was Jesus who turned a few loaves and fishes into enough food to feed the multitude who gathered to hear him preach him the Sea of Galilee, and didn't care who got fed.

It was Jesus who warned about the people who make a big show of their faith on Sunday morning and are less than godly the rest of the week. "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them," warned Jesus.

When you strip the teachings of Christ down to the essentials, they are about love for your fellow man and about an active display of that love. That is precisely what is lacking from the version of Christianity that currently controls the Republican Party,

It's bad enough that groups like radical cleric James Dobson's Focus on the Family are trying to push their version of morality onto the nation. It's even worse when they are trying to push their economic beliefs, too.

"Taxing the rich is such a negative approach," Charles Jarvis, a former Reagan administration official who now is executive vice president of Focus on the Family, recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. "The question (social justice activists) should be asking is what creates economic well-being."

The answer to Jarvis' question, in the view of the supply-side Christians, is more tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization of Social Security and the elimination of nearly all social welfare programs. Their free- market version of Christianity wants to the rich to be richer, and never mind pointing out that trickle down economics never works.

This isn't about Christianity. It seems to be the same old reverse Robin Hood scam that the Republican Party is so good at. For all the talk about the rise of the "moral values" voter, one of the best indicators of whether you voted Republican in 2004 was not how often you go to church but how much money you make.

Political scientist and blogger Phil Klinkler was cited in The Village Voice last month offering these choice statistics: in the 2004 election, 58 percent of folks making more than $100,000 a year voted for Bush, compared to 54 percent in 2000. This income group made up 18 percent of the electorate in 2004, up from 15 percent in 2000. By comparison, Bush got roughly the same amount of votes from heavy churchgoers (59 percent in 2000, 61 percent in 2004) with roughly the same turnout (42 percent in 2000, 41 percent in 2004).

All the constant nattering about morals does is obscure the real deal: Republicans have succeeded in replacing the words "conservative ideology" (or "class warfare," if you prefer) with the term "moral values."

"They (the GOP) have reworked the political calculus so thoroughly that liberal definitions of what is or isn't a moral value don't count," concluded Rick Perlstein in The Village Voice last month. "It's as if liberals didn't have any values at all."

And it worked. People voted for Bush because they believed he shared their values. Even though the winning margin was apparently provided by the people who believed they would benefit economically from four more years of Bush, the corporate press and the Democratic Party establishment continues to believe the so-called "values voter" made the difference.

If there was a real push for moral values, George W. Bush wouldn't be president. The real value that Bush and his staunchest supporters seem to believe in is as long as someone other than them gets screwed, all their policies are good. Let Social Security be destroyed. Let the poor pay more taxes. Let some other family's son get blown to bits in Iraq. Love, tolerance and helping your neighbor is a sucker's game. Acquiring and maintaining power is all that matters.

That President Bush can wrap the most reactionary policies in American history in the cloak of Christianity is a perversion of the central tenets of that faith. That he can get away with it is even worse.

[b]Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.[/b] - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Jesus Christ's Moral Values Would Be Condemned by Hypocrite Bush & His GOP Crooks!

12.16.04 (6:15 am) [edit]

Bush's Bloodbath: Iraq Is Getting Worse ...

12.16.04 (6:12 am) [edit]

[b]A Year After Saddam's Capture

Iraq is Getting Worse[/b]

[b]Baghdad[/b] - A suicide bomber blew himself up and killed seven people in Baghdad yesterday on the first anniversary of the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Far from that being the turning point the US had hoped for, the conflict remains bitter a year later. American planes have resumed bombing Fallujah, which the Marines claimed to have captured last month. Seven US Marines were killed in combat in western Iraq at the weekend. And the suicide bombings are creating a growing mood of insecurity in the capital.

"I am a building worker and I was waiting with my two brothers to enter the Green Zone when a bomb exploded near us," said Saleh Hassan Sajid, as he lay with a broken leg and a deep gash in his face at al-Yarmouk hospital. "I heard that one of my brothers was killed and the other is injured."

Kifah Khudair Abbas, 41, who has seven children, was in the back of a car being driven by her brother-in-law when the bomb went off. She was knocked unconscious but it was the Iraqi police who inflicted her worst injury by shooting indiscriminately after the attack. "I got wounded by a bullet in my leg when the police opened fire," said Mrs Abbas as she lay in a hospital.

Her son Abbas Hussein, standing beside her bed, said: "I am very angry about what happened to my mother. The Americans caused all this mess. All these explosions and all this security vacuum is because of the Americans."

The blast of the bomb, which exploded at about 9am, was strong enough to shake the doors and windows of The Independent office two miles away.

The entrances to the Green Zone are peculiarly vulnerable to attack but the casualties are almost invariably Iraqi workers or passers-by. The seat of the interim government and the American and British embassies, the 3 sq km zone is also an easy target for the insurgents' mortars which lob bombs almost every night.

Responsibility for the attack yesterday was claimed on a website by the al-Qa'ida Organisation for Holy War in Iraq reputedly led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It said: "On this blessed day, a lion from the martyrs battalion struck a group of apostates and Americans in the Green Zone."

Iraq's interim President, Ghazi al-Yawar, said in an interview with the BBC yesterday that the US was wrong to dismantle the Iraqi army and security forces.

"Definitely, dissolving the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of the Interior was a big mistake at the time," he told the BBC. He said as soon as Iraq had efficient security forces "we can see the beginning of the withdrawal from our friends and partners and I think it doesn't take years, it will take months".

US commanders have been trying to build up and train Iraqi security forces but there is little sign of this working. In Mosul, supposedly a model for US-Iraqi co-operation a year ago, the 8,000-strong police force dissolved last month when guerrillas attacked. President Yawar, a Sunni tribal chief, said that Iraqis yearned for strong leadership in the current turmoil. He warned: "This could create an environment in which an Iraqi Hitler could emerge like the one created by the defeat of Germany and the humiliation of Germans in World War One."

Members of the Iraqi interim government are much more visible and vocal abroad than they are in Iraq - and enthusiasm for foreign travel among government ministers is a standing joke in the press. Their absence is understandable because they are in danger of assassination in Baghdad and are often confined to the Green Zone and a few heavily defended government buildings.

Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister, said that he hoped that Saddam would stand trial a matter of weeks after the election. Eight of Saddam's former senior aides are reported to have refused food on Monday morning seeking a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross. A US military spokesman said they had eaten two hours later.

The failure to quell the insurgency makes it less and less likely that the election can be held in Sunni Arab districts on 30 January. In Mosul most of the voter registration materials have been destroyed. - http://www.counterpunch.org/c...

Bush's Bloodbath: Iraq Is Getting Worse ...

12.16.04 (6:12 am) [edit]

Corporate Slut Bush's Hostility Towards Clean Air Environmental Protections

12.14.04 (6:20 am) [edit]

While the environmental movement has been energetically battling the Bush Administration's relentless rollback of federal laws and regulations that protect America's environment and public health, a parallel Bush strategy has been grinding forward almost unnoticed.

Taking advantage of the movement's focus on trying to salvage environmental protection at the federal level, the administration has been simultaneously implementing a steady attack on environmental initiatives enacted at state and local levels.

Utilizing both its judicial appointees, an increasingly anti-environmental federal judiciary and its own regulatory powers, the Bush team is making a mockery of conservatives' famously advertised dedication to "states rights."

The Bush Administration is instead promoting a form of libertarian federalism that is hostile to environmental safeguards at all levels. The fallacy of libertarian federalism has been exposed recently by the Washington-based Community Rights Counsel http://www.communityrights.or... (CRC), a nonprofit legal team dedicated to supporting state and local environmental protections. CRC has just released a new book, [i]Redefining Federalism: Listening to the States in Shaping "Our Federalism[/i]", published by the Environmental Law Institute http://www.eli.org/ .

As CRC's Doug Kendall, editor of [i]Redefining Federalism [/i]puts it, "State and local governments recognize that they cannot achieve cleaner air without transportation and land use plans that lead to less driving. They cannot have cleaner rivers, lakes and streams without regulating the farms, shopping centers and subdivisions that are along their banks."

And so, continues Kendall, while strong federal regulations are obviously needed because so many pollutants travel across state borders, it is important that state and local bodies also be able to initiate regulations that pertain to their particular local or regional situations.

Alarmingly, however, Washington's "states rights" administration appears not to be content with merely reversing federal protections. It is also working resolutely to squelch state and local initiatives that might compensate for the damage being done at the federal level.

In California, for example, CRC attorney Jennifer Bradley notes that:

1. Because of its extraordinary air pollution problems, California has been aggressive in passing legislation and regulations to clean up its air. The Bush Administration has tried to stifle California’s innovations at every turn. In August 2003, the Administration told the U.S. Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act banned Southern California from requiring cleaner-fueled cars, trucks, buses and other fleet vehicles.

2. Also in August 2003, the EPA interpreted the Clean Air Act to prohibit EPA from taking any action to combat CO2 emissions. CO2 is the principal global warming gas. This interpretation also appears to prohibit any state from taking bold steps to cut down on CO2 emissions from cars and trucks.

3. In October 2002, the Department of Justice said that California's Zero Vehicle Emissions (ZEV) regulations were pre-empted by the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA). The Justice Department argued that the ZEV regulations were actually fuel economy standards, despite the fact that California gave automakers several ways to meet the regulations that had nothing to do with reducing fuel consumption. - http://www.bushgreenwatch.org...

Corporate Slut Bush's Hostility Towards Clean Air Environmental Protections

12.14.04 (6:19 am) [edit]

Corporate Slut Bush's Hostility Towards Clean Air Environmental Protections

12.14.04 (6:19 am) [edit]

Just Answer the Question, Mr. Rumsfeld (To Shit-Head Rummy: You Ain't My Dictator!)

12.14.04 (6:12 am) [edit]

[b]Just answer the question, Mr. Rumsfeld[/b]

If you don't like the message, as an old spin doctors' motto goes, knock the messenger. That's how some people are reacting to the soldier's question that knocked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld off his game during a town-hall session in Kuwait.

Spc. Thomas J. Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit, wondered out loud why soldiers still have to fortify their canvas-covered Humvees with "hillbilly armor": scrap metal and ballistic-resistant glass that they dig out of landfills for protection. After a brief moment of stony silence, the comment brought a spontaneous eruption of "hooah!" and applause from other troops.

It also brought a remarkably condescending response from Rumsfeld, who may have become too accustomed to treating reporters like annoyingly curious children to shift gears to a tone appropriate for the combat men and women under his command.

"You go to war with the Army you have," he said, "not the one you might want or the one you might wish to have at a later time."

That was a curious comment, considering how much time the Defense Department has had to build up to "the Army we might want" since the end of what the administration calls "major fighting" last year.

Rumsfeld deliberately held down the manpower and support for Iraq against the strong advice of former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki and other generals who said that more troops and equipment would be needed. The Army we have is what Rumsfeld wanted, not what the generals said we needed.

Now, Rumsfeld assured the troops, the Pentagon is pushing its suppliers to produce armored vehicles as fast as possible. But his claim brought swift dispute from some of the makers of armor and Humvees. The factories have been running well below capacity, spokesmen said, but the Pentagon had not taken them up on the offers to produce more armored vehicles.

Meanwhile, improvised explosive devices at roadsides -- against which our troops could use more armor -- have caused about half of America's casualties.

Yet, Rumsfeld added what may be the world's least necessary caveat: "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank; it can (still) be blown up."

Gee, thank you, Mr. Secretary. And happy holidays to you, too.

I don't know when Rumsfeld will take questions from soldiers again, but the day after you-know-what freezes over sounds about right.

Yet, hard as it may be to criticize Spec. Wilson for raising a question that undoubtedly weighs on the mind of each and every soldier in Iraq, some people are finding ways to criticize the combat newspaper correspondent who, it turns out, had a hand in Wilson asking it.

Edward Lee Pitts, a reporter with the Chattanooga, Tenn., Times Free Press who is embedded with Wilson's Tennessee National Guard unit, took credit in an e-mail later leaked to Internet sites that after he learned that reporters would not have a chance to question Rumsfeld, he worked on questions in advance of the meeting with two soldiers from the unit.

"I have been trying to get this story out for weeks," he wrote, "as soon as I found out I would be on an unarmored truck -- and my paper published two stories on it. I believe lives are at stake with so many soldiers going across the border riding with scrap metal as protection. It may be too late for the unit I am with, but hopefully not for those who come after."

In a letter to readers, his newspaper acknowledged that the reporter should have mentioned his role in his reporting, but otherwise, his editors supported him, as they should. He did not deceive anyone. No one forced Wilson to ask the question, which President Bush later agreed was a legitimate question to ask.

Yet, some partisan critics, apparently unable to defend Rumsfeld, attacked Pitts. "He created news in order to cover it," said conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh. ". . . We found out the whole thing today is a setup." A setup to do what? Tell the truth?

A Pentagon spokesman, huffed that the meeting was "intended for soldiers to have dialogue with the secretary" and that no one should have "interfered with that opportunity, whatever the intention." Hey, you want dialogue? You got dialogue!

Here's a bigger question: Why should reporters have to resort to asking questions through soldiers in order to get an answer and, one hopes, some action from the top brass and the Bush administration on a long-standing problem like vehicle armor?

Our uniformed men and women in Iraq are not whining about this. They courageously take on dangerous missions every day. Afterward, they want to get home safe. The rest of us should support them with something more substantive than flag-waving. That's not too much to ask. -
http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20041213-0 52808-2098r.htm" title="http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20041213-0 52808-2098r.htm" target="_blank"http://washingtontimes.com/co...

Just Answer the Question, Mr. Rumsfeld (To Shit-Head Rummy: You Ain't My Dictator!)

12.14.04 (6:12 am) [edit]

Just Answer the Question, Mr. Rumsfeld (To Shit-Head Rummy: You Ain't My Dictator!)

12.14.04 (6:08 am) [edit]

Herr Fuhrer Bush Installs U.S. Nazi-Style HOLOCAUST Regime in Iraq

12.14.04 (5:58 am) [edit]

[b]Iraq President: Citizens That Feel Humiliated Could Lead to 'Iraqi Hitler' [/b]

DUBAI - Long-term instability in Iraq could give birth to an "Iraqi Hitler" if citizens continue to feel humiliated and despondent, Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar has said.

Daily bombings and kidnappings have plagued Iraq since last year's U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein and the relentless Sunni-led insurgency has crippled reconstruction and development projects in the country.

"This could in the long term create an environment in which an Iraqi Hitler could emerge like the one created by the defeat of Germany and the humiliation of Germans in World War I," Yawar told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper in remarks published on Monday.

Iraq's interim leaders have also come under fire for failing to reach out to some alienated factions and U.S.-led offensives on rebel-held cities have led to further divisions.

Yawar -- a Sunni Muslim who was chosen for the largely symbolic post of president in June -- also urged Iraq's neighbors to break their "negative silence" about attacks in Iraq and play a positive role in helping stabilize the country.

"When a fire breaks out in your neighbor's house you should act quickly to put it out, not only for the sake of your neighbor's but also so that you are not forced to put it out in your own home when it spreads there," the president said.

Earlier this month, Iraq and its neighbors made vague promises to improve security cooperation after a meeting in which Iraqi officials voiced growing frustration that neighboring states were not doing enough to halt the flow of people, arms and funds linked to guerrilla violence in Iraq.

Yawar, who has said that parliamentary elections should go ahead on time on January 30, told BBC radio that he expected more violence in Iraq aimed at derailing the landmark polls.

"Their tactical target is to undermine the electoral process and to stop us having our first elections. This is why we see it is a challenge we have to meet.

"The problem is we are not fearing representation, we are fearing the time of the elections. If people can feel safe enough to go and cast their vote," he said, adding that Iraq was "exploring all ideas" to ensure an acceptable majority of people voted as well as balanced representation in the assembly.

Most of the parties representing Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20 percent of the country's 26 million population, recently called for the elections to be postponed for up to six months, saying a free and fair poll could not be held amidst the violence, most of which is affecting Sunni areas.

Yawar said the security situation could not be solved unless Iraqi forces became completely efficient. He said some former army and police officers with clean records should be reinstated, adding that Washington had made a mistake when it dissolved the defense and interior ministries. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Herr Fuhrer Bush Installs U.S. Nazi-Style HOLOCAUST Regime in Iraq

12.14.04 (5:53 am) [edit]

Herr Fuhrer Bush Installs U.S. Nazi-Style HOLOCAUST Regime in Iraq

12.14.04 (5:52 am) [edit]

Herr Fuhrer Bush Installs U.S. Nazi-Style HOLOCAUST Regime in Iraq

12.14.04 (5:51 am) [edit]

Human Rights Group Puts Bush Nazi on Spot Over CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Committed by U.S.

12.14.04 (5:47 am) [edit]

[b]Rights Group Puts Rumsfeld on Spot Over Afghan Deaths [/b]

KABUL - An international rights group said it knows of more prisoners dying in U.S. military custody in Afghanistan and called on Washington to reveal details of the cases.

In an open letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Human Rights Watch revealed two new cases http://www.commondreams.org/n... of deaths in custody and demanded an investigation into a third that took place three months ago.

"It's time for the United States to come clean about crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan," Brad Adams, Asia Division director for Human Rights Watch, said on Monday.

Chris Grey, spokesman for the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Command in Washington, later told Reuters of another two prisoners who had died in U.S. detention, bringing the total number to eight.

The two new cases mentioned by the HRW in its letter to Rumsfeld involved the death of an Afghan army soldier mistakenly arrested with seven others in March last year, and the suspected murder of another detainee in 2002, HRW said.

The soldier, Jamal Naseer, died at the U.S. base at Gardez, southeast of Kabul in March, 2003. The army opened an investigation into the case in May, 2004, the rights group said.

Men detained with Naseer have said U.S. forces punched them, kicked them, hung them upside down, and hit them with sticks or cables. Some said they were soaked in cold water and forced to lie in snow, and given electric shocks to their toes, HRW said in its letter.

The rights group also said there was another previously unpublicised suspected murder of an Afghan detainee by four U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in or before September 2002.

Defense Department documents released to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past week show the Army opened an investigation in September, 2002. HRW says the document states that a captain and three sergeants murdered the Afghan, but it does not know if anyone was prosecuted.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command spokesman identified the dead man as M. Sayari and said he died on August 28, 2002. The investigation had closed, and the case was adjudicated by the Army, the spokesman said without giving further details.

The most recent reported death in custody was that of Sher Mohammad Khan, who died, HRW said, after being arrested during a raid at the village of Lakan in southeast province of Khost on Sept. 24.

The U.S. military said Khan died of a heart attack. Khan's brother was shot dead in the same raid. The military said he was killed in self defense.

The rights group had earlier taken the U.S. military to task over deaths of three other detainees, including two at Bagram airbase in December, 2002, that were ruled as homicides by U.S. military pathologists.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command announced in October that it had recommended 28 people for prosecution in connection with the deaths at Bagram. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Human Rights Group Puts Bush Nazi on Spot Over CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Committed by U.S.

12.14.04 (5:46 am) [edit]

Human Rights Group Puts Bush Nazi on Spot Over CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Committed by U.S.

12.14.04 (5:45 am) [edit]

Human Rights Group Puts Bush Nazi on Spot Over CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Committed by U.S.

12.14.04 (5:44 am) [edit]

REPUBLICAN Senator Chuck Hagel Loses Confidence in Rumsfeld, the "Incompetent"

12.13.04 (5:54 am) [edit]

[b]Senator Chuck Hagel loses confidence with Rumsfeld: http://www.crooksandliars.com... [/b]

On Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer today, Chuck Hagel stated he has completely lost confidence in Donald Rumsfeld over his remark to the soldier that "they have to fight with the army they've got."

Hagel stated that he has talked with many returning soldiers and national guardsmen who returned from the war, and they have all told him that they need body and vehicle armor to protect themselves from bullets. He also questioned the honesty of administration officials who were "going around the country reassuring the American people our troops have everything they need."

Hagel characterized Rumsfeld's performance as "incompetent" and refused to endorse him for another 4 years. "Bush has got to live with his choice for the next four years," said Hagel. Some of his remarks are paraphrased below:

"Our soldiers do not deserve such a flippant answer. That might work in a newsroom, where you can be cute, but not with soldiers about to die."

"I wonder what the parents thought?"

"This defense secretary went to war without enough troops. He's dismissed outside advice, he's dismissed inside advice, and he's dismissed the advice of men and women who have been in the military 25 years."

"When I went alone in a room with these returning soldiers, they've been having these complaints about body armor for the last year."

"Administration officials have been going around the country reassuring the American people our troops have had everything they needed." - http://www.dailykos.com

REPUBLICAN Senator Chuck Hagel Loses Confidence in Rumsfeld, the "Incompetent"

12.13.04 (5:53 am) [edit]

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S "GIFT" TO AMERICA: 'No safer and less free'

12.13.04 (5:48 am) [edit]

"Show me your papers" is a phrase most Americans would never expect to hear in their everyday lives, but with the intelligence bill passed by Congress last week, that's the type of Big-Brother society we're becoming. The de facto national ID that lawmakers approved won't make us any safer, but it will make us much less free.

Most people already use a driver's license -- to cash checks, vote and travel -- so what's wrong with standardizing and consolidating data?

A national ID is an identity thief's dream come true. Under new federal guidelines, state IDs must include personal information, plus a digital photograph, and they must be "machine readable." Businesses might soon be able to swipe your ID to track what you bought, and when and where you bought it. They could be able to use that information themselves or sell it to others.

Since 9/11, Americans have had to weigh tradeoffs between privacy and security. A national ID, though, protects neither. Of the 25 countries most affected by terrorist attacks -- including Israel -- 80% already have national IDs. A national ID hasn't made these nations any safer.

A convincing case has not been made that this system would have stopped 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, because a national ID cannot reveal malicious intentions. For example, some of the 9/11 hijackers obtained identification documents legally, and were in the country legally.

It takes good, old-fashioned police work to follow up on leads and separate the Mohamed Attas and Timothy McVeighs from law-abiding people.

A national ID wouldn't have stopped those with fake IDs, either. An ID is only as secure as the "source documents" it requires. Someone who used a fake birth certificate and fake Social Security card to get an ID will still be able to do so under the new law; the same people who manufacture fake driver's licenses today will be manufacturing fake national IDs tomorrow.

Our privacy isn't the only price we'll pay for this system. Enacting this legislation will cost billions of dollars -- money better spent on real security measures that will keep us both safe and free.

[b]Laura W. Murphy is director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington Legislative Office[/b]. - http://www.usatoday.com/print...

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S "GIFT" TO AMERICA: 'No safer and less free'

12.13.04 (5:45 am) [edit]

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S "GIFT" TO AMERICA: 'No safer and less free'

12.13.04 (5:45 am) [edit]

BUSH OBLITERATES OUR U.S. SOLDIERS; FAILING TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS!!!

12.13.04 (5:42 am) [edit]

[b]'Dubya and the Humvees'[/b]

[i]A Failure to Support the Troops[/i]

As usual, Donald Rumsfeld was in control. At a "town hall" meeting with almost 2,000 American combat soldiers in northern Kuwait, the Secretary of Defense and his PR machine were going to give a "pep rally" to troops about to go into combat. He would prove he cared about the individual troops, that the Bush Administration supported them, and that God and country, at least 51 percent of the mortal voters, were patriots who supported George W. Bush and, thus, the war.

But, just in case there might have been a problem--and in the Bush Administration there are no problems, no weaknesses, no errors--the Secretary of Defense didn't allow any reporters to ask questions. He didn't really need to impose that restriction. For more than two years, the nation's reporters had lamely tossed cream-filled puffs at Rumsfeld, who effortlessly swatted each one into crumbs. Even the public enjoyed seeing the Secretary of Defense pose his own questions and then answer them, or tongue-lash reporters whose inane questions became indicative of how poor the media had prepared for this war.

In an aircraft hangar at Camp Buehring, a transitional camp for soldiers going into the quagmire that was Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld was smiling, joking, and mugging for the cameras, completely in control. And then a soldier spoke out.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Spec. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee National Guard asked to the applause and cheers of hundreds of others. It was a question thousands of Americans had asked but were largely ignored by the establishment media and by sycophantic generals who should have, but didn't, question post-war occupation strategies. It was also unusual for an enlisted person, drilled to obey orders unquestioningly, to even ask such a question, especially of the Secretary of Defense. But these Reservists and National Guardsmen were tired; tired of lies and deceptions from being told the Army would honor their contracts to how quickly they were be paid--and how little protection the sand-slogging soldier was given.

"You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have," said a slightly shaken Rumsfeld, who never acknowledged that it was the Bush Administration that decided how and when to launch the invasion of Iraq. Nor had Rumsfeld admitted it was the Bush Administration that didn't have substantial plans to occupy the country, as Colin Powell and dozens of retired four-star generals and admirals had said prior to that invasion. And so friends and relatives of soldiers bought bullet-proof Kevlar vests to send to the war zone, and millions of Americans sent all kinds of personal supplies to the troops. But now the question to the Secretary was about the lack of armor protection that Americans couldn't afford or couldn't send to protect the troops.

It's "physics," said Rumsfeld, thinking he could dismiss the soldier's question, just as he easily dismissed the questions of those who previously challenged his authority. "It isn't a matter of money. . . . It's a matter of production and capability of doing it," he said. The Army later claimed that at least three-fourths of its vehicles had protection. Gary Motsek, a civilian official for the Army Materiel Command and a former Army colonel, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that about one-third of all convoy vehicles are armored. An analysis by the House Armed Forces Committee revealed only about 10 percent of medium and light military trucks in combat zones were protected.

"The demand has gone up leaps and bounds since 9/11," says Ray Toone, general managing partner of Elite Armoring Co. of Dallas, Tex. Toone says his company has had to increase staff by more than 40 percent in the past three years to meet demand. Most of Elite's customers are CEOs and the wealthy who pay as much as $85,000 to protect their own Hummers, BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, Cadillac Escalades, Chevy Suburbans, Ford Expeditions, and Lincoln Navigators. When Elite finishes with a vehicle, it appears to be just like a floor model. Elite's Level IV protection will stop a 147 grain 7.62 x 51 NATO-certified armor-piercing bullet fired with a velocity of 2,900 feet per second or a 220 grain .30-06 armor-piercing bullet fired at 2,400 feet per second.

During most wars, the United States required private companies to retool their production lines to produce war materiel not for the elite of other countries but for the American war effort. Elite doesn't manufacture armor for the military. "We haven't been contacted," Toole says, but his company is supplying vehicles for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Elite isn't the only company that provides vehicle armor. International Armoring Corp. of Ogden, Utah, in partnership with the Ford Motor Co., produces armored Lincoln Town sedans.

Even if Elite, International Armor, or dozens of other companies aren't retooling for military production, a Pentagon spokesman said that the U.S. is already producing armored Humvees as fast as it can--at least since August 2003, two months after the war began. However, at least two companies with military contracts said they were capable and willing to produce more armor kits for Humvees but were rejected. Matt Salmon of ArmorWorks in Tempe, Ariz., said his company was at 50 percent capacity "and we could do a lot more." He told USA Today that the Pentagon was "aware of it." Robert Mecredy of Armor Holdings of Jacksonville, Fla., said his company, which also had a military contract, could produce at least 100 more armor kits to trucks per month. Dozens of companies are now providing at least parts of Humvee armor or bullet-resistant glass. President Bush, trying to cover Rumsfeld's comments, told military families, "We're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones." More than 1,100 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq; more than 9,000 have been wounded. More than half of them were in military vehicles. It's been 21 months after the invasion, and the mightiest military force in the world, with the mightiest intelligence operation, hasn't provided for the needs of the soldiers. Instead of empty promises and misleading rhetoric, the Bush Administration might consider doing what it falsely claims the anti-war opposition doesn't do--support the troops.

[b]Brasch's latest book is America's Unpatriotic Acts; the Federal Government's Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights (Peter Lang Publishing, Jan. 2005). You may contact Brasch at brasch@bloomu.edu or through his website, www.walterbrasch.com[/b] - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

BUSH OBLITERATES OUR U.S. SOLDIERS; FAILING TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS!!!

12.13.04 (5:41 am) [edit]

HOW FUNDAMENTALISM FAILS AMERICA

12.12.04 (6:51 am) [edit]

Can a country where more people believe in the Devil than in evolution maintain its leadership in the sciences?

That's a question that David Baltimore, Nobel laureate and president of the California Institute of Technology, asked in a recent op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Baltimore believes that "Asia has the potential to blow us out of the water" because their scientists and engineers "are as good as ours, as imaginative as ours - they work longer hours and are more dedicated."

The numbers bear him out. India's colleges and universities are turning out more than 40,000 computer science graduates each year, and the enrollments in those programs are rising while U.S. colleges struggle to fill their science programs. And China produces more 325,000 engineers each year, or five times more than the United States.

By contrast, Baltimore wrote that our nation has a "lack of federal leadership in funding schooling that emphasizes math and science" with a "fragmented educational system that leaves much to local control" and an attitude of "general anti-intellectualism."

China is not a paradise politically, but it isn't having arguments over whether Darwin's theories are correct. It isn't rewriting science textbooks to give the Biblical version of creation equal weight with evolution. It isn't letting narrow political agendas or special interests trump scientific or medical facts.

Anti-intellectualism has always been a powerful force in America. Combine that with religious fundamentalism and you have a recipe for economic, scientific and political disaster. Because scientists in secular societies like Asia and Europe aren't fighting fundamentalist dogma and political hackery at every turn, they are now poised to kick our collective butts. And when this happens, most Americans will never know what hit them.

Why are we still arguing about Darwin? Why are more schools around the country forcing teachers to treat "intelligent design" (the new euphemism for creationism) as something as valid as evolution? Why do two-thirds of Americans (according to a CBS News poll taken last month) favor teaching creationism and evolution side-by-side in public schools?

This is happening because America is now a post-literate, post-logical society where truth and reason no longer matter. Fundamentalism appears to be gaining on modernism and what's become known as the "reality-based community" is treated with total contempt by people willing to distort science (and facts in general) for political gain. All you have to do is look at the way the Bush administration - that perfect nexus of religious fundamentalism and cynical politics - treats science.

Take the issue of global warming. There is little doubt in reputable scientific circles that the earth's climate is changing and that those changes - mainly brought on by the burning of fossil fuels - will ultimately cause major environmental problems.

The rest of the world's reaction to this is to work on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Europe has taken the lead in this area, developing new technologies to reduce energy use and pollution. The United States lags behind because it has been decided by the Bush administration that global warming is a myth. The United States - the nation that consumes about a quarter of the world's energy and natural resources - has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and any other steps toward reducing energy use.

This sort of willful blindness infects every bit of the Bush administration's treatment of science. If the facts conflict with their beliefs or the ability of their corporate patrons to make more money, they either ignore the facts or fund studies that give them the version of the facts they want.

The anti-intellectual, anti-reason myopia that now infects America will come back to haunt us. As this nation turns into a religious cult with nuclear weapons, scientific innovation will migrate to places where radical clerics and corrupt politicians aren't calling the tune. Just as our manufacturing base has migrated overseas, our scientific and intellectual base will travel the same path.

Baltimore wrote in his piece for the Times that the thousands of international students who once filled our math and science programs are now staying home because the schooling in China and India is as good as America's, while the Bush administration has made it increasingly difficult for international students to study here. Both China and India have poured huge sums of money into education, while American schools are falling behind.

The countries not held hostage by fundamentalism will ultimately overtake the United States. The technological lead the United States once had will vanish. We will become an industrialized nation without industry, a technologically advanced society without technologists.

The future belongs to those who aren't slaves to dogma and are willing to innovate. It belongs to societies where intelligence and hard work are rewarded and excellence is celebrated. Sadly, these qualities are not in great supply in the United States today.

[b]Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.[/b] - http://www.american-reporter....,536W/1.html

HOW FUNDAMENTALISM FAILS AMERICA

12.12.04 (6:49 am) [edit]

HOW FUNDAMENTALISM FAILS AMERICA

12.12.04 (6:49 am) [edit]

HOW FUNDAMENTALISM FAILS AMERICA

12.12.04 (6:47 am) [edit]

HOW FUNDAMENTALISM FAILS AMERICA

12.12.04 (6:47 am) [edit]

Lost in a Masquerade

12.10.04 (4:49 am) [edit]

Hoooo-rah! Rummy finally got called on the carpet.

Not by the president, of course, but by troops fighting in Iraq. Some of them are finally fed up enough to rumble about his back-door draft and failure to provide them with the proper armor for their Humvees, leaving them scrambling to improvise with what they call "hillbilly armor."

The defense secretary had been expected to go to Iraq on this trip but spent the day greeting troops in Kuwait instead. Even though Pentagon officials insist that security wasn't an issue, I bet they had to be worried not to travel the extra 40 miles to Iraq.

Rummy met with troops at Camp Buehring, named for Chad Buehring, an Army colonel who died last year when insurgents in Baghdad launched a rocket-propelled grenade into Al Rasheed, a Green Zone hotel once frequented by Western journalists and administration officials that is still closed to guests because - despite all the president's sunny bromides about resolutely prevailing - security in Iraq is relentlessly deteriorating.

As Joe Biden told Aaron Brown of CNN about his visit to Falluja, "They got the biggest hornets' nest, but the hornets have gone up and set up nests other places." He said that a general had run up to him as he was getting into his helicopter to confide, "Senator, anybody who tells you we don't need forces here is a G.D. liar."

Rummy, however, did not hesitate to give the back of his hand to soldiers about to go risk their lives someplace he didn't trouble to go.

He treated Thomas Wilson - the gutsy guardsman from Tennessee who asked why soldiers had "to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" - as if he were a pesky Pentagon reporter. The defense chief used the same coldly cantankerous tone and squint he displays in press briefings, an attitude that long ago wore thin. He did everything but slap the kid in the hospital bed.

In one of his glib "Nothing's perfect," "Freedom's untidy" and "Stuff happens" maxims, Rummy told the soldier: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have."

It wouldn't make a good Army slogan, and it was a lousy answer, especially when our kids are getting blown up every day in a war ginned up on administration lies. Remember when the president promised in the campaign that the troops would have all the body armor they needed?

These young men and women went to Iraq believing the pap they were told: they'd have a brief battle, chocolate, flowers, gratitude. Instead, they were thrust into a prolonged and savage insurgent war without the troop levels or armor they needed because the Pentagon's neocons had made plans based on their spin - that turning Iraq into a democracy would be a cakewalk. And because Rummy wanted to make his mark by experimenting with a lean, slimmed-down force. And because Rummy kept nattering on about a few "dead-enders," never acknowledging the true force, or true nationalist fervor, of the opposition.

The dreams of Rummy and the neocons were bound to collide. But it's immoral to trap our troops in a guerrilla war without essential, lifesaving support and matériel just so a bunch of officials who have never been in a war can test their theories.

How did this dangerous chucklehead keep his job? He must have argued that because of the president's re-election campaign, the military was constrained from doing what it is trained to do, to flatten Falluja and other insurgent strongholds. He must have told W. he deserved a chance to try again after the election.

He had a willing audience. W. likes officials who feed him swaggering fictions instead of uncomfortable facts.

The president loves dressing up to play soldier. To rally Camp Pendleton marines facing extended deployments in Iraq, he got gussied up in an Ike D-Day-style jacket, with epaulets and a big presidential seal on one lapel and his name and "Commander in Chief" on the other.

When he really had a chance to put on a uniform and go someplace where the enemy was invisible and there was no exit strategy and our government was not leveling with us about how bad it was, W. wasn't so high on the idea. But now that it's just a masquerade - giving a morale boost to troops heading off someplace where the enemy's invisible and there's no exit strategy and the government's not leveling with us about how bad it is - hey, man, it's cool.

[b]Maureen Dowd, New York Times[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1...

Lost in a Masquerade

12.10.04 (4:49 am) [edit]

When Fundamentalism and Political Hackery Trump Science

12.10.04 (4:46 am) [edit]

Can a country where more people believe in the devil than in evolution maintain its leadership in the sciences?

That's a question that David Baltimore, Nobel laureate and president of the California Institute of Technology, asked in a recent op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Baltimore believes that "Asia has the potential to blow us out of the water" because their scientists and engineers "are as good as ours, as imaginative as ours - they work longer hours and are more dedicated."

The numbers bear him out. India's colleges and universities are turning out more than 40,000 computer science graduates each year, and the enrollments in those programs are rising while U.S. colleges struggle to fill their science programs. And China produces more 325,000 engineers each year, or five times more than the United States.

By contrast, Baltimore wrote that our nation has a "lack of federal leadership in funding schooling that emphasizes math and science" with a "fragmented educational system that leaves much to local control" and an attitude of "general anti-intellectualism."

China is not a paradise politically, but it isn't having arguments over whether Darwin's theories are correct. It isn't rewriting science textbooks to give the Biblical version of creation equal weight with evolution. It isn't letting narrow political agendas or special interests trump scientific or medical facts.

Anti-intellectualism has always been a powerful force in America. Combine that with religious fundamentalism and you have a recipe for economic, scientific and political disaster. Because scientists in secular societies like Asia and Europe aren't fighting fundamentalist dogma and political hackery at every turn, they are now poised to kick our collective butts. And when this happens, most Americans will never know what hit them.

Why are we still arguing about Darwin? Why are more schools around the country forcing teachers to treat "intelligent design" (the new euphemism for creationism) as something as valid as evolution? Why do two-thirds of Americans (according to a CBS News poll taken last month) favor teaching creationism and evolution side-by-side in public schools?

This is happening because America is now a post-literate, post-logical society where truth and reason no longer matter. Fundamentalism appears to be gaining on modernism and what's become known as the "reality-based community" is treated with total contempt by people willing to distort science (and facts in general) for political gain. All you have to do is look at the way the Bush administration - that perfect nexus of religious fundamentalism and cynical politics - treats science.

Take the issue of global warming. There is little doubt in reputable scientific circles that the earth's climate is changing and that those changes - mainly brought on by the burning of fossil fuels - will ultimately cause major environmental problems.

The rest of the world's reaction to this is to work on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Europe has taken the lead in this area, developing new technologies to reduce energy use and pollution. The United States lags behind because it has been decided by the Bush administration that global warming is a myth. The United States - the nation that consumes about a quarter of the world's energy and natural resources - has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and any other steps toward reducing energy use.

This sort of willful blindness infects every bit of the Bush administration's treatment of science. If the facts conflict with their beliefs or the ability of their corporate patrons to make more money, they either ignore the facts or fund studies that give them the version of the facts they want.

The anti-intellectual, anti-reason myopia that now infects America will come back to haunt us. As this nation turns into a religious cult with nuclear weapons, scientific innovation will migrate to places where radical clerics and corrupt politicians aren't calling the tune. Just as our manufacturing base has migrated overseas, our scientific and intellectual base will travel the same path.

Baltimore wrote in his piece for the Times that the thousands of international students who once filled our math and science programs are now staying home because the schooling in China and India is as good as America's and the Bush administration has made it increasingly difficult for international students to study here. Both China and India have poured huge sums of money into education, while American schools are falling behind.

The countries not held hostage by fundamentalism will ultimately overtake the United States. The technological lead the United States once had will vanish. We will become an industrialized nation without industry, a technologically advanced society without technologists.

The future belongs to those who aren't slaves to dogma and are willing to innovate. It belongs to societies where intelligence and hard work are rewarded and excellence is celebrated. Sadly, these qualities are not in great supply in the United States today.

[b]Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). [/b]

When Fundamentalism and Political Hackery Trump Science

12.10.04 (4:45 am) [edit]

When Fundamentalism and Political Hackery Trump Science

12.10.04 (4:45 am) [edit]

Of course, with the Bushies we know it gets sillier and bloodier too ...

12.08.04 (7:37 am) [edit]

[b]Killed Unarmed Iraqis, Ex-Marine Tells Hearing

U.S. deserter was right to flee his post, immigration and refugee board told[/b]

A former U.S. marine testified yesterday that the U.S. military "murdered" civilians in Iraq and that he pumped 500 rounds of bullets into vehicles that failed to stop at military checkpoints.

Jimmy Massey, a former marine staff sergeant, told an immigration and refugee board hearing in Toronto that he and his fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children and even shot a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms in the air.

"We killed the man. We fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle," testified Mr. Massey, a marine for 12 years who was honourably discharged last year. "The company gunnery sergeant came running over and began yelling, 'You just shot a guy with his hands up.' "

Mr. Massey testified in the refugee claim of U.S. army deserter Jeremy Hinzman, 26, who sought asylum in Canada after his application to be a conscientious objector was rejected. Mr. Hinzman said he did not want to be deployed to Iraq with his 82nd Airborne Division because he feared he would be forced to commit war crimes and atrocities in a conflict he considered illegal.

IRB member Brian Goodman has said he won't consider evidence about the legality of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, but yesterday Mr. Massey was permitted to testify about the killing of civilians.

The former marine said none of the Iraqis they shot had suicide bombing materials in their vehicles. He speculated that they didn't understand the hand signals and signage indicating they should stop.

On another occasion, marines reacted to a stray bullet by killing a small group of unarmed protesters and bystanders, said Mr. Massey, who said he has nightmares and posttraumatic stress disorder. "I was deeply concerned about the civilian casualties," he said. "What they were doing was committing murder."

[b]More [/b]... http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Republicans at it again ...

12.08.04 (7:24 am) [edit]

[b]Congress, the Bush-Cheney Gang & the "Shadow Government"[/b]

"[i]It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress[/i]." —Mark Twain

America is in deep trouble because of its warmongering in the Middle East. A big part of the reason for this fact is that the US Constitution is considered just a piece of paper by most of the elected politicos in Washington. The other problem, even more potentially serious, is that the Iraqi War is bringing into focus the activities of a sinister force that has no allegiance to our democracy, yet it seems to exercise enormous influence over our government. What, if anything, can be done about these matters?

There are, at least two constitutional arguments to be made against the Iraqi War. The first is that it violates Art. 1, Sec. 8 (11) of that document, since the US Congress failed to declare war. The second is that the war was initiated by the Bush-Cheney Gang not to provide for "the common defense" or to promote "the general welfare," which are two of the noble objects of our Republic, but mostly to enrich the behind-the-scene Wire Pullers, who operate as a kind of "Shadow Government."

From its murderous, terror-filled "Shock and Awe" inception on March 20, 2003, ([b]This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer[/b] http://www.cswnet.com/~dgh/3untitled.html ) to today's lethal military operations, the Iraqi War has led to untold deaths, mass mayhem ([b]Falluja In Pictures[/b] http://fallujapictures.blogsp... ) and a waste of our valuable resources. It has also created more enemies for the US in the Islamic World and is a stain on our Republic. ([b]Where Your income tax Money Really goes[/b] http://www.warresisters.org/p... ).

[b]The background[/b]: On or before Oct. 10, 2002, two of the leading members of the Congress, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT), both with ties to Israel's Ariel Sharon and to the Neocons, like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, led the charge to enact Joint House Resolution 114. They were aided and abetted by other rabid warmongers, such as Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) and Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA). JHR 114 authorizes the, “President...to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary...regarding Iraq.” ([b]War on Iraq - Conceived In Israel[/b] http://www.currentconcerns.ch... ).

[b]More[/b] ... http://baltimorechronicle .com...