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Pray for John Paul Stevens.
The court made an error and they should of allowed his appeal to go through. This case had no business going up that high, he probably had a strong appeal and would of won, so they took him out of the system.
Don’t Listen to What the Man Says
June 17, 2007
Editorial
If the Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority, wanted to announce that it was getting out of the fairness business, it could hardly have done better than its decision last week in the case of Keith Bowles. The court took away Mr. Bowles’s right to challenge his murder conviction in a ruling that was so wrong and mean-spirited that it seemed like an outtake from MTV’s practical joke show “Punk’d.”
Mr. Bowles, an Ohio inmate, challenged his conviction in federal district court and lost. The court told Mr. Bowles that he had until Feb. 27 to appeal. He filed the appeal on Feb. 26, and was ready to argue why he was wrongly convicted. But it turned out the district court made a mistake. The appeal should have been filed by Feb. 24.
The Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, that Mr. Bowles was out of luck, and his appeal was invalid. So much for heeding a federal judge.
The decision was wrong for many reasons. The Supreme Court has made clear in its past rulings that deadlines like this are not make-or-break. Appeals could still be heard, the court recognized in the past, if there were “unique circumstances” that accounted for the delay. Clearly, following an order from a federal judge is such a circumstance.
Courts also have the authority to create an exception to the rules in the interest of fairness. The Supreme Court has recognized that an “equitable exception” should be granted when a party has relied on an order from a federal judge. By refusing to do so now, Justice David Souter argued for the dissenters, the court was saying that “every statement by a federal court is to be tagged with the warning ‘Beware of the judge.’ ”
The four dissenters distilled this case perfectly when they said, “it is intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/opinion/17sun3.html?pagewanted=print
A Bid to Litigate the Legality of U.S.-Sponsored Torture in Federal Court: Will It Succeed?
By ANTHONY J. SEBOK
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/sebok/20070605.html
This should be an interesting court case, if it is allowed to proceed it could pave the way for a flurry of cases involving the private sector.
And you can tack on his stooge Gonzales as well.
Original dpb5, the flat tax reminds me very much of the 'fair' tax...and here's what I think of the 'fair tax' (not much)....
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=19807967
That was four pages of an excellent article that anyone who is pro-war should be reading. Unfortunately, they won't.
Very interesting link here discussing a FLAT TAX vs. a PROGRESSIVE TAX...
Please read the following and post your thoughts...
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=30742073&postID=4394291755320550950
Can You Believe This War Is Still Going On?
By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted May 26, 2007.
After committing troops to a war that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions without homes, George W. Bush says he prays for safety and peace. Way to go, Georgie, shift the responsibility for your mess to God.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/52290/?page=1
War Without End
Published: May 27, 2007
Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President Bush has been swaggering around like a victorious general because he cowed a wobbly coalition of Democrats into dropping their attempt to impose a time limit on his disastrous misadventure.
By week’s end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit of parliamentary strong-arming had left him free to ignore not just the Democrats, but also the vast majority of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions of victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice of young Americans’ lives.
And, ever faithful to his illusions, Mr. Bush was insisting that he was the only person who understood the true enemy.
Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, Mr. Bush declared that Al Qaeda is “public enemy No. 1” in Iraq and that “the terrorists’ goal in Iraq is to reignite sectarian violence and break support for the war here at home.” The next day, in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush turned on a reporter who had the temerity to ask about Mr. Bush’s declining credibility with the public, declaring that Al Qaeda is “a threat to your children” and accusing him of naïvely ignoring the danger.
It’s upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging sectarian violence in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that he does not recognize that Americans’ support for the war broke down many bloody months ago. But we have grown accustomed to this president’s disconnect from reality and his habit of tilting at straw men, like Americans who don’t care about terrorism because they question his mismanagement of the war or don’t worry about what will happen after the United States withdraws, as it inevitably must.
The really disturbing thing about Mr. Bush’s comments is his painting of the war in Iraq as an obvious-to-everyone-but-the-wrongheaded fight between the United States and a young Iraqi democracy on one side, and Al Qaeda on the other. That fails to acknowledge that the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq is not a democracy and is at war with many of its own people. And it removes all pressure from the Iraqi leadership — and Mr. Bush — to halt the sectarian fighting and create a real democracy.
There is no doubt that organized Islamist terrorism — call it Al Qaeda or by any other name — is a dire threat. There is also no doubt that terrorists entered Iraq — mostly after the war began.
We, too, believe that Iraq has to be made as stable as possible so the United States can withdraw its troops without unleashing even more chaos and destruction. But Mr. Bush is not doing that and his version of reality only makes it more unlikely. The only solution lies with the Iraqi leaders, who have to stop their sectarian blood feud and make a real attempt to form a united government. That is their best chance to stabilize the country, allow the United States to withdraw and, yes, battle Al Qaeda.
The Democrats who called for imposing benchmarks for political progress on the Iraqis, combined with a withdrawal date for American soldiers, were trying to start that process. It’s a shame they could not summon the will and discipline to keep going, but we hope they have not given up. As disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense than Mr. Bush’s denial of Iraq’s civil war and his war-without-end against terror.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/opinion/27sun1.html?hp
I am just stunned that Congress has decided to put off till June the no confidence vote on Gonzo.
The SOB should be impeached NOW. I can tell you right now all the incumbents can kiss my vote goodbye.
It's all part of the package of a total police state, either you are with us or you are against us.
The machine grinds on...
The Justice Dept scandal has me very disturbed. bascially the Bill of Rights has been run through a shredder and Americans are too dumb to figure it out.
New Bush Scandal Helping Big Oil Companies Hide Billions From Government at Taxpayer Expense.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052507O.shtml
It's just one thing right after another like a row of dominoes falling down in a line.
There is no doubt we should all be concerned for our children's futures in light of the travesty that has taken place at the Department of Justice.
“If there’s wrongdoing, it will be taken care of,” Mr. Bush said at a Rose Garden news conference, speaking of internal Justice Department inquiries into the dismissals of the United States attorneys and whether politics influenced how lower-level jobs were filled.
Democrats said that Mr. Gonzales’s credibility had been further eroded by the testimony on Wednesday of Monica M. Goodling, a former aide to the attorney general. Testifying under a grant of immunity from prosecution, Ms. Goodling said she had “crossed the line” in using inappropriate political considerations to screen applicants for nonpartisan legal jobs at the Justice Department.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/washington/25attorneys.html?_r=1&ref=washington&oref=slogi...
Ms. Goodling's resume consists mostly of her being class president in college. And yet she was responsible for hiring and firings at the DOJ.
And even after a DOJ investigation started it's been revealed that Gonzales talked to her about the investigation and upcoming testimony. Then testified under oath to Congress that no such conversation took place.
However after Ms Goodling's testimony this week it; the DOJ released a statement...
Justice Department officials said that Mr. Gonzales was not seeking to shape her recollections, but was trying to comfort Ms. Goodling at a difficult moment when she was upset at the prospect of giving up her job on his staff.
Bottom line Gonzales clearly has violated the law and lied to Congress under oath.
It speaks volumes of having him at Justice along with Goodling who is too stupid to realize just how used she was. And how little she knew of the law to begin with.
Unlike federal judges, immigration judges are civil service employees, to be appointed by the attorney general based on professional qualifications, not their politics.
In Ms. Goodling’s tenure, vacancies were apparently not always posted and she selected lawyers to be considered for interviews based in part on their loyalty to the Republican Party and the Bush administration, she said in her testimony on Wednesday.
The judges appointed during her tenure include Mark H. Metcalf, a former Justice Department lawyer and Republican Congressional candidate in Kentucky.
Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said new procedures had already been put into place, including the advertising of vacancies and the initial review of applicants by the office of the chief immigration judge.
“There is no disagreement within the department, including between the civil division and the office of legal counsel, about whether the civil service laws apply to the appointment of immigration judges,” Mr. Boyd said in a statement, disputing a claim by Ms. Goodling that political views of the applicants could be considered. “They do apply.”
And lets not forget Gonzales rush to Ashcroft's bedside to get him to sign off on the illegal wiretap program. Or the suspension of habeas corpus last November.
We should all be concerned for our children's future. This admin can essentially now lock them up and throw away the key. And their isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it.
The Bill of Rights has been run through the shredder and all congress has to offer is a No confidence vote now put off till next month.
The House should be impeaching the bastard NOW! A third grader could draw up the bill of impeachment.
"The ignorance, arrogance and incompetence of the American architects of the invasion and it's aftermath..." remains squarely on The Decider's shoulders. The chaos now taking place in Iraq allows the architect/s to do what they planned in the beginning - arrange for the oil distribution.
How to end the war in Iraq
by Dennis Jett
http://www.opednews.com
Despite all the rhetoric and resolutions emanating from Washington, two fundamental facts about the war in Iraq won't change. The killing will continue, but not all of it has to. Iraqis will continue to die in large numbers regardless of what the United States does. The troop surge will shift the violence to other locations or cause the combatants to go underground for a time, but will do nothing to resolve the reasons for the fighting.
The ignorance, arrogance and incompetence of the American architects of the invasion and its aftermath have created the perfect storm of factors that made the current civil war possible and inevitable for years to come. The deepening of the sectarian divide, the struggle over who gets to steal the oil revenue and the proxy fight for influence being waged by other countries in the region all ensure that peace will not break out soon.
The war is lost The politicians in Washington, whether they support the war or oppose it, do not want to end it at all costs, however. Those who pass legislation calling for a fixed timetable for withdrawing American troops do so secure in the knowledge that it will never be enacted. They would not pass a bill that would actually take effect because they are not about to remove the Iraqi albatross from around President Bush's neck and hang it around their own.
Those political leaders who say they support the war know it is lost, but cannot admit it. Their constituents cannot accept the idea of defeat. What has been won, how or why does not matter. In the Vince Lombardi school of international relations, winning is the only thing. So, for them, there is no accepting any outcome called defeat even though invading Iraq has not made us safer and debilitates us more every day. Instead they have to stay the course hoping something they can call victory will miraculously appear. And so the conflict continues, but it doesn't have to, at least for the Americans. While Iraqis will fight and die for some time to come, the Americans can withdraw now.
Chaos in the region At one point not so long ago, the war was sold to the voters with the claim that creating a democracy in Iraq would be easy and would spread across the region. Now the excuse for having to stay is that the chaos in Iraq will engulf the region. Both these variations of the domino theory are wrong, and the damage we are doing to our national security by staying is far greater than we would do by getting out.
To make our exit all we really need to do is select a date to celebrate our victory in Iraq. Opponents of the war will not have to worry about assuming responsibility for the war or any impact on the verdict of history. President Bush is sure that historians 50 years from now will look back on him as a visionary leader.
With $500 billion squandered already and more than that yet to be spent repairing the damage to our armed forces, the true cost of Mr. Bush's trillion-dollar disaster will escape no historian. Those politicians who profess to support the war should also be content with a declaration of victory. By asserting that we won there would be time for many voters to have forgotten the war by the next election. The declaration can't unfortunately come immediately, however, since the recent surge can't be expected to show results for a few more months. By saying we won then, no more terrorists would be emboldened and no one would doubt American resolve.
Where's the good news? Some might question whether proclaiming victory should not be driven by the situation on the ground. That has never affected administration policy or pronouncements in the past, so why should it matter now? Besides the announcement is the perfect response to all those who complain that the good news from Iraq is not being reported. To make it even more patriotic and above questioning, the date for V-I Day could be set for the Fourth of July. So let's support our troops and our politicians by bringing the former home this summer and letting the latter find a way out as well.
Dennis Jett is a former career diplomat, he served as Ambassador to Peru and Mozambique, on the National Security Council and in Argentina, Israel, Malawi and Liberia. He has a Ph.D. in international relations and his dissertation entitled "Why Peacekeeping Fails" has been published by Palgrave. He has been interviewed on Jim Lehrer News Hour, CNN, NPR and other national news programs and has written over 80 opinion pieces for major newspapers.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_dennis_j_070409_how_to_end_the_war_i.htm
I'm only surprised we haven't seen more of this.
Ex-Aide Details a Loss of Faith in the President
By JIM RUTENBERG
AUSTIN, Tex., March 29 — In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush’s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.
A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.
Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.
In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.
He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.
“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,” he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.”
In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush’s inner circle to break so publicly with him.
He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.
Mr. Dowd, a crucial part of a team that cast Senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper who could not be trusted with national security during wartime, said he had even written but never submitted an op-ed article titled “Kerry Was Right,” arguing that Mr. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and 2004 presidential candidate, was correct in calling last year for a withdrawal from Iraq.
“I’m a big believer that in part what we’re called to do — to me, by God; other people call it karma — is to restore balance when things didn’t turn out the way they should have,” Mr. Dowd said. “Just being quiet is not an option when I was so publicly advocating an election.”
Mr. Dowd’s journey from true believer to critic in some ways tracks the public arc of Mr. Bush’s political fortunes. But it is also an intensely personal story of a political operative who at times, by his account, suppressed his doubts about his professional role but then confronted them as he dealt with loss and sorrow in his own life.
In the last several years, as he has gradually broken his ties with the Bush camp, one of Mr. Dowd’s premature twin daughters died, he was divorced, and he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic. Mr. Dowd said he had become so disillusioned with the war that he had considered joining street demonstrations against it, but that his continued personal affection for the president had kept him from joining protests whose anti-Bush fervor is so central.
Mr. Dowd, 45, said he hoped in part that by coming forward he would be able to get a message through to a presidential inner sanctum that he views as increasingly isolated. But, he said, he holds out no great hope. He acknowledges that he has not had a conversation with the president.
Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said Mr. Dowd’s criticism is reflective of the national debate over the war.
“It’s an issue that divides people,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Even people that supported the president aren’t immune from having their own feelings and emotions.”
He said he disagreed with Mr. Dowd’s description of the president as isolated and with his position on withdrawal. He said Mr. Dowd, a friend, has “sometimes expressed these sentiments” in private conversation, though “not in such detail.”
During the interview with Mr. Dowd on a slightly overcast afternoon in downtown Austin, he was a far quieter man than the cigar-chomping general that he was during Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign.
Soft-spoken and somewhat melancholy, he wore jeans, a T-shirt and sandals in an office devoid of Bush memorabilia save for a campaign coffee mug and a photograph of the first couple with his oldest son, Daniel. The photograph was taken one week before the 2004 election, and one day before Daniel was to go to boot camp.
Over Mexican food at a restaurant that was only feet from the 2000 campaign headquarters, and later at his office just up the street, Mr. Dowd recounted his political and personal journey. “It’s amazing,” he said. “In five years, I’ve only traveled 300 feet, but it feels like I’ve gone around the world, where my head is.”
Mr. Dowd said he decided to become a Republican in 1999 and joined Mr. Bush after watching him work closely with Bob Bullock, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas, who was a political client of Mr. Dowd and a mentor to Mr. Bush.
“It’s almost like you fall in love,” he said. “I was frustrated about Washington, the inability for people to get stuff done and bridge divides. And this guy’s personality — he cared about education and taking a different stand on immigration.”
Mr. Dowd established himself as an expert at interpreting polls, giving Karl Rove, the president’s closest political adviser, and the rest of the Bush team guidance as they set out to woo voters, slash opponents and exploit divisions between Democratic-leaning states and Republican-leaning ones.
In television interviews in 2004, Mr. Dowd said that Mr. Kerry’s campaign was proposing “a weak defense,” and that the voters “trust this president more than they trust Senator Kerry on Iraq.”
But he was starting to have his own doubts by then, he said.
He said he thought Mr. Bush handled the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks well but “missed a real opportunity to call the country to a shared sense of sacrifice.”
He was dumbfounded when Mr. Bush did not fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after revelations that American soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Several associates said Mr. Dowd chafed under Mr. Rove’s leadership. Mr. Dowd said he had not spoken to Mr. Rove in months but would not discuss their relationship in detail.
Mr. Dowd said, in retrospect, he was in denial.
“When you fall in love like that,” he said, “and then you notice some things that don’t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a relationship, you say ‘No no, no, it’ll be different.’ ”
He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.
He describes as further cause for doubt two events in the summer of 2005: the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the president’s refusal, around the same time that he was entertaining the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch, to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq.
“I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up,” he said. “That it’s not the same, it’s not the person I thought.”
He said that during his work on the 2006 re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, which had a bipartisan appeal, he began to rethink his approach to elections.
“I think we should design campaigns that appeal not to 51 percent of the people,” he said, “but bring the country together as a whole.”
He said that he still believed campaigns must do what it takes to win, but that he was never comfortable with the most hard-charging tactics. He is now calling for “gentleness” in politics. He said that while he tried to keep his own conduct respectful during political combat, he wanted to “do my part in fixing fissures that I may have been part of.”
His views against the war began to harden last spring when, in a personal exercise, he wrote a draft opinion article and found himself agreeing with Mr. Kerry’s call for withdrawal from Iraq. He acknowledged that the expected deployment of his son Daniel was an important factor.
He said the president’s announcement last fall that he was re-nominating the former United Nations ambassador John R. Bolton, whose confirmation Democrats had already refused, was further proof to him that Mr. Bush was not seeking consensus with Democrats.
He said he came to believe Mr. Bush’s views were hardening, with the reinforcement of his inner circle. But, he said, the person “who is ultimately responsible is the president.” And he gradually ventured out with criticism, going so far as declaring last month in a short essay in Texas Monthly magazine that Mr. Bush was losing “his gut-level bond with the American people,” and breaking more fully in this week’s interview.
“If the American public says they’re done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want,” Mr. Dowd said. “They’re saying, ‘Get out of Iraq.’ ”
Mr. Dowd’s friends from Mr. Bush’s orbit said they understood his need to speak out. “Everyone is going to reflect on the good and the bad, and everything in between, in their own way,” said Nicolle Wallace, communications director of Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign, a post she also held at the White House until last summer. “And I certainly respect the way he’s doing it — these are his true thoughts from a deeply personal place.” Ms. Wallace said she continued to have “enormous gratitude” for her years with Mr. Bush.
Mr. Bartlett, the White House counselor, said he understood, too, though he said he strongly disagreed with Mr. Dowd’s assessment. “Do we know our critics will try to use this to their advantage? Yes,” he said. “Is that perfect? No. But you can respectfully disagree with someone who has been supportive of you.”
Mr. Dowd does not seem prepared to put his views to work in 2008. The only candidate who appeals to him, he said, is Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, because of what Mr. Dowd called his message of unity. But, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.”
He added, “I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/washington/01adviser.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewan....
A Look at the Moon behind the Bush'es
- an 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise' >-
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/021707.html
Moon/Bush 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise'
By Robert Parry
February 17, 2007
From petty local scams to international money-laundering, the
Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s political/media/business/religious empire
has all the looks of a global “ongoing criminal enterprise,”
albeit one with enough powerful friends in Washington
to protect it from serious consequences.
Benefiting from relationships with the Bush family and other
prominent Republicans, Moon’s Unification Church slips away from
1 illegal scheme after another - despite overwhelming evidence and
first-person admissions about a systematic pattern of the criminality.
Somehow U.S. authorities never put two and two together.
Even Moon’s 1982 felony conviction for tax evasion arising from
an earlier money-laundering scheme and public confessions from
his ex-daughter-in-law and other church insiders about later financial
conspiracies don’t clue in the feds to the bigger picture before them.
So, while prosecutors mostly look the other way, Moon continues
to pour an estimated $100 million a year into his influential
Washington Times newspaper & other pro-Republican media outlets.
Additional millions have gone to fund right-wing political conferences;
to pay speaking fees to world leaders, such as former President
George H.W. Bush; and to bail political allies out of financial troubles.
The latest example of a Moon-connected operation getting a legal
break despite breaking the law was the exposure of a decade-long
scheme led by a local pastor of Moon’s Unification Church that
poached thousands of baby leopard sharks from San Francisco Bay.
The undersized sharks were sold illegally to private buyers
in the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
The local pastor, Kevin Thompson, claimed that Moon personally
approved the scheme and encouraged its expansion.
In a recorded sermon from 2003, Thompson told his congregation that
Moon was excited when he heard about the shark-catching operation.
“He told me, you know you need 20 boats out there fishing,”
Thompson said. “He had this big plan drawn out.”
Though the poaching never reached that scale, it did use
church-owned boats and stored the catch at a San Leandro, CA,
distribution center for one of the largest U.S. sushi wholesalers,
True World Foods Inc., a business affiliated
with the Unification Church. [AP, Feb. 12, 2007]
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern\
_california/16683614.htm
Despite the evidence of these close Moon connections to the illegal
scheme, the Bush administration reached a “non-prosecution”
agreement with Moon’s church in which it agreed to pay
$500,000 to help restore the damaged habitat.
(While U.S. Attorney Kevin V. Ryan was deliberating this case,
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanded his resignation as
1 of 9 U.S. attorneys to be replaced by Bush political loyalists.)
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16555903.htm
For his part, pastor Thompson pleaded guilty and was
sentenced to one year in prison. Another church member,
John Newberry, received a six-month sentence. But senior
Unification Church officials denied that Moon, now 87, had
“any kind of personal knowledge or involvement with the details
or the particulars,” according to church spokesman Phillip Schanker,
who claimed that any conversation between Moon and Thompson
would have been a casual chat about fishing, nothing more.
Small & Big Scams
Still, the poaching scheme fits with the church’s long-standing
pattern of financing its local activities through relatively small scams.
Bigger-ticket items, like the Washington Times, rely on smuggling
vast sums of money from overseas, according to former
church insiders, including Nansook Hong, Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law.
In both Asia and South America, Moon’s operations
have been linked to major crime syndicates including
the Japanese yakuza and Latin American cocaine cartels.
When I was investigating Moon’s activities in the mid-1990s,
I interviewed several former church insiders who explained
how the smaller and bigger operations meshed.
Local church-related operations were expected to finance
themselves often through petty criminality while the national
business operations served to launder overseas money.
For instance, John Stacey, a former New York University
student who was recruited into Moon’s organization in 1992
and became a youth leader in the Pacific Northwest,
said small-scale fraud covered local expenses.
At first, like most newcomers, Stacey worked as part of
"mobile fund-raising teams" that traveled by van from town to town
selling flowers and other cheap items. The fund-raisers
always hid their links to Moon and presented themselves
as students raising money for some worthy cause, Stacey said.
Stacey said he broke that rule only once, when going door to door
selling wind chimes on an island off the coast of Alaska.
"I told everyone that I was doing this for Reverend Sun Myung Moon,"
Stacey said. "I didn't make a penny.
It was the only time in four years that I was honest."
With his intelligence, hard work and clean looks, Stacey rose quickly
through the ranks. He opened an office for Moon’s Collegiate
Association for the Research of Principles in Portland, Oregon,
& became CARP’s Pacific Northwest leader in Seattle, Washington.
The fund-raising schemes also grew more sophisticated
as the church phased out the "mobile fund-raising teams"
because of bad publicity. Instead of roaming from city to city,
local chapters sold gift items at mall kiosks before Christmas.
But always, Stacey said, there was the deception & the certainty that
the end,advancing the cause of Moon's church justified the means.
Stacey said his chapter made $80,000 one holiday season
by working a bait-and-switch scheme: the kiosk would display a
decorative light which looked stunning with a powerful halogen bulb.
But after the purchase, the customer was given a boxed lamp
which contained a "much cheaper" and dimmer bulb.
“I was a con artist,” Stacey told me.
"When I looked at the [church] leaders, they were all con artists. …
Reverend Moon is training a race of very charming manipulators. ...
He's creating almost an elite force of people who are very charming
but very dangerous." [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“One Mother’s Tale: Moon & Her Son.”]
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/021707a.html
Widows & Pagodas
Moon’s organization implemented similar but more lucrative schemes
in Japan where superstitious widows proved to be easy marks for the
sale of mini.pagodas & other ornaments dedicated to dead loved ones.
Some of this money was transferred to the United States.
Eventually, however, thousands of consumer complaints led
to legal judgments against Moon’s operation, with out-of-court
settlements reportedly reaching into the 100's of millions of dollars.
[See, for instance, this report from the Wash. Post, Aug. 4, 1996.]
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/55a/018.html
While some Moon watchers believe these scams help explain
Moon’s fortune - and how he could afford to lose an estimated
$3 billion on the Washington Times alone - others suspect
that Moon’s major funding comes from his close relationships
with major underworld figures in Asia and South America.
Those ties date back several decades to negotiations conducted
by one of Moon’s early South Korean supporters, Kim Jong-Pil,
who founded the Korean CIA and headed up sensitive negotiations
on bilateral relations between Tokyo and Seoul.
The negotiations put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two other important
figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and
Ryoichi Sasakawa, who had been jailed as fascist war criminals
at the end of World War II. A few years later, however, both Kodama
and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.
The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help
in combating communist labor unions and student strikes,
much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals
who supplied intelligence and performed other services
in the intensifying Cold War battles with European communists.
Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their assocn.
with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited
off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea.
Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became
power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with right-wing leaders proved invaluable to
Moon,who had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s.
Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and
Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese
Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church,
according to Yakuza, a book by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.
"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's
Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated
with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations
in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.
Far-Right Extremism
Moon's church was active in the Asian People's Anti-Communist
League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments
of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into
the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance
that brought together traditional conservatives with former Nazis,
overt racialists and Latin American “death squad” operatives.
Authors Scott Anderson & Jon L. Anderson wrote in their 1986 book,
Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was 1 of 5 indispensable
Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.
The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea’s
dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Sasakawa and Kodama,
and Moon, “an evangelist who planned to take over the world
through the doctrine of ‘Heavenly Deception,’” the Andersons wrote.
WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret
meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama
representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan.
The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist
organization that “would further Moon’s global crusade
and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade,”
the Andersons wrote.
Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course,
has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements
often have blended with criminal operations as a way
to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.
Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way
to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that
find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations
of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.
In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist
movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the Allies,
the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the
start of the Cold War. They helped both Western democracies
and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.
Some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II,
but others managed to make their escapes along “rat lines”
to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships
with the victorious powers, especially the United States.
Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance
that existed between the European fascists and prominent
Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis
also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers
across Latin America who already used repression to keep down
the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.
In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose
reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie,
sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services
in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.Other Nazis on the lam
trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between
intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.
French Connection
Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated
with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up
the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia
drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of
the heroin traffic into the United States.
Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord’s accomplices
as some of Paraguay’s highest-ranking military officers.
Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on
protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin,
David also “took on assignments for Argentina’s terrorist
organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance,”
Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup.
During President Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” U.S. authorities
smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions
of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.
By the time the French Connection was severed, however, powerful
Mafia drug lords forged strong ties to So. America’s militaty leaders.
An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade,
servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place.
Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced
anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work,
and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the
CIA’s training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations.
Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia
soon filled the void left by the broken French Connection
and its mostly Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.
During this time of transition, Sun Myung Moon brought
his evangelical message to South America. His first visit
to Argentina had occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square
behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires.
But he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.
Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign
of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973.
He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in
Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with
the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases
and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.
“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the
[World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the
[Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations
throughout Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.
“As an international money laundry, … the Church tapped into
the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny
of American and European investigators, the Church could now
funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil,
where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”
Cocaine Coup
In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America when
a right-wing alliance of Bolivia military officers and drug dealers
organized what became known as the Cocaine Coup.
WACL associates, such as Alfred Candia, coordinated the arrival of
some of the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent putsch.
Right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with
a contingent of young European neo-fascists collaborating
with Nazi war criminal Barbie in carrying out the bloody coup
that overthrew the elected left-of-center government.
The victory put into power a right-wing
military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords.
Bolivia became South America’s first narco-state.
One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate
the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak.
The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting
with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza.
After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared,
“I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”
According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a
Moon rep. invested about $4 Million in preparations for the coup.
Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA,
one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed
as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.
Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin
of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big
Narco-traffickers, including Trafficante’s Cuban-American smugglers.
Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found
new work protecting Bolivia’s major cocaine barons
and transporting drugs to the border.
“The paramilitary units – conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS -
- sold themselves to the cocaine barons,” German journalist
Kai Hermann wrote. “The attraction of fast money in the cocaine
trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution
in Latin America.” [An English translation of Hermann’s article
was published in Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986]
A month after the coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the
Fourth Congress of the Latin Am. Anti-Communist Confederation,
an arm of the World Anti-Communist League.
Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president
Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.
As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon
organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported
that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader
Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.
On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA
reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall of Freedom in La Paz.
Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza
led prayer for Pres. Reagan’s recovery from an assassination attempt.
In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared,
“God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America
as the ones to conquer communism.” According to a later Bolivian
intelligence report, the Moon organization sought to recruit an
“armed church” of Bolivians, with about 7,000 Bolivians
receiving some paramilitary training.
Moon’s Escape
But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta
was so deep and the corruption so staggering that
U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point.
“The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia
as clandestinely as they had arrived,” Hermann reported.
The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too.
Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami
and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking.
Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison term.
General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence
imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder.
Barbie was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes.
He died in 1992.
But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from the
Cocaine Coup. By early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds,
Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican
administration in Washington. An invited guest to the Reagan-Bush
Inauguration, Moon made his organization useful to President Reagan,
Vice President Bush and other leading Republicans.
Where Moon got his cash remained one of Washington’s deepest
mysteries – and one that few U.S. conservatives wanted to solve.
“Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the
business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking,”
wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson.
While Moon’s representatives have refused to detail
how they’ve sustained their far-flung activities,
Moon’s spokesmen have angrily denied recurring allegations
about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.
In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine
newspaper,Clarin,Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded,
“I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities
that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds
to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims
that the family is the school of love.” [Clarin, July 7, 1996]
Without doubt, however, Moon’s organization has had a long record
of association with organized crime figures, including ones
implicated in the drug trade. Besides collaborating with leaders
of the Japanese yakuza and the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia,
Moon’s organization developed close ties with the Honduran military
and the Nicaraguan contras who were permeated with drug smugglers.
Retired U.S. Army Gen. John K. Singlaub, a former
WACL president, told me that “the Japanese [WACL]
chapter was taken over almost entirely by Moonies.”
On the Offensive
Moon’s organization also used its political clout in Washington
to intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists
who tried to investigate Moon-connected criminal activities.
In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional
investigators began probing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking,
they came under attacks from Moon’s Washington Times.
An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger
about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running
by the contras was denigrated in an April 11, 1986,
front-page Washington Times article with the headline:
“Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.”
When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, conducted a Senate
probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra-drug trafficking,
the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first
published articles Kerry’s probe as a wasteful political witch hunt.
“Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,”
announced the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.
But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing,
the Washington Times shifted tactics.
In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff
of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly
interfering with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth.
“Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe,” said one Times article that
opened with the assertion: “Congressional investigators for Sen.
John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last
summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations
of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law
enforcement officials said.” [Washington Times, Jan. 21, 1987]
Despite the attacks, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually
concluded that a number of contra units – both in Costa Rica
and Honduras – were implicated in the cocaine trade.
“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras
were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras
was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the
contras themselves knowingly received financial and material
assistance from drug traffickers,”
Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989.
“In each case, one or another agency of the U.S.
government had information regarding the involvement
either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.”
Kerry’s investigation also found that Honduras had become
an important way station for cocaine shipments
heading north during the contra war.
“Elements of the Honduran military were involved ...
in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” the report said.
“These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government
officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively
to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence
in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States
was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed
the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.”
[Drug, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy
- the Kerry Report - December 1988]
The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to
V.P. George H.W. Bush, who had been named by Pres. Reagan
to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow
of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge
of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System.
In short, Vice President Bush was the lead official in the U.S.
govt. to cope with the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed
a national security threat. If the American voters came to believe
that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to
protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists
in Central America, that judgment could have threatened
the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family.
By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this
touchy subject, the Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable
media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President.
Mounting Evidence
The now-available evidence shows that there was much more
to the contra-drug issue than either the Reagan-Bush administration
or Moon’s org. wanted the American people to know in the 1980s.
The evidence – assembled over the years by investigators at the CIA,
the Justice Department and other federal agencies – indicates that
Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever
drug smugglers who tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella
of Reagan’s favorite covert operation, the contra war.
[For details, see Robert Parry, Lost History, or for a summary
http://www.secrecyandprivilege.com/
of the contra-drug evidence, see Consortiumnews.com's
"Gary Webb's Death: American Tragedy."]
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/120906.html
Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, cozying up to the contras
and sharing some of the profits, as a way to minimize investigative
interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies.
The contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the
Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military,
the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros,
and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections
to Mafia operations throughout the United States.
The drug traffickers’ strategy also worked. In some cases, U.S.
intelligence officials bent over backwards not to take timely notice
of contra drug trafficking out of fear that fuller investigations would
embarrass the contras & their patrons in the Reagan-Bush admin.
For instance, on Oct. 22, 1982, a cable written by the CIA’s
Directorate of Operations stated, “There are indications of links
between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan
counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange
in [the United States] of narcotics for arms.”
The cable added that the participants were planning a meeting
in Costa Rica for such a deal. When the cable arrived, senior
CIA officials were concerned. On Oct. 27, CIA headquarters
asked for more information from a U.S. law enforcement agency.
The law enforcement agency expanded on its report by telling the
CIA that representatives of the contra FDN and another contra force,
the UDN, would be meeting with several unidentified U.S. citizens.
But then, the CIA reversed itself, deciding that it wanted no more
information on the grounds that U.S. citizens were involved.
“In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout,
agree you should not pursue the matter further,” CIA headquarters
wrote on Nov. 3, 1982. Two weeks later, after discouraging additional
investigation, CIA headquarters suggested it might be necessary
to label the allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal as “misinformation.”
The CIA’s Latin American Division, however, responded
on Nov.18,1982, that several contra officials had gone
to San Francisco for the meetings with supporters,
presumably as part of the same guns-for-drugs deal.
But the CIA inspector general found no additional information
about that deal in CIA files. Also, by keeping the names censored
when the documents were released in 1998, the CIA prevented
outside investigators from examining whether the “U.S. religious
organization” had any affiliation with Moon’s network of quasi-
religious groups, which were assisting the contras at that time.
Studied Disinterest
Over the past quarter century - as Moon invested in prominent
Republicans - this pattern of government disinterest
in his illicit operations remained one consistency.
That disinterest wasn’t even shaken when disenchanted
Moon insiders went public with confessions
of their own first-hand involvement in criminal conspiracies.
For instance, Moon’s former daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong,
admitted to participating in money-laundering schemes
by personally smuggling cash from South Korea into the U.S.
In her 1998 memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons,
Nansook Hong alleged that Moon’s organization had engaged
in a long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into
the United States and to deceive U.S. Customs agents.
“The Unification Church was a cash operation,” Nansook Hong wrote.
“I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals
at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City]
with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon
would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various
church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table.
“The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the U.S.;
they would tell customs agents that they were
in America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition,
many businesses run by the church were cash operations,
including several Japanese restaurants in New York City.
I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that went
directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon’s closet.”
Mrs. Moon pressed her daughter-in-law into one cash-smuggling
incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong wrote.
Mrs. Moon had received “stacks of money” and divvied it up
among her entourage for the return trip through Seattle,
Nansook Hong wrote.
“I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills,” she recalled.
“I hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. ...
I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed the followers
of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws.”
U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above $10,000
be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the country.
It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser amounts
when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure.
Nansook Hong also said she witnessed other cases
in which bags of cash were carried into the United States
and delivered to Moon’s businesses.
Moon “demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time
he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash
collected from true believers” who smuggled the money
in from overseas, Nansook Hong wrote.
Corroboration
Nansook Hong’s allegations were corroborated by other disaffected
Moon disciples in press interviews and in civil court proceedings.
Maria Madelene Pretorious, a former Unification Church member
who worked at Moon’s Manhattan Center, a New York City
music venue and recording studio, testified at a court hearing
in Massachusetts that in December of 1993 or January of 1994,
one of Moon’s sons, Hyo Jin Moon, returned from a trip to Korea “
with $600,000 in cash which he had received from his father. ...
Myself along with three or four other members that worked at
Manhattan Center saw the cash in bags, shopping bags.”
In an interview with me in the mid-1990s, Pretorious said
Asian church members would bring cash into the United States
where it would be circulated through Moon’s business empire
as a way to launder it.
At the center of this financial operation, Pretorious said,
was One-Up Corp., a Delaware-registered holding company
that owned many Moon enterprises including the
Manhattan Center and New World Communications,
the parent company of the Washington Times.
“Once that cash is at the Manhattan Center, it has to be accounted
for,” Pretorious said. “The way that’s done is to launder the cash.
Manhattan Center gives cash to a business called Happy World
which owns restaurants. ...
Happy World needs to pay illegal aliens.
Happy World pays some back to the Manhattan Center
for ‘services rendered.’ The rest goes to One-Up
and then comes back to Manhattan Center as an investment.”
While the criminal enterprises may have been operating at one level,
Moon’s political influence-buying was functioning at another,
as he spread around billions of dollars
helpful to the top echelons of Washington power.
Moon launched the Washington Times in 1982 and its staunch
support for Reagan-Bush political interests quickly made it
a favorite of Reagan, Bush and other influential Republicans.
Moon also made sure that his steady flow of cash found its way
into the pockets of key conservative operatives,
especially when they were most in need.For instance,
when the New Right’s direct-mail whiz Richard Viguerie fell on
hard times in the late 1980s, Moon had a corporation run by a chief
lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak, buy one of Viguerie’s properties for $10 million.
[SeeOrangeCounty Register, Dec.21,1987;Wash Post,Oct.15,1989]
Moon also used the Washington Times and its affiliated publications
to create seemingly legitimate conduits to funnel money to individuals
and companies. In another example of Moon’s largesse,
the Washington Times hired Viguerie to conduct a pricy
direct-mail subscription drive, boosting his profit margin.
Falwell’s Savior
Another case of saving a right-wing icon occurred
when the Rev. Jerry Falwell was facing financial ruin
over the debts piling up at Liberty University.
But the fundamentalist Christian school in Lynchburg, VA, got a last-
minute bail-out in the mid-1990s ostensibly from 2 VA businessmen,
Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas, who used their non-profit
Christian Heritage Foundation to snap up a large chunk
of Liberty’s debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value.
Falwell rejoiced and called the moment
“the greatest single day of financial advantage”
in the school’s history, even though it was accomplished at the
disadvantage of many small true-believing investors who had
bought the church construction bonds through a Texas company.
But Falwell’s secret benefactor behind the debt purchase was
Sun Myung Moon, who was kept in the background partly
because of his controversial Biblical interpretations that hold
Jesus to have been a failure and because of Moon’s
alleged brainwashing of thousands of young Americans,
often shattering their bonds with their biological families.
Moon had used his tax-exempt
Women’s Federation for World Peace to funnel $3.5 million
to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit
that purchased the school’s debt.
I stumbled onto this Moon-Falwell connection by examining
the Internal Revenue Service filings of Moon’s front groups.
The Women Federation’s vice president Susan Fefferman
confirmed that the $3.5 million grant had gone to
“Mr. Falwell’s people” for the benefit of Liberty University.
[For more on Moon’s funding of the Right,
see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
http://www.secrecyandprivilege.com/
Moon also used the Women’s Federation to pay substantial
speaking fees to former President George H.W. Bush,
who gave talks at Moon-sponsored events. In September 1995,
Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave 6 speeches in Asia
for the Women’s Federation.
In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon supporters in Tokyo,
Bush said “what really counts is faith, family and friends.”
In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again.
The former President addressed the Moon-connected
Family Federation for World Peace in Washington,
an event that gained notoriety when comedian Bill Cosby tried
to back out of his contract after learning of Moon’s connection.
Bush had no such qualms. [Washington Post, July 30, 1996]
In fall 1996, Moon needed the ex-President’s help again.
Moon was trying to replicate his Washington Times influence in
So. America by opening a regional newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo.
But South American journalists were recounting unsavory chapters
of Moon’s history, including his links to South Korea’s feared
intelligence service and various neo-fascist organizations.
In the early 1980s, Moon had used friendships with the military
dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay - which had been responsible
for 10's of 1,000's of political murders - to invest in those 2 countries.
There also were allegations of Moon’s links
to the region’s major drug traffickers.
Moon’s disciples fumed about the critical stories and accused
the Argentine news media of trying to sabotage Moon’s plans
for an inaugural gala in Buenos Aires on Nov. 23, 1996.
“The local press was trying to undermine the event,”
complained the church’s internal newsletter, Unification News.
Given the controversy, Argentina’s elected president,
Carlos Menem, decided to reject Moon’s invitation.
Trump Card
But Moon had a trump card: the endorsement of an ex-President
of the United States, George H.W. Bush. Agreeing to speak
at the newspaper’s launch, Bush flew aboard a private plane,
arriving in Buenos Aires on Nov. 22.
Bush stayed at Menem’s official residence, the Olivos.
As the headliner at the newspaper’s inaugural gala,
Bush saved the day, Moon’s followers gushed. “Mr. Bush’s
presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige,”
wrote the Unification News.
“Father [Moon] and Mother [Mrs. Moon]
sat with several of the True Children [Moon’s offspring]
just a few feet from the podium” where Bush spoke.
“I want to salute Reverend Moon,” Bush declared.
“A lot of my friends in South America don’t know about
the Washington Times, but it is an independent voice.
The editors of the Washington Times tell me that never once
has the man with the vision [Moon] interfered with the running
of the paper, a paper that in my view brings sanity to Wash., D.C.”
Bush’s speech was so effusive that it surprised even Moon’s followers.
“Once again, heaven turned a disappointment into a victory,”
the Unification News exulted.
“Everyone was delighted to hear his compliments.
We knew he would give an appropriate and ‘nice’ speech,
but praise in Father’s presence was more than we expected. ...
It was vindication. We could just hear a sigh of relief from Heaven.”
While Bush’s assertion about Moon’s Washington Times
as a voice of “sanity” may be a matter of opinion,
Bush’s vouching for its editorial independence simply wasn’t true.
Almost since it opened in 1982, a string of senior editors
and correspondents have resigned, citing the manipulation
of the news by Moon and his subordinates.
The first editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984,
confessing that - “I have blood on my hands” -
for helping Moon’s church achieve greater legitimacy.
But Bush’s boosterism was just what Moon needed in South America.
“The day after,” the Unification News observed,
“the press did a 180-degree about-turn once they realized
that the event had the support of a U.S. President.”
With Bush’s help, Moon had gained another beachhead
for his worldwide business-religious-political-media empire.
After the event, Menem told reporters from La Nacion that Bush had
claimed privately to be only a mercenary who did not really know
Moon. “Bush told me he came and charged money to do it,”
Menem said. [La Nacion, Nov. 26, 1996]
But Bush was not telling Menem the whole story. By fall 1996,
Bush and Moon had been working in political tandem for at least
a decade and a half. The ex-President also had been earning
huge speaking fees as a front man for Moon for more than a year.
Throughout these public appearances for Moon, Bush’s office refused
to divulge how much Moon-affiliated orgs. have paid the ex-President.
But estimates of Bush’s fee for the Buenos Aires
appearance alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000.
Sources close to the Unification Church told me that the total spending
on Bush ran into the millions, with one source telling me that Bush
stood to make as much as $10 million from Moon’s organization.
The senior George Bush may have had a political motive, too.
By 1996, sources close to Bush were saying the ex-President
was working hard to enlist well-to-do conservatives and their money
behind the presidential candidacy of his son, George W. Bush.
Moon was one of the deepest pockets in right-wing circles.
Smurfing
Also in 1996, the Uruguayan bank employees union blew the whistle
on one scheme in which some 4,200 female Japanese followers
of Moon allegedly walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito
in Montevideo and deposited as much as $25,000 each.
The money from the women went into the account of an anonymous
association called Cami II, which was controlled by
Moon’s Unification Church. In one day, Cami II received $19 million
and, by the time the parade of women ended,
the total had swelled to about $80 million.
It was not clear where the money originated, nor how many
other times Moon’s organization has used this tactic - sometimes
known as “smurfing” - to transfer untraceable cash into Uruguay.
Authorities did not push the money-laundering investigation,
apparently out of deference to Moon’s political influence
and fear of disrupting Uruguay’s banking industry.
However, other critics condemned Moon’s operations.
“The first thing we ought to do is clarify to the people [of Uruguay]
that Moon’s sect is a type of modern pirate that came to the country
to perform obscure money operations, such as money laundering,”
said Jorge Zabalza, who was a leader of the
Movimiento de Participacion Popular, part of Montevideo’s
ruling left-of-center political coalition.
“This sect is a kind of religious mob that is trying
to get public support to pursue its business.”
Moon’s pattern of putting into Bush family causes
has continued into George W. Bush’s presidency.
In 2006, Moon again used money-laundering techniques
to funnel a donation to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.
The Houston Chronicle reported that Moon’s Washington Times
Foundn. gave $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundn,
which in turn acted as a conduit for donations to the library.
The Chronicle obtained indirect confirmation that Moon’s money
was passing through the Houston foundation to the Bush library
from Bush family spokesman Jim McGrath. Asked whether Moon’s
$1 million had ended up there, McGrath responded,
“We’re in an uncomfortable position. …
If a donor doesn’t want to be identified we need to honor their privacy.”
But when asked whether the $1 million was intended to curry favor
with the Bush family to get President George W. Bush
to grant a pardon for Moon’s 1982 felony tax fraud conviction,
McGrath answered,
“If that’s why he gave the grant, he’s throwing his money away. …
That’s not the way the Bushes operate.”
McGrath then added, “President Bush has been very grateful
for the friendship shown to him by the Washington Times Foundation,
and the Washington Times serves a vital role in Washington.
But there can’t be any connection to any kind of a pardon.”
[Houston Chronicle, June 8, 2006,
citing the work of private researcher Larry Zilliox.]
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/3953506
But Moon has earned the deepest gratitude of the Bush family
and the Republican Party via his reported $3 billion investment
in the Washington Times, a powerful propaganda organ that helped
the GOP build its political dominance over the past quarter century.
George Archibald, who describes himself - “as the first reporter
hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group”
and author of a commemorative book on the Times’ first 2 decades,
recently joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who
departed & warned the public about extremism within the newspaper.
In an Internet essay on bigotry and extremism inside the Times,
http://georgearchibald.typepad.com/george_archibald/2006/12/can_the_washing.html
Archibald also confirmed claims by some former Moon insiders
that the cult leader has continued to pour in $100 million a year
or more to keep the newspaper afloat. Archibald put the price tag
for the newspaper’s first 24 years at “more than $3 billion of cash.”
Over those years, the Times has targeted American politicians
of the center and left with journalistic attacks, sometimes
questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic
presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore.
Those themes then resonate through the broader right-wing
echo chamber and often into the mainstream media.
In 2000, the Washington Times was at the center of the assault
on Al Gore’s candidacy – highlighting apocryphal quotes by Gore
and using them to depict him as either dishonest or delusional.
[See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore vs. the Media.”]
http://consortiumnews.com/2000/020100a.html
Aiming at Obama
The intervention by Moon’s media outlets
into U.S. Presidential politics continues to the present.
In one of the first dirty tricks of Election 2008,
Moon’s online magazine Insight tried to sabotage
Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign before it even got started, while
laying the blame at the feet of Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
The Insight article cited supposed opposition research
by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that had allegedly dug up evidence
that Obama had attended a fundamentalist Muslim “madrassah”
while a young child & had sought to conceal his allegiance to Islam.
The Insight attack on Obama was framed as a heartfelt desire
to test out the credibility of the 45-year-old Illinois senator who
identifies himself as a Christian and belongs to a church in Chicago.
“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” a source supposedly close
to Clinton’s background investigation of Obama told Insight.
“The idea is to show Obama as deceptive.”
Insight used no named sources for the allegations, nor did the mag.
check out the facts about the school. [Insight, Jan. 17, 2007]
http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/Obama_2.htm
After Moon’s online magazine published the “madrassa” story,
it quickly spread to the wider audiences of Rupert Murdoch’s
right-wing media outlets, Fox News and the New York Post,
and then into the mainstream press.
To further the subliminal link between Obama and Islamic terrorism,
the New York Post ran its story under the headline
“‘Osama’ Mud Flies at Obama.”
As the Obama-madrassa article circulated,
Fox News made sure the story was put in the harshest possible light.
“Hillary Clinton reported to be already digging up the dirt on
Barack Obama,” said John Gibson, anchor of Fox’s “The Big Story.”
“The New York Sen. has reportedly outed Obama’s Madrassah Past.
That’s right, the Clinton team reported to have pulled out all
the stops to reveal something Obama would rather you didn’t know
- that he was educated in a Muslim madrassah.” For Obama’s part,
he wrote in his autobiography that after he had attended
a Catholic school for 2 years, his Indonesian stepfather sent him
to a “predominantly Muslim school” in Jakarta when he was 6.
This inconsequential fact apparently became the basis for Insight’s
suggestion that Obama was indoctrinated at a radical “madrassa.”
“The allegations are completely false,” Obama spokesman
Robert Gibbs told the Washington Post.
“To publish this sort of trash without any documentation
is surprising, but for Fox to repeat something so false,
not once, but many times is appallingly irresponsible.”
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson termed the Insight article
“an obvious right-wing hit job by a Moonie publication
that was designed to attack Senator Clinton and Senator Obama
at the same time.” [Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2007]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/21/AR2007012101161.\
html
When CNN checked out the Insight article
on Jan. 22, the story collapsed.
The Indonesian school that Obama attended as a child
turned out not to be some radical “madrassah”
where an extreme form of Islam was taught, but a well-kept
public school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Jakarta.
The boys and girls wear school uniforms and are taught a typical
school curriculum today as they were 39 years ago
when Obama was a student there, while living with his mother
in Indonesia, reported CNN correspondent John Vause.
While most of the school’s students are Muslim - Indonesia is a
Muslim country, after all – Vause reported that the religious views
of other students are respected and that Christian children
at the school are taught that Jesus is the son of God.
For once, a Moon-financed hit job on a political enemy appeared
to backfire, although it’s hard to know whether planting a
subliminal doubt about whether Obama is a secret agent
of radical Islam will take root among some American voters
who are paranoid about Muslim terrorists.
By citing Clinton operatives as the supposed source of the smear,
Moon’s publication also played to the negative image of the New York
senator as a ruthless politician who would sling mud at an opponent.
Whether the Obama/Clinton story has a long-term impact or not,
it is a reminder of the value that Moon’s billions
of mysterious dollars have purchased in the U.S. political process
- and why his allies seem so determined to protect him
from anything approaching aggressive law enforcement.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book,
Secrecy & Privilege:Rise of Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq,
can be ordered at http://www.secrecyandprivilege.com
It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book,
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here.
http://consortiumblog.com/
To comment to us by e-mail, click here.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/contact.html
To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories
like the one you just read, click here.
https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/consortiumnews/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=2043
I'd prefer your cat :)
the guy is about as qualified as my cat.
yet they expect to confirm him anyway... sounds like he's bought his appointment
Fitzgerald Answers Questions About the Libby Trial
March 6, 2007
Transcript
The following is a transcript of Patrick Fitzgerald, special counsel in the C.I.A. leak investigation, answering reporters questions, as provided by Federal News Service.
MR. FITZGERALD: Obviously we are gratified by the jury's verdict today. The jury worked very long and hard, and deliberated at some length over the charges and returned a verdict of guilty on four of the counts. The jury was obviously convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had lied and obstructed justice in a serious matter.
The results are actually sad. It's sad that we had a situation where a high-level official, a person who worked in the Office of the Vice President, obstructed justice and lied under oath. We wish that it not had -- that had not happened, but it did.
And I want to thank the colleagues and investigators behind me, who worked hard to make sure that we brought that to light and brought it to court and proved it beyond reasonable doubt. And we're gratified by the jury's verdict and thankful for their service.
And we'll take questions.
Q Sir, you've received a lot of criticism that in last couple months because Rich Armitage had come forward and said he was the first leaker, that you knew that at the beginning. Do you think this now justifies your investigation? And what do you have to say to those critics?
MR. FITZGERALD: I would say this: it's not the verdict that justifies the investigation, it's the facts.
And if people would step back and look at what happened here, when the investigation began in the fall of 2003, and then when it got appointed to the special counsel at the end of December 2003, what is now clear is what we knew at that time. By that point in time, we knew Mr. Libby had told a story, that what he had told reporters had come not from other government officials but from reporter Tim Russert. It's also now public that by that point in time, the FBI had learned that in fact Tim Russert did not tell Mr. Libby that information, the fact Tim Russert didn't know it, Tim Russert could not have told him.
And for us as investigators and prosecutors to take a case where a high-level official is telling a story that the basis of his information wasn't from government officials but came from a reporter -- the reporter had told us that was not true; other officials had told us the information came from them -- we could not walk away from that.
And it -- to me, it's inconceivable that any responsible prosecutor would walk away from the facts we saw in December 2003 and say, "There's nothing here. Move along, folks."
And one responsibility we have as prosecutors is, we cannot always explain what we do, why we charge or why we don't charge. But at the end of the day, if we look you in the eye and say we made a decision charges are not appropriate, we have to feel comfortable ourselves that that's the case. And none of us on the team could walk away from what we knew in the -- December 2003 and walk away from that. And so we brought charges, we went to trial, and we proved the case.
So we think the facts justify themselves.
(Cross talk.)
STAFF: Okay, one -- Carol and then I'll come back to you.
Q Is part of the reason you could not walk away from this case the seriousness of the lies in the sense that the information concealed the role of the vice president?
MR. FITZGERALD: Well, I would just say this. Any lie under oath is serious. Any prosecutor would tell you -- in my days in New York, in my current days in Chicago -- that we cannot tolerate perjury. The truth is what drives our judicial system. If people don't come forward and tell the truth, we have no hope of making the judicial system work. If someone knowingly tells a lie under oath during any investigation, it's every prosecutor's duty to respond by investigating and proving that, if you can. And so that's a serious matter in any case.
It's obviously a serious matter in a case here where there's a national security investigation. So the nature of any person telling a lie under oath to a grand jury is a serious problem. Having someone, a high-level official do that under oath in a national security investigation is something that can never be acceptable, and that just made it mandatory that we pursue it.
Q Mr. Fitzgerald --
Q You made several references in this trial, especially in the closing, to Vice President Cheney in that the FBI, the grand jury deserve to know the truth from Scooter Libby about the vice president. Is there still information about Vice President Cheney that you do not know? And secondly, do you believe the vice president was truthful in his testimony to you?
MR. FITZGERALD: And -- we don't comment -- we try and treat everyone the same under our legal system. No one's above the law. No one gets less protection than the law. And so I want to make clear that we don't talk about people not on trial, and that's not a negative comment about anyone. And we apply the same rules to the vice president.
Our comments in summation were directed to responding to an argument by the defense that they fairly made. We fairly responded, and our point was that Mr. Libby did not tell the truth to the system.
And when someone doesn't tell the truth to the system, everyone suffers. The legal system suffers because we don't know what the actual facts are, and, frankly, lots of other people suffer, since, when you don't know what the truth is, people draw all sorts of conclusions.
So all we'll say is that Mr. Libby, by lying and obstructing justice, harmed the system, and that was something serious, and that's the point we made to the jury, and obviously the jury agreed factually.
Q Sir --
Q (Off mike) -- there are still unanswered questions, though, about the vice president.
Q -- but in your summation, you said that there was a cloud over the vice president and there was a cloud over the White House. Do you think that cloud still remains after this verdict?
MR. FITZGERALD: And what I'll say is this. I said what I said in court. I'm not going to add to it or subtract from it. What was said in court was the defense argument made that we put a cloud over the White House, as if, one, we were inventing something, or, two, making something up in order to convince the jury that they ought to convict. And I think in any case where you feel that someone's making an argument that you're inventing something or improperly casting a cloud on someone, you respond. And we responded fairly and honestly by saying there was a cloud there caused by -- not caused by us. And by Mr. Libby obstructing justice and lying about what happened, he had failed to remove the cloud. And sometimes when people tell the truth, you know, the clouds disappear; sometimes they don't. But when you don't know what's happening, that's a problem. And so the fact that there was a cloud over anyone was not arguing; it was the facts of the case, it was aggravated by Mr. Libby telling falsehoods, and that's what we said. We're not going to add to that or subtract from that. That's what we said in court, and that's the context in which we said it.
Q Sir, is your investigation over now? Now that this trial's over, now that you have this verdict, is this investigation -- is your special counsel investigation over?
MR. FITZGERALD: I would say this. I do not expect to file any further charges. Basically, the investigation was inactive prior to the trial. I would not expect to see any further charges filed.
We're all going back to our day jobs. If information comes to light or new information comes to us that would warrant us taking some action, we will, of course, do that. But I would not create the expectation that any of us will be doing further investigation at this point. We see the investigation as inactive.
Q (Off mike) -- for you to make public the complete account of your investigation, including the testimony of many public officials -- Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove and others, whose full accounts were not revealed in this trial?
MR. FITZGERALD: And the short answer is no. I am not an independent counsel. The independent counsel statute, many people may not appreciate, doesn't exist anymore. And what was different about an independent counsel from a regular prosecutor were that independent counsels would issue reports. They would either file charges or not file charges, and then they'd give a lengthy explanation of what they found.
That is different than what ordinary prosecutors do. We file charges, and then we're obliged to prove them, or we don't file charges.
And there has been criticism of whether independent counsels should be filing reports, because sometimes you say things about people that you're not prepared to prove in court. And that was, I think, an appropriate criticism of it.
Whatever you think of the independent counsel statute, it doesn't exist. I am not an independent counsel. I am bound by the laws of grand jury secrecy. We're bound by the laws that we don't talk about people who have not been charged. So we are not going to be opening up our file drawers, handing them over to you guys to write newspaper articles or magazine articles or books, whatever you want to do. That's not the system. And part of that, I think we ought appreciate as citizens is fair. If you want people to come in and tell the truth, and you tell them, if you talk to us there's grand jury secrecy, there are protections for you, we have to live by our word. And we gave our word to have people talk to us. And unless we're going to file charges or it becomes public, as it does at a trial, that's it.
Q Pat, how will you feel if a pardon is granted in this case?
MR. FITZGERALD: I'm not going to comment on things that have not happened.
Q And what about an appeal in which you are asked to bring the case again or a new trial, how would you feel about that?
MR. FITZGERALD: Okay, an appeal where we're asked to bring the case again is different than an appeal where we're required to do so. (Laughter.)
Q If you're required to do so.
MR. FITZGERALD: If we're required to do so, I will not be happy about that. Obviously, when we announced the case, we announced that we would go to trial, if necessary, and seek to prove it. And we did not predict an outcome, out of respect for the process and respect for the jury. We obviously feel confident that we think the trial was a fair trial. We think it was an appropriate trial, and that we think the jury's verdict should stand. We also understand the defense will likely pursue an appeal. And out of respect for the appellate process, we're not going to predict how three judges, who have not been selected, will rule on an appeal not yet filed, based upon arguments not yet made.
So we will respond appropriately. And we're confident in how the trial went forward. But we're going to respect the appellate process by not predicting an outcome.
Q Does Mr. Libby have an opportunity to get a downward departure in sentencing from you if he provides additional information?
MR. FITZGERALD: We're not going to comment about anything. Mr. Libby is like any other defendant; if his counsel or he wish to pursue any options, they can contact us. But we're going to treat him like any other defendant and not comment beyond that.
Q What are the guidelines -- (inaudible) -- sentence?
MR. FITZGERALD: I don't know what range it is off-hand. I did not spend time looking at the guidelines book. And we do think that Judge Walton will hear the government's position on sentencing when we file papers before him.
So I'm not going to predict what the guidelines will be.
Q Did you get worried after 10 days? It was going on so much, and they were asking some questions about the charges and what the charges meant. Did you get worried?
MR. FITZGERALD: Of course I got worried. (Laughter.) You -- lawyers are paid to worry or -- some paid more than others. But we're paid to worry. And when a jury goes out, because there's nothing we can do, we just sit around worrying about things that we have no control over. So you do your best on both sides. And you have no idea what's going on, so you just wait for the verdict.
Q And a question about Vice President Cheney not testifying. The CIPA hearings were predicated on the idea that Libby would testify. The -- some of the questions in voir dire were predicated on Cheney testifying. Can you tell us a little bit and the public a little bit about you reaction when both of those things proved not to be the case?
MR. FITZGERALD: No.
Q Can you say whether you think they shaped jury selection or the defense's knowledge of your case?
MR. FITZGERALD: Well, what I can say is that obviously the jury selection -- there was extensive questioning by the parties and the judge as to whether or not the possible appearance of the vice president as a witness might affect how the jurors perceived the case and whether they could be fair. So obviously it affected jury selection.
But beyond that, you know, lawyers make decisions at trial on both sides as to whether or not to call witnesses. And the reason I said I couldn't answer is, we have our own reactions, but the bottom line is, we have to try the case in court. And so if a witness shows up, you're prepared to deal with the witness. If a witness doesn't show up, you move on to the next thing. And I'm not going to -- you know, I -- we have a tough enough time trying to figure out what we're doing at our table and what's coming next.
So I think it affected the trial in the voir dire process, but at the end of the day, I think we got a very fair jury.
Q Mr. Fitzgerald, to follow on, the indictment says that -- (off mike) -- originally learned the identity of Ms. Plame from the vice president, who had gotten it from some presumably from the CIA. Do you know about that transaction between the person at the CIA and the vice president, how that came about, and why that was important to your -- the indictment?
MR. FITZGERALD: I won't say anything beyond what was said in the trial about -- from Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony about what he understood in the note. And the only relevance of that point was to show that Mr. Libby had the information he gave out from an official source and understood that the vice president had it from an official source, not from a reporter. So that was the relevance of it, and I don't know if there's anything beyond that from the trial record.
Q Why is it important that the CIA was the person that -- (off mike) -- that originally told the -- (off mike)?
MR. FITZGERALD: Well, it would be a very different case if the vice president learned it from Mr. Russert back in June and then told Mr. Libby. If he was passing on a reporter's rumor, that would be very different than if he was passing on official information.
So the contention we made was that Mr. Libby learned it from a number of officials, first learning it from the vice president. And what was important to establish was that the vice president learned it from official channels, so that Mr. Libby had an understanding that this was all official information, which is very different than saying it was a rumor he heard from a reporter.
Q Sir, do you --
STAFF: We'll take two more questions and yield to Mr. Juror, who's come out.
MR. FITZGERALD: Okay. Yes?
Q Do you have any regret at all about giving Ari Fleischer immunity?
MR. FITZGERALD: We think we made an appropriate decision, and I'd have no regret.
Yes?
Q If Congress chooses to investigate the leak, the Plame leak, will you cooperate with them? Will you make your records available to Congress?
Q (Off mike) -- records?
MR. FITZGERALD: We'll do what's appropriate.
Q Mr. Fitzgerald, can you say in what ways you believe the investigation -- not the trial, but the investigation -- changed the nature of how reporters deal with official sources and their promises of -- their pledges of confidentiality?
MR. FITZGERALD: I will say this, it's probably -- you know, reporters can tell us how it's affecting things. I think what people ought to understand is what was unique about this case. What was unique about this case that's different than many other cases is that the reporters involved here were not just people who got whistleblowing tips. We do not think that what Mr. Libby was telling reporters was whistleblowing. Secondly, they were not reporting something that would not otherwise be heard, they were actually potential eye-witnesses to a crime. If someone is passing out classified information to a reporter, that's different.
And I think what people have to understand here is if the mission that you're given is to find out whether the law has been broken, and you've been told that the story that the person gave to the FBI is false, that the information came from officials and not reporters, but their claim is that they told reporters the information and they made sure to tell the reporters that they knew it came from other reporters and they didn't know if it's true, you could not ever bring a case without talking to the reporters. That would be irresponsible, because if the reporters came in and said that's actually what he said, you would be charging someone who was innocent. And so by placing the information behind reporters, there was no choice but to find out from the reporters what that information was. In a situation where the person had already disclosed the confidences and waived the confidences, we think that was the appropriate way to proceed.
We are not saying that we shouldn't be very careful, that we shouldn't have attorney general guidelines, that we shouldn't follow attorney general guidelines, that resorting to questioning reporters should be a last resort in the very unusual case. But I think what we have -- I think what people should realize is that we never take that off the table. And there are times when government informants, we have confidential relationships that we have to breach, and that's something that we have to recognize. We can't just say that this will never, ever happen, that we'll never, ever ask a reporter about a source. And this was a case where it was appropriate.
Q Was there clear evidence in the trial that the information about here was indeed classified?
MR. FITZGERALD: The trial evidence, the judge made a ruling that we were not going to try the case about whether the information was classified. I can tell you, on the face of the indictment it states that her relationship with the CIA was classified. And I have 100 percent confidence in that information. And we would not plead it in an indictment. While we didn't make it an issue at the trial, because the issue was whether or not Mr. Libby perjured himself under oath, there is no doubt that her relationship with the CIA was classified, and that's just a fact.
Q Following up on Neil (sp). So this case and your investigation doesn't necessarily become a paradigm for future leak investigations? Or do you think it will encourage others, given the success you've had here?
MR. FITZGERALD: I think people can look -- should look to any case for sort of -- you know, for developments. But I think there's a danger in reading too much into it. I think people ought to look at the law, look at the facts, and then I think you have to be careful in applying to other cases.
So if it's made clear what the circumstances were in this case, I think people will look to this case. But we're not -- I think people ought to look at it as what it is, a particular set of facts where reporters were eye witnesses to a potential crime, and reporters, if they did not testify, we could never get to the bottom of the questions here. And that's what was key. If we did not question reporters, we could not answer the question of whether or not a lie was told. And in fact, talking to reporters proved the lie. And that's a very unusual circumstance, so I would just caution people to view it in context.
STAFF: Okay, thank you very much.
MR. FITZGERALD: Thank you.
Q Thank you.
.... END
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/washington/06transcript-fitz.html?pagewanted=print
ROTF! The guy has no recollection of why he gave away $50K, who asked him for it or how it was going to be used.
Kerry blasts nominee over Swift Boat contribution
By Grant Slater
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
(MCT)
WASHINGTON - Prominent Missouri businessman and Republican financier Sam Fox, accompanied by heavyweight backers, expected smooth sailing in the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday on his way to confirmation as ambassador to Belgium.
He didn't get it.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., broadsided Fox, criticizing his 2004 donation to the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and questioning Fox's credentials for the job.
"You saw fit to put $50,000 on the line to continue the smear, my question to you is: Why?" Kerry said.
The Swift Boat group gained notoriety for running a well-funded campaign that questioned the validity of Kerry's Vietnam War medals during Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.
Fox, 77, said he couldn't recall who had asked for the contribution and counted it among thousands of contributions he makes yearly. "When I'm asked, I just generally give," Fox said.
The majority of Fox's supporters, including Missouri Sens. Christopher "Kit" Bond, a Republican, and Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, had left the hearing room by the time Kerry took the microphone.
Fox's wife, Marilyn, his five children and eight of his grandchildren remained to witness Kerry's 30-minute grilling of Fox about his political contributions and the intricacies of Belgian politics.
In his introduction, Bond called Fox a "good man, dedicated to his family and country." His charitable contributions to Washington University, the Boy Scouts and the Missouri arts community had benefited the city of St. Louis, Bond said.
Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., and Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and former Missouri Sen. John Danforth joined Bond in praise of Fox. Danforth said that Fox's departure for Belgium would be "a huge loss for St. Louis."
Fox has donated more than $1 million to GOP candidates around the country since the late 1990s and chairs the national Jewish Republican Coalition. Several senators noted his rags-to-riches biography on his way to founding the Harbour Group, a holding company with diverse products.
Kerry prodded Fox about changing perceptions of the United States in Europe since President Bush took office in 2001. Fox said he had no first-hand information other than what he'd read in newspapers.
The committee is expected to vote in March on his confirmation, which is not believed to be in jeopardy.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/politics/16796943.htm
Pay back's a bitch and the guy deserved it. Good job Kerry.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/02/28/senator-kerry-confronts-swift-boat-funder/
THIS IS WHAT GOVERNMENT MEANT AND YOU KNOW IT!!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070301/tv_nm/newyork_word_dc_3
JAMES BOND TEQUILA!!!
You know that is not what I meant.
The point is that if the GOVERNMENT needs buildings to put beds into they don't have to build them.
Modernizing Women .. Gender and Social Change in the Middle East.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hOVjBzQrdxkC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&sig=WvWyZ...
The buildings are sitting there vacant and ready for use.
for free? You have a free building you want to let them use?
That wasn't my point.
My point was that a "bed" does not cost $24,000!!!
Think of all the empty buildings available nationwide. We don't need to build any new buildings to hold any new beds. The buildings are sitting there vacant and ready for use.
Why should any new funding in this country require any need to build a new building??
A Secret History
By CARLA POWER
For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the stock image of an Islamic scholar is a gray-bearded man. Women tend to be seen as the subjects of Islamic law rather than its shapers. And while some opportunities for religious education do exist for women — the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo has a women’s college, for example, and there are girls’ madrasas and female study groups in mosques and private homes — cultural barriers prevent most women in the Islamic world from pursuing such studies. Recent findings by a scholar at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Britain, however, may help lower those barriers and challenge prevalent notions of women’s roles within Islamic society. Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists.
Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical dictionary of female hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrasa chronicles and letters for relevant citations. “I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,” he says. To date, he has found 8,000 of them, dating back 1,400 years, and his dictionary now fills 40 volumes. It’s so long that his usual publishers, in Damascus and Beirut, have balked at the project, though an English translation of his preface — itself almost 400 pages long — will come out in England this summer. (Akram has talked with Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to the United States, about the possibility of publishing the entire work through his Riyadh-based foundation.)
The dictionary’s diverse entries include a 10th-century Baghdad-born jurist who traveled through Syria and Egypt, teaching other women; a female scholar — or muhaddithat — in 12th-century Egypt whose male students marveled at her mastery of a “camel load” of texts; and a 15th-century woman who taught hadith at the Prophet’s grave in Medina, one of the most important spots in Islam. One seventh-century Medina woman who reached the academic rank of jurist issued key fatwas on hajj rituals and commerce; another female jurist living in medieval Aleppo not only issued fatwas but also advised her far more famous husband on how to issue his.
Not all of these women scholars were previously unknown. Many Muslims acknowledge that Islam has its learned women, particularly in the field of hadith, starting with the Prophet’s wife Aisha. And several Western academics have written on women’s religious education. About a century ago, the Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher estimated that about 15 percent of medieval hadith scholars were women. But Akram’s dictionary is groundbreaking in its scope.
Indeed, read today, when many Muslim women still don’t dare pray in mosques, let alone lecture leaders in them, Akram’s entry for someone like Umm al-Darda, a prominent jurist in seventh-century Damascus, is startling. As a young woman, al-Darda used to sit with male scholars in the mosque, talking shop. “I’ve tried to worship Allah in every way,” she wrote, “but I’ve never found a better one than sitting around, debating other scholars.” She went on to teach hadith and fiqh, or law, at the mosque, and even lectured in the men’s section; her students included the caliph of Damascus. She shocked her contemporaries by praying shoulder to shoulder with men — a nearly unknown practice, even now — and issuing a fatwa, still cited by modern scholars, that allowed women to pray in the same position as men.
It’s after the 16th century that citations of women scholars dwindle. Some historians venture that this is because Islamic education grew more formal, excluding women as it became increasingly oriented toward establishing careers in the courts and mosques. (Strangely enough, Akram found that this kind of exclusion also helped women become better scholars. Because they didn’t hold official posts, they had little reason to invent or embellish prophetic traditions.)
Akram’s work has led to accusations that he is championing free mixing between men and women, but he says that is not so. He maintains that women students should sit at a discreet distance from their male classmates or co-worshipers, or be separated by a curtain. (The practice has parallels in Orthodox Judaism.) The Muslim women who taught men “are part of our history,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you have to follow them. It’s up to people to decide.”
Neverthless, Akram says he hopes that uncovering past hadith scholars could help reform present-day Islamic culture. Many Muslims see historical precedents — particularly when they date back to the golden age of Muhammad — as blueprints for sound modern societies and look to scholars to evaluate and interpret those precedents. Muslim feminists like the Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi and Kecia Ali, a professor at Boston University, have cast fresh light on women’s roles in Islamic law and history, but their worldview — and their audiences — are largely Western or Westernized. Akram is a working alim, lecturing in mosques and universities and dispensing fatwas on issues like inheritance and divorce. “Here you’ve got a guy who’s coming from the tradition, who knows the stuff and who’s able to give us that level of detail which is missing in the self-proclaimed progressive Muslim writers,” says James Piscatori, a professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University.
The erosion of women’s religious education in recent times, Akram says, reflects “decline in every aspect of Islam.” Flabby leadership and a focus on politics rather than scholarship has left Muslims ignorant of their own history. Islam’s current cultural insecurity has been bad for both its scholarship and its women, Akram says. “Our traditions have grown weak, and when people are weak, they grow cautious. When they’re cautious, they don’t give their women freedoms.”
When Akram lectures, he dryly notes, women are more excited by this history than men. To persuade reluctant Muslims to educate their girls, Akram employs a potent debating strategy: he compares the status quo to the age of al jahiliya, the Arabic term for the barbaric state of pre-Islamic Arabia. (Osama Bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of modern Islamic extremism, have employed the comparison to very different effect.) Barring Muslim women from education and religious authority, Akram argues, is akin to the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive. “I tell people, ‘God has given girls qualities and potential,’ ” he says. “If they aren’t allowed to develop them, if they aren’t provided with opportunities to study and learn, it’s basically a live burial.”
When I spoke with him, Akram invoked a favorite poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray’s 18th-century lament for dead English farmers. “Gray said that villagers could have been like Milton,” if only they’d had the chance, Akram observes. “Muslim women are in the same situation. There could have been so many Miltons.”
Carla Power is a London-based journalist who writes about Islamic issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25wwlnEssay.t.html?ref=middleeast&pagewanted=print
The Stuff Sam Nunn’s Nightmares Are Made Of
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
Correction Appended
By now we can too readily imagine the horror of terrorists exploding a nuclear weapon in a major American city: the gutted skyscrapers, the melted cars, the charred bodies. For Sam Nunn, however, a new terror begins the day after. That’s when the world asks whether another bomb is out there. “If a nuclear bomb went off in Moscow or New York City or Jerusalem, any number of groups would claim they have another,” Nunn told me recently. These groups would make steep demands as intelligence officials scrambled to determine which claims were real. Panic would prevail. Even after the detonation of a small, crude weapon that inflicted less damage than the bomb at Hiroshima, Nunn suggested, “the psychological damage would be incalculable. It would be a slow, step-by-step process to regain confidence. And the question will be, Why didn’t we take steps to prevent this? We will have a whole list of things we wish we’d done.”
Nunn thinks of those things every time he picks up a newspaper. When, for instance, he reads about the arrest of a Russian man who, in a sting operation, tried to sell weapons-grade uranium — a reminder of a possible black market in nuclear materials and of the poor security at facilities in the former Soviet Union. Or when he sees news about Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, which could set off a wave of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and thus significantly raise the possibility that terrorists will someday acquire a bomb. And despite the apparent diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea earlier this month, in which the North Koreans agreed to begin dismantling their nuclear facilities in return for fuel and other aid, Nunn, who finds the deal encouraging, remains concerned since North Korea’s unpredictable, cash-starved dictatorship still retains perhaps half a dozen nuclear bombs, and the ingredients to make more.
A decade after leaving the United States Senate, where he spent years as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nunn posed one, overriding question about his list of things we’ll wish we had done if a doomsday should ever come: “Why aren’t we doing them now?” In a sense, his own answer has been to help found and run the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based foundation largely bankrolled by Nunn’s friends Ted Turner and Warren Buffett. In what may be the most ambitious example of private dollars subsidizing national security, the N.T.I. is trying to fill in the gaps where government is failing to reduce nuclear threats. In other words, to do the things now that we would otherwise wish we had done.
The war in Iraq has understandably consumed America’s foreign-policy energies. But it occludes what Nunn and many others, on both the right and left, regard as a deepening worldwide nuclear crisis. Despite its willingness to confront North Korea, the U.S., Nunn insists, still does not fully grasp the nuclear dangers it faces. “We are at a tipping point,” he says. “And we are headed in the wrong direction.” As he sees it, the trouble is, in a defense establishment that once war-gamed the end of the world a thousand different ways, there has been a shortage of thinking about what the right direction looks like or how to take it. It is a situation that has led Nunn, who once extolled nuclear weapons as a guarantor of American safety, to reassess decades of hawkish cold-war thinking, to reconsider his most fundamental beliefs about whether the country would be safer in a world with any nuclear weapons at all.
Sam Nunn’s nuclear nightmare begins with a character like Oleg Khinsagov. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that officials in the former Soviet republic of Georgia had arrested Khinsagov, a 50-year-old Russian fish and sausage trader, for attempting to sell 100 grams of highly enriched uranium to a Muslim buyer who, Khinsagov had been told, represented “a serious organization.” The price: $1 million. Khinsagov, who was caught in a sting operation, had nowhere near enough material for a bomb, but he claimed to have far more at his apartment. (Whether he actually did is unclear.) An American laboratory analysis indicates that the material most likely originated at a Russian nuclear facility.
To some, Khinsagov’s arrest was a success story, a sign that recent efforts to crack down on nuclear smuggling are producing results. Nunn is not so sanguine. He says that nuclear smugglers who get caught — the international agency counts 18 confirmed cases involving highly enriched uranium and plutonium since 1993 — are usually unsophisticated amateurs. “It’s the ones we don’t see that worry me,” he says.
It is a worry that he shares with Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of CNN whose donation of $250 million in Time Warner stock enabled the Nuclear Threat Initiative to open for business in 2001. Turner long dreaded a nuclear holocaust, but he assumed the threat had fizzled out with the end of the cold war. “I was getting ready to celebrate the millennium in 2000 because it looked like humanity was going to make it,” he told me, when we spoke last month. “And if we could do that, maybe we could make it to 3000. I figured that we had nuclear disarmament.” And then he saw a report on “60 Minutes” about lax security in the former Soviet Union. There were 20,000 warheads and stockpiles of uranium and plutonium capable of making another 40,000 or more warheads scattered across 11 time zones, whose safety too often depended on lackadaisical guards, shabby locks and defective security cameras. There was another related problem: large quantities of uranium that could be used to make bombs were being stored at some 130 civilian nuclear reactors around the world, often under even more slipshod security. A small group of terrorists might break into such a facility and if they had basic engineering and chemistry skills could probably forge a crude nuclear bomb out of a grapefruit-size 30-pound lump of highly enriched uranium (to say nothing of a much simpler radioactive “dirty” bomb).
Turner considered establishing an organization to revive the dormant nuclear-disarmament movement. But foreign-policy specialists he met with persuaded him to focus on more realistic, incremental change. A mutual friend connected Turner with Nunn, who was then practicing law at an Atlanta firm. According to one person familiar with N.T.I.’s founding, who does not want to be named because he works with N.T.I. and does not have permission to speak on its behalf, “There was this very prolonged dance where people were trying to come up with ideas that were exciting enough for Turner but sensible enough for Nunn,” who was uncomfortable with Turner’s passion for disarmament, a movement Nunn had long considered irresponsible.
Nunn and Turner found common ground, however, in a narrower mission: responding to the threat of “loose nukes,” or the possibility that nuclear weapons and materials might be smuggled out of the former Soviet Union and find their way into malevolent hands. They settled on having the Nuclear Threat Initiative spend millions of dollars on everything from annual reports written by Harvard academics on the loose-nukes problem to filming a docudrama about a nuclear-terrorism crisis. Above all, the foundation would finance direct-action programs to secure nuclear materials around the world, in coordination with the U.S. and foreign governments.
It was one such program that led Nunn and Turner to a warehouse in Ust-Kamenogorsk, an industrial city in eastern Kazakhstan, in October 2005. They were there to size up an effort, paid for in part by N.T.I., to “blend down” 6,400 pounds of highly enriched uranium — enough to make dozens of bombs — into a form that couldn’t be used in weapons. The uranium was spent fuel from a decommissioned nuclear power plant situated near the Iranian border. A few years earlier, he had made the following offer to Kazakhstan’s president: N.T.I. would provide its expertise to relocate and then blend down the uranium, and it would pay half of the $2 million cost to do so. By the time Nunn and Turner toured the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, the project was close to completion. A portion of the uranium had not yet been blended down, however, and it lay stored in 20 or so tubes in a corner of the warehouse. Nunn and Turner stood and gazed solemnly at it. “Here was the potential, right there in that little corner, in the hands of the wrong people, to wipe out cities around the world.” Nunn says. “That’s a pretty stark realization.”
N.T.I. intervened in Kazakhstan, Nunn explains, because the U.S. government did not act first. It’s not the only such example: in mid-2002, more than 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium — stored in portable canisters that emit little radiation — was lying at the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, a civilian research reactor in Belgrade. The security there would have been no match for even a small terrorist squad. And Islamic militants operated in the region. Clearly Vinca was a high-priority problem. Yet even though the first American plans to rescue the material were drawn up during the Clinton administration, no action had been taken a year after Sept. 11. The obstacle was bureaucratic: in return for giving up the uranium, the Serbian government demanded help cleaning up Vinca’s spent reactor fuel. That qualified as an environmental cleanup, however, which the U.S. lacked the authority to pay for. So N.T.I. stepped in and covered the $5 million cleanup fee. It wasn’t until August 2002 that a motorcade of technicians and machine-gun-toting commandos finally transferred the uranium from the Vinca Institute to a cargo plane that flew it to Russia to be blended down.
“If there’s anything that most Americans would think the government would happily chip in for, it’s getting highly enriched uranium out of a place where it could fall into terrorist hands,” says Matthew Bunn, a former nuclear-arms official in the Clinton administration who is now at Harvard and whose work is partly financed by N.T.I. “Yet” — in Vinca — “the government could not get this done without N.T.I.’s money.”
A small-town lawyer and politician who won an underdog campaign in Georgia in 1972, Nunn quickly made his name in Washington as a defense-policy wonk. Thanks to an intimidating expertise on defense affairs and a bespectacled air of judicious authority, Nunn was “looked upon with awe” by colleagues in both parties, says Pete V. Domenici, the Republican senator from New Mexico. Such was his authority, in fact, that he comfortably rebuffed offers from George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to serve as secretary of defense, knowing that he wielded even more power from his longtime perch as chairman of Senate Armed Services. Nunn used that influence to consistently pro-military ends. During the 1970s, he fought with liberal Democrats seeking to cut defense budgets and ultimately forced Jimmy Carter to accept substantial increases in defense spending. Nunn also strongly defended the value and morality of nuclear weapons. The nuclear-freeze movement, in his mind, was naïvely utopian. “We had to have a nuclear deterrent,” he says today. “Not only that, but a first-use policy,” which refers to the U.S.’s stated willingness in certain circumstances to strike first with nuclear weapons.
Nunn considered a run for president in 1988, and his name surfaced again after Michael Dukakis’s crushing defeat in November of that year, which further persuaded centrist Democrats that they needed a Southern moderate as a candidate. But that talk ground to a halt after Nunn opposed the first gulf war. He urged at the time that sanctions and diplomacy be given more time and, in January 1991, voted against the Senate’s war resolution. A sign went up on a Georgia highway calling him “Saddam’s Best Friend,” and some suggested that he was cynically appealing to liberal Democratic primary voters. As it happened, however, opposing such a short and easy war probably ruined Nunn’s shot at the White House. In Washington, his vote was considered a colossal political blunder. “He got a lot of political flak,” says his friend Al From, the chairman of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. “It probably hastened his decision to retire from politics.” (Nunn’s vote “profoundly influenced the next generation of senators that confronted plans for the second invasion” 11 years later, says a former Clinton defense official who advises Congressional Democrats. White House officials even invoked Nunn’s “mistake” as they lobbied Congress to vote for war.)
By the mid-1990s, the cold war was over and the stature of defense gurus diminished. Moreover, politics on Capitol Hill were changing. The rise of fierce, Gingrich-style cultural politics made life uneasy for all Southern Democrats. In 1993, Nunn resisted Bill Clinton’s attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military, prompting a gay-rights spokesman to brand him a “Jesse Helms Democrat.” Washington was growing far less hospitable to a moderate with little taste for the blood sport of partisan politics. “The premium is on stirring up your base,” he says now. When Nunn announced his retirement in 1995, even the Republican Strom Thurmond urged him to stick around. Nunn was just 58 when he left the Senate. For more than 20 years, his life had been defined by the cold war and the fight against Communism. That cause was over.
Nunn first became alarmed by the threat of loose nukes during his last Senate term. A year after the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1990, he passed legislation with his friend Richard Lugar, the Republican from Indiana, that dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the Pentagon budget to the dismantling of surplus Soviet nuclear weapons, upgrading security at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and finding jobs for its nuclear scientists lest they be tempted to work for terrorists or would-be nuclear powers. Since 1991, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program — or simply Nunn-Lugar, as it is generally known — has spent more than $10 billion on its mission, and it is considered a triumph of forward-looking lawmaking.
Even so, huge quantities of weapons and material remain in what Nunn considers perilously unsafe conditions. Only about half of the buildings containing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union have undergone post-1990 security upgrades to install things like perimeter fences, cameras and radiation-monitors to prevent theft. And 134 tons of excess plutonium, which the Russians are willing to destroy, are just sitting in storage. Progress in addressing these problems has been stymied in part by conservatives in the last Republican Congress who bristled at the notion of sending American tax dollars to a Russian military that, they said, should pay for its own fences and cameras. Cooler relations between Russia and the United States have stalled matters further. Russian military officials are less willing to let Americans poke around their nuclear sites and assess security conditions. And the uncompromising diplomacy of the Bush administration has played a role too. American and Russian officials recently fought over arcane rules that would govern a program to dispose of that 134 tons of excess plutonium. The lead United States negotiator demanded extremely broad guarantees for U.S. contractors involved in the work, including freedom from liability even in the event of intentional spillage of nuclear material. The standoff delayed the program for more than a year, until Bush and Vladimir Putin finally hammered out a solution at a summit last fall.
One of the few points of agreement between George Bush and John Kerry during the presidential campaign in 2004 was that preventing a terrorist nuclear attack is among America’s very highest priorities. But many critics on both the left and right argue that the Bush administration has lacked a sense of urgency toward the threat of loose nukes. Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan-era arms-control official and a Pentagon adviser under George W. Bush, recently recalled a private meeting with Donald Rumsfeld days after his swearing in as defense secretary. “He was very skeptical of the Nunn-Lugar program,” Adelman told me. “That wasn’t the kind of thing he thought the Department of Defense should be doing. He had it in his head that it was a wimpy thing to have the Pentagon involved in.”
Some Bush allies maintain that the real blame lies with Russia’s increasingly belligerent leader. “I believe there are still many installations where the security of materials is still not to the high level that we would hope,” John Wolf, who served as assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation in Bush’s first term, told me. “Somebody ought to look into Mr. Putin’s eyes and down to his soul and say, ‘You’re putting the fate of the world at risk by your unwillingness to take action.’ ”
Last September, Nunn and N.T.I.’s president, a former Energy Department official in the Clinton administration named Charles Curtis, flew to Vienna to meet with Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. ElBaradei admires Nunn, whom he calls “a shining example” in the fight against a potential nuclear catastrophe — presumably not least because N.T.I. has given ElBaradei’s agency more than $1 million to upgrade its monitoring of nuclear material worldwide. Part of the reason for Nunn’s visit was to discuss a major new N.T.I. proposal: the creation of an international nuclear fuel bank.
This was the foundation’s response to an unsettling wave of countries showing interest in new or expanded nuclear capabilities. Several nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, say they might want to develop civilian nuclear power. Meanwhile, South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Argentina and Australia all talk of creating home-grown uranium-enrichment programs — ostensibly for power but potentially also for military ends. “What I see is a new wave of countries not necessarily trying to develop nuclear weapons but nuclear-weapons capability — the ability to process or enrich plutonium or uranium,” ElBaradei told me recently. “And I know, and you know, that if a country is capable of doing that, they are virtually a nuclear-weapon state.”
The idea behind an international fuel bank is to make it possible for nations to generate nuclear power without developing a nuclear-weapons capability. Iran, for instance, has rejected offers from Russia to manage its uranium supply on the alleged grounds that it doesn’t want to be dependent on Russia’s political whims for its energy needs. The fuel bank would render such complaints obsolete and make transparent who is using energy programs as a cover for military ambitions. If a country has access to a reliable fuel supply, why would it need its own enrichment program?
For Nunn, this is the logical next phase in the fight against loose nukes: preventing the creation of new nukes that could become loose someday. ElBaradei has predicted that as many as 30 or 40 countries could begin trying to develop nuclear capability in coming years. And while traditional policies of deterrence may keep future nuclear states in check, every new bomb factory necessarily means there is more dangerous nuclear material in the world. “I see the two going together,” Nunn says. “The more countries that have this fissile material, the more likely the risk of a diversion or theft of fissile material becomes.”
America was lucky to survive the cold war, Nunn told an audience in Washington last month. “I don’t believe if you get another 7, 8, 10 countries with a nuclear weapon that you’re going to be so lucky.”
It is very likely that North Korea’s success in building weapons and Iran’s steady progress toward that goal have only encouraged other nations to get into the nuclear game. But, Nunn believes, the United States, mired in Iraq and strained in its relations with former allies, has never had less leverage to counter them. Nunn says that the current Iraq war (which he also opposed) has distracted U.S. officials, undermined the credibility of any U.S. military threat it might bring to bear on North Korean or Iran and “dealt a severe blow to the leadership credibility we need in the world.”
In this view, American credibility is an essential part of persuading other nations to stop or reverse their nuclear programs. One way to enhance American credibility, according to this line of thinking, is for the United States to decrease its own nuclear stockpile. Yet the Bush administration has not only not moved to significantly reduce that stockpile, it is also exploring new nuclear technologies (like bunker-buster mini-nukes). “I think we have very badly failed to meet our responsibilities,” Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Nunn’s friend, told me. “I think it is the sort of neoconish notion that it is our job to dominate the world and that the way you dominate it is by pushing ahead on new nuclear stuff.”
Nunn complains that the Bush White House also subordinates nonproliferation to other goals. As an example, he cites the deal the administration cut with India last year. It created a legal exemption allowing American companies to conduct trade with India’s nuclear-power industry even though India is not a party to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nunn publicly called for Congress to impose conditions on the deal — specifically, a provision requiring that India halt production of new fissile material for weapons. A worldwide treaty barring the creation of all new fissile material is near the top of Nunn’s wish list, and he saw the deal with India as a fine opportunity. But in the end, the Bush administration, which is eager to cultivate India as a regional ally, got its way. “We missed that opportunity,” Nunn says. “We should not have entered into that agreement.”
The Bush administration is not without its achievements or its defenders. Persuading Libya to abandon a nascent nuclear program in 2003 is one of its least-heralded triumphs. The recent deal with North Korea, if it holds up, could be another success story. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a program set up by the Energy Department to remove nuclear material from civilian nuclear reactors around the world, has been widely commended. (Nunn, who is not prone to boasting, says people “at very high levels” have told him that the example set by the Vinca operation in Serbia was a crucial impetus behind the creation of the new program.) Meanwhile, conservatives note that the sorts of international treaties embraced by Nunn but spurned by Bush have historically failed to blunt the nuclear ambitions of states like India and Pakistan and, now, possibly Iran. Hence American power and the deterrent threat of brute force remain the best way to confront the dangers of proliferation. “If you want to discourage countries from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Richard Perle, the former Reagan arms-control official, says, “make it clear that once they get a nuclear weapon, it is something they can’t use directly because we will annihilate them.”
Nunn, for one, remains unconvinced. The North Korea deal, he says, came about after the Bush administration shifted tactics from its confrontational, axis-of-evil posture to intensive multilateral diplomacy. While Nunn says he applauds the administration for changing direction on North Korea — “You have to talk to countries unless you’re going to leave yourself with one resort, which is military force,” he says — Perle’s vision of deterrence is ineffective if a nuclear weapon is stolen or transferred from a state to a terrorist group with no fixed address to incinerate. It is potential threats like these that have led Nunn to shift his focus from locking up loose nukes to grander ideas, like the international fuel bank.
At the same time, he has had to enlist new allies. Ted Turner’s initial donation of $250 million to the Nuclear Threat Initiative came in the form of Time Warner stock, which lost 70 percent of its value before N.T.I. sold it off. N.T.I. might have gone under by now had Nunn not enlisted another wealthy angel, Warren Buffett. Nunn has known Buffett for years through his service on the Coca-Cola corporate board — Nunn estimates he spends 30 to 50 percent of his time serving on several corporate boards, including those of Coca-Cola, Dell and Chevron — and Buffett has long been concerned about the risk of nuclear terrorism.
“One thing you learn in the insurance business is that anything that can happen will happen,” Buffett told me. “Whether it’s the levees in New Orleans or the San Francisco earthquake, things that are very improbable do happen.” Buffett once gave Nunn a formula that the latter likes to repeat: assuming a 10 percent chance of a nuclear attack in any given year, the odds of surviving 50 years without an attack are less than 1 percent. If the odds of an attack can be reduced to 1 percent per year, however, the chances of making it 50 years without a nuclear detonation improve to better than even. Buffett also told Nunn that if he ever had “a big idea” for reducing the chances of nuclear terrorism, he should call. After Nunn proposed the fuel-bank project, Buffett backed the effort with a pledge of $50 million — on the condition that at least one government contributes $100 million in cash or nuclear fuel within two years. Buffett is now N.T.I.’s chief underwriter, promising to donate $7 million annually to the foundation through 2009. (Fund-raising generates the rest of N.T.I.’s money.) “I told Sam we’re not going to have something as important as his effort disappear because of the actions of a stock,” Buffett says. “As long as Sam’s involved, I’ll be involved. I promise you that.”
For his part, ElBaradei is ecstatic that Buffett stepped forward. But he also regards it as a damning reflection on the seriousness with which the world is taking nuclear proliferation. “It’s discouraging, to say the least, for my organization to go and pass the hat to seek funding for these problems when everyone agrees that this is the No. 1 security threat,” ElBaradei says. “Governments are not putting money where their mouths are.”
Last month, Nunn wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal with former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and former Secretary of Defense William Perry that sent waves through the foreign-policy establishment. Its title was “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” The article declared that, after the cold war, “reliance on nuclear weapons for [deterrence] is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” Deterring terrorist groups has become nearly impossible, and the peacekeeping value of nuclear weapons is more and more outweighed by the risk of their possible use. Therefore, the authors wrote, it is time to pursue the goal of “a world free of nuclear weapons.” To seek abolition, in other words.
The language used in the op-ed — for example, the claim that abolition is “consistent with America’s moral heritage” — struck some as an echo of 1980s liberal critiques that treated nuclear deterrence as a moral abomination. “Many people said this was a leftist view, a pacifist view of the world, to come and say we need to move to a new abolition of nuclear weapons,” ElBaradei told me shortly after the piece was published. On the other hand, Nunn’s byline on the article seems to have buoyed those who have long called for weapons reductions. “Here is a man who was known as the leading Democratic hawk in the Senate saying we have got to recapture this vision of eliminating nuclear weapons,” Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear-proliferation expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, says. “Not just reducing nuclear dangers but eliminating these weapons. It was a shot in the arm to everyone who’s been trying to correct the disastrous policies of the last six years.”
Nunn says that some people were stunned by his new stance. “How could you endorse this?” he has been asked. Ronald Reagan believed passionately in the principle of disarmament, but few in Washington’s foreign-policy establishment have ever shared that view. Brent Scowcroft, for one, calls abolition “a fantasy. But even if you could do it, that’s dangerous. I just think that we have invented nuclear weapons, and we cannot disinvent them. And a world where everybody gets rid of their nuclear weapons means that anybody that cheats can become a superpower in a short period of time. And I just think that’s a very dangerous world.”
Nunn acknowledges this danger and admits that any realistic disarmament plan would have to allow the U.S. to quickly reconstitute weapons if a threat emerged. But he has come to believe the greater danger is continuing on our current path. “I think we have to turn it around,” he told me a few weeks ago. “You literally can’t get there” — to a safer world, that is — “from here.”
Nunn concedes that any path to complete disarmament would be long and slow. He says that the U.S. could begin by finally starting to make substantial cuts in its nuclear forces, and by ratifying a 1996 international nuclear-test-ban treaty that Congress has refused to ratify, and by working to halt the production of new fissile material everywhere. But only a sweeping vision of a world free from the bomb can start such a process, Nunn says. “I don’t believe the steps are possible without the vision.”
It has been a long journey to this point. Twenty years ago, he says, the Wall Street Journal article “would not have been possible. I would not have been in that mood at that stage, and I said so.” Today, in fact, Nunn finds himself unexpectedly aligned with the original abolitionist vision that he only recently urged Ted Turner to de-emphasize. It is a vision many Democrats say Nunn could bring into a future Democratic administration, possibly as secretary of state or defense. (In a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton cited Nunn and the N.T.I. as her inspiration for a bill to create a White House nuclear-terrorism adviser.)
But Nunn knows it could be another 20 years — probably more — before such a vision can be realized, if at all. “You can probably only get to the achievement with the next generation,” he says. “Probably none of the people who signed that will be able to see it through. But the world has to see that direction. Perhaps then a younger generation will see that the goal is achievable.”
Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Correction: February 24, 2007
An article on Page 50 of The Times Magazine this weekend, about Sam Nunn, head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, misstates the name of a company on whose board he serves. It is Chevron, not ChevronTexaco. The article also misspells the surname of a former secretary of state with whom Nunn and others wrote a recent op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal. He is George P. Shultz, not Schulz. And the article misspells the surname of the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in several references. He is Mohamed ElBaradei, not ElBaredei.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Nunn.t.html?pagewanted=print
Good math. You do realize the beds go in buildings now don't you? geesh.
Vets On The Street...
The following article states that the VA has recently added $24 MILLION for an extra 1,000 beds for homeless vets.
That equates to $24,000 PER BED!?!?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17315490/site/newsweek/
On Presidential Coinage
Perhaps the most striking thing about the new presidential coin released yesterday is that Congress has asked the United States Mint to issue one for every president from George Washington to Gerald Ford. With four new coins coming out each year, it will be hard to complain about the 2007 series, which offers a bumper crop of Founding Fathers. Washington, who appeared yesterday, will be followed by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
The down side of this inclusive approach, though, is that not every year will be so glorious.
The year 2010, for example, stands out as looking particularly dispiriting. The first coin will bear the likeness of Millard Fillmore, who may be best remembered today for signing the Fugitive Slave Act into law. The next will belong to Franklin Pierce, a hard-drinking military man who was derided as the “victor of many a hard-fought bottle.”
Collectors who hold out until 2014 will be rewarded with a dollar bearing the visage of Warren G. Harding. A shiny dollar may be a fit commemorative for a president whose administration is best remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal, when lots of oil money sloshed corruptly around Washington. And later that same year, there will be a coin for Herbert Hoover, who presided so unsatisfactorily over Depression-era America. For Hoover, the dollar may appear to be poignant commentary.
From there it is a short two years until Americans get their hands on the first Richard M. Nixon dollar.
The decision to make a line of presidential coins was a natural one, and once made, it would be hard to pick and choose. If you started by removing Millard Fillmore, where would you stop? But there is a real educational value in including every president. At a time when the current occupant of the White House thinks presidential powers should be expanded to new extremes, the series will be a four-times-a-year reminder that not everyone who makes it to the White House belongs on Mount Rushmore.
"misled"... why don't they just say "lied"
Ex-aide says Rice misled Congress on Iran
Thu Feb 15, 2007 12:38AM EST
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Controversy over a possible missed U.S. opportunity for rapprochement with Iran grew on Wednesday as former aide accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of misleading Congress on the issue.
Flynt Leverett, who worked on the National Security Council when it was headed by Rice, said a proposal vetted by Tehran's most senior leaders was sent to the United States in May 2003 and was akin to the 1972 U.S. opening to China.
Speaking at a conference on Capitol Hill, Leverett said he was confident it was seen by Rice and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell but "the administration rejected the overture."
Rice's spokesman denied she misled Congress and reiterated that she did not see the proposal.
Separately, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns warned Iran it risked further U.N. and other sanctions if it did not halt uranium enrichment as the U.N. Security Council demanded.
He stressed there was still time for diplomacy before Iran reached a critical point in its nuclear capability and said conflict with Iran was not inevitable.
Washington remains patient and committed to negotiations with Tehran and its carrot-and-stick approach with other major powers is influencing Iran's internal debate, Burns told the Brookings Institution think tank.
Leverett, speaking at a conference hosted by the New America Foundation think tank, said the 2003 overture "was a serious proposal" for a comprehensive agenda for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.
"The Bush administration up to and including Secretary Rice is misleading Congress and the American public about the Iran proposal," he said.
Testifying before a U.S. Congress committee last week, Rice, said about Leverett's previous public comments on the Iranian proposal: "I don't know what Flynt Leverett's talking about."
She faulted him for not telling her, "We have a proposal from Iran and we really ought to take it."
On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said: "What she said is she has no recollection of having seen it. She has said that repeatedly."
Leverett and others have represented the proposal as a missed opportunity that could have defused tensions with Iran which have grown to the point that the U.S. administration has been forced to deny it plans military action against Tehran.
Leverett said Rice should apologize for calling his competence into question.
He said he had left the National Security Council, which advises the president on security issues, in March 2003 before the Iranian proposal was received. He returned to the CIA where he previously worked and soon after left government. Hence, he was not in a position to make this case directly to Rice, he said.
Leverett said Powell, in a conversation about the Iranian proposal, told him he "couldn't sell it at the White House." This was evidence it had been discussed there, he said.
The proposal was transmitted in May 2003 by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, who represented U.S. interests there. Washington has not had diplomatic relations with Iran since two years after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
According to a copy of the proposal posted on The Washington Post Web site and cited by Leverett, it contains considerable detail about approaching issues of central interest to the United States and Iran.
This included an end to Iran's support for anti-Israel militants and acceptance of Israel's right to exist.
It carried a cover letter from Guldimann, who said the proposal was approved by Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and then-President Mohammed Khatami.
http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSN1433692720070215
Online iHUB Interview...
Mr. Frank McNulty, an independent candidate for Election 2008 has agreed to an online interview on Feb. 26th, 2007 beginning at 5PM EST.
If you have questions for Mr. McEnulty
please click the following link for information as to how to submit your questions.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=17148944
most corrupt and incompetant as well
Neither do I. This will go down as one of the most corrupt admins of all time.
what I don't understand is why there aren't calls for heads to roll... rumsfeld, cheney and bush
FRANK RICH: Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
In the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation’s armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.
The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq.
He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago.
When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring. It’s entirely possible that the White House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.)
The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn’t make that accusation in the first place.) But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else.
According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what he didn’t find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president’s men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson’s modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration’s W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq’s purchase of uranium in Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines at frankrich.com/timeline.htm.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in January 2003, the same month as the president’s State of the Union address, when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful “uranium from Africa” in his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration’s deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article appeared — some five months after the State of the Union and two months after “Mission Accomplished” — there was something terribly wrong with the White House’s triumphal picture.
More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of “major combat operations” by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren’t even able to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was “unacceptable.” It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson’s revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial boondoggle arranged by his wife.
The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of the Union speech. What we are learning from Mr. Libby’s trial is just what a herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby’s lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was — and still is — a stooge for the vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being retrofitted to expand and extend it.In a replay of the run-up to the original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his surge.
Even the declassified passages released on Friday — the grim takes on the weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence — foretell that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases bad news on Fridays because “fewer people pay attention when it’s reported on Saturday.”) A Pentagon inspector general’s report, uncovered by Business Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops lack the guns and ammunition to “effectively complete their missions.” Army and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that “five brigades of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky.”
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell’s notorious W.M.D. pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving the same script to rev up the war’s escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections. In his Jan. 10 prime-time speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying “advanced weaponry and training to our enemies,” even though the evidence suggests that Iran is actually in bed with our “friends” in Iraq, the Maliki government.
The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls “a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration’s case.” Call it a coincidence — though there are no coincidences — but it’s only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later.
Still, we can’t push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country can’t wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood.
http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/02/frank-rich-why-dick-cheney-cracked-up.html
The Build-a-War Workshop
Published: February 10, 2007
It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.
The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.
The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved.
We’re sure he was. But there is no comfort in knowing that his dirty work was approved by his bosses. All that does is add to evidence that the Bush administration knowingly and repeatedly misled Americans about the intelligence on Iraq.
To understand this twisted tale, it is important to recall how Mr. Feith got into the creative writing business. Top administration officials, especially Mr. Cheney, had long been furious at the C.I.A. for refusing to confirm the delusion about a grand Iraqi terrorist conspiracy, something the Republican right had nursed for years. Their frustration only grew after 9/11 and the C.I.A. still refused to buy these theories.
Mr. Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
But the C.I.A. kept saying there was no reliable intelligence about an Iraq-Qaeda link. So Mr. Feith was sent to review the reports and come back with the answers Mr. Cheney wanted. The inspector general’s report said Mr. Feith’ s team gave a September 2002 briefing at the White House on the alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection that had not been vetted by the intelligence community (the director of central intelligence was pointedly not told it was happening) and “was not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
The false information included a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots. It never happened. But Mr. Feith’s report said it did, and Mr. Cheney will still not admit that the story is false.
In a statement released yesterday, Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been dogged in pursuit of the truth about the Iraqi intelligence, noted that the cooked-up Feith briefing had been leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine so Mr. Cheney could quote it as the “best source” of information about the supposed Iraq-Qaeda link.
The Pentagon report is one step in a long-delayed effort to figure out how the intelligence on Iraq was so badly twisted — and by whom. That work should have been finished before the 2004 elections, and it would have been if Pat Roberts, the obedient Republican who ran the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not helped the White House drag it out and load it in ways that would obscure the truth.
It is now up to Mr. Levin and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the current head of the intelligence panel, to give Americans the answers. Mr. Levin’s desire to have the entire inspector general’s report on the Feith scheme declassified is a good place to start. But it will be up to Mr. Rockefeller to finally determine how old, inconclusive, unsubstantiated and false intelligence was transformed into fresh, reliable and definitive reports — and then used by Mr. Bush and other top officials to drag the country into a disastrous and unnecessary war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/opinion/10sat1.html?em&ex=1171342800&en=f6f2b1387b2cee37&a...
World is running out of water, says UN adviser
Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Monday January 22, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
The Ganges, India's most famous river, is now stagnant, according to Jeffrey Sachs. Photograph: Getty Images
The world is running out of water and needs a radical plan to tackle shortages that threaten the ability of humanity to feed itself, according to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the UN's Millennium Project.
Professor Sachs, who is credited with sparking pop star Bono's crusade for African development, told an environment conference in Delhi that the world simply had "no more rivers to take water from".
The breadbaskets of India and China were facing severe water shortages and neither Asian giant could use the same strategies for increasing food production that has fed millions in the last few decades.
A Bleak Assessment on Iraq
There isn’t much encouraging news in the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Ethnic and sectarian identities are hardening and violence is spiraling, as shown again in Saturday’s horrific Baghdad market bombing. Iraq’s new governing institutions are weak and leading politicians have a “winner-take-all attitude” that can only make matters even worse.
The intelligence agencies see “real improvements” in Iraqi security forces. But those gains are strictly relative and the report still finds those forces unlikely to be able to successfully battle Shiite militias in the next 12 to 18 months.
A good example of this problem can be found in the accounts of last week’s battle between the Iraqi Army and a mysterious group of armed religious extremists outside the Shiite shrine city of Najaf. Najaf is supposed to be a showcase province for the American-trained Iraqi Army. The Pentagon chose it in December for the first symbolic handover of security responsibilities.
Barely a month later, in their first major battle, the Iraqis had to be bailed out by American air and ground forces. Hundreds of armed zealots had managed to set up a fortified encampment, complete with tunnels, trenches, blockades, 40 heavy machine guns and at least two antiaircraft weapons.
This happened just 10 miles northeast of the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of religious pilgrims and Iraq’s leading Shiite clerics were headed there for annual holiday observances. A successful attack on top clerics and pilgrims in Najaf would have been disastrous.
The Iraqis’ next mistake was sending only one army battalion and some police to raid this armed camp after its belated discovery. Government forces were quickly surrounded and called in American air support. Still pinned down, the Iraqis had to summon American ground support as well before they could advance on the camp.
This less-than-impressive performance by a supposedly top-of-the-line Iraqi Army division has grave implications for President Bush’s new Baghdad security drive, in which an additional 17,000 or so American troops are supposed to work in tandem with a much larger Iraqi force.
Perhaps the Iraqi security forces will improve over the next 18 months. But as the intelligence estimate also makes clear, the only real hope for Iraq lies in a bold reversal of course by Iraqi politicians that puts national reconciliation ahead of sectarian advantage. Mr. Bush needs to get serious about demanding such a change, including enforceable deadlines for overdue steps like eliminating militia supporters from the police, ending vengeful anti-Baathist measures targeting the Sunni middle class, and guaranteeing the fair allocation of oil revenues.
Otherwise, Iraq seems headed over the cliff.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/opinion/05mon1.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
so true... delusional isn't strong enough
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