Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
One Meal a Day for Most Palestinians
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
November 13, 2003
Most Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank are eating only one meal a day, leading to malnutrition at levels found in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new United Nations report.
The area is "on the verge of humanitarian catastrophe," adds the document released Wednesday by the UN Human Rights Commission's special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler.
The report, based on a visit to the territories in July, as well as statistics accumulated over the past year by UN and US agencies, describes the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as a "horrifying tragedy," and stresses that Israel has the right to take defensive measures to protect its citizens against attacks.
But Ziegler, a recognized authority on international law and human rights from Switzerland, charges Israel with failing to uphold its legal obligation to ensure the right to food of the civilian Palestinian population.
The result – more than one-half of Palestinian households are currently eating only one meal a day and are fully dependent on international food aid.
"Many Palestinians who the special rapporteur met spoke of trying to subsist on little more than bread and tea," Ziegler wrote in his 24-page report.
"Severe malnutrition reported in Gaza is now equivalent to levels found in poor, sub-Saharan (African) countries, an absurd situation as Palestine was formerly a middle-income economy" with a rich agricultural base.
"The consequences of the ways in which current security measures are applied in the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories) are entirely disproportionate in the sense that they jeopardize the food and water security of the great majority of the Palestinians and thus amount to collective punishment," it added.
Ziegler called on Israel to "immediately lift internal closures within the OPT" that restrict movement and access to food, and to end "the regime of closures and curfews where these are causing an increase in the malnutrition and poverty levels of the civilian Palestinian population."
The report was released just one day after another UN study by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned that Israel's construction of a barrier separating Palestinian from Israeli populations around and within the West Bank will cause major additional hardships for Palestinian civilians, separating some 680,000 of them from their fields, jobs and schools.
When completed, the 640-km-long fence will also effectively expropriate or render useless some 14.5 percent of the West Bank, it added.
The Israeli government, which says the wall is necessary to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from infiltrating into Israel and Jewish settlements, responded that no more than four percent of the land will be cut off by the barrier, and that the number of Palestinians to be affected will run into the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.
Israel rejected an overwhelming vote by the UN General Assembly last month to cease work on the wall and tear down what has already been built.
Only four countries voted against the resolution: the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and the United States, as well as Israel itself. Washington earlier vetoed a similar Security Council resolution condemning the barrier's construction.
At the same time, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also appears to be increasingly concerned about the humanitarian situation in the occupied territories, particularly since armed forces chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, told reporters late last month that Israel risked a social explosion if the situation remain unchanged.
The cumulative impact of curfews, roadblocks and crackdowns, he warned, are "tactics that operate against our own strategic interests," and are only increasing hatred for Israel among the Palestinian population that would translate into greater support for terrorism.
"The war," Yaalon said, "is taking place on the backs of civilians."
On Tuesday, Sharon announced an easing of restrictive measures in advance of Wednesday's investiture of a Palestinian government under its new prime minister, Ahmed Qurei.
"I have a strong desire to implement humanitarian measures rapidly but our problem is that as we take important steps to ease the situation and open the roadblocks, terrorist actions will increase," he said.
The statement came after Sharon reportedly told his fellow Likud Party members Monday he was increasingly concerned that a collapse of the Palestinian Authority would force Israel to assume responsibility for the welfare of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
But in his report Ziegler insists that "the vast majority of the OPT is under the effective control of the occupying army," thus Israel has the responsibility under international humanitarian law to ensure that the civilian population receives adequate supplies of food and water.
He also criticized building of the barrier, which he referred to as "the security fence/apartheid wall," in a reference to the racial separation policies implemented by the National Party government in South Africa.
Ziegler noted, "many Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals and non-governmental organizations" believe the barrier is intended to further a strategy of "Bantustanization" of the Palestinian territory that will make it impossible for any future Palestinian state to "realize the right to food of its own people."
"The confiscation of land, extension of settlements and settler-only roads, and the building of the security fence/apartheid wall, where this deprives thousands of Palestinians of their lands, homes, crops and means of subsistence, is a violation of the right to food," says the report.
"For many Palestinians, the inability to feed their families is leading to a loss of human dignity, often heightened by bullying and humiliation at checkpoints," said Ziegler, who noted that during his nine-day visit to the territories a soldier at one checkpoint "deliberately took aim with his weapon at very short range at the special rapporteur's vehicle."
"Fortunately, the soldier did not fire his weapon, but the special rapporteur noted that these types of incidents are occurring far too frequently."
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Relaxed US Rules Fuelled Toxic ''Ghost Ships''
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
November 11, 2003
The Bush administration's relaxation of U.S. environmental regulations enabled the four rusty World War II-era ships that were the subject of a UK High Court ruling Wednesday to set sail for Britain to be turned into scrap.
A High Court judge in London granted a temporary injunction requested by Friends of the Earth (FoE) forbidding a British company from dismantling the ships until a full hearing can be held next month.
Because the ships lack official permission to enter British ports, the FoE and other environmental groups are calling for them to return to the United States at the earliest possible date.
Britain's Environment Agency (EA) announced last week that permits issued to the British firm Able UK to import and dismantle the four ships, plus nine others that are mothballed on the James River in southern Virginia, were invalid. The EA did not contest FoE's action and has also urged that the ships be returned.
''If the UK government and its agencies don't secure their immediate return,'' warned FoE UK Director Tony Juniper on Tuesday, ''then these toxic time bombs could be sitting off our coast within days, threatening our environment indefinitely''.
Environmental groups on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and the Basel Action Network (BAN), have been protesting the scheme to sail the ships, which are laden with thousands of tons of toxic materials -- including PCBs, asbestos and contaminated fuel oils -- across the ocean for dismantling, particularly when ship recyclers in the United States could do the job.
Several U.S. recyclers have asked Congress why their bids to dismantle the ships were rejected or ignored, and Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) has agreed to investigate.
''We have the technology right here in Virginia to recycle the ships in the Ghost Fleet safely,'' said Michael Town, director of the Sierra Club's Virginia chapter Tuesday. ”This is another example of the Bush administration trying to make an end run around the public,” he added in a statement.
Former President Bill Clinton outlawed the sale of mothballed ships for scrap overseas both because of the environmental hazards they posed to ocean waters and because of growing public concern that toxic wastes were being shipped to developing countries where workers were inadequately protected from exposure to poisonous chemicals.
But the administration of President George W. Bush won a waiver from its Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to send the ships overseas.
The case of the four U.S. ships highlights a growing problem, as governments try to dispose of decommissioned naval vessels, many of which are highly toxic.
In another case, a French aircraft carrier, the Clemenceau, is currently anchored off Sicily awaiting resolution of a number of disputes arising from a contract by a Spanish salvaging company to dismantle it.
When French reconnaissance planes found the ship under tow, apparently bound for Turkey, it rescinded the contract, according to the 'Financial Times' newspaper. The French government had stipulated that the asbestos on the ship had to be removed within the European Union (EU).
The 13 U.S. ships are part of the ''Ghost Fleet'' under the jurisdiction of the United States Maritime Administration (MARAD). Two of the four ships that are currently underway are due to enter British waters Friday if they are not ordered home before then.
Britain's EA originally granted Able UK a modification to its waste-management license to carry out the work in September but then last week declared it ''invalid'' after FoE started legal proceedings.
But merely declaring it ''invalid'' will not necessarily stop the ships from docking in Britain, which is why the group went to court to have the ruling formally revoked or quashed.
A major problem with the scheme surfaced when it turned out that a promised 10-hectare dry-dock facility where the work was to be performed does not exist, something the environmental groups have been warning about for weeks.
The groups went to court to get an injunction blocking the export of the ships in late September. They argued, among other things, that the scheme violated a provision in the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act that barred the export of PCBs in the absence of a waiver granted only through a rulemaking procedure that included public input.
The U.S. judge in the case issued a temporary restraining order blocking nine of the 13 ships, but allowing the four now underway to sail.
The groups said they are concerned that these ships represent just the ''tip of a toxic iceberg'' of more than 150 toxic and mothballed ships that are rusting in U.S. waters, and that the Bush administration plans to send the rest to developing countries, such as India and China, which have lower environmental and worker-protection standards.
''Why is the Bush administration ignoring U.S. environmental laws when domestic ship breakers could handle these toxic ships safely and economically''? asked Martin Wagner, an Earthjustice attorney on Tuesday.
The circumvention of the PCB export ban could set a particularly dangerous precedent, he added, in a statement.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Rumsfeld Takes More Friendly Fire
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
November 11, 2003
The right-wing coalition that powered the United States into Iraq earlier this year appears in ever greater disarray amid increasingly heated complaints by friends, as well as foes, that the US occupation is not going well at all.
The main target is Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who appears increasingly at a loss to explain US strategy beyond his now-famous admission in a "leaked" memo to his top aides last month that the situation in Iraq – not to mention the wider war against al-Qaeda terrorists – will be a "long, hard slog."
That was before Iraqi insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter, killing 15 US servicemen at a single blow 10 days ago, and then destroyed a Blackhawk helicopter late last week and killed 6 more.
Meanwhile, the daily US death count, as well as the number of attacks against US forces, has roughly doubled since midsummer, while public confidence in President George W. Bush's Iraq policy continues to erode.
A whopping 87 percent of respondents in one ABC-Washington Post poll taken before the Chinook disaster said they feared that the United States is getting bogged down, while public and media discourse is increasingly studded with the dreaded "V" word, for Vietnam.
While military commanders continue to insist that the attacks on US forces do not amount to anything like a strategic threat, their latest reactions suggest a sharp rise in concern, at the very least.
In the past week, for example, the administration announced a dramatic acceleration of plans to recall thousands of Iraqi army troops, police and even intelligence officers to active duty, a strategy that will necessarily mean far less training than originally contemplated and a much stronger likelihood that former Baathists or other anti-US elements will be back in uniform.
Moreover, US military raids against suspected guerrilla strongholds in the so-called "Sunni Triangle" in central Iraq are now being carried out with much more firepower.
After the Blackhawk was shot down, US warplanes dropped 500-pound bombs on suspected enemy sites near Tikrit and Fallujah for the first time since Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended May 1.
Other reports said that tanks and howitzers were also involved in an assault, in what commanders in the field called "a show of force."
As more than one commentator has pointed out, such tactics risk undermining the battle for "hearts and minds" in the most troublesome Sunni areas, which Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer says must become a focus of US efforts.
"These growing attacks against American forces have two clear goals: inflict casualties and force a reaction that alienates the local population," wrote Milt Bearden, a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who oversaw US covert actions against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the New York Times Sunday.
"Both are being achieved, as the quick-response raids by coalition troops to seize those behind the attacks fuel Iraqi alienation."
But that is not the only risk of more aggressive tactics. Larger shows of force also demonstrate to the public both here and in Iraq that the insurgency must be taken seriously.
In the face of this development, the administration in general and Rumsfeld in particular, are getting no end of increasingly biting advice, from friendly as well as less friendly sectors.
Neo-conservatives, the most insistent war boosters outside the administration before last March's invasion, are plainly upset with what they see as Rumsfeld's desperation to reduce US troop numbers in favor of activating the Iraqis.
In a two-page lead editorial Monday, the Weekly Standard newspaper accused the defense chief, its former hero, for essentially subverting the express wishes of the commander-in-chief.
"The president wants to win, and the Pentagon wants to get out," wrote Executive Editor William Kristol and Contributing Editor Robert Kagan in their piece called Exit Strategy or Victory Strategy?
The accelerated "Iraqification" strategy, according to the two founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the platform on which the "Attack Iraq" coalition behind Bush's post-Sept. 11 policies was forged – posed a potential disaster given the likelihood that the force will be inadequately trained and almost certainly penetrated by Baathists.
"It takes only a couple of mistakes in background checks to have a disaster," they warned.
Their answer is to sharply increase US troop numbers in Iraq, particularly in Sunni areas, and to increase the size of the US army from 10 to 12 divisions, even at the risk of fueling public worries that the country is becoming a quagmire, both militarily and fiscally.
Their advice echoed that given by Republican Senator John McCain, who, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last week, charged that the administration's actions, in contrast to its rhetoric, was creating the impressions that "our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon as possible, not meeting our strategic objective of building a free and democratic country in the heart of the Arab world."
McCain stressed that he believed Washington could still achieve its strategic objective with a greater military commitment, "but not if we lose popular support in the United States."
But that appears to be what is happening, judging by the latest polls, as well as the increasing frequency with which the current situation is being compared to the Vietnam War.
For their part, Democrats are behaving cautiously, seeing in the administration's obvious flailing about an opportunity to score political points and attack Bush's unilateralism.
Their leading presidential candidates also agree with the administration, the neo-conservatives and McCain that "cutting and running" is unacceptable because Washington would lose all "credibility" – another oft-heard echo of Vietnam – in the Middle East and beyond, and leave Iraq to the Baathists and even Islamist terrorists.
Their general solution is to internationalize the occupation, both by enlisting NATO forces under US command to keep the peace and by handing control of the civil and economic administration to the UN Security Council or some other multilateral mechanism.
But both options were rejected by Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney in September, and the deterioration in the security situation since then makes it much less likely that either the United Nations or most NATO members will want to get deeply involved.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Iran Invades Iraq amidst 135,000 American Deaths
Watch for the headlines soon...
Hawks Fleeing the Coop: Does the Departure of a Recent Pentagon Hawk Foreshadow a Policy Shift?
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
November 8, 2003
First Published in Foreign Policy in Focus
Facing falling poll numbers and renewed initiatives at engagement from both Iran and North Korea, the harder edges of the Bush administration's hawkish foreign policy is seen as a growing liability for next year's election. Further speculation along this line has deepened as a major Pentagon hawk has abruptly resigned his post. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, J.D. Crouch II, resigned effective Friday, October 31, in order to return to his academic post at Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU).
Significantly, the announcement did not give a reason for his departure or the suddenness with which it is taking place. Nor was anyone named to replace him.
While officials stressed that Crouch, who has a long association with many of the key figures who have promoted military pre-eminence as U.S. post-cold war strategy, was leaving voluntarily, some sources said his resignation reflected a loss of influence on the part of right-wing and neoconservative hawks concentrated in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
"He's not being fired, but they're starting to move people around," said one knowledgeable source. "It's all about (Bush's) re-election and how to get rid of the loonies without look like they screwed up."
As assistant secretary, Crouch reported to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose office has been responsible for post-war strategy in Iraq. Feith also oversaw the work of the now-disbanded Office of Special Plans (OSP), which has been charged by retired intelligence and State Department officials with "cherry-picking" intelligence that bolstered the case for going to war and sending it directly to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney's office without having it vetted by professional analysts for credibility.
As a result, Feith's office has become a major target of critics of both the war and the post-war situation which, given its rising cost in money and the lives of U.S. soldiers, is being blamed for Bush's plummeting poll numbers.
Extremist Opponent of Arms Control
Crouch, an arms-control specialist, had very little to do with the preparation for war against Iraq. But he has long taken what have been regarded as extreme and extremely unilateralist positions on a number of key issues.
A champion of U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, Crouch has supported military action against Cuba; defended the development of offensive chemical weapons; opposed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT); and advocated the development of new nuclear weapons for such purposes as destroying underground facilities (bunker-busters).
Before his appointment in 2001, he also strongly criticized the previous Bush administration's decision to withdraw nuclear weapons from South Korea and called for Washington to unilaterally destroy suspected nuclear and missile installations in North Korea unless Pyongyang complied with an ultimatum to dismantle them.
Crouch's departure is the latest in a series of developments that have suggested to some analysts here that a significant foreign policy shift is underway.
Those hints began with the announcement by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice earlier this month of a new interagency committee to coordinate Iraq policy in the National Security Council. Rumsfeld's unusually tetchy reaction to the announcement suggested that the move was more than cosmetic.
The next shoe that dropped came during Bush's recent trip to Asia where he repeatedly stressed his willingness to sign a five-nation security guarantee if North Korea agreed to fully and verifiably dismantle its nuclear program.
While this did not go as far as Pyongyang's demand for bilateral non-aggression pact, it was a more flexible offer than what Bush had previously put on the table, prompting Donald Gregg, the chairman of the Korea Society and a former top aide to George H.W. Bush, to assert that "a corner has been turned and the administration's pragmatists are in charge."
Engaging Iran
In just the past week, a number of other developments suggested that the White House was tacking to the middle, away from right-wingers and neoconservatives like Crouch and Feith.
Testifying before Congress Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage affirmed that Washington was not seeking "regime change" in Iran and indeed expected to engage Teheran in a dialogue over its nuclear program and other issues shortly. His remarks, which appeared to align the administration behind a recent European initiative on Iran's nuclear program, also included an unusually strong denunciation of the Pentagon's decision to negotiate a cease-fire with an Iraq-based Iranian rebel group during the Iraq war. "We shouldn't have been signing a cease-fire with a foreign terrorist organization," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Pentagon hawks had reportedly favored keeping the group, the Mujahadin e Khalq (MeK), intact for possible use as leverage against Teheran. "Armitage is always blunt," said one congressional aide, "but he must have had a lot of confidence in his position to say what he said."
Finally, Bush's decision Wednesday to "drop by" a meeting between visiting Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Cao Gangchuan and Rice was considered particularly disappointing to hawks who had lobbied hard against such an encounter.
While none of these developments by themselves would warrant the conclusion that the hawks are in decline, the totality suggests that they may be more than mere straws in the wind. "This could be the beginning of a change," according to Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. "What's new is that Bush's poll numbers are nosediving, and he's scared."
Some sources say that Robert Blackwill, the administration's former ambassador to India who was taken on as a senior aide by Rice last month, may be most responsible for the shifts. Blackwill, who was Rice's boss in the National Security Council during the first Bush administration, is a savvy Republican operator with friends and proteges in key posts in the national security bureaucracy and on Capitol Hill. While considered on the right, he reportedly shares the first Bush's distrust of neoconservatives, in particular.
Ties to the Neocons
While Crouch is not considered a neoconservative, he has long been closely associated with them. A former member of the board of advisers of the Center for Security Policy, he worked for former Republican Sen. Malcolm Wallop, a far-right Republican from Cheney's home state of Wyoming before joining the Pentagon as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security in the first Bush administration.
In that capacity, he worked under then-Undersecretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz for whom he reportedly helped prepare the controversial 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) draft which called for, among other things, Washington to pursue military dominance in and around Eurasia; carry out pre-emptive attacks against potential threats; and to rely more on ad hoc alliances than multilateral mechanisms, like the UN or NATO, to promote U.S. interests.
When the paper was leaked to the New York Times that spring, it was repudiated by the administration, and Wolfowitz, the current deputy defense secretary and Feith's superior, and a close aide, I. Lewis Libby (currently Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser) were reportedly almost fired. Crouch himself left the Pentagon in July, 1992, just three months after the draft DPG was exposed. The current administration's September 2002 National Security Strategy, however, was based largely on the DPG developed under Wolfowitz, Libby, and Crouch ten years before.
Crouch is a long-time protege of William van Cleave, a nuclear-arms specialist who played a key role in the mid-1970s in derailing détente with the Soviet Union, in part by working with Rumsfeld and neoconservative hawks in derailing then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's efforts to reach a major strategic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.
Van Cleave, who heads the SMSU department of defense and strategic studies to which Crouch will be returning, has been a major, if low-key, champion of U.S. military dominance and of developing new nuclear weapons that can be used in conventional warfare. Van Cleave also serves on the boards of advisers of the CSP and two Israel-based institutions closely tied to the right-wing Likud Party--the Ariel Center for Policy Research and the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org), where this essay first appeared. He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
"What's Gonna Happen With Feith?”
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
November 6, 2003
That, in a nutshell, is the question of the month for the Washington cognoscenti trying to figure out whether a major shift in the Bush administration's unilateralist and ultra-hawkish foreign policy is or is not underway.
The reference is to Douglas Feith, the administration's rather obscure but nonetheless strategically placed undersecretary of defense for policy, who reports directly to deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
If the administration is looking for a scapegoat for the situation it faces in Iraq, Feith is the most likely candidate both because of his relative obscurity compared to other administration hawks and the fact that, of virtually all of them, his ideas – particularly on the Middle East – might be the most radical.
A protégé of Richard Perle, the former chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) who stands at the center of the neo-conservative foreign-policy network in Washington, Feith has long opposed territorial compromise by Israel.
He was an outspoken foe of the Oslo process and even the Camp David peace agreement mediated by former President Jimmy Carter between Egypt and Israel. His former law partner, L. Marc Zell, is a spokesman for the Jewish settlers' movement on the occupied West Bank.
But, more to the point, virtually everything that has gone wrong in Iraq – especially those matters that Congress is either investigating or is poised to probe – is linked directly to his office. "All roads lead to Feith," noted one knowledgeable administration official this week.
His now-defunct Office of Special Plans (OSP) is alleged to have collected – often with the help of the neo-conservatives' favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi – and "cooked" the most alarmist prewar intelligence against Saddam Hussein and then "stovepiped" it to the White House via Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, unvetted by the intelligence agencies.
It was also his office that was in charge of postwar planning, and rejected the product of months of work by dozens of Iraqi exiles and Mideast experts in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who anticipated many of the problems that have wrong-footed the occupation.
The OSP also excluded many top Mideast experts from the State Department from playing any role in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.
And it is Feith's office that, with the CPA, recommended companies for huge, and in some cases no-bid, contracts in Iraq that have amounted, in the eyes of some critical lawmakers, to flagrant profiteering.
Among the firms that have profited most are those whose consultants or officers also serve on the Pentagon's DPB, members of which are chosen by Feith.
In a particularly provocative move that raises a host of conflict-of-interest questions, Feith's former partner Zell has set up shop with Chalabi's nephew in Baghdad to help interested companies win contracts for reconstruction projects.
"Until they get rid of Feith, no one is going to believe that the administration is seriously reassessing its policies," one congressional aide whose boss has been a strong critic of Bush's policy in Iraq, told IPS.
There are hints that Feith has seen his authority dwindle since the first half of October, when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice announced that she would head a new interagency Iraq Stabilization Group (ISG).
The move appeared designed not only to give the appearance that the White House was taking control of a situation that had contributed to a precipitous decline in Bush's approval ratings, but also to ensure that the Pentagon could no longer simply ignore other bureaucracies, Rice included, as it had for much of the past year.
Creation of the ISG followed growing public criticism, even by otherwise loyal Republican lawmakers, of the administration's failure to anticipate postwar problems. It came soon after the appointment of former US ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill – who was Rice's boss on the National Security Council (NSC) in the first Bush administration – to a special, high-ranking NSC post.
Other hints that Feith's and other hawks' grip on policy has been loosened came in the form of a distinct softening of the rhetoric against the other two members of the "axis of evil" – Iran and North Korea.
Then, last week a top Feith aide, former assistant defense secretary for international security policy J.D. Crouch II, abruptly resigned his position without explanation.
There have been unconfirmed reports that top White House officials decided two months ago that Feith had to go, but were then dissuaded by Rumsfeld who argued that his departure would be seen as an admission that things had gone seriously wrong in Iraq.
It was in that context, according to these reports, that the administration moved to quietly reduce Feith's authority, in part by creating the ISG.
Like his mentor Perle, Feith has long been a hard-liner on foreign policy and arms control. He was an outspoken opponent of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Chemical and Biological Weapons conventions, which he criticized as ineffective and dangerous to US interests.
Among other clients, his law firm represented arms giants Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grumman.
Also like Perle, Feith has long taken a strong interest in Israel and its security. His father, Dalck Feith, a philanthropist and major Republican contributor from Philadelphia, was active in the militantly Zionist youth movement Betar, the predecessor of Israel's Likud Party, in Poland before World War II.
Both father and son have been honored by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which, unlike other mainstream Jewish groups in the United States, has consistently supported Likud positions and the settlement movement in the occupied territories and actively courted the Christian Right.
Feith also served with Perle on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a think tank that promotes military and strategic ties between the United States and Israel.
Feith first entered government as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council (NSC) under Ronald Reagan in 1981, but was abruptly fired after only one year. Perle, who was then serving in the Pentagon as assistant secretary of defense for international security, hired him as his deputy, a post he retained until leaving in 1986 to found Feith & Zell.
Three years later, Feith was retained as a lobbyist by the Turkish government and, in that capacity, worked with Perle to build military ties between Turkey and Israel.
In 1996, he participated in a study group chaired by Perle and sponsored by a right-wing Jerusalem-based think tank that produced a report calling for incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to build a strategic alliance with Turkey, Jordan, and a new government in Iraq that would transform the balance of power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could decisively resist pressure to trade "land for peace" with the Palestinians or Syria.
In 1997, he published a lengthy article, "A Strategy for Israel," in Commentary magazine, Feith argued that Israel should repudiate the Oslo accords and move to reoccupy those parts of the West Bank and Gaza that had been transferred to the Palestinian Authority.
Two years later, he and Perle signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton calling for Washington to work with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to oust Saddam Hussein.
In May 2000, they signed a report calling for the United States to be prepared to attack Syria militarily unless Damascus failed to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Postwar Casualties Rise Amid Disarray in US Plans
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
October 20, 2003
Despite a two-week public-relations offensive designed to persuade the world and the U.S. public that it knows what it is doing in Iraq, the Bush administration appears increasingly at sea.
That was made clear by a number of developments this week, which were capped Friday by the killings of four more U.S. soldiers in two separate incidents, bringing the number of U.S. troops slain since President George W. Bush in May declared the end of major hostilities in Iraq to 101.
Passing the particularly disturbing benchmark number of 100 led the television news Friday night, dashing administration hopes that the week would be remembered more for the unanimous United Nations Security Council approval Thursday of a new resolution that officials here depicted as international endorsement of the U.S.-led occupation.
But even that achievement proved anticlimactic, as countries voting for the measure, including France, Russia, Germany and even Pakistan, made clear that they were not yet ready to contribute troops to Iraq and remained doubtful that Washington's strategy for restoring security to the country – if it actually had one – was working.
While the administration made clear that the resolution would not necessarily provide troops to take the place of the 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Pakistan's announcement that it would not do so came as a particular blow.
On the other hand, that Washington is still negotiating with its handpicked Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) over the deployment of up to 10,000 troops promised by Turkey suggests that Pentagon planners still are not very clear on what use foreign troops could serve in Iraq anyway.
The IGC has made it increasingly clear since the Turkish parliament approved the deployment – after Washington signed off on an eight-billion-dollar loan and promised to disarm Turkish rebels based in Kurdistan – almost two weeks ago that Turkish troops are simply not welcome, not in Kurdistan, nor in the rest of the country.
The IGC, from which the ardently pro-U.S. Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani threatened to resign if the Turkish deployment proceeds, has by all accounts become increasingly restive and resentful, particularly of the often high-handed behavior of Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Jerry Bremer, who has demanded that the IGC formally invite the Turks in.
The growing friction between Bremer and the IGC has become a source of embarrassment.
So have the ongoing frictions here between the Pentagon on the one side and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the State Department on the other.
The latest incident began after Rice briefed selected media on the creation of the 'Iraq Stabilization Group' (ISG), a new mechanism overseen by her to which Bremer and the CPA are to report.
Seeing in the move an implicit but high-profile criticism of the way the Pentagon had handled the CPA, if not an outright power grab, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld reacted with thinly veiled irritation, which lasted the best part of a week and was capped by a contemptuous reference to those ''little committees of the NSC (National Security Council)''.
Several days later, Rumsfeld's office struck back with the announcement that it will soon set up its own Project Management Office (PMO) in Baghdad that will take over the awarding of contracts for reconstruction projects from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is run out of the State Department.
The sequence of events left many observers scratching their heads, uncertain as to what precisely will be the ISG's mandate. ''We don't know what, if anything, has changed'', noted one Congressional aide. ''Nobody has explained any of this to us in ways that make sense.''
The impression of disarray was further compounded by the revolt staged by a significant number of Republican senators Thursday against the administration's demands that Congress provide 20 billion dollars in grants for Iraqi reconstruction as part of an 87-billion-dollar appropriations bill to fund U.S. operations in the occupied nation through next year.
In a 51-47 vote, the Senate approved a provision that would make one-half of the reconstruction aid a loan, thus adding to Iraq's accumulated foreign debt estimated at between 150 billion and 200 billion dollars.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pulled out all the stops in lobbying for the original plan, but eight Republicans deserted the president and joined 42 Democrats to thwart Bush in what the 'Los Angeles Times' described as ''the latest sign of eroding public and political support for Bush's Iraq policy''.
The loan provision might still be stripped from the bill when members of the House of Representatives – which rejected a similar provision by a 200-226 vote Thursday – and the Senate meet to hammer out a final version, but the unexpected outcome in the upper chamber suggests that Republican discipline is breaking down over Iraq.
The most serious signs of trouble for the administration this week were probably in Iraq itself, especially in the Shia-dominated southern part of the country which, until now, has been relatively quiet compared to the central ''Sunni Triangle'' region where insurgents have caused the vast majority of U.S. casualties since May 1.
Three of the four soldiers killed Friday were involved in a shoot-out with unknown assailants in the holy Shia city of Karbala. It was by far the worst incident in a series over the past month that reportedly involves a major power struggle between at least two key armed Shia factions.
Last week, two other U.S. soldiers were killed in what the CPA described as an ambush in Sadr City, a Shia-dominated part of Baghdad in which the factional struggle has also increased.
That U.S. troops might now be targeted by one of the factions – associated most closely with Muqtada al-Sadr, who has called for the establishment of an independent government – is particularly disturbing to Iraq specialists here.
While Sunnis, who were generally favored under British colonial and Ba'ath Party rule, constitute about 20 percent of Iraq's population, Shias are thought to make up as much as 65 percent. Any fighting or breakdown in order within the Shias or between Shias and occupation forces would make it vastly more difficult to restore security to the country.
It would almost certainly pose new questions as well about what U.S. troops are doing there, a question that is apparently being raised with increasing frequency and intensity by soldiers themselves.
A survey based on almost 2,000 questionnaires distributed by the Pentagon-funded 'Stars and Stripes' newspaper in August found that one-half of those questioned described their unit's morale as low, their training irrelevant or inadequate, and their re-enlistment plans non-existent.
The troops also complained about the tours provided by the Pentagon to visiting dignitaries, including top military officers, congressmen and senators. They said visitors were generally shown only hand-picked troops who could be relied on to show enthusiasm for their mission and who did not represent the views of most troops.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Cheney's Mask is Slipping
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
October 2, 2003
In the 2000 elections, he was the thoughtful, gray-haired Washington veteran who reassured nervous voters that candidate George W Bush would indeed have adult supervision if he became president of the United States.
Calm, if intensely purposeful and focused, always substantive, and with virtually unmatched experience, Dick Cheney, who already at age 34 had served as White House chief of staff under president Gerald Ford and later as defense secretary under Bush's father during the Gulf War in 1991, embodied competence and gravitas. In addition to his government service, he had worked for several years as the chief executive officer of one of the country's biggest and most profitable corporations.
You could trust him to round out Bush's own inexperience and curb his boyish enthusiasms, especially, perhaps, for Texas wildcatters, tax cuts, Christian fundamentalism, or baseball. His was the steady hand that communicated good old mainstream conservative Republicanism.
Now, three years later, the image of Vice President Dick Cheney is changing. Already tarnished by questions surrounding the huge no-bid reconstruction contracts won by his former company, Halliburton, in which he retains a financial interest, as well as his refusal to disclose to Congress what meetings he held during his formulation of Bush's energy policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as a serious rightwing extremist and ideologue, and by far the most powerful number two in US history.
As much as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisors have become the lightning rod for criticism over the Iraq war and the administration's hubris, Cheney appears to have acted as their principal patron and advocate with Bush himself, and more than any other official except perhaps Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the driving force within the administration for war with Iraq.
Although long in the making, the secretive vice president's image as zealot appears to have impressed itself in the media just in the past two weeks.
In particular, his September 14 appearance on the Sunday television news program, Meet the Press, when he not only defended the administration's pre-war optimism about Iraq, but also revived two stories long dismissed by the intelligence community - that one of the September 11 hijackers had met with an Iraqi spy at a Prague cafe just five months before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and that Iraq sponsored the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center - has attracted unprecedented attention.
The Prague story, which apparently rests on a report to Czech intelligence by a single "Arab student" who claimed five months after the alleged meeting to have witnessed and overheard it, had been pushed primarily by Cheney and several neo-conservatives outside the administration, notably Richard Perle and James Woolsey, since it first surfaced in November, 2001.
After an exhaustive investigation, US intelligence agencies concluded a year before the March invasion of Iraq that the hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was in the US at the time of the alleged meeting. Moreover, the Iraqi spy, who has been in US custody in Iraq since July, has apparently failed to back up the story despite, no doubt, repeated suggestions that he do so.
According to a major account in the Washington Post on Monday, Cheney and his top aide, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, continued to press the story on the administration long after the intelligence community had dismissed it, even insisting on the eve of Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council last February on Iraq's defiance of the council's resolutions that it be included in Powell's indictment.
Powell kept it out, and 10 days ago, in a major blow to Cheney's credibility, Bush himself told reporters that the administration had "no evidence" that Saddam Hussein played any role at all in the September 11 attacks.
Cheney's suspicions - and their lack of any grounding in reality - have now become fair game in the media. "Cheney in Wonderland" was how the Los Angeles Times titled one editorial, while accounts in Newsweek and the Post have gone to unusual lengths to debunk Cheney's theories.
There had long been hints that Cheney was not quite the reasonable and deliberate presence that he so effectively conveyed throughout his long career.
At the beginning of the administration, it was he who championed Rumsfeld, his former boss in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, for the defense post and then insisted, over fierce objections by Secretary of State Colin Powell, on placing Wolfowitz in the number two position at the Pentagon.
He also insisted, again over Powell's misgivings, on making ultra-unilateralist John Bolton, then vice president of the American Enterprise Institute (where Cheney's spouse, Lynne Cheney, is a fellow), Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
Bolton - praised by the ultra-rightwing former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman as "the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon", the final, apocalyptic battlefield between good and evil prophesied in the Bible - told the Wall Street Journal last year that the "happiest moment in his government service" came when the US pulled out of the treaty creating the International Criminal Court.
Cheney also made Libby his own chief of staff and national security advisor. A hard core neo-conservative who had worked with Wolfowitz in 1992 on a controversial draft strategy that called for global US military dominance that was strongly denounced by the Republican foreign policy establishment at the time, Libby later served as general counsel to the Cox Commission, a Congressional body convened to investigate alleged Chinese spying and acquisition of advanced-weapons technology. Its final report was almost universally derided as flimsy, exaggerated and inaccurate by both technical and China experts.
Libby also represented Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive who reportedly enjoys very close ties to Israeli intelligence and whose pardon by Bill Clinton in the last days of his presidency became a major scandal, but one quickly hushed by the incoming Bush administration. The fact that Rich had renounced his US citizenship after his conviction for tax evasion made the pardon - and Libby's efforts to obtain one - particularly galling for many conservatives and made Libby himself a particularly curious choice for Cheney's chief aide.
Cheney also reportedly played a key role in the appointment of another controversial neo-conservative, Elliott Abrams, to head the Middle East office on the National Security Council. Abrams, a strong rightwing critic of the Oslo peace process, has identified closely with positions of the Likud Party in Israel. Cheney himself told Israel's defense minister in a meeting in early 2002 that he thought Palestinian President Yasser Arafat "should be hanged".
At the same time, in what was widely interpreted as an effort to intimidate the Near East bureau of the State Department, which has generally favored a more even-handed position toward Israelis and Palestinians, Cheney's daughter, Elizabeth, was appointed by the White House to serve as deputy assistant secretary of state of that office in early 2002.
And it was also Libby and Cheney who reportedly visited the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) several times in the run-up to the war in Iraq in what was taken as pressure on CIA analysts to take a darker view of Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction than what was reflected in the agency's reports.
In spite of the change in Cheney's media image and the questions raised about the propriety of his ties with Halliburton and the soundness of his judgment, there is little indication that Cheney's influence with Bush has been reduced.
While Powell appeared to have been given the authority to negotiate a new Security Council resolution that would dilute Washington's authority over reconstruction and political affairs in Baghdad earlier this months, Cheney led an internal effort to retain full control, even as Powell was negotiating in New York, according to several knowledgeable sources. "He has been far more inflexible than Rumsfeld," said one.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Sharp Increase in US Military Aid to Latin America
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
September 25, 2003
Spurred by the wars on drugs and terrorism, levels of U.S. military aid to Latin America have more than tripled over the last five years, according to a new report released here Monday by three foreign policy groups.
And even as Washington has intensified its training of military and security forces in Central and Southeast Asia and the Middle East as part of its "war on terrorism," Latin America soldiers and police received the most U.S. training of any region--13,000 Latin American personnel out of a total of 34,000 worldwide.
Moreover, at a time when the region's economies are stagnating or even shrinking, throwing millions more people into poverty, total U.S. military aid to Latin America now almost equals the amount of money Washington is devoting to social or economic development there.
"Despite pervasive problems of poverty in Latin America, the United States' focus on military rather than economic aid to the region is increasing," according to Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF), one of the groups that sponsored the new study.
Colombia, the biggest recipient of U.S. aid globally after Israel and Egypt, has received by far the most assistance--both military and economic--in the region for the last several years, and the sheer volume of aid as a proportion of all aid going to Latin America dominates the regional picture.
Nonetheless, some of the patterns--particularly the rise in military aid as a proportion to all U.S. assistance--that have applied to Colombia also apply to the region as a whole.
Entitled 'Paint by Numbers: Trends in U.S. Military Programs with Latin America,' the report also expresses concern over the growing number of obstacles to obtaining reliable information about U.S. military-related programs in the region.
It charged that the administration of President George W. Bush (news - web sites) has tried systematically to repeal a number of Congressional mandates to report on military training, joint exercises, and equipment that Washington provides to Latin American countries, calling such requirements "overly burdensome" or of "minimal utility."
For the most part, Congress has resisted the administration's pressure, but, in a number of cases, the administration has moved training programs from the State Department to the Pentagon (news - web sites), whose $400 billion annual budget makes oversight much more difficult.
Moreover, Pentagon control not only effectively reduces the amount of information the administration is required to produce but also transfers jurisdiction for their oversight to Congressional committees that are less attuned to foreign policy priorities, human rights, and civilian control over militaries. It also reduces the State Department's leverage.
"Congress' tendency to fund security assistance programs directly through the Defense Department is making the State Department increasingly irrelevant to important foreign policy interactions," said Joy Olson, the director of the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA). She noted that civilian control of the Latin American militaries has long been weak.
While the militarization of U.S. aid in Latin America actually began under former President Bill Clinton (news - web sites)--particularly with the launch of Plan Colombia in 2000--trends established then have become more pronounced under Bush, the report found.
Most alarming, according to the report, is the sharp rise in military aid as a proportion of all U.S. assistance for the region.
For fiscal year 2004, which begins October 1, the administration has requested a total of $874 million in military and police aid for Latin America compared to a total of $946 million in aid for economic and social programs.
Even during the height of the Cold War, military and police aid to the region were generally less than half as great as economic and social levels. Indeed, despite the rise in the region's poverty rate to well over 40 percent since 2001, Washington has actually reduced its economic aid in the same period.
While the enormous quantity of military aid to Colombia--$605 million in 2003 and $553 million requested for 2004 compared to $137 million and $136 million in economic and social aid, respectively--naturally skews the balance, a number of other countries receive or will soon receive more security-related aid than social and economic assistance.
Brazil, for example, is slated to receive about $21 million in military and security assistance next year, slightly more than it will receive in social and economic aid. The Bush administration plans to reduce the economic aid Ecuador receives from $46 million to $40 million, while raising its military and security assistance from $30 million to $49 million.
A similar reversal is planned for Panama, which is to get $14 million and $13 million for military aid and economic assistance, respectively, while the balance for Mexican aid will be particularly spectacular: military aid is slated to almost double from $27 million to $52 million--$20 million more than what it will get in economic aid. Costa Rica too will receive more security assistance than economic aid, continuing a trend that began in 1999.
For Peru, economic aid will be down more than 20 percent--from $147 million to $115 million--while military aid will increase by ten percent, to $71 million.
The report notes that over half of all U.S. military and security aid and trainings in Latin America is attributed to counter-narcotics work by security agencies. But it stresses that this distinction is increasingly unimportant as the U.S. blurs the line, especially in Colombia, between counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics. Indeed, most of the training for counter-narcotics programs are directly applicable to counter-insurgency work as well.
Two-thirds of all U.S. military training is now also paid through the defense budget rather than the foreign-aid budget, according to the report, which stressed that Pentagon programs are not subject to the same human rights and democracy provisions as required by the foreign-aid bill.
The report also found that the Pentagon is training an increasing number of police in Latin America, including those, like Panama and Costa Rica, that have no military institutions, as well as those, like Peru, which do.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
US Dominates Arms Sales to Third World
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
September 30, 2003
The United States retained its dominance of the Third World arms market for the eighth year in a row in 2002, according to the latest in an annual series of reports produced by the Congressional Research Service.
Washington accounted for close to one-half of all new arms transfer agreements concluded during the year, as well as actual arms deliveries. Altogether, arms sales from all sources to developing countries made up about two-thirds of arms sales worldwide during 2002, according to the report, which is based on the most comprehensive data compiled by the US government.
New arms agreements with developing nations totaled US$17.7 billion, a 10 percent increase over new deals in 2001. Of that total, US sales came to $8.6 billion, or almost 48 percent of all arms transfers to Third World countries, up from 41 percent the previous year.
Washington was followed by Russia, which sold $5.7 billion worth of arms; Ukraine ($1.6 billion); Italy ($1.5 billion); and Germany and France ($1.1 billion each).
China was the leading recipient of conventional arms transfers in 2002, accounting for $3.6 billion in purchases; followed by South Korea ($1.9 billion); India ($1.4 billion); and Oman ($1.3 billion).
Of the 10 top recipients, five were in the Middle East - Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Israel, in addition to Oman - and four in Asia, with Malaysia ranking eighth behind China, Korea and India.
Chile, which ranked tenth on the strength of a major purchase of advanced fighter jets from the US, was the only country outside the other two regions, which have been the developing world's biggest customers for conventional arms for the past decade.
While the Middle East proved the bonanza market of the 1980s - particularly when warring Iran and Iraq, as well as Saudi Arabia, were making huge purchases - Asia, particularly China and India, has been the big buyer of the past seven years, according to the report, "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1995-2002".
In that period, China ranked number one, with $17.8 billion worth of purchases; the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ranked second at $16.3 billion; and India third at $14.1 billion, suggesting the emergence of a new arms race between the world's two most populous nations that could dominate the market for some time, particularly if purchases in the Middle East continue to decline in relative terms.
The US, which has sharply upgraded its military relationship with India in the past several years, particularly since the beginning of Washington's "war on terrorism", has made little secret of its hopes of integrating Delhi into a containment strategy against Beijing.
The 84-page report, whose graphs and tables are ritually pored over by intelligence analysts around the world to glean key trends and possible future military threats to their governments, tracks both actual deliveries of arms, as well as new agreements that will result in eventual deliveries. The time between the signing of an agreement and actual delivery can stretch beyond a decade, depending on many factors.
In addition to covering the value of sales and deliveries each year and over periods as long as seven years, the report also tracks the transfer by various countries and categories of countries of specific weapons systems.
It found, for example, that a total of 60 surface-to-surface missile systems were transferred last year, none of which was supplied by the US, Russia, China, the four major West European countries (France, Britain, Germany, and Italy) or "all other European countries".
Suppliers of the missiles were found in a category called "all others", which includes North Korea, South Africa and Israel.
The report does not identify the individual suppliers in a category because that information remains classified.
In the introduction, Richard Grimmett, who has authored the report since it was first published some two decades ago, stressed that the overall trend in arms purchases by the developing world has been downward since the early 1990s, when countries that could afford them bought large quantities of advanced US weapons systems that were displayed during the 1991 Gulf War.
While arms transfers were up in 2002 compared to the previous year, the $17.7 billion in new agreements was still the second lowest in the last seven years.
Grimmett stressed that it was still too soon to assess the impact, if any, of the "war on terrorism", including the ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and this year's war in Iraq.
Economic conditions in specific countries as well as the state of the world economy continued to be a major factor constraining arms buying, according to Grimmett. "Economic as well as military considerations have factored heavily in [developing country] arms purchasing decisions, a circumstance likely to continue for some time," he wrote.
This has benefited both wealthier developing countries vis-à-vis their rivals, as well as those arms suppliers that can provide credit or are willing to provide offset arrangements or joint-production ventures with buyer states in what has become a more competitive market.
The report noted that Russia, which has encountered strong competition for the number two spot on the arms suppliers' list since 1995, intends to offer more flexible credit and payment arrangements than it has in the past in order to secure its ranking.
While China has been the fourth biggest supplier over the same period, "its role is more as a consumer than a buyer," Grimmett told Inter Press Service, noting that over the past seven years the combined sales of the big four European suppliers rival Russia's sales.
Indeed, as a group, the four countries claimed 12 percent of total sales in 2002, up from 5 percent in 2001.
Two major buyers of the past decade - Saudi Arabia and Taiwan - are fading as consumers in more recent years, the report says. Riyadh has faced financial constraints and, in fact, is still absorbing weapons systems worth some $64.5 billion that it purchased in the early 1990s.
Taiwan, which ranked second to Saudi Arabia with respect to deliveries since 1995 ($20 billion) has dropped out of the top 10 in purchasers, much to the frustration of anti-China hawks in the Bush administration.
Different suppliers also penetrated different regional markets over the same seven-year period. Asia - particularly China, India and Malaysia - accounted for 82 percent of Russia's arms sales, or about one-half of all arms sold to the region.
US sales to Middle Eastern clients has accounted for 76 percent of its total arms sales since 1999 and about the same percentage of all sales to the region in that period. It has also became the dominant supplier to Latin America in the past three years, primarily on the strength of the warplanes for Chile.
Germany (due to a big sale to South Africa) and Russia have been the biggest single arms sellers to Africa in the past three years, at 16 percent and 15 percent, respectively. By contrast, Washington accounted for only 1 percent of sales to that continent.
On the other hand, "all other European" countries - mainly Central and Eastern Europe - accounted for a whopping 37 percent of total weapons transfers to Africa, giving a clue to the source of small arms that are fueling the region's many civil conflicts, according to Grimmett.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Is the Neocon Agenda for Pax Americana Losing Steam?
by Jim Lobe
Dissident Voice
September 9, 2003
President George W. Bush's speech to the nation last night was notable in many ways, most critically for marking what appears to be a weakening of the steep unilateralist trajectory on which neoconservative and right-wing hawks set U.S. foreign policy two years ago. Who would have thought it would lose momentum so quickly after Washington's stunning military victory in Iraq in early April and plummet back to earth?
Now, just a week before the second anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration appears to have decided that Washington really cannot run Iraq, let alone the entire Middle East, by itself and must rely on others--even the much-despised United Nations--to help out.
Whether the UN will agree to do so--and on what conditions--remains to be determined, but, for the first time in two years, it appears that the administration's more multilaterally inclined, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, may actually be moving into the driver's seat. While the battle for control is far from over, the signs of what is being euphemistically called a "policy adjustment'' have already emerged.
Powell and the UN
Not only has Powell been given the authority to launch serious negotiations over a new UN Security Council resolution that will almost certainly reduce Washington's control over the political process and reconstruction in Iraq, but even the ultra-unilateralist Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith--whose office was responsible for post-war planning in Iraq--insisted publicly that he has long favored going to the UN for help.
Feith's scarcely credible protests underline the degree to which the hawks, particularly his two superiors, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, have been placed on the defensive. Hailed as strategic geniuses as recently as July, their repeated assurances that everything was going according to plan despite steadily mounting U.S. casualties, a series of disastrous bombings, and skyrocketing estimates of the financial costs of occupation--the latest estimates call for as much as $80 billion next year, or four times the State Department's annual administrative and foreign aid budget--have become the stuff of late-night comedy routines and growing anger in key institutional sectors, particularly the military and Republicans in Congress.
Thus, carefully orchestrated clarion calls by Wolfowitz and his allies in the media to stay the course in Iraq in order to defeat international terrorism once and for all, published at the beginning of the week in the neoconservative Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard, were quickly drowned out by Republican lawmakers returning from the August recess demanding that the administration quickly devise an "exit strategy'' for Iraq and, explicitly evoking the Vietnam War, show them a "light at the end of the tunnel."
"Wolfowitz frankly has very little credibility up here," said one congressional staffer who recalled that the Pentagon's number two man had led the campaign to persuade Congress that Iraq had vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and close ties to al Qaeda before the war. He has since admitted that the intelligence on both questions was "murky." Wolfowitz, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, also argued that U.S. troops would be greeted as "liberators" by the Iraqi operation, rather than occupiers. "For him, of all people, to be the point man for arguing that Iraq is now the decisive battlefield in the war on terrorism simply defies common sense," the aide added, noting that Wolfowitz also supervised Feith's post-war planning, which is now seen as an appalling failure.
But while Republican lawmakers, fresh from public meetings with their constituents back home and only one year away from the 2004 elections, expressed growing impatience with the costs in U.S. lives and money of an open-ended occupation, senior military officers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appear to have decided that their civilian bosses represent a major threat to their institution.
Uniformed Discontent
The Washington Post reported September 4th that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard B. Myers, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace, effectively circumvented the Pentagon's civilian leadership in lobbying in support of Powell's efforts to turn to the Security Council for a new resolution. The result was that when Powell presented the idea to Bush earlier this week, he was able to speak for the uniformed military, as well as the State Department, effectively undermining Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
The willingness of the top brass to defy their civilian leadership is remarkable, but their discontent has grown by leaps and bounds since just before the Iraq war when Wolfowitz publicly berated then-Army chief Eric Shinseki for telling lawmakers that at least 200,000 soldiers would be needed to keep the peace in Iraq, an estimate that Wolfowitz called "wildly off the mark" at the time, but which is now seen as an accurate forecast. For his impertinence, Shinseki was made to retire a year earlier than would normally have applied in his case.
Now, the Army is seen as stretched far beyond its limits both in Iraq and around the world, fulfilling another warning by Shinseki in his farewell address earlier this year: "Beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army."
All of this has emboldened retired senior officers to unleash unprecedented criticism of Rumsfeld and his chief aides. At a meeting Thursday of several hundred Marine and Navy officers, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who served as head of the U.S. Central Command until 2000 when he supported Bush's presidential candidacy, issued a blistering attack on the Pentagon leadership's performance in Iraq, even comparing it to the Vietnam War. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities," said Zinni, "were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," he said. "I ask you, is it happening again?"
Zinni, who now works for Powell on Middle East issues at the State Department, also complained bitterly about both the Pentagon's planning for post-war Iraq and the decision to circumvent the UN in going to war. "We certainly blew past the UN," he said. "Why, I don't know. Now we're going back hat in hand."
Zinni received "prolonged applause at the end," according to the Washington Post, which noted that some officers bought tapes of the speech to give to others.
''I've never seen so much discontent among the retired community," former Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who served as a commander in the Gulf War, told another Post reporter. At a meeting last week with eight other retired generals, Van Riper said, one asked about Rumsfeld, who was on an unannounced visit to Baghdad at the time. "When are they going to get rid of this guy?"
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Tuesday's White House decision to permit National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly under oath before the so-called 9/11 Commission marks an unusual reversal by an administration that has fiercely resisted taking any moves that suggests it is capable of making mistakes.
It also signals recognition by President George W. Bush's political handlers that last week's testimony before the commission by the administration's former senior counter-terrorism official, Richard Clarke -- and, even more, its own ferocious efforts to discredit Clarke -- have inflicted serious damage to Bush's re-election campaign.
So ferocious were the administration's attacks on Clarke that more than one commentator was moved by the end of last week to compare the tactics to those of former President Richard Nixon, whose downfall 30 years ago in the Watergate scandal was prompted by ''dirty tricks'' against his real or suspected foes.
''This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics -- even compared with Nixon's'', noted 'New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman on Tuesday in an article that quoted John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, who himself has just published a book on the Bush administration titled, Worse Than Watergate.
Clarke, whose own book, Against All Enemies, elaborates on the 15 hours of testimony he has delivered to the commission that was set up to investigate the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, has come to be regarded by the administration as a particularly dangerous enemy.
A career civil servant who coordinated counter-terrorism on the White House National Security Council (NSC) staff from 1992, when Bush's father was in power, until the eve of the Iraq War in February 2003, Clarke is the first high-level insider to attack Bush's campaign pose as the leader in the war on terrorism as hollow.
On the CBS show '60 Minutes', the most watched public-affairs network television program in the country, he said Bush did ''a terrible job'' pursuing terrorists.
Specifically, and of special interest to the 9/11 Commission, Clarke said the Bush administration completely failed to respond to intelligence and his own urgings through the summer of 2001 that the al-Qaeda terrorist group of Osama bin Laden was planning a major attack on U.S. targets.
This was a marked contrast to the Clinton administration, Clarke added, where he had the authority spur key agency chiefs to heighten their vigilance whenever intelligence ''chatter'' indicated an imminent attack, as in the December 1999 ''Millennium Plot'' to attack the Los Angeles Airport and other targets.
That scheme was successfully broken up when border agents in Washington State arrested an Algerian terrorist trying to enter the United States from Canada.
And, instead of pursuing al-Qaeda after the ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November 2001, according to Clarke, the administration began preparing its attack on Iraq, which he insisted had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. In doing so, the administration diverted key intelligence and military resources, including highly specialized intelligence officers, from Afghanistan to the Iraq theatre.
''By invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism'', Clarke told the commission last week, arguing that not only did it make the pursuit of al-Qaeda more difficult, but also made the group's anti-U.S. propaganda more credible to the Islamic world.
Clarke also said Bush had personally pressed him to find a connection between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and 9/11 shortly after the attacks, even though Clarke assured him there was none.
The major points of Clarke's critique have been made before, and, indeed, little of what he said was surprising for the policy cognoscenti who have followed the debate over the war on terrorism.
But the combination of Clarke himself as a 30-year veteran hard-liner of the national-security bureaucracy who had served in high positions in Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the '60 Minutes' forum in which he appeared and the timing of his appearance in the opening stages of a political campaign in which Bush is running primarily as a ''war-time president'' guaranteed a major impact.
The White House and its allies in the media responded with all guns blazing. Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, depicted Clarke as a disgruntled staffer who had been passed over for promotion and was in any case ''out of the loop'', while White House spokesman Scott McClellan charged that Clarke was ''grandstand(ing)'' to sell his book and or gain a post in a future administration headed by presumptive Democratic nominee Senator John Kerry.
Clarke's ''best buddy'', noted McClellan, was Rand Beers, Kerry's co-ordinator for national security issues, who had succeeded Clarke in the NSC post only to resign in March 2003, to protest the Iraq War's impact on the anti-al-Qaeda campaign.
On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist unleashed a furious attack on the floor of the Senate, accusing Clarke of ''profiteering'' and suggesting he had committed perjury in his commission testimony which, according to Frist, was at odds with the praise he had heaped on the administration in classified testimony to Congress two years before.
But the administration's most ubiquitous assailant was Rice, Clarke's former boss, who not only produced a column in the 'Washington Post' just a few hours after '60 Minutes' was broadcast defending the administration's pre-9/11 performance, but who was also interviewed on '60 Minutes' to rebut Clarke the following Sunday.
In between, she appeared on virtually every other major national news program, making her omnipresence a required joke on late-night talk shows.
The campaign to discredit Clarke, which was widely decried by major newspapers and even some prominent Republicans, was partly successful -- the latest polls indicate that some 50 percent of respondents believe his disclosures were motivated by personal or political reasons.
But at the same time, they also made the book an instant bestseller and Clarke, who had long kept to the bureaucratic shadows, a very prominent figure. By the end of last week, a whopping 89 percent of the public said they had heard of him; 42 percent said they had heard ''a lot'' about him.
Moreover, his charges appear to have further dented Bush's campaign image. While the Bush-Kerry race remains extremely tight, 'Newsweek' found a decline in the percentage of voters who approve of the president's handling of terrorism, from 65 percent just five weeks ago to 57 percent last weekend, and a rise in those who disapprove, from 28 percent to 38 percent.
It also found a rise in the same period in the percentage of voters who believe Iraq was a ''distraction'' from the war on terrorism, from 42 percent to 47 percent.
Meanwhile, Rice's accessibility to the media made a mockery of the White House's insistence that she should not testify publicly and under oath before the 9/11 Commission itself. (She has voluntarily given four hours of unsworn testimony to specific commission members to date.)
Traditionally, national security advisers have not been required to testify before Congress (although her predecessor, Sandy Berger, did so twice) under a doctrine of ''executive privilege'', the notion that the president should have some close advisers who can give policy advice on an entirely confidential basis.
The administration has insisted that the exemption should apply to the commission as well because it was created by an act of Congress.
But with Rice appearing almost everywhere except before the commission, that position became increasingly politically untenable, and on Tuesday, the White House relented, saying Rice could testify on the understanding that she could not be recalled later in case she left unresolved key discrepancies between her testimony and Clarke's.
Rice now faces a difficult task, because previous unsworn public statements about Clarke's charges, including his encounter with Bush after 9/11 and even his actual status within the White House, have subsequently been contradicted by other senior administration officials.
During her private testimony to the commission last month, she even asked to revise a statement she made publicly on several occasions during 2002 and 2003.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and a correspondent with Inter Press Service, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Other Recent Articles by Jim Lobe
* Democrats Slam Bush Administration Over Aristide Ouster
* Gaffes and Gullibility: The NY Times Gets it Wrong
* Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War
* War Hawks Undermined by Zarqawi Letter
* Co-Chair of Bush Panel Part of Far Right Network
* Iraqi Governing Council Plans Latest Assault on Women's Rights in Iraq
* Will Dubya Dump Dick?
* Bush Administration Faces Growing Chaos in Iraq While Some Plan Expansion of War
* Concerns Grow Over Taliban Resurgence, Opium
* Carnegie Foundation Report Charges Bush Adm. of Misrepresenting Iraqi Threat
* Future Uncertain as Saddam Unearthed
* A Sunday in Samarra
* Experts Returning from Iraq Criticize US Tactics
* US Keeps its Iraqi Bases Covered
* US War Tactics Slammed by Rights Groups
* Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress
* New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation
* Murder of UN Worker Spotlights Resurgence of Taliban
* Washington's New Sound and Fury Hide Fear and Worry
* Brave Face Belies Administration's Panic
* One Meal a Day for Most Palestinians
* Relaxed US Rules Fuelled Toxic ''Ghost Ships''
* Rumsfeld Takes More Friendly Fire
* Hawks Fleeing the Coop
* "What's Gonna Happen With Feith?”
* Postwar Casualties Rise Amid Disarray in US Plans
* Bush Stance on Syria Hit Shows Neocons Still Hold Sway
* We Report, You Get it Wrong
* Cheney's Mask is Slipping
* US Dominates Arms Sales to Third World
* Sharp Increase in US Military Aid to Latin America
* Is the Neocon Agenda for Pax Americana Losing Steam?
April Fools' Day is traditionally one of good-natured mischief, but not this year. Indeed, U.S. President George W. Bush's trademark smirk, which normally fits the day's spirit almost to a T, was nowhere to be seen Thursday.
The reason was clear enough: Iraq suddenly, if gruesomely, recaptured the headlines with Wednesday's horrific killings of four private US security contractors, whose fiery and grisly end at the hands of an angry mob in the chronically rebellious city of Fallujah was caught on videotape.
While television and cable networks here censored or otherwise obscured the most graphic images of their deaths and mutilation, the public Thursday was still absorbing the meaning of the images that so clearly recalled the grisly scenes in Mogadishu, Somalia more than 10 years ago.
Then, 18 US servicemen were killed and some of them mutilated and dragged through city streets in what became the basis not only for the best-selling book and Hollywood movie, Blackhawk Down, but also, and more importantly for foreign-policy purposes, for the speedy withdrawal of US forces from Somalia.
While few expect a similar reaction now, the fiery reemergence of Iraq in the public consciousness – after a relatively calm month when it was pushed to the back pages – makes it clear that the Bush administration's optimistic depictions of the situation there might be as misleading as its prewar claims about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist group of Osama bin Laden.
Such a conclusion was reinforced by the coincidence Wednesday of the worst single attack on U.S. forces in several months. Five US soldiers were killed when their armored personnel carrier ran over a particularly powerful "improvised explosive device" on a highway not far from Fallujah.
That incident brought to 48 the number of US military combat fatalities in March, making it the worst month since last November, and bringing the total US combat toll since May 1, when Bush declared an end to major hostilities, to a new milestone: 600.
The March toll was more than double February's. Military officials also said Wednesday that the average number of attacks against occupation forces, at about two dozen a day – or more than twice the January rate – remains on an upward trajectory toward their height last November, when more than 80 servicemen were killed.
Attacks against foreign civilians are also on the rise. Twelve were killed in March, the highest toll to date. Among the victims were four missionary workers and several other security guards, including a Canadian and Briton, who were gunned down last Sunday in Mosul, also to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers.
As noted by veteran New York Times correspondent John Burns on Thursday, both the Fallujah murders and the latest roadside killings should prompt military and occupation officials to rethink their conclusions in early February that foreign and local Islamist terrorists had replaced loyalists of former President Saddam Hussein in the "Sunni Triangle" of north-central Iraq as their principal enemy in the country and that they had "turned the corner" in putting down the insurgency of the Ba'ath Party supporters.
"This reminds me so much of Vietnam, it's scary," Lawrence Korb, a senior Pentagon official under President Ronald Reagan (1981–89), told the Washington Post Thursday. "Every time in Vietnam that we kept saying there was light at the end of the tunnel, then something horrible would happen."
The pattern of these attacks suggested to T.X. Hammes, a senior military fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies who just returned from a two-month assignment in Iraq, that occupation forces face a real insurgency that will not be defeated in the short term.
"They plan to beat us," he wrote, adding that the opposition now consists of disparate groups who are loosely allied "to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of Iraq."
The "quality" of the mob's violence in the attack on the four security workers – all former members of US Special Operations Forces – also struck Juan Cole, an Iraq specialist at the University of Michigan, as both remarkable and ominous.
"The degree of hatred for the new order among ordinary people is bad news," he wrote in his daily "blog" (Internet journal). "It helps explain why so few of the Sunni Arab guerrillas have been caught, since the locals hide and help them."
"It also seems a little unlikely that further US military action can do anything practical to put down this insurgency; most actions it could take would simply inflame the public against them all the more" Cole added.
Nonetheless, tougher measures were precisely what was urged by the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal, which called for occupation forces to institute military trials and executions of irregulars, a recommendation not immediately accepted by the military in Iraq, whose chief spokesman, Army Brig Gen. Mark Kimmitt, however, promised to "hunt down" those responsible for the killings and "pacify that city."
Washington had been hoping that the transition to the Jun. 30 handover of sovereignty from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to an interim Iraqi government and initial disbursements of some 18 billion dollars in US reconstruction and other economic funds would also help to curb the insurgency.
But continuing maneuvering by various factions and personalities in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and the persistent uncertainty about the United Nations' role in the transition have reportedly contributed to a rise, rather than a lessening, in sectarian tensions.
At the same time, the growing insecurity, particularly in the Sunni Triangle, is raising serious questions about how economic development and the investments that it is supposed to promote can proceed.
This was highlighted by a State Department warning earlier this week that the safety of US citizens attending a major trade and investment exposition in Baghdad next week could not be assured.
Coming on the heels of the pledge by Spain's incoming prime minister to withdraw Madrid's 1,300 troops in Iraq, the renewed attention to the security situation there also raises new doubts about the continued presence of other foreign peacekeepers and the willingness of foreign businesspeople to travel there. Two Finnish businessmen were killed by assailants last month.
Nor is the instability confined solely to the Sunni-dominated region.
Cole also noted that Wednesday's incidents in the Sunni Triangle obscured another ominous event in Baghdad itself, where several thousand Shiites protested the CPA's controversial closure earlier this week of the al-Hawzah newspaper of Muqtada al-Sadr. The authority said the paper was circulating wild and unfounded rumors and deliberately inciting the population against the occupation.
According to Cole, al-Sadr, a radical rival of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has only rarely been able to mobilize a demonstration of that size, and his ability to do so now, after several months in which Sistani appeared to have moved him to the shadows, could herald a rise in his influence, ironically aided by the CPA's ham-handed actions.
The Journal, which often reflects the views of Pentagon hawks who oversee the occupation from Washington, defended the newspaper's closure and suggested that the military consider arresting al-Sadr.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and a correspondent with Inter Press Service, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Other Recent Articles by Jim Lobe
* Clarke, Watergate Echoes Prompt Rare Bush Reversal
* Democrats Slam Bush Administration Over Aristide Ouster
* Gaffes and Gullibility: The NY Times Gets it Wrong
* Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War
* War Hawks Undermined by Zarqawi Letter
* Co-Chair of Bush Panel Part of Far Right Network
* Iraqi Governing Council Plans Latest Assault on Women's Rights in Iraq
* Will Dubya Dump Dick?
* Bush Administration Faces Growing Chaos in Iraq While Some Plan Expansion of War
* Concerns Grow Over Taliban Resurgence, Opium
* Carnegie Foundation Report Charges Bush Adm. of Misrepresenting Iraqi Threat
* Future Uncertain as Saddam Unearthed
* A Sunday in Samarra
* Experts Returning from Iraq Criticize US Tactics
* US Keeps its Iraqi Bases Covered
* US War Tactics Slammed by Rights Groups
* Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress
* New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation
* Murder of UN Worker Spotlights Resurgence of Taliban
* Washington's New Sound and Fury Hide Fear and Worry
* Brave Face Belies Administration's Panic
* One Meal a Day for Most Palestinians
* Relaxed US Rules Fuelled Toxic ''Ghost Ships''
* Rumsfeld Takes More Friendly Fire
* Hawks Fleeing the Coop
* "What's Gonna Happen With Feith?”
* Postwar Casualties Rise Amid Disarray in US Plans
* Bush Stance on Syria Hit Shows Neocons Still Hold Sway
* We Report, You Get it Wrong
* Cheney's Mask is Slipping
* US Dominates Arms Sales to Third World
* Sharp Increase in US Military Aid to Latin America
* Is the Neocon Agenda for Pax Americana Losing Steam?
100,000 US Troops Overwhelmed in Iraq by 1,000,000 Iranian Forces
Watch for that headline before the election...
With U.S. Marines effectively locking down the defiant city of Fallujah in the rebellious "Sunni Triangle," other US military forces in Iraq opened a new front Monday to quash an apparent uprising by a Shiite militia in Baghdad and the south, in what some experts warn could be a major turning point in the year-old occupation.
US officials appear to believe that the two shows of force – coming in the wake of some of the worst US losses since the official end of major hostilities in Iraq 11 months ago – will remind both rebellious Sunnis and increasingly impatient Shiites that Washington remains very much in charge of the ongoing "transition" that is supposed to end in a US transfer to power to Iraqis by Jun. 30.
But some experts believe that both actions could well trigger even greater resistance in the Sunni heartland of north-central Iraq, and, more dangerously, among the Shiite community, which, with roughly 60 percent of the country's total population, could create overwhelming problems for an increasingly beleaguered occupying force.
Independent analysts, such as Anthony Cordesman of the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, have long warned that active opposition by the Shiite population would doom the occupation and make Iraq ungovernable.
Monday's actions followed the killing and mutilation of four private US security contractors in Fallujah and the deaths of five US troops in a roadside bomb explosion about 15 kms from the predominantly Sunni city last Thursday.
They also followed the killings of eight US troops in gun battles with members of the Mahdi Army headed by the radical, outspoken anti-occupation Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, in the Sadr city section of Baghdad on Sunday.
His militia and supporters, who had carried out increasingly confrontational demonstrations after Sadr's Al Hawza newspaper was closed down last Sunday, also mounted uprisings in Najaf, Kufa and Amara in southern Iraq, where they quickly took over police stations and clashed with Iraq and occupation troops.
One soldier from El Salvador and at least two dozen Iraqis were reported killed.
To reassert their power, US forces flew Apache gunships over Sadr City on Monday, but journalists reported that the Mahdi army appeared to remain in control of the streets.
Sadr reportedly retreated to a mosque in Kufa that has been surrounded by coalition troops after an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant for him in connection with the killing of Ayatollah Abdel-Majid al Khoei in Najaf shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the regime of former President Saddam Hussein.
While US officials downplayed any sense of crisis over the situation in Fallujah or the unprecedented crackdown against the Mahdi, US President George W Bush insisted that Washington would "stay the course" on Iraq, including handing over sovereignty to an interim government Jun. 30, but others – both for and against US designs in Iraq – depicted a much more dire scenario.
"We are on the edge of a generalized civil war in Iraq," said Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), who told IPS that occupation authorities must follow through on any crackdown against Sadr's forces by disarming and dismantling all of Iraq's militias if the transition process and future elections are to have any hope of success.
Diamond, a democracy specialist at the Hoover Institution in California, also called on the administration to sharply increase the number of US troops in Iraq in order to disarm and dismantle the militias, and accused Iran of financing and arming Sadr and other Shiite militias, which he says are building up arms in advance of elections or possible civil war.
"Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever and lavishly resourced campaign to defeat any effort to create a genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq, and we've been sitting back," he said in what has become a growing refrain among neo-conservatives and administration officials who blame Tehran for the coalition's growing problems among the Shiites.
"I think we should tell the Iranian regime that if they don't cease and desist, we will play the same game – we will destabilize them."
Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), who visited Iraq last month, agreed that the situation, particularly regarding the Shiites, has reached a potentially decisive moment, but warned that shows of military force of the kind the coalition appears to have embarked on are likely to be counterproductive.
"This is what Sadr wants," said Toensing. "His father was a martyr to Saddam (Hussein); he wants to be a martyr of the US occupation, so, in a sense, the US is playing right into his hands" by issuing the arrest warrant.
Hunkered down in Baghdad "Green Zone" and in US bases across the country, the occupation's military and political leadership, according to Toensing, fails to appreciate how distrustful most Iraqis are of US intentions.
Rather than persuade Iraqis that the crackdown on Sadr is designed to protect the transition process, according to Toensing," it will be largely understood as a provocation in order to create violent conflict that will, in turn, justify the continuing US presence."
The move also risks radicalizing Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric, who has generally cooperated with the CPA, although his recent ruling, or fatwa, that declared the interim constitution approved by the CPA-selected Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) illegitimate, has clearly clouded the transition process.
While Sistani is considered a political moderate who is reported to personally detest Sadr, he has also publicly supported some of his positions.
Indeed, while a close aide of Sistani's reportedly urged in the ayatollah's name that Shia demonstrators "remain calm" Monday, he also noted their demands were "legitimate" and that Sistani "condemns acts waged by the occupation forces."
"Sistani has been following rather than leading Shiite opinion," according to Toensing, who added that while Sadr is only one actor in the Shiite community, "it's also true that the most prominent poster on display on the highway from Sadr City to the south is of his father. The US has a vested interest in keeping him alive."
But Iraq expert Juan Cole at the University of Michigan said that might be difficult to accomplish, given Sadr's "apocalyptic mindset" that left him convinced after the closure of his newspaper that the "US planned to silence him and destroy his movement, leaving him no choice but to launch an uprising."
"Muqtada saw his father and brothers cut down by Saddam and he is clearly a paranoid personality deeply traumatized by Ba'ath terror against Shiites, and he views the Americans as little different from the Ba'athists," Cole wrote in his Web log, adding that perhaps at least one-third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to his ideology.
Hussein led Iraq's Ba'ath Party.
Cole wrote that he could not fathom why the coalition acted against Sadr now, given that the indictment of the cleric was issued last November and that he and his followers "haven't been up to anything extraordinary as far as I can see in recent weeks .... this is either gross incompetence or was done with dark ulterior motives."
The latter could include, according to Cole, the provocation of greater sectarian violence or casting blame on Iran, thus halting any progress towards détente with Tehran in its tracks.
But Diamond insisted that the speed and intensity with which all the Shiite militias, including al-Dawa and the Badr Brigades of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) – both of which are represented on the IGC – as well as the Mahdi Army, have been building up their arsenals and their ranks is "very alarming."
"If we don't get a grip on this situation, entire communities will be prevented from registering to vote, opposition candidates will be assassinated, and electoral officials will be intimidated," he said.
"There's no hope for a peaceful and democratic Iraq without taking apart these militias," an action Diamond said will naturally create "more protest and violence. But what I'm saying is that's better now than later."
"We will fight a limited war now to disarm and demobilize these militias, or there will be a larger civil war later," he stressed.
Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and a correspondent with Inter Press Service, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at: jlobe@starpower.net
Other Recent Articles by Jim Lobe
* Fallujah Deflates Washington's Optimism
* Clarke, Watergate Echoes Prompt Rare Bush Reversal
* Democrats Slam Bush Administration Over Aristide Ouster
* Gaffes and Gullibility: The NY Times Gets it Wrong
* Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War
* War Hawks Undermined by Zarqawi Letter
* Co-Chair of Bush Panel Part of Far Right Network
* Iraqi Governing Council Plans Latest Assault on Women's Rights in Iraq
* Will Dubya Dump Dick?
* Bush Administration Faces Growing Chaos in Iraq While Some Plan Expansion of War
* Concerns Grow Over Taliban Resurgence, Opium
* Carnegie Foundation Report Charges Bush Adm. of Misrepresenting Iraqi Threat
* Future Uncertain as Saddam Unearthed
* A Sunday in Samarra
* Experts Returning from Iraq Criticize US Tactics
* US Keeps its Iraqi Bases Covered
* US War Tactics Slammed by Rights Groups
* Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress
* New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation
* Murder of UN Worker Spotlights Resurgence of Taliban
* Washington's New Sound and Fury Hide Fear and Worry
* Brave Face Belies Administration's Panic
* One Meal a Day for Most Palestinians
* Relaxed US Rules Fuelled Toxic ''Ghost Ships''
* Rumsfeld Takes More Friendly Fire
* Hawks Fleeing the Coop
* "What's Gonna Happen With Feith?”
* Postwar Casualties Rise Amid Disarray in US Plans
* Bush Stance on Syria Hit Shows Neocons Still Hold Sway
* We Report, You Get it Wrong
* Cheney's Mask is Slipping
* US Dominates Arms Sales to Third World
* Sharp Increase in US Military Aid to Latin America
* Is the Neocon Agenda for Pax Americana Losing Steam?
29 die in Iraqi clashes
11.25PM, Sun Apr 4 2004
A series of violent clashes between Shi'ite Muslims and coalition forces across Iraq has killed eight US and one Salvadoran soldier and left 20 Iraqis dead.
Militiamen marched to protest against the arrest of an aide to a radical Shi'ite cleric and the closure of a militant Iraqi newspaper.
In the worst clashes near Najaf 20 Iraqis, one American and one Salvadoran soldier were killed.
Witnesses claim Spanish soldiers fired on a group of demonstrators after they marched on a Spanish run military base.
And later, seven US soldiers were killed in fierce clashes with Shi'ites in Baghdad's impoverished slum area of Sadr City.
US military officials in Baghdad said Shi'ite militiamen had tried to take over police stations and government buildings without success using small arms and grenade launchers.
Tony Blair is to fly out to Washington next week to meet with US President George W Bush amid growing instability in Iraq.
As many as a dozen US Marines were killed when they were attacked in the Iraqi city of Ramadi near the Sunni hotbed of Fallujah, a US defence official said.
The official said initial reports indicated that dozens of Iraqis assaulted the Marine position near the governor's palace in Ramadi.
"There may have been as many as a dozen Marine deaths," the official said, adding that "a significant number" of Iraqis were killed.
Amid speculation that the country is descending into civil war, Iraq's Shia majority has now joined the Sunni Muslims in attacking coalition forces in a spate of violent attacks over the past few days.
Mr Blair held talks with Iraqi Foreign Minister Mr Hoshyar Zebari after a radical Shi'ite group, led by the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, turned to violence in Baghdad.
US officials have issued a warrant for al-Sadr's arrest, while Mr Bush has insisted that the deadline for the transfer of political power from the US to Iraq should remain as June 30.
But the recent unrest in Iraq has raised questions about whether the hand-over date is realistic.
Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry suggested Bush may have chosen June 30 for political reasons.
He said: "I have always said consistently that it is a mistake to set an arbitrary date and I hope that the date has nothing to do with the election here in the United States."
Meanwhile, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has said the costs of the war in Iraq have outweighed the benefits of removing Saddam Hussein.
"Bush declared war as a part of the US war on terror, but instead of limiting the effects of terror, the war has laid the foundation for even more terror," Blix said.
Apr 4: 29 die in Iraqi clashes
Bush Scandals Are Roiling: Turn Up the Heat! Connect the Dots between Russia and US and you'll see the makings of World War IV. Some Say that the Cold War was World War III which is over and despite political rhetoric, the US is more socialistic and fascistic than at any previous time in history. The following are only a few cases in point from the views of others.
By Bernard Weiner, Co-Editor,
The Crisis Papers
April 6, 2004
In the face of imminent scandal-eruptions, it's surprising to see Bush&Co. moving so forcefully in so many domestic-policy areas, rather than pulling back and trying to ease their way through the November 2 election.
This aggressive attitude suggests a firm belief on their part that they'll still be residing in the White House after January inauguration day. What do they know that we don't? Rigged computer-voting machines with no way to double-check manipulated vote tallies? Osama bin Laden already in the can? Photos of John Kerry in flagrante delicto with a parakeet?
Something strange is going on sub-rosa beneath the subtext. How else to explain the following list? Carried out to solidify their rightwing, militarist, fundamentalist base? Exhibiting lotsa muscle to indicate confidence and lack of fear? Grabbing for what they can get now because they're not really that confident about victory in November? What?
So, let's try to examine the actions on this list -- all engineered or encouraged by the Bush Administration -- and see what they indicate, taken as a package, and what kind of sense we can make of them.
JUDICIAL END-AROUND. During a recent congressional recess, Bush appointed two Southern appeals-court judges, Pickering and Pryor, so far to the right that there was no way they were ever going to gain the required Senate approval. Now these two rightwing activists are hearing major federal appeals.
GOP HACKING. The Republicans got caught with their hands -- and eyes and ears -- in a Watergate-like bugging, but this time in a high-tech kind of way: For months, as a result of computer hacking, a key GOP Judiciary Committee staffer was reading top Democratic Senators' emails about strategy and tactics, and passing them on to his superiors; selected newspapers then reported these private communications. No wonder many in the GOP constantly seemed to be one step ahead of their Democratic opposition.
DUCT-TAPING MOUTHS SHUT. The Republican National Committee is pressing the Federal Election Commission to issue new rules that would hamstring non-profit groups that try to communicate with the public in any way critical of Bush Administration policy. As MoveOn notes: "Any kind of non-profit -- conservative, progressive, labor, religious, secular, social service, charitable, educational, civic participation, issue-oriented, large, and small -- could be affected by these rules." In other words, shut yo' mouth, "watch what you say."
WHAT CAN BE TAUGHT. The Bush Administration is moving to control curriculum and expression on college campuses, especially in the teaching faculty. HR 3077, the so-called "International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003" -- which has passed the House overwhelmingly and now is in the Senate -- would monitor the curriculum in colleges and universities of, among other things, professors deemed critical of the Bush Administration's neo-imperialist and Middle Eastern policies. In other words, you pointy-headed liberalcommiepinko perfessors better alter your ways or face the consequences.
UNDER THE MEDIA-RADAR. On the same day that Saddam Hussein was captured, with the media focused on the events in Tikrit, Bush signed an order giving the FBI widesweeping new powers to examine any business' financial records -- and, if you've dealt with businesses (and who hasn't?), your records as well -- without having to seek any sort of court approval. The new rules also forbid the affected businesses discussing the matter with any of their clients involved. In other words, you'll never know what hit you, or that you even got hit. (Sort of like the Patriot Act, which permits sneak-and-peek explorations of your computer and email, without you even knowing the government is violating your privacy.)
YEEGADS, FLORIDA AGAIN! There's a Republican bill making its way through that state's Senate that would outlaw any manual recounts of undervotes from touch-screen computer machines. One wonders why the GOP in Florida would not want there to be a manual recount -- which, conceivably, could benefit their candidate -- unless they're pretty confident about the computer-voting outcome long before the election even will be held.
YOUR HOME IS YOUR CASTLE -- NOT. According to a 5th Circuit Appeals Court decision, police officers in Louisiana no longer need a warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or business. A reminder, if more are needed, about the power to influence policy for decades through the judicial appointments to the Appeals Courts; see Pickering/Pryor item above.
BACK TO THE FRONT. To meet the demand for troops in Iraq, the military has been deploying some National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers who aren't fit for combat. More than a dozen members of the Guard and reserves told Knight Ridder they were shipped off to battle with little attention paid to their medical histories -- including imminent heart-attacks because of badly clogged arteries. Those histories included other ailments such as asthma, diabetes, recent surgery and hearing loss. Once in Iraq, the soldiers faced severe conditions that aggravated their medical problems (the soldier with clogged arteries died), and the medical care available to them was limited.
HERE, HAVE A SUBPOENA. Ashcroft's Justice Department has been targeting peaceful anti-war and anti-Administration groups -- religious, political, civic -- issuing subpoenas left and right, trying in the public mind to equate dissent with aid to terrorists.
FEEL A DRAFT IN HERE? The Bush Administration is moving to re-institute the military draft, probably by June of 2005. Initially, they will be doing selective drafting -- that is, picking those with certain skills deemed essential by the Pentagon planners. After that, further drafting will depend on how many countries are selected for the honor of having themselves invaded.
"WORSE THAN WATERGATE"
Well, one could go on and on with this list. There is no lack of frightening actions in Bush&Co.'s world. But you get the picture. A little slice of your freedom here, another slice there, another there, and, before you realize it, the militarized state has amassed more power into the hands of government and police agencies.
As John W. Dean, President Nixon's counsel, titles his new book, it's "Worse Than Watergate." Far, far worse; most of the Nixon crimes involved trying to cover-up a scandal, but the Bush Administration has turned its extremism into permanent national policy, with horrifying consequences.
Now, what Bush&Co. haven't been able to fully control are events on the ground here in this country, and, especially in Iraq.
Domestically, they still have to maneuver their way through the political/judicial minefields of their most egregious scandals: doing nothing with their pre-9/11 knowledge, their outing of a covert CIA agent, and their gross lies and manipulations that took the country to war in Iraq. Abroad, the Bush Administration has to hope and pray that things go their way in the roiling Iraq snakepit.
Let's take them one at a time:
THE 9/11 HEARINGS
Unless she blows it bigtime -- in which case she can conveniently take the fall for the decision-makers -- Condoleezza Rice might be able to wiggle her way through her hearing before the so-called "independent" 9/11 Commission. (The quote marks are used because not only is that word laughable in terms of who Bush appointed and who's in charge, but because White House counsel Alberto Gonzales contacted at least two of the GOP members of the panel right before Richard Clarke's testimony and apparently supplied them talking points for questioning the White House's former counter-terrorism chief.
In addition, even though the commission held the best cards, the panel permitted itself to get snookered by Karl Rove. In order to get Rice under oath and in public, the commission too quickly agreed to the sneaky White House deal that: ensured that Rice will testify only for a few hours -- if the GOP panelists ask long questions and she gives long answers, she's basically home free; guaranteed that Rice can't be called back and that nobody else on the NSC staff (such as key Rice deputy Stephen Hadley) can be made to testify; and caved by agreeing that Cheney and his sock-puppet can testify together and NOT UNDER OATH!
In short, this commission -- which, in any case, has concentrated on lower-level intelligence failures all along, rather than on what exactly the executive decision-makers knew, when they knew it, and what they did or didn't do about their knowledge -- is designed to be an ineffective truth-seeker and probably will decide nothing all that important with regard to Bush Administration crimes and misdemeanors. I would be overjoyed to be proven wrong.
THE PLAME OUTING
The Plame case -- where two "senior Administration officials" revealed that Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush critic Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a covert CIA operative -- is a bit more potentially explosive. For one thing, revealing the identity of CIA agents is against the law; former President George H.W. Bush called such outing of secret operatives "treasonous." The issue is too hot and too public to hide. Somebody is going to have to be indicted.
The only question is whether Bush&Co. can minimize the damage by having a couple of lower-level aides take the fall (supposedly "rogue elements" acting on their own), or whether the grand jury investigating the case won't be content with that B.S. but will go after the Big Guys, maybe Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby or maybe even Cheney Hisself.
The Bush Administration may not be able to postpone the investigation past Election Day, so the thinking here is to get the indictments out soon and the cases into the judicial system, so as to diffuse the potential electoral damage as much as possible and make the Plame issue "old news" by the time November rolls around. My guess is: limited indictments of lower-level aides, dragged-out court cases beyond November 2, pardons later if anyone is convicted. But, again, I would be happy to be proven wrong.
THE IRAQI TIME-BOMB
If 9/11 and the Plame case are explosive and potentially hurtful to Bush's election hopes, what's happening in Iraq is positively catastrophic to those chances. There are so many things that can continue to go wrong, and unlike the Plame and 9/11 Commission cases, the U.S. has far less control over the unfolding events. (And I'm not even talking here about the egregious lies of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al. that were used to manipulate the country into approving a war that was one of choice, not self-defense. Those deceits could come back and bite them with the electorate -- at the least, removing the cloak of "trustworthiness" from Bush -- but far more likely is that the military situation in Iraq will continue to spiral out of control.
The whole Bush&Co. object here is to try to rig events from now until Election Day so that the worst aspects of the ongoing war in Iraq disappear from the political radar screen in the U.S. To this end, the U.S. desperately wants to hand over a limited kind of "sovereignty" to its own appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which presumably then will exercise (or seem to be exercising) total control over domestic matters. If Paul Bremer, with U.N. help, can somehow can get to that point -- the whole of Iraq may explode into outright rebellion and/or a civil war before the handover -- the military will pull back to bases outside the flash points, with Iraqi army and police forces in charge of security operations.
The Bush&Co. hope is that once that happens, the Iraqi insurgency either will ease off its violent campaign since "sovereignty" has been transferred to the Iraqis -- or, if not, that mainly Iraqi soldiers and police will take the brunt of the bombings and shootings rather than American forces. In short, the theory goes, there won't be the daily stories (and graphic images) on America's TV networks about the rising rate of U.S. dead; the Bush hope is that the U.S. population will be content that it's Iraqis being slaughtered rather than our own young men and women, and the issue of a continually rising military death toll will disappear as a volatile one for the election campaign.
After November, assuming Bush wins, the Administration figures it can do whatever it wants to do in Iraq (it's already set up 14 military bases in that country), since it'll have four years to make things right there, with only limited and ineffective opposition anticipated from the defeated Democrats and others. In addition, the compliant corporate media will remain faithfully in the Bush&Co. camp, the so-called "peace/anti-war" movement can be marginalized or frightened by the use of police force against them or indicted for "impeding the war effort," and the internet political websites can be effectively dealt with and neutralized.
THE KERRY FACTOR
Another unknown for the Bushistas is how strong a candidate Kerry will turn out to be. So far, the GOP has been able to keep the Massachusetts senator from roaring ahead in the polls -- even during the past several weeks, when Bush&Co. suffered a lot of political damage -- by trying to define him as a typical Dem tax-raiser, a flip-flopper on issues, and weak on national defense.
The whole object here is to keep Kerry locked solely into his base voters -- union workers, liberal Democrats, minorities, etc. -- but not let him break out where he could attract enough moderate Republicans, Independents, Libertarians and so on to make an electoral difference.
The GOP strategy appears to be: to solidify the 40% Bush base, keep Kerry boxed in to his 40% Dem base, and lure or frighten enough swing voters and swing states to pick up the requisite electoral votes for victory. And they're not forgetting either the Nader factor -- they're covertly supporting his run in hopes that he can pull 3-6% of votes away from Kerry in key states -- or that many millions of voters will be using touch-screen voting machines that provide no paper or other means of double-checking the ballots cast.
If Kerry were to fire himself up as a campaigner, and distinguish himself more from Bush on key issues -- for example, on the Iraq war and Sharon's policies in the Middle East -- the electorate would be able to see two very different candidates and candidacies, and Kerry might begin to rise more in the polls. But, on foreign policy, as Noam Chomsky has observed, Kerry is "Bush-lite" -- representing the concerns of the corporate power-wielders -- though he's much better on domestic issues such as health care, prescription drugs, judicial appointments, the economy, the environment, Medicare, veterans' rights, etc.
If only because of his domestic policies on most issues, he deserves our enthusiastic support. A Kerry administration would not be as arrogant, mean-spirited, greedy, or corrupting. Potentially, he could bring the country back more toward the liberal-moderate center, and away from the extremist, reckless domestic direction Bush&Co. have taken us, and (though he needs to re-examine some of his foreign positions) international policies that have created such havoc here and around the globe.
But Kerry does need to grow as a campaigner, and as a human being. He said he admires the late Robert Kennedy; now is the time for him to grow, as RFK did, into a compassionate, thoughtful, determined, dynamic campaigner -- and, as Kerry sometimes exhibits, into even more of a scrapper against Bush's dirty tricks and as a fighter for justice and peace.
BUSH CAN BE BEATEN!!!
The scandals are bubbling away in Washington's political pressure-cookers, and the opposition to Bush is building up steam and momentum. Critical mass could occur at any time. In short, Bush CAN be denied a second term -- if all of us pitch in to make it happen, concentrating a good share of our energies on the computer-voting dangers -- and the country CAN, after the January inauguration in 2005, start to reverse the immense damage caused by the Bush neo-cons.
Not only will a GOP defeat rob Bush&Co. of their absolute hold on power and their control of billions to hand out to friends and supporters, but it could leave some of the higher-ups in danger of criminal prosecutions. This helps explain the ferocity of their attacks, and why the anti-Bush fight to dislodge them is not going to be easy. But the battle must be joined.
But if we and Kerry blow it, it's clear where the country will be headed: down the dark road of a kind of police-state neo-fascism domestically, and more imperial war-mongering abroad. We simply cannot allow that to happen. Regardless of what we may think of some of Kerry's positions, the alternative of four more years of unchecked power in the hands of Bush&Co. is too horrific to contemplate.
It's time now, even eight months before Election Day, to head toward the electoral ramparts and make our power and determination felt. To do otherwise is to abandon our country to the shadow forces currently obscuring the sun that is our beloved country; grab a light and let's make a stellar difference in our collective future.
That almost covers it, he left out the Bush/Carlyle/Saudi/Citigroup investigations which haven't hit the mainstream media yet...wait till the October surprise.
It is called the Art of War by Lao Tse or whatever Chinaman wrote that book..
LIST OF LITIGATIONS WITH ORDERS OR DECISIONS AVAILABLE ON THE DATABASE
Sorted by company's name
http://securities.stanford.edu/decisions.html
LIST OF LITIGATIONS WITH COMPLAINTS AVAILABLE ON THE DATABASE
Sorted by company's name
http://securities.stanford.edu/filings.html
HEADLINES
http://securities.stanford.edu/news.html#settles
$250 Billion Lost Due to Stock Market Scams
http://securities.stanford.edu/
http://securities.stanford.edu/Settlements/REVIEW_1995-2002/settlementspr.pdf
http://securities.cornerstone.com/pdfs/3_03PR.pdf
http://securities.stanford.edu/research/studies/20020219_JAG.pdf
$250 Billion Lost Due to Stock Market Scams
http://securities.stanford.edu/
http://securities.stanford.edu/Settlements/REVIEW_1995-2002/settlementspr.pdf
STOCK FRAUD'S SILENT ACCOMPLICE
or
"Things I wish I knew before now but everyone neglected to tell me"
"As a shareholder in CYPT.ob [denotes Yahoo user] I have been amazed at the selling pressure on the stock over the past couple weeks. After phoning investor relations I was made aware of your service. After several hours of investigation to find your website it is clear the negative affect your allegations have had on the stock price. Although I don't negate your findings, my issue with your service is that it does not show up on any of the many financial news services that I use nor the search engines that I systematically use to source news on companies that I am invested or plan to invest in. From the inception of your reports on Calypte I have been negatively impacted to the tune of $45,000 +. If your service is truly meant to protect investors (by exposing foul play) & not attracting short sellers, you should make sure your statements are visible to all."
unsolicited email from a concerned investor
WE COULDN'T AGREE MORE!
Public companies that commit fraud in the stock markets have a knowing yet silent accomplice in plain sight yet the market says nothing, investors are in the dark and the SEC is powerless to intervene.
Public companies distribute their press releases to the market and the world by using one of several Press Release/news dissemination services. The largest of these are Business Wire and PR Newswire. In the first few words of the body of every press release you will see the name of the distribution service clearly stated.
These Press Release distributors charge a fee to their clients depending upon the length of the release and upon the level of distribution the client wants. Fees can range from around $100 for a release of limited size and distribution plus wire services to $1,500 and more for broad distribution into newspapers, publications and services globally.
Both private and public companies can publish just about any kind of statement about themselves they want so long as the release isn't completely and blatantly illegal or immoral. All they have to do is sign up for the service and pay the fee. Unfortunately, part of the press release distributors obligation is NOT to check for the accuracy of a company's representations. Since the lies these scoundrels tell are usually about themselves in some regard, it isn't logical to expect these distributors to check every claim for its veracity. Instead these services take great pains to disclaim any responsibility for what is being said by their clients. Heck, they aren't writing the release, just putting them out over the wire. Assuming the proper checks and balances are in place, this process would seem logical and appropriate.
Still, this process creates fertile soil for fraud and, as is always the case, where there is a clear opportunity to rip off investors, the professional criminals along with businessmen of every ilk yet sharing a common shortcoming, the complete lack of moral fibre, are not far behind. It should come as no surprise to anyone then, that many of the 10b-5 violations prosecuted by the SEC are the result of materially false and/or misleading press releases issued by dishonest company officers and unscrupulous stock promoters.
Such is the nature of the financial community and nothing will change that tendency yet, with the proper checks and balances, it can still function for the investing community. We will get to the lack of those all important checks and balances and why the individual investor is still at great and unnecessary risk in just a moment but first, let's continue exploring the process and explore yet another problem built into it.
When press releases are submitted over the "wire" they are captured and displayed by hundreds of internet based quotation systems and financial web pages by virtue of their stock trading symbol. Yet, each individual service or website decides which press release and news services' releases they will capture and display. From almost universal capturing of the primary providers, Business Wire and PR Newswire, to less penetration by the second tier providers like MarketWire and PrimeZone each provider's releases are captured by a differing number of websites.
Only a few websites actually provide the investor with virtually all of the available information linked to the various public companies. Even the most frequented, Yahoo.com and the industry itself at nasdaq.com fall amazingly short of publishing all the news and announcements that are released. Of course, this fact is not prominently displayed and easily found by the user. It is, instead, buried in the terms and conditions or elsewhere in the vast inner reaches of their sites. The two best web sites for publishing most if not all the information that comes out are Wallstreetcity.com and pcquote.com. For this reason, we recommend that all individual investors use one of these sites for all their news and stock information needs. (we are not affiliated with these folks and were not paid to say that either).
This creates a problem for the individual investor who logs on to Yahoo every day to check his/her stocks and is completely unaware of the fact that some relevant news was published about one of his stocks simply because Yahoo had chosen not to capture news from that specific distributor. This can be even more troubling if the investor notices a dramatic change in one of their stock's price yet sees nothing to explain it in the way of news on the quote page (simply because Yahoo didn't carry it) and trusts that, if it was important, it would be there. Big mistake, HUGE! Of course, Yahoo and the rest of the financial sites have well crafted disclaimers as well so you can forget having any luck in passing the blame on to them. After all, you should have been smart enough to spend an hour or so digging around in our fine print and familiarizing yourself with what we don't do for you before you ever trusted us you foolish investor.
Investors have a right to know all the news, developments and information available about their stocks when they log on to their favorite financial web site or be warned most clearly each and every time of the fact that they could be missing essential information.
Additionally, although press release distributors will say they discourage third parties from using stock symbols to link their opinion based promotional materials to a public company's stock by using the company's stock symbol, often times those promotional pieces will also be displayed along with the press releases issued by the companies themselves. Also attached to a company's symbol and available on most quotation systems and financial websites are the "hard" news stories about individual public companies that are published by the mainstream news media such as the DOW Jones NewsWire and Reuters to name but two.
The PR distribution industry is both competitive and matured and, as a result, companies can get the information they choose out to the world, quickly and cost effectively. Everything from simple "disclosure" releases with only the minimum facts as required by law to full blown promotional pieces that extol the virtues of just about any occasion or situation the company is experiencing or that management can dream up, regardless of how feeble the information's relationship is to the truth, can be on the wire within minutes of submitting it to one of these distributors.
Unfortunately for the innocent investors, especially in the world of the Bulletin Board and Pink Sheet stocks, a simple cold call to a company about exploring the possibility of discussing the concept of possibly negotiating a working relationship at some time in the future can magically turn into a "strategic alliance" between the two companies in a press release. A grant application to the government which hasn't even been filed, can suddenly be deemed to be "close to approval". A non-existent and completely fabricated "buy" recommendation, supposedly issued by an established investment house, that was simply conjured up in the devious mind of a stock manipulator can suddenly show up in a press release with all the apparent credibility of a highly respected Merrill Lynch telecommunications analyst's recommendation on a NYSE company. (OK, bad choice for an analogy but you get the point).
Since press releases by companies are not subject to verification of accuracy or truthfulness by the services that distribute them, the investing public has no idea that any of them are anything but reliable and truthful information and only subject to the usual safe harbor provisions which say, "all this might never happen as stated". Sadly it doesn't say, "every word here could just as easily be a big fat lie intended only for the purpose of ripping off the investing public and enriching the promoters and insiders".
It is true that, companies that manipulate their stocks through false or misleading press releases can be, and often are, held accountable by the SEC but, unfortunately, this can often take several years to come to light and that is long after the proverbial horse has left the proverbial barn and all that remains is the pain of loss and the bad taste left in the investor's mouth from another betrayal of trust.
There are only a handful of groups that work to inform the public about scams and rip offs by public companies that use illegal or questionable tactics in promoting their stock. These tactics usually include the publishing of false or misleading press releases. Our-Street.com is one such group. You would think, with so many companies pumping their stock and so few of us exposing them, that we would have our collective hands full just writing enough reports and complaints. Sort of a case of "So much crime- So little time". However, writing and publishing the reports is only a part of the problem because of stock fraud's silent accomplice.
None of the primary or second tier press release distributors, with the exception of M2 PressWire, Europe's largest distributor but a lesser player in the US markets, will allow companies like Our-Street.com to issue a truthful press release through them that sheds a negative light on any public company, whether a customer of theirs or not. We want to applaud the courage of M2 PressWire for being the ONLY distributor we have found to show the courage to actually act as a legitimate news portal and allow both sides to be heard. We respect the fact they recently were called upon to test that courage and, upon reviewing our practices have determined that our releases are accurate and fairly represent newsworthy information and as such have allowed us to continue. Of course M2 PressWire, like the others, do not attest to the accuracy of our releases anymore than they attest to the accuracy of the other releases they distribute. As a result of their courage, we want to recommend them to anyone wishing to distribute news about their company. They also happen to be the most cost effective as well. We suggest everyone check them out and consider giving them some of your business. (this endorsement was not solicited or paid for)
The reasons the other distributors give are as varied as the services themselves. We have been told that "policy prohibits third party releases". Stated simply, this means that a press release must be about your company and cannot be about, and therefore linked to, another. We have been told, "It simply isn't worth it" to have the subject of a release call and yell at us until we give up and pull the release. We have been told that, that the company itself "owns" the symbol and any press release by a third party must be approved by the company before distributing. Of course, the simple fact is that the National Association of Securities Dealers (the NASD) assigns trading symbols to companies in order to facilitate an orderly market and since a pubic company cannot, to our knowledge, sell a symbol, we doubt very much if they own them either. Finally, we have simply been told that the simple and factual press releases we issue are not something they are willing to distribute.
We know the services' refusal to accept the releases published by the small band of watchdogs is not based upon the accuracy of the releases themselves since accuracy is not a concern regarding the thousands of public companies issuing through them every day. Besides, aside from the companies we expose, no one has ever challenged the truthfulness of one of our releases and no one has ever proven that one of our press releases is anything but completely accurate.
We believe that, by distributing press releases for public companies without regard to truthfulness while simultaneously blocking all attempts by those groups who would expose the lies, the industry has virtually eliminated the all-important checks and balances we mentioned earlier and effectively become a willing accomplice and facilitator in the ongoing problem of stock manipulation and fraud. We have written both PR Newswire and Business wire and asked them to comment on this problem. In our email we explained our perception of the problem and closed with these two paragraphs:
"By allowing fraudulent press releases to be distributed
while refusing to distribute press releases exposing these
frauds to the public, it seems as if you are creating an
uneven playing field. Wouldn't you serve the public and
the industry better by allowing both to be distributed
thereby taking a truly neutral position of news portal and
not that of facilitator and protector?
How do you justify providing a service which distributes fraudulent press releases while protecting the criminals against exposure by refusing press releases from companies such as Our-Street.com?"
You will note we do not differentiate between "knowingly" and "unknowingly" distributing these releases since no effort is made to discern between the two. All services recognize that some of the releases they distribute are fraudulent and thusly they "know" that each press release could be fraudulent yet they distribute them anyway. To date, we have not received a response. We will publish them here if we get one but don't hold your breath.
So, why do these companies shy away from distributing releases which expose the lies of the unethical companies? The reasons are not totally clear but we have a theory which we feel is most likely. It is based upon our experience and our conversations with industry types from both sides of the equation. When a company issues a fraudulent or false or misleading press release the only one to complain at the time would be the individual investor and a few watchdog sites like Our-Street.com who are skilled at exposing the well crafted lies of the dishonest corporate executives and unscrupulous stock promoters. None of us have the leverage or resources necessary to intimidate a BusinessWire or PRnewswire into retracting a press release. They simply say, "The only one who can pull a press release is the company that issued it".
On the other hand, when something negative is published about a public company, the press release distributor knows full well, or will quickly find out, that that company or its attorney will probably be on the phone threatening that service with all kinds of unspeakable horrors while using disturbing phrases like "illegal short selling" and "manipulating the stock down". This kind of talk has a tendency to cloud even a rational person's thinking to the point where they forget that the fraudulent and misleading press releases being exposed were themselves designed to manipulate the stock to irrational heights so as to allow people who were given vast quantities of stock to promote those lies could sell their stock while innocent investors are buying the stock based upon those lies.
Simply put, it isn't risky in the least to let public companies publish false or misleading press releases and satisfying customers (releasing what they submit) is an important part of doing business. It does, however, require principal and a willingness to stand for something to take on even one of the few watchdogs as customers knowing that you will have to take some heat for doing the right thing. When you compare the thousands of public companies (the core of their business) against the few watchdogs (unnecessary irritants), allowing them to expose the lies of even a few of those solid paying customers could at the very least prove upsetting and in the worst case, could cost you some business or make you (gasp) have to defend what is right. In business today on both sides of the Atlantic, these qualities are rare indeed.
In conclusion, individual investors today are faced with two significant challenges when it comes to staying informed and on top of their equity investments.
1. The lack of consistent and effective distribution of releases throughout the internet. This requires an awareness of the limitations of ones financial website regarding how much of the relevant information they capture as it is released. CHOOSE YOUR QUOTE SITE CAREFULLY!
2. Trying to discern the truth from the lies within a system that facilitates the distribution of fraudulent, false or misleading press releases while sheltering the perpetrators from those who would expose them. (SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT OUR-STREET.COM)
These two challenges are responsible for untold losses as investors find themselves buying when they wouldn't and not selling when they would, if only they knew the truth, a truth which was out there but unavailable to them because their web site failed to inform them of their limitations or stock fraud's silent accomplice kept the news off the wire and out of sight. Something needs to change if we are ever going to successfully take back Our Street!
NOTE: If you like this editorial, please share it with as many people as you can. The only way things will ever change is if we all become informed and demand a change. If you wish to write someone to complain, write these people or your favorite business news reporter and complain long and loud.
public_relations@prnewswire.com
michael.lissauer@businesswire.com
squawk@cnbc.com
OpenExchange@CNBC.com
Editor's note: We just got a call from Xavier Franco at Marketwire.com. Apparently he feels left out because marketwire.com wasn't listed as part of the problem and his competitors were. Now, this is despite the fact that marketwire.com is the company that actually told us that companies own their symbols and they would have to get the companies' permission prior to publishing our press releases about them. Well, I guess Mr. Franco wants his share of the complaints so please, if you feel like complaining to someone about this deplorable situation, make sure that Mr. Franco gets his share of your indignation. Trust me, they deserve it as much as anyone.
xfranco@marketwire.com
NOTE: Stock promotion is an essential tool in today's micro-cap market. Emerging growth companies must invest energy and capital to alert the markets to the opportunities they present. There are many fine and honorable firms that do their best to only work with honest companies and attempt to only distribute accurate and truthful information about their clients. We applaud them. This editorial is not about them! This article is about the dark side of stock promotions and those companies that intentionally make up lies, take S8 stock as payment and conspire with unethical public companies to execute fraudulent stock promotions and the good ol' pump and dump.
Editor's note: We do not intend to suggest in this editorial that the Press Release distribution companies are breaking any law or are in any way acting illegally. They are fully within their rights to conduct business as they do. We are not addressing the legal issues here, we are looking at what is in our opinion a problem of businesses acting legally but still impacting the markets in a negative way. These are OPINIONS of Our-Street.com only. Please take them as such.
http://our-street.com/conspiracy.htm
http://securities.stanford.edu/
STOCK FRAUD'S SILENT ACCOMPLICE
or
"Things I wish I knew before now but everyone neglected to tell me"
"As a shareholder in CYPT.ob [denotes Yahoo user] I have been amazed at the selling pressure on the stock over the past couple weeks. After phoning investor relations I was made aware of your service. After several hours of investigation to find your website it is clear the negative affect your allegations have had on the stock price. Although I don't negate your findings, my issue with your service is that it does not show up on any of the many financial news services that I use nor the search engines that I systematically use to source news on companies that I am invested or plan to invest in. From the inception of your reports on Calypte I have been negatively impacted to the tune of $45,000 +. If your service is truly meant to protect investors (by exposing foul play) & not attracting short sellers, you should make sure your statements are visible to all."
unsolicited email from a concerned investor
WE COULDN'T AGREE MORE!
Public companies that commit fraud in the stock markets have a knowing yet silent accomplice in plain sight yet the market says nothing, investors are in the dark and the SEC is powerless to intervene.
Public companies distribute their press releases to the market and the world by using one of several Press Release/news dissemination services. The largest of these are Business Wire and PR Newswire. In the first few words of the body of every press release you will see the name of the distribution service clearly stated.
These Press Release distributors charge a fee to their clients depending upon the length of the release and upon the level of distribution the client wants. Fees can range from around $100 for a release of limited size and distribution plus wire services to $1,500 and more for broad distribution into newspapers, publications and services globally.
Both private and public companies can publish just about any kind of statement about themselves they want so long as the release isn't completely and blatantly illegal or immoral. All they have to do is sign up for the service and pay the fee. Unfortunately, part of the press release distributors obligation is NOT to check for the accuracy of a company's representations. Since the lies these scoundrels tell are usually about themselves in some regard, it isn't logical to expect these distributors to check every claim for its veracity. Instead these services take great pains to disclaim any responsibility for what is being said by their clients. Heck, they aren't writing the release, just putting them out over the wire. Assuming the proper checks and balances are in place, this process would seem logical and appropriate.
Still, this process creates fertile soil for fraud and, as is always the case, where there is a clear opportunity to rip off investors, the professional criminals along with businessmen of every ilk yet sharing a common shortcoming, the complete lack of moral fibre, are not far behind. It should come as no surprise to anyone then, that many of the 10b-5 violations prosecuted by the SEC are the result of materially false and/or misleading press releases issued by dishonest company officers and unscrupulous stock promoters.
Such is the nature of the financial community and nothing will change that tendency yet, with the proper checks and balances, it can still function for the investing community. We will get to the lack of those all important checks and balances and why the individual investor is still at great and unnecessary risk in just a moment but first, let's continue exploring the process and explore yet another problem built into it.
When press releases are submitted over the "wire" they are captured and displayed by hundreds of internet based quotation systems and financial web pages by virtue of their stock trading symbol. Yet, each individual service or website decides which press release and news services' releases they will capture and display. From almost universal capturing of the primary providers, Business Wire and PR Newswire, to less penetration by the second tier providers like MarketWire and PrimeZone each provider's releases are captured by a differing number of websites.
Only a few websites actually provide the investor with virtually all of the available information linked to the various public companies. Even the most frequented, Yahoo.com and the industry itself at nasdaq.com fall amazingly short of publishing all the news and announcements that are released. Of course, this fact is not prominently displayed and easily found by the user. It is, instead, buried in the terms and conditions or elsewhere in the vast inner reaches of their sites. The two best web sites for publishing most if not all the information that comes out are Wallstreetcity.com and pcquote.com. For this reason, we recommend that all individual investors use one of these sites for all their news and stock information needs. (we are not affiliated with these folks and were not paid to say that either).
This creates a problem for the individual investor who logs on to Yahoo every day to check his/her stocks and is completely unaware of the fact that some relevant news was published about one of his stocks simply because Yahoo had chosen not to capture news from that specific distributor. This can be even more troubling if the investor notices a dramatic change in one of their stock's price yet sees nothing to explain it in the way of news on the quote page (simply because Yahoo didn't carry it) and trusts that, if it was important, it would be there. Big mistake, HUGE! Of course, Yahoo and the rest of the financial sites have well crafted disclaimers as well so you can forget having any luck in passing the blame on to them. After all, you should have been smart enough to spend an hour or so digging around in our fine print and familiarizing yourself with what we don't do for you before you ever trusted us you foolish investor.
Investors have a right to know all the news, developments and information available about their stocks when they log on to their favorite financial web site or be warned most clearly each and every time of the fact that they could be missing essential information.
Additionally, although press release distributors will say they discourage third parties from using stock symbols to link their opinion based promotional materials to a public company's stock by using the company's stock symbol, often times those promotional pieces will also be displayed along with the press releases issued by the companies themselves. Also attached to a company's symbol and available on most quotation systems and financial websites are the "hard" news stories about individual public companies that are published by the mainstream news media such as the DOW Jones NewsWire and Reuters to name but two.
The PR distribution industry is both competitive and matured and, as a result, companies can get the information they choose out to the world, quickly and cost effectively. Everything from simple "disclosure" releases with only the minimum facts as required by law to full blown promotional pieces that extol the virtues of just about any occasion or situation the company is experiencing or that management can dream up, regardless of how feeble the information's relationship is to the truth, can be on the wire within minutes of submitting it to one of these distributors.
Unfortunately for the innocent investors, especially in the world of the Bulletin Board and Pink Sheet stocks, a simple cold call to a company about exploring the possibility of discussing the concept of possibly negotiating a working relationship at some time in the future can magically turn into a "strategic alliance" between the two companies in a press release. A grant application to the government which hasn't even been filed, can suddenly be deemed to be "close to approval". A non-existent and completely fabricated "buy" recommendation, supposedly issued by an established investment house, that was simply conjured up in the devious mind of a stock manipulator can suddenly show up in a press release with all the apparent credibility of a highly respected Merrill Lynch telecommunications analyst's recommendation on a NYSE company. (OK, bad choice for an analogy but you get the point).
Since press releases by companies are not subject to verification of accuracy or truthfulness by the services that distribute them, the investing public has no idea that any of them are anything but reliable and truthful information and only subject to the usual safe harbor provisions which say, "all this might never happen as stated". Sadly it doesn't say, "every word here could just as easily be a big fat lie intended only for the purpose of ripping off the investing public and enriching the promoters and insiders".
It is true that, companies that manipulate their stocks through false or misleading press releases can be, and often are, held accountable by the SEC but, unfortunately, this can often take several years to come to light and that is long after the proverbial horse has left the proverbial barn and all that remains is the pain of loss and the bad taste left in the investor's mouth from another betrayal of trust.
There are only a handful of groups that work to inform the public about scams and rip offs by public companies that use illegal or questionable tactics in promoting their stock. These tactics usually include the publishing of false or misleading press releases. Our-Street.com is one such group. You would think, with so many companies pumping their stock and so few of us exposing them, that we would have our collective hands full just writing enough reports and complaints. Sort of a case of "So much crime- So little time". However, writing and publishing the reports is only a part of the problem because of stock fraud's silent accomplice.
None of the primary or second tier press release distributors, with the exception of M2 PressWire, Europe's largest distributor but a lesser player in the US markets, will allow companies like Our-Street.com to issue a truthful press release through them that sheds a negative light on any public company, whether a customer of theirs or not. We want to applaud the courage of M2 PressWire for being the ONLY distributor we have found to show the courage to actually act as a legitimate news portal and allow both sides to be heard. We respect the fact they recently were called upon to test that courage and, upon reviewing our practices have determined that our releases are accurate and fairly represent newsworthy information and as such have allowed us to continue. Of course M2 PressWire, like the others, do not attest to the accuracy of our releases anymore than they attest to the accuracy of the other releases they distribute. As a result of their courage, we want to recommend them to anyone wishing to distribute news about their company. They also happen to be the most cost effective as well. We suggest everyone check them out and consider giving them some of your business. (this endorsement was not solicited or paid for)
The reasons the other distributors give are as varied as the services themselves. We have been told that "policy prohibits third party releases". Stated simply, this means that a press release must be about your company and cannot be about, and therefore linked to, another. We have been told, "It simply isn't worth it" to have the subject of a release call and yell at us until we give up and pull the release. We have been told that, that the company itself "owns" the symbol and any press release by a third party must be approved by the company before distributing. Of course, the simple fact is that the National Association of Securities Dealers (the NASD) assigns trading symbols to companies in order to facilitate an orderly market and since a pubic company cannot, to our knowledge, sell a symbol, we doubt very much if they own them either. Finally, we have simply been told that the simple and factual press releases we issue are not something they are willing to distribute.
We know the services' refusal to accept the releases published by the small band of watchdogs is not based upon the accuracy of the releases themselves since accuracy is not a concern regarding the thousands of public companies issuing through them every day. Besides, aside from the companies we expose, no one has ever challenged the truthfulness of one of our releases and no one has ever proven that one of our press releases is anything but completely accurate.
We believe that, by distributing press releases for public companies without regard to truthfulness while simultaneously blocking all attempts by those groups who would expose the lies, the industry has virtually eliminated the all-important checks and balances we mentioned earlier and effectively become a willing accomplice and facilitator in the ongoing problem of stock manipulation and fraud. We have written both PR Newswire and Business wire and asked them to comment on this problem. In our email we explained our perception of the problem and closed with these two paragraphs:
"By allowing fraudulent press releases to be distributed
while refusing to distribute press releases exposing these
frauds to the public, it seems as if you are creating an
uneven playing field. Wouldn't you serve the public and
the industry better by allowing both to be distributed
thereby taking a truly neutral position of news portal and
not that of facilitator and protector?
How do you justify providing a service which distributes fraudulent press releases while protecting the criminals against exposure by refusing press releases from companies such as Our-Street.com?"
You will note we do not differentiate between "knowingly" and "unknowingly" distributing these releases since no effort is made to discern between the two. All services recognize that some of the releases they distribute are fraudulent and thusly they "know" that each press release could be fraudulent yet they distribute them anyway. To date, we have not received a response. We will publish them here if we get one but don't hold your breath.
So, why do these companies shy away from distributing releases which expose the lies of the unethical companies? The reasons are not totally clear but we have a theory which we feel is most likely. It is based upon our experience and our conversations with industry types from both sides of the equation. When a company issues a fraudulent or false or misleading press release the only one to complain at the time would be the individual investor and a few watchdog sites like Our-Street.com who are skilled at exposing the well crafted lies of the dishonest corporate executives and unscrupulous stock promoters. None of us have the leverage or resources necessary to intimidate a BusinessWire or PRnewswire into retracting a press release. They simply say, "The only one who can pull a press release is the company that issued it".
On the other hand, when something negative is published about a public company, the press release distributor knows full well, or will quickly find out, that that company or its attorney will probably be on the phone threatening that service with all kinds of unspeakable horrors while using disturbing phrases like "illegal short selling" and "manipulating the stock down". This kind of talk has a tendency to cloud even a rational person's thinking to the point where they forget that the fraudulent and misleading press releases being exposed were themselves designed to manipulate the stock to irrational heights so as to allow people who were given vast quantities of stock to promote those lies could sell their stock while innocent investors are buying the stock based upon those lies.
Simply put, it isn't risky in the least to let public companies publish false or misleading press releases and satisfying customers (releasing what they submit) is an important part of doing business. It does, however, require principal and a willingness to stand for something to take on even one of the few watchdogs as customers knowing that you will have to take some heat for doing the right thing. When you compare the thousands of public companies (the core of their business) against the few watchdogs (unnecessary irritants), allowing them to expose the lies of even a few of those solid paying customers could at the very least prove upsetting and in the worst case, could cost you some business or make you (gasp) have to defend what is right. In business today on both sides of the Atlantic, these qualities are rare indeed.
In conclusion, individual investors today are faced with two significant challenges when it comes to staying informed and on top of their equity investments.
1. The lack of consistent and effective distribution of releases throughout the internet. This requires an awareness of the limitations of ones financial website regarding how much of the relevant information they capture as it is released. CHOOSE YOUR QUOTE SITE CAREFULLY!
2. Trying to discern the truth from the lies within a system that facilitates the distribution of fraudulent, false or misleading press releases while sheltering the perpetrators from those who would expose them. (SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT OUR-STREET.COM)
These two challenges are responsible for untold losses as investors find themselves buying when they wouldn't and not selling when they would, if only they knew the truth, a truth which was out there but unavailable to them because their web site failed to inform them of their limitations or stock fraud's silent accomplice kept the news off the wire and out of sight. Something needs to change if we are ever going to successfully take back Our Street!
NOTE: If you like this editorial, please share it with as many people as you can. The only way things will ever change is if we all become informed and demand a change. If you wish to write someone to complain, write these people or your favorite business news reporter and complain long and loud.
public_relations@prnewswire.com
michael.lissauer@businesswire.com
squawk@cnbc.com
OpenExchange@CNBC.com
Editor's note: We just got a call from Xavier Franco at Marketwire.com. Apparently he feels left out because marketwire.com wasn't listed as part of the problem and his competitors were. Now, this is despite the fact that marketwire.com is the company that actually told us that companies own their symbols and they would have to get the companies' permission prior to publishing our press releases about them. Well, I guess Mr. Franco wants his share of the complaints so please, if you feel like complaining to someone about this deplorable situation, make sure that Mr. Franco gets his share of your indignation. Trust me, they deserve it as much as anyone.
xfranco@marketwire.com
NOTE: Stock promotion is an essential tool in today's micro-cap market. Emerging growth companies must invest energy and capital to alert the markets to the opportunities they present. There are many fine and honorable firms that do their best to only work with honest companies and attempt to only distribute accurate and truthful information about their clients. We applaud them. This editorial is not about them! This article is about the dark side of stock promotions and those companies that intentionally make up lies, take S8 stock as payment and conspire with unethical public companies to execute fraudulent stock promotions and the good ol' pump and dump.
Editor's note: We do not intend to suggest in this editorial that the Press Release distribution companies are breaking any law or are in any way acting illegally. They are fully within their rights to conduct business as they do. We are not addressing the legal issues here, we are looking at what is in our opinion a problem of businesses acting legally but still impacting the markets in a negative way. These are OPINIONS of Our-Street.com only. Please take them as such.
http://our-street.com/conspiracy.htm
SkyWay Communications Holding Corp. Reports Financial Results For The Third Quarter of 2004.
Clearwater, Florida, March 26, 2004 – SkyWay Communications Holding Corp. (OTCBB: SWYC — News) Reports Financial Results For The Third Quarter of 2004. Third Quarter, 2004 For the third quarter of 2004, SkyWay reported a net loss of $6.258 million (7 cents per share), compared with net loss of $.140 million (1 cent per share) in the third quarter of 2003. The increases in expenses were the result of our merger with Sky Way Aircraft, Inc. and the fact that Sky Way Aircraft had minimal operations during the nine months ended January 31, 2003. The company reported quarterly sales of $0.015 million versus $ 0.0 during the quarter ended 2003. The revenue represents company sales from their wireless division as it begins to focus on sales to multi development units. As of the quarter end we had a cash position of approximately $1,535,000.
In addition, during the current quarter, the company procured a DC-9 for $2.112 million, including improvements. Of this amount, $1.5 million is funded with a promissory note. The company is currently having the plane retrofitted with the equipment necessary to demonstrate the company’s technology and provide the information necessary to obtain FCC certifications which are necessary for installations in commercial aircraft. It is expected that the aircraft will be available for testing in early May 2004.
2004 Year-to-Date Results, Since Inception and Subsequent Events
The company’s net loss for the first nine months of 2004 was $13.3 million ($.19 per share). For the first nine months of 2003, the company recorded a net loss of $.3 million ($.04 cents per share).
From our inception on April 24, 2002 to January 31, 2004, we incurred operating losses of approximately $14,600,000 (approximately $10,000,000 of this loss was from non-cash stock based compensation expense) and at January 31, 2004 we had a net working capital deficit of approximately $904,000. Net cash used in operating activities for the period from April 24, 2002 to January 31, 2004 was approximately $4,278,000. Net cash used from investing activities for equipment and an aircraft, after borrowings of $1,500,000 secured by the aircraft, was approximately $1,756,000. We funded these needs through the sale of common stock and advances from related parties that were converted to common stock which have provided us approximately $7,900,000.
Between February 1, 2004 and March 9, 2004, we raised an additional approximate $4,500,000 from the sale of common stock and as of March 9, 2004, we had approximately $3,700,000 of cash on hand.
We believe our cash resources are sufficient to satisfy our cash requirements over the next 5 months based upon our current run rate. We will need to secure a minimum of $3,000,000 more to satisfy requirements for our full 12 months of operations, but we also will need an additional minimum of $5,000,000 to finance our planned expansion, which funds will be used for product development, capital procurement and personnel. In order to become profitable we may still need to secure additional debt or equity funding.
We may experience problems; delays, expenses, and difficulties sometimes encountered by an enterprise in Sky Way Aircraft’s stage of development, many of which are beyond our control. These include, but are not limited to, unanticipated problems relating to the development of the system, production and marketing problems, additional costs and expenses that may exceed current estimates, and competition. “The quarterly and year to date results are in line with our expectations” according to Brent Kovar, President of SkyWay Communications Holding Corp. “From a cash position, the company is in its best position since its inception which will allow us to continue to build out our network, move forward with the approval process for the equipment to be installed in aircraft, and obtain capital equipment needed in support of the operations”. “With the recent approval from the FCC, which has granted us licenses for 114 towers we qualify as the largest Air To Ground network in the world. This will allow us to broadcast seamlessly to airborne aircraft providing in-flight entertainment and Homeland Security solutions anywhere in the United States territory. Finally, with the procurement of the DC-9 and other aircraft we have available, we are in the process of testing our technology in the transmission of data between the ground and air. We have demonstrated that video and internet connection data can be transmitted between the ground and airplanes using our technology and we are in the process of additional testing to refine these communication links. All of the tests are functioning as planned at this time”.
Certain information contained in this press release constitutes forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various economic, financial and industry factors including without limitation the company’s ability to implement its technology, obtain additional funds and achieve its targets. Additional factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward looking statements are discussed in the company’s Form 10-KSB for the year ended April. 31, 2003 and Form 10-QSB for the quarters ended July 31, 2003, Oct. 31, 2003, and Jan. 31, 2004 which are on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, any forward-looking statements represent our estimates only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our estimates as of any subsequent date. While we may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our estimates change.
For more information about SkyWay Communications Holding Corp. please visit our website at www.skywayaircraftsecurity.com or our Investor Relations Department at stevek@positivereturns.usa
Contact:
Contact:
SkyWay Communications Holding Corp.
Brent Kovar
President
(727) 535-8211
http://www.skywayaircraftsecurity.com
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1128723/000110801704000111/e991.htm
Skyway Communications Holdings, Inc Part II
OTC- BULLETIN BOARD SYMBOL SWYC
Corporate Headquarters:
6021 — 142nd Avenue North
Clearwater, FL 33760
727.535.8211
bkovar@SkyWaynet.us
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this logo has been added to this picture to give the false impression this is a Skyway Aircraft facility. This is both outrageous and insulting and we believe this is the kind of dishonest practice that deserves swift and harsh SEC action.
NAME THAT ROOM -
Now you too can be a Junior Detective and help Our-Street.com find out exactly what kind of room this is. We notice to the right of the logo is a map of Florida and some weather data so it looks like a Doppler radar screen but we just don't know. Can you find this room somewhere else on the net? Do you recognize exactly what this room is actually used for? If so, please let us know. Write us at info@our-street.com and help us "name that room". Help us solve this and, if we had a secret decoder ring we would send one to you.. but we don't. You will have to settle for our gratitude and that of others who want to know as well and you will know you helped us take back our street, plus, if you want, we will post your name right here as a champion internet detective.
TO STC OR NOT TO STC. THAT IS THE QUESTION!
The March 2004 issue of Avionics Magazine it is reported that
"The aircraft itself will serve as a technology demonstrator and test bed. The systems on the DC-9-15, as of early February, were in the supplemental type certificate (STC) approval process."
We have been further informed by the company's IR person that the DC9 is in Chicago at DuPage Airport and that the system is being installed by Scott Aviation. So we checked with the Aircraft Certification Office at the Chicago office of the FAA since that is the normal place where an STC for the plane would be handled. As of March 29, 2004, the FAA representative called us back after checking all the records and informed Our-Street.com that
"there is not any current Sky Way Aircraft STC projects in this office"
In fact the man we talked to at the FAA hadn't even heard of Sky Way Aircraft or Skyway Communications. We figured that if anyone in the FAA knew about Sky Way Aircraft or Skyway Communications or the Kovars, it would be the Tampa FSDO office of the FAA so we called them as well. They informed us that they had never heard of Sky Way either and further, that neither Sky Way Aircraft nor Skyway Communications had applied for or been granted any FAA licenses either.
We also asked about an STC under the other Registered owner of the plane Royal Sons Motor Yacht Sales, Inc.
Now maybe there is an STC application somewhere in some other name but frankly, we doubt it very much. We invite the Kovar's to provide the proof of an ongoing application and we will gladly publish it here.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the STC process, the first step is to file a Certification Plan. This informs the FAA of what you intend to do. You can't even start work without that plan being filed and approved.
We also spoke with the FSDO office of the FAA in Tampa, Skyway's nearest office and the gentleman there, who handles the certification of companies hadn't even heard of Skyway or the Kovars either.
BUGGY WHIPS ANYONE?
In 2002 Claircom Communications, a division of AT&T shut down their InFlight phone service. It wasn't profitable, it wasn't going to be profitable and previous attempts to sell the system had failed. This left Verizon as the only other Air to Ground company providing in flight phone service the old fashioned way, with land based towers instead of satellites.
In steps a white knight, Skyway Communications and they get the deal of the century, or so it might seem. They bought the entire 10+ year old system, including the broadcasting hardware for a cool million. Was this because no one else knew about it? Hardly, the fact Claircom was trying to dump this property was common knowledge in the airline and communications industry.
We are being led to believe that the reason the system didn't make sense to anyone else in the industry is that Brent Kovar and Skyway Communications Holdings has been sitting on a technology so advanced that it will allow the Clarion tower/communication system to transmit data in both directions ten times faster than land based broadband internet systems and what's more, he has been sitting on this unique software technology since 2000 without finding a single profitable commercial outlet for it to date.
Further, Brent is asking us to accept his claim that this technology will not only support high speed internet access on commercial aircraft, he also is asking us to accept his claim that their web cams and other aircraft monitoring technology will prove valuable to both airlines and governments in the quest for homeland security.
Of course to accomplish this task we have to suspend our concern for the fact that this technology, (assuming it even works at all in the first place), will be limited to the US and some limited parts of the Caribbean and Canada so it would have no practical value to any airlines that have need for technology which is international in scope. Without the use of the latest ground-to-air satellite based technologies, Skyway's system will be useless as soon as the plane leaves US airspace and the range of the coastal towers. This automatically eliminates all the international carriers.
Of course, this also calls into question the logic behind ramping up the towers in Alaska and Hawaii since the system would go dark en-route. We could also get into discussions about compatible systems and how Skyway intends to integrate their airlines and systems with the major airlines who will all be forced to use competing systems that feature the latest in leading-edge, state-of-the-art equipment and global satellite communications technology instead of surplus towers and equipment purchased from a now defunct company.
In case you didn't know it, Transdigital Communications Corporation, the company SWYC just announced buying some equipment from, is out of business. Phones at their listed phone number are disconnected and their website is down and has been for some time. We aren't quite yet sure what happened but if you look at their former website you will see that they never really got beyond the "we're putting our website together" stage.
Also, since international flights are the ones that are the primary focus of terrorist watches, having facial recognition software installed only on airlines and planes that will be limited to domestic flights would seem a little irrelevant.
We are doing our best here not to get really sarcastic but come on now. Are you getting a clue here?
Competition Anyone?
Just so no one thinks that the Kovar's have a lock on the high speed air to ground communication/internet business out there, there are a few other players on the scene. Granted, none make the claim of 15Mbps of two way data transmission like Skyway does and none of the serious players have the advantage of a once mothballed network of ground based antennae that Skyway does either. Lacking the distinct qualities of a "US and limited areas of Canada and the Caribbean only" ground based antenna system these companies are forced to resort to other methods of air to ground data transmission like leading-edge, state-of-the-art, global satellite systems.
Of course, being well funded companies, they have managed to get a jump on Skyway. One example is the Boeing Connexion who, although they don't have the Southeast Airlines letter of intent contingent on just about everything including the apparent "if it works and we decide we like it and haven't found something better in the interim" clause, they do have Boeing behind them.
It is our understanding that Boeing does have some involvement in the manufacture and sales of commercial airplanes and, even though they don't operate their own airline, we suspect they can perhaps influence the kind of systems which are installed in some fleets anyway. Perhaps that is why the Boeing Connexion has already concluded in flight trans atlantic testing and is launching their system using Lufthansa Airlines as their initial launch airline.
NOTE: The chart displayed by Skyway showing their connection speeds is misrepresented. The initial trans-Atlantic test run, according to articles had a downloaded speed of 3 Mbps and an upload speed of 128kps. This initial test download speed surpasses what Skyway indicates on their comparison chart and according to Boeing Connexion, their download speed now is at 20 Mbps, surpassing Skyway's claimed download speed by 33%. Boeing Connexion's upload speed is currently at about 1 Mbps.
IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE COMPARISON CHARTS, AT LEAST GET THE INFORMATION RIGHT. DON'T MISREPRESENT THE COMPETITION TO MAKE YOURSELF LOOK BETTER THAN YOU REALLY ARE!
Another player in the field is a Bothell, Washington company called Matsushita Avionics Systems. Matsushita is a bit of a newcomer to the Avionics business having only entered this field in 1979. Fortunately they did have some previous experience in electronics having originated in Japan about a century ago and establishing a name for themselves in electronics. Among other ventures they established and still control the Panasonic product line. They already supply systems to airlines and are offering upgrades to their latest systems that include internet access in addition to other features. Of course, Matsushita is also stuck with that leading-edge state-of-the-art, global satellite based communication system instead of Skyway's 10+ year old revived, ground based, geographically limited system so there is no telling how they are going to compete against Skyway once (and if) Skyway ever gets their system installed, working as represented, and certified by the FAA.
Of course Skyway will have the edge, they claim, because they will be offering the systems for free to the airline and the internet free to the customer and making their money on forced advertising. Despite the fact this model has yet to be successful over the long haul, as far as we know except in the area of mass media, Skyway has offered to prove the critics wrong and backs it up with presales of high value advertising contracts to the likes of Dew Cadillac, Dimmitt Bentley and others commercial establishments in Florida.... or do those contracts really exist after all and are they for cash in the amounts represented??? Looks like a bunch of smoke and mirrors to us based upon what we have been told.
DID YOU KNOW THAT BRENT FAILED AT AN IPO ATTEMPT BEFORE SWITCHING TO A SHELL MERGER?
We find it interesting too that the Kovar's initially attempted to take Sky Way Aircraft, Inc public before finally giving up and taking the easy way to the market with the reverse merger into a shell. Now, in our opinion, there is nothing wrong with a shell merger but we get concerned when a company, or more appropriately, the people involved with a company, can't get an IPO through the SEC then quit trying and resort to merging into a shell where the SEC has less to say and less opportunity to ask questions. Remember, the key to getting an IPO through the SEC is thorough and accurate disclosure. They don't conduct a merit review to determine if they like the business. They simply want you to explain the business and the corporate structure completely and accurately.
If you can't get your IPO cleared, there is definitely something wrong. Aside from not answering the SEC's questions fully and accurately, there aren't too many reasons why you might not get cleared. We have heard that another source of difficulty can sometimes come (unofficially) from being someone the SEC would prefer wasn't running a public company. In the past the SEC has been accused of "bed-bugging" registrations (not responding in a timely fashion) or of simply issuing comment letter after comment letter no matter how well you responded to the previous ones. Given that registrations are reviewed in a subjective fashion by people with more files on their desk than they should have, both are certainly possible and we don't even fault them for employing such tactics if it protects the market. In the case of Sky Way Aircraft, we have no idea whatsoever why they quit trying but what we do know for certain is that they filed their initial SB-2 in July 2002 and subsequently filed 4 amended registration statements over the next 8 months then quit trying and filed a formal notice to abandon the registration in May 2003 just before sliding into the shell and starting trading.
*Preferred shares
The Series A and Series B Preferred, which represent 300,000,000 common shares currently are convertible into common. Although both Series initially had milestones that had to be reached prior to conversion, the most recent 10Q has eliminated any discussion of their conversion into common which suggests they can be converted at any time with no additional payment. The Series B is still convertible upon certain events that may never occur. Those events are 1. The completion of a successful IPO in the amount of $25 Million. 2. A minimum closing price of $4 per share for 30 days (adjusted for splits, acquisitions etc) or 3. the successful launch of their product (definitive agreements with three (3) nationally recognized airlines to provide its Products and Services; (ii) to have an operational network capable of providing its Products and Services throughout the United States; and (iii) an operational ground base data center.
Based upon available information, we do not consider the agreement with Southeast Airlines a "definitive agreement" however, management may disagree. Further, it is important to keep in mind that conversion terms of convertible preferred shares can be changed and since the Kovars have voting power equal to the converted shares, they control this company with absolute power.
We believe, their disclosure in SEC filings is woefully inadequate considering the level of potential dilution and the voting control they hold. We also find no evidence that the Kovars, with their overwhelming control of the voting power of the corporation, are prohibited from modifying the conversion terms to suit themselves.
Although the Kovars do disclose the terms of the convertible preferred in their SEC filings, we feel they do not disclose this adequately and that this failure also represents a violations of Section 13 of the Exchange Act as a material omission.
ALMOST TOO STUPID TO EVEN MENTION.
We sometimes marvel at the hubris and gall of people sometimes and this time is no exception. Brent published this amazing sounding announcement in August of last year.
SkyWay Communications Holding Corp Announces Congressman and Republican Majority Leader Tom Delay's Appointment of Brent C. Kovar, President of SkyWay, to the National Republican Congressional Committee Business Advisory Council
HONESTLY, HOW STUPID DOES THIS GUY THINK YOU ARE? First he doctors the picture to make you think that is his monitoring room or something then this!! This is nothing more than a simply fund raising tactic on behalf of the Republican party. They cold call people and get them to contribute a few hundred dollars then name you to this Business Advisory Council. Nothing wrong with doing it but any company that uses is to promote their stock is, in our opinion, up to no good!
A little more on the subject
Even a little more
ENOUGH SAID!
SUMMARY
Give us a break here!! We have here a family with proven lack of credibility running this company and paying themselves generous salaries ($175,000 annually to Brent). We have here a family that either currently is or almost certainly was under SEC examination with the Net Command Tech/SAS matter and yet, in our opinion, continues to act so as to deceive the investing public to get where they want to go.
We have here a software technology that has not been proven or confirmed by any reputable independent source that we can find.
We have a company that is issuing shares at a rate even Our-Street.com finds hard to comprehend. In the past 3 quarters, we have seen the issued and outstanding go from 57,200,000 on July 7, 2003 to 70,200,000 on October 31, 2003 and 124,701,669 on March 9, 2004 and all this dilution was without benefit of an acquisition. That means that the Kovar's are issuing stock at an average rate of 204,893 per day. Of course, all this stock has nothing to do with the 351,998,000 shares represented by existing convertible preferred shares.
Finally, we have here a company that has mislead the markets about the value and nature of existing contracts of clients on both sides of this business equation.
In our opinion, if the Kovars aren't stopped here, they will continue to use the public markets and trusting investors as their personal ATM machine without consideration or concern for shareholder value, honesty, disclosure, or ethics.
As always, we will gladly provide a forum for any documented and verifiable comments by the company and will promptly and sincerely apologize for any errors in our facts. Our commitment is to bring forth the truth and the facts in the matter and we encourage Skyway Communications Holdings to produce whatever documents they can to clear up our concerns and the concerns of what we assume are many SWYC shareholders.
http://our-street.com/featured.htm
Skyway Communications Holdings, Inc
OTC- BULLETIN BOARD SYMBOL SWYC
Corporate Headquarters:
6021 — 142nd Avenue North
Clearwater, FL 33760
727.535.8211
bkovar@SkyWaynet.us
The Ones Responsible
Officers and Directors and Significant Players
Brent Kovar
Glenn Kovar
Joy Kovar
James Kent
SEC FILINGS
Some Basic Facts - as of January 31, 2004
Common Shares outstanding (March 9, 2004) - 124,701,669
FULLY DILUTED AFTER CONVERSION OF PREFERRED SHARES INTO
351,998,000 shares of common - 476,699,669*
Total Assets December 31, 2003- $4,881,565 (unaudited)
Total Liabilities - $2,554,308
Revenues for year ending 1/31/2004 $15,398 (also revenues since inception)
Total Net Loss from continuing operations for 9 months ended 1/31/04 -
$13,326,597
Accumulated Deficit from April 2002 - $14,608,290
Stock price when report was published $.80
Market capitalization $99,761,335
Market Capitalization fully diluted $381,359,735
Date Complaint filed: March 25, 2004
Filed with: Enforcement Division of the SEC, Washington and Florida
Known actions to date - None
2 APRIL 2004 - Our-Street.com been contacted by a former high level employee of Satellite Access Systems (Kovar's former company) who, after reading our report, concluded that the Kovars were up to the same misdeeds as they witnessed with Satellite Access Systems. Those misdeeds included some of the following more disturbing events.
1. The Kovars took millions of investor dollars without generating any meaningful income and enjoyed extravagant lifestyles while failing to pay employees in a timely fashion. This included throwing a $20,000 New Years party at Brent's expensive executive home while continuing to fail to pay employees. (Brent lives in a luxury executive home most of us can only dream about and it is funded entirely by investor dollars).
2. Demonstrations of SAS technology were faked by Brent. On one occasion, while moving a computer, a "critical" hardwired component was ripped from the computer and Brent simply instructed the employee to reinsert the broken connection and proceeded to conduct a demonstration that would have been impossible under the circumstances.
3. When conducting a demonstration of the satellite link between the demo room and his receptionist who was on camera, Brent secretly instructed his receptionist to pause three seconds after hearing the speaker to give the impression there was a time delay due to satellite distances.
4. Contracts were specifically drawn to enable SAS to take huge "stand still" deposits from customers yet not require delivery of services and still allow retention of deposits. (this supports statements by Net Command Tech regarding all customers of SAS and the Kovars demanding their money back for failure to perform).
5. Our contact also stated clearly that Brent Kovar is the brains behind the outfit and that he is the most capable con man our whistleblower personally has ever witnessed. "He could sell ice to Eskimo's".
6. Brent not only took money from investors, he also talked his relatives out of money as well and they too ended up losing investments they could hardly afford to lose.
Generally speaking this highly placed whistleblower spoke of Brent, Glenn and Joy's conning everyone from family and friends to investors to companies out of millions of dollars and spending that money in helping support the con with impressive offices and demo rooms while enjoying extravagant lifestyles at the expense of the investors. All this was pulled off while NEVER delivering a single product. Our whistleblower compared Brent to a skilled magician as he staged mock demonstrations and took non-refundable deposits then failed at every instance to deliver the promised technology.
OUR COMPLAINT
Sometimes a story almost too strange to the point where you wonder how people believe it to begin with. Such is the case with the Kovar family's latest venture, Skyway Communications Holdings, Inc.
Here is a family that has been working different versions of the same type story with the public since at least 1996 and still seems to be able to find willing believers. The premise is simple. "Invent" a product with remarkable capabilities. Also invent a great story to go along with the "product" and be really good at telling the press and others about it so you can convince others to invest in you and the product. (Keep in mind, when we say "invent" we mean that in the broadest terms possible). Keep this up as long as you can and make sure you pay yourself and your family well along the way. When the story falls apart, invent a new product or recycle the old one in a different package and repeat the process.
The head of this family, Papa Glenn Kovar's history as a man who makes materially false and/or misleading statements to get what he wants goes back even further beginning with his lies on a job application to get a position with a Redevelopment Agency from which he was subsequently fired when the lies were exposed.
Actually, our story starts in the late 1980's. Around that time Glen was getting fired for his "creative resume" work. Also around the same time another apparent turning point for the Kovar family occurred. Glenn tells you of a poignant father/son moment aboard a sail boat in 1987 in the Virgin Islands, where Glenn and Brent began wondering about the opportunities in the satellite and related businesses. We don't know if this moment came before or after Glen was fired from the Redevelopment Agency but with Glenn being out of work and fresh from this magical moment, Glen and Brent experienced the genesis, the inspiration for their first recorded commercial father and son project, Satellite Access Systems (SAS).
This is the first evidence we have of Brent and his dad teaming up on a project. Now, when it comes to getting caught in a lie as Glenn did, some people learn their lessons and change or even commit themselves to atoning for their past mistakes while others just keep on keeping on. That appears to be the case with Glenn because his misstatements didn't stop after the resume lie/firing incident. There are so many misstatements in the article about his formation of SAS that we are reluctant to list them all on this page. Instead, we have listed some as additions to the article itself.
Tampa Bay Business Journal article
Although Glenn credits Brent with being the "genius", it is obvious where Brent got his education when it comes to outrageous promotional claims. We can see this in their first venture together, Satellite Access Systems. Although Glenn is the one taking the lead in the news story and bragging about their mysterious "black box", Brent, at age 29 does "yeoman's duty" in helping carry the promotional load by making his own grandiose claims. For example, when Glenn tossed up the claim that they just were signing a contract with an AOL subsidiary, Brent hit it over the fence by adding that the contract could "blossom into well over $500 million."
It was only after realizing how badly he had been scammed, that the reporter who wrote the initial SAS story came back and filed a follow up story not only on Glenn's resume problems but on several of the other lies told to him as well.
It isn't often you see a follow up story by a reporter where the reporter actually goes back and attempts to correct a snow job he had gotten previously. We commend the reporter on his vigilance and note this must have been a better than average snow job to cause this kind of reaction.
From here we don't find much on the Kovar's and their so called "black box" technology and inch wide satellite dishes until two and a half years later in April 1999, when Corsaire Snowboard Inc announced the acquisition of SAS and the changing of their name to Net Command Tech, Inc. (OTCBB: NCDT now pink sheets). Here is what they thought they were acquiring.
According to NCDT, the Kovars were involved in the "development of ultra high speed satellite and Internet communications for the transmission of voice, date and video signals; technology"
Somehow the Kovar's managed to talk the folks controlling NCDT out of about $3 million in cash in addition to debt assumption and a bunch of stock without ever confirming the existence or effectiveness of their alleged technology.
Were not quite sure how these things happen but we got this information from NCDT SEC filings (see link below). We find additional credibility in these particular disclosures due to the fact that about 60 days after the announcement of the SAS acquisition and right about the same time as the acquisition of SAS was closing, the SEC stepped in and suspended trading in NCDT stock while requesting information on, among other things, their recent acquisitions and claims surrounding the acquired company's technology and claimed income.
There are some pretty troubling claims in these filings and we suggest anyone with an interest in Skyway Communications, read this information thoroughly.
NCDT FILING
Here is just a sample of what you are going to find.
"However, SAS had not successfully delivered contracted services or technologies under these contracts. In addition, as discussed in Note 9, substantially all counterparties to SAS's contracts have made claims for return of the customers' advance deposits and other damages."
Bottom line here is simple; amazing claims about technologies were made but not delivered by Glenn Kovar and Brent Kovar while sucking money out of the investor's pockets.
Fast forward again to today and the latest venture of the Kovar family, Skyway Communications Holdings. Through this company and its subsidiaries, they are once again promoting some amazing technology with outrageous claims both in their press releases and on their website and people are buying the story. Here are some of the claims:
"While all commercial airlines currently provide some limited In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) and communication services, these systems currently rely on data transfer systems that are inferior in reliability and speed when compared to Sky Way Aircraft’s system. Sky Way Aircraft has the ability to provide data link technology that will dramatically increase IFE connection speed and capability."
BUT WAIT!
In their most recent 10Q filed on March 16, 2004 they clearly state, All of our products and services are in the development stage and will require additional testing.
The obvious question here is
How can these two statements exist when referring to one technology?
It appears to us that Skyway simply hopes to someday have the ability to provide these services.
And
How in the world can they claim superior reliability when they haven't even finished installing the first working model which will decide if the technology even works? This it a total fabrication.. a lie... a deception.. a con... "masculine bovine exhaust" at its best.
Section 10b-5 of the Exchange Act prohibits a person from making materially false and/or misleading statements in relation to the sale of stock and we believe that SWYC's claims on their website as stated above are clearly false and/or misleading.
We have another problem with Kovar's claims about his technology. This has to do with how he describes it in his SEC filings. In his most recent 10Q, Kovar refers to his technology this way.
"Sky Way Aircraft, a division of Sky Way Communications Holding Corp. was formed to utilize now-patented wireless data transmission software technology developed by Mr. Brent Kovar, our President. This technology is a software program for data indexing, which is similar to data compression but which mitigates data loss problems associated with compression. This technology permits faster and less expensive transmission of data, video, voice and audio between the ground and an airplane or other homeland security related ground locations than using traditional, non-indexed data transmission mechanisms"
However, when we look at the patent itself, the first sentence of the abstract clearly says,
"A system for increasing the transmission bandwidth of a terrestrial digital network". Additionally, the patent says nothing at all about cost effectiveness. More masculine bovine exhaust!
Again we find contradictions between representation and fact. And for those who might want to say, "but the technology can be used for wireless", we say SO WHAT? Disclosure is about accuracy and truth and the truth is that Brent Kovar's patent, IF IT EVEN WORKS, was designed for terrestrial digital networks. In his patent, Kovar even goes futher to make the distinction between satellite and wireless transmissions and the more traditional "terrestrial networks" such as phone lines.
Given this fact, how can Kovar then file a disclosure document with the SEC and call his technology a "wireless data transmission software technology"?
It is a violation of Securities Law to knowingly file false information with the SEC and, in our opinion, the claim that Brent's patent is for wireless data transmission software, is materially false and/or misleading.
Basically, this is what we see going on with the "technology". The Kovars, through SWYC, have acquired the old AT&T in-flight tower phone system for the US. This is the system that AT&T essentially abandoned when it got out of the in-flight phone business. Now, they are attempting to upgrade this system to support their claim of being able to transmit data at a rate of 15,000,000 bits per second". According to their own charts, the system they acquired from AT&T, an "in flight phone system" was only equipped to transmit data at a rate of 2,400 bits per second. Skyway does not disclose exactly what is required to upgrade their system from 2,400 bps to 15,000,000 bps but we think this is the kind of information that should be clearly and fully disclosed both in terms of cost and time.
This use of bits per second alone is quite misleading, in our opinion. The industry simply doesn't measure data transmission in bits per second anymore. A bit is the smallest form of data one can transmit. Data transmission today is measured in terms of kilobits, megabits per second (Mbps) and not bits per second.
Accordingly, the data transmission rate being claimed by Skyway is 15 Mbps or 15 Megabits per second. By comparison a typical T1 internet connection transfers data at a rate of around 1.5 Mbps. So, according to Skyway, they have developed their own technology for transmitting data back and forth between an airplane and a ground tower about 10 times faster than a T1 connection by using their software designed for terrestrial network systems and not by using other state of the art compression technologies or hardware thus allowing them that speed on both the up and down link.
Given the historical facts of the Satellite Access Systems promotion and eventual demise added to the apparent inconsistencies already in evidence, we find Mr. Kovar's latest claims about this technology to be highly questionable at best. We have written the company and asked for some documentation of their claims and have not received a reply. We will advise you if we get any additional information.
Adding to our concerns regarding the technology and the credibility of the Kovars and Skyway Communications, is evidence we are receiving regarding the relationship between Southeast Airlines and Skyway. According to Skyway, Southeast Airlines initially entered into a Letter of Intent in July and then
"signed a SkyWay in-flight system contract for a wide variety of in-flight services. Under the contract, Southeast Airlines shall receive, on a reoccurring basis, a percentage of the revenue generated by advertising and in-flight service usage of the system. Terms of the contract call for the installation of the Upgraded SkyWay in-flight system on the fleet of Southeast Airlines eight (8) MD-80 and DC-9 aircraft."
This understanding is not shared by Scott Bacon, a VP for Southeast Airlines. According to reliable sources who have spoken with Mr. Bacon, there is no formal contract with Skyway Communications or any of its subsidiaries. According to Mr. Bacon,
1. There is no "formal contract" with Skyway Communications or any subsidiary.
2. They do have what amounts to an agreement that is more like a letter of intent based upon numerous conditions gs, among them
a. Proof that the technology works
b. All required FAA certifications
c. Inspection and working demonstration of a fully installed and complete working model
3. Once Southeast has had an opportunity to see the product in action and can confirm its functionality and that both the airplane and Skyway have the proper certifications from the FAA, then they will "look at it" to determine if they want it.
4. It is way too early in the process to determine if anything will come from the relationship.
5. In the interim Southeast continues to investigate other options including but not limited to the Verizon technology which uses existing installed hardware. They also have been in discussion with other airlines. This is an active subject of investigation for Southeast out of a commitment to be competitive while Skyway continues to fail to deliver requested documentation.
Recent developments also concern us. We called Southeast Airlines to personally speak further with Mr. Bacon about this subject and were told by the operator at Southeast that Skyway had called and instructed her to refer any further calls regarding their relationship with Southeast Airlines to Steve Kline, the IR representative for Skyway. We find this action both troubling and inappropriate. We have written Mr. Bacon and asked him to comment and will let you know if he replies.
ADVERTISING CONTRACTS?
We also have serious concerns about the accuracy of certain press releases referring to advertising contracts between Skyway and commercial organizations in the Florida area.
On October 2, 2003, Skyway issued a press release announcing that
"SkyWay Communications Holding Corp. its wholly owned subsidiary, Sky Way Aircraft Inc., and Mavilo Jewelry Company of Tampa, Fl. announces their new Southeast Airlines 12 week In-Flight advertising contract valued at $75,000. The contract is scheduled to commence Spring 2004.
As previously announced in the original press release of August 29, 2003, SkyWay and Southeast Airlines signed an in-flight services contract whereby SkyWay would provide a wide variety of in-flight services to Southeast Airlines. A significant part of these services were the advertising of local Tampa Bay and other businesses and info-commercials that would be tailored to specific destinations of the Southeast Airlines flight schedule. The contract with Mavilo Jewelry Company, an import diamond and fine jewelry company located in Tampa, provides for a 12 week ad coverage on Southeast Airlines scheduled flights, between St. Petersburg., Ft. Lauderdale, and Orlando, Fl. Allentown, Pa, Newburg, NY, and Newark, NJ.
We contacted Mavilo Wholesalers in Tampa Florida, a respected jewelry company and asked them to confirm the contract with Sky Way Aircraft. When we informed the receptionist we needed to talk to someone who would know about advertising contracts, we were put in touch with Maria in their business office. We introduced ourselves and told her we were researching Skyway Aircraft and Skyway Communications and wanted to confirm the existence of an advertising contract between Mavilo and Skyway and she replied
"I’ve never heard of them."
Question; You’ve never heard of them?
Answer; "If we had, I would know about it."
Question: You would think if it was for $75,000…..
Answer: "[Laughs] – Yeah, I think I would know about it."
We also looked at the two press releases regarding contracts with automobile dealerships. One claims that Dew Cadillac entered into an advertising contract valued at over $200,000 and the other claimed to have made a deal with a West/Central Florida Bentley dealership. Surprisingly enough Dew Cadillac is a part of the Dimmitt Luxury Automobile Group as is Dimmitt Cadillac, the only Bentley dealer in West/Central Florida.
We have spoken with both the marketing department for Dimmit Luxury Automobile Group and with the General Manager of Dew Cadillac. Originally, Tracy Peterson, in the marketing department, indicated "I can't confirm this..... We're not doing anything like that". We offered to send her a link to the press release and she confirmed her willingness to follow up her statements with an email. We subsequently received an email from her referring us instead to Scott Larguier, the General Manager of Dew Cadillac.
We then spoke with Scott at Dew Cadillac and he refused to comment any further indicating that they were not in the habit of discussing their advertising relationships and weren't familiar with Our-Street.com. When we explained to them that Skyway stock was being publicly promoted using the Dew name already as well as the $200,000 figure, he didn't feel this was sufficient to change his mind. We then invited him to visit our website and to review the work we do and then decide further if he wanted to provide more information. To date, we have not heard further from him. We can only hope that, should the SEC inquire of them, that they will have more success with Dew Cadillac than we did.
We think it is important to note here that these press releases announce contracts "valued at" various figures. This should indicate the value to Skyway but understanding deceptive promotional tactics, we are fully aware of the fact that this can also be used to describe the value to the advertising customer as in "we can let you have this advertising package valued at over $200,000 today for the incredibly low price of only $xxx". Who of us haven't had the opportunity to purchase something from a TV pitchman that represents an $820 value for only $69.95?
Time alone will tell us what the actual truth is with deal with Dew Cadillac and the Dimmitt Luxury Automobile Group but as far as we are concerned, we are terribly disappointed in the Dimmitt group because, in the world of stock promotions, if you are involved as Dew Cadillac is, and you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. We would expect this from an old style bait and switch Motor's Holding type store from the 70's but not a Cadillac and Bentley dealership. Oh, well.. no accounting for ethics.
Now for something really stupid!
(And really, really wrong too!)
In our opinion, Brent Kovar holds the investing public in very low regard. In fact, we get the feeling he thinks most of you are total idiots. We have reached this conclusion based upon a picture Brent has added to the monitoring page of his technology overview page. Here he has added a picture of a high-tech room full of monitors and work stations. On the wall of this obviously state of the art looking room, in the center of all the monitors, is the Skyway Aircraft Logo.
http://our-street.com/featured.htm
Our-Street.com has made a lot of noise as a self-appointed securities cop, even recently winning accolades from no less than the Dow Jones (NYSE: DJ) Newswire. The site's purported proprietor, "Nick Tracy," screams for more "transparency," but like most would-be anonymous vigilantes, there is a dark side. A very, very dark side. And not a lot of "transparency" for Our-Street and Tracy.
The site's current target is Skyway Communications Holdings, Inc. (OTCBB: SWYC), and its recent targets have included H-Quotient (OTCBB: HQNT) and Circle Group Holdings (AMEX: CXN) when it was on the over-the-counter bulletin board. Short sellers love the site, and until recently Tracy had disclosed that he was among the short sellers trading the companies he posted.
Targeting H-Quotient turns out to have been Our-Street's Achilles heel. H-Quotient has sued Our-Street and Nick Tracy, who claims to live and operate out of the countryside near London, Chancery Number 86916, Fairfax Circuit Court, Virginia.
Except the company didn't sue Tracy, and it certainly didn't sue him "just outside London," where he has claimed residence. It sued Timothy J. Miles, of 918 Pacific Terrace, Klamath Falls, Oregon 97601, phone 541-273-0225, fax 541-273-0206, a character whose background is definitely interesting and eclectic. Miles, purportedly a.k.a. Nick Tracy, sent his attorneys, Charles Hildebrandt and Michael York of the law firm of Wehner & York (www.lawyers.com/w&ylaw/) to answer the suit. The next hearing is scheduled May 27.
The website operator's claim to be "outside London" appears to be true. Klamath Falls, Oregon, is definitely outside London.
Other companies that Our-Street has gone after include Silverado Gold Mines, Ltd. (OTCBB: SLGLF), Epixtar Corp. (OTCBB: EPXR), Aqua Vie Beverage Corporation (OTC: AQVB), ChampionLyte Holdings, Inc (OTCBB: CPLY), BEVsystems Interenational, Inc. (OTC: BEVI), DataMeg, Inc. (OTCBB: DTMG), Kingdom Ventures, Inc. (OTCBB: KDMV), Imaging Diagnostics, Inc. (OTCBB: IMDS), SHEP Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: STLOF), EdgeTech Services, Inc (OTCBB: EDGH), Nutra Pharma Corp. (OTCBB: NPHC), Verdisys Inc. (OTC: VDYS), Calypte Biomedical Corporation (OTCBB: CYPT), Galaxy Energy Corp. (OTCBB: GAXI), PowerChannel, Inc. (OTCBB: PWRC), US Global Nanospace (OTCBB: USGA), and Universal Guardian Holdings (OTCBB: UGHO).
A handful have indeed become targets of the SEC, not always though for the "crimes" that Our-Street has accused them of. Many others, however, have actually prospered, and some, such as H-Quotient, reported strong earnings and revenues hard on the heels of Our-Street's representations that its finances were a sham.
At first it was hard not to admire Our-Street's premise, and even FinancialWire reported the site's activities and Investrend Information even listed the site as a partner, for about a week, until certain representations became suspicious and requests for documentation as to Tracy's existence and true whereabouts were brick-walled. The circumstances were outlined in a comment letter posted on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/investrend010404.htm, which claimed among other things that "Tracy's" own comment letter supporting short selling may have been a violation if, as suspected, Tracy had not truly identified himself in an official letter to a government agency.
In response, "Nick Tracy" wrote to FinancialWire and claimed that the SEC "knows who I am."
For Timothy J. Miles, nothing could be closer to the absolute truth.
"Securities and Exchange Commission v. C. Jones & Company, Carter Allen Jones, Timothy J. Miles, Gaylen P. Johnson, and Jonathan Curshen, Civil Action No. 03-WM-0636(PAC) (District of Colorado, filed April 11, 2003)" is proof of that. On March 1, 2004, the SEC was awarded a summary judgment against Miles in their case against him after Miles' dismissal motion was denied.
The SEC charged Miles and his co-defendants, most of whom are believed to have dropped out of sight or left the country, with securities fraud for their participation in an alleged "pump and dump" scheme involving Freedom Golf Corporation's common stock, where Miles was a "principal shareholder."
The complaint alleges that in the fall of 1999, Miles provided a broker-dealer with false information to be filed with the National Association of Securities Dealers in order to initiate public trading of securities issued by Freedom Golf's predecessor company. The complaint also alleges that from late January through early March 2000, Miles paid two stock promoters, Jones and Curshen, to hype Freedom Golf via the Internet, telephone, and mail. Specifically, the complaint alleges that Jones arranged for the dissemination of between 25 and 35 million unsolicited "spam" e-mails touting Freedom Golf in February 2000. During the same period, the complaint continues, Johnson created baseless profit, revenue, and expense projections for Freedom Golf that Jones published on his company's Internet website, and that Curshen publicized on an Internet message board. In addition, the complaint alleges that Jones and Curshen failed to disclose the full amount that Miles was paying them to tout Freedom Golf, in violation of the federal securities laws.
The complaint further alleges that Freedom Golf's stock price and trading volume was pumped up to artificially inflated levels as a result of the false and misleading e-mails and baseless price projections.
According to the complaint, during the course of this manipulation, Jones, Miles, and Curshen all sold shares of Freedom Golf stock and reaped profits of more than $500,000.
And yes, indeed, the SEC does know Miles. The case is used as "class materials" in presentations on stock fraud by John Reed Stark, Chief of the Office of Internet Enforcement in the Division of Enforcement of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, at www.johnreedstark.com/ClassMaterials/LitigationReleases/freedomgolf.htm.
As it turns out, the SEC's recognition of Miles' activities were nothing new for him. From 1997 to 2001, operating from Hilton Head, SC, an EDGAR search reveals that Timothy Miles would indeed make a Nick Tracy a very knowledgeable resource for pumps, dumps and sham public companies.
Miles is listed in registration statements during that period for a wide range of public companies that were soon pumped and dumped out of business, including Ballyhoo Capital Ventures, Casinovations, Inc., Global Foods Online, Inc., ICV, Inc., Pratt Wylce & Lords Ltd., Sea Shell Galleries, and Wahoo Capital Ventures. Only one company in which he was involved, Bionet Technologies, Inc. (OTC: BNTK), survived as a public entity, and it is nothing more than a shell, with zero trades at $0.0001.
Before leaving Hilton Head for Klamath Falls, however, Miles appears to have had an epiphany. As "Reverend" Timothy Miles, our self-described fighter against "corporate evil-doers" apparently discovered "the meaning of life," and began sharing his revelations with the world at www.themeaningoflife.net. Recently, FinancialWire wrote to the email address on the website, addressing "Nick Tracy." Miles/Tracy did not respond but the website was promptly taken down, perhaps to save the author from embarrassment. However, the website was downloaded and stored, and portions of it may be accessed at www.investrendinformation.com at www.investrend.com/Admin/Topics/Articles/Resources/925_1081035055.htm .
"In February 1991, a unique and mysterious crystal was discovered near what some authorities believe to be the site of the Garden of Eden. This crystal possessed remarkable powers. Anyone who held this magical crystal was healed emotionally, restored spiritually and enlightened. Everyone who held the crystal was changed in a positive and profound way," stated Rev. Timothy Miles as part of a pitch to have individuals register at his website.
"In 1999 the crystal was discovered to also contain data. This data turned out to be a text file that revealed new insight into the meaning of life. Religious leaders and scientists gathered together and examined the crystal and the newly found text. What followed was a scientific evaluation of the crystal and the gathering of all available empirical evidence. The result; the only possible explanation for the powers of the crystal and the unusual and unexplainable characteristics of the file containing the message was that this was indeed a message from God.
"For reasons too numerous and complex to detail here, these religious leaders decided that the best thing to do with this message was to put it on the internet, accompanied by a complete story about the crystal's discovery and the events leading up to its being placed on the net to let God's will determine if and how it would be disseminated.
Rev. Miles goes on to say that "the insight I have gained from the story and the message has changed my life in many ways, all for the better. I am a 54-year old ordained minister (30 years) and I can say without reservation, this story has strengthened my faith," noting that "there is something remarkable about the actual file containing the message, something beyond scientific explanation that has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is indeed a message from God. It blew me away."
Blown away to Klamath Falls to become London's "Hellboy" saving the world from corporate evildoers?
One would think that one public website besides Our-Street.com would have been enough for the versatile Rev. Miles, but drum roll, please, straight from Klamath Falls, Oregon, ladies and gentlemen, we bring you, wonder of wonders, OTCart.com, at www.otcart.com.
Here, he is a little bit more upfront about his interests, although "fine art" would not be among those most observers would have guessed. Mighty fine art, perhaps, but fine art?
Here is how the Reverend Stock Corruption Expert Pumper Dumper Corruption Fighter Art Connoisseur describes yet another enterprise: "OTCart.com was conceived and developed by Timothy J. Miles. Over 2 years in development, OTCart.com represents the logical and essential meeting of two of Mr. Miles' great passions, the stock market and the world of fine art.
"Mr. Miles has been an avid collector of original and limited edition fine art for over 20 years. As a collector, Mr. Miles recognized the lack of a cohesive secondary market for limited edition art. He also recognized that this lack of a structured market, kept limited edition art from reaching its potential as an investment medium. After all, cars, commodities and even companies, through the public stock markets, had an organized and cohesive trading platform for their products.
"Having spent the past 14 years working as a stockbroker, consultant to and president of publicly traded companies, Mr. Miles has an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Over the Counter Stock Market and recognized the similarities between stock and limited edition art. He also realized that what the art world needed was a market similar to the Over the Counter Market as a venue to establish not only the value of a particular work of limited edition art, but the strength and depth of that market as well. In that way, the collector could make a more informed decision regarding a particular artist or work of limited edition art and a gallery owner could expand his market by participating in a global trading platform both as both a buyer and as a seller.
"OTCart.com is the perfect marriage between the stock market and the art world. Establishing a simple, effective and relevant real-time market for registered works of art, this platform creates the essential distinction between decorative and investment-grade limited edition art and facilitates the execution of that market," concludes the quirky site.
Miles' OTCart, Inc., in Klamath Falls, lists a phone and fax which executives at one public company say are the same where messages were left and documents were faxed from and to Nick Tracy. Our-Street publicly acknowledged receiving phone messages that were left exclusively at the phone number, 541-273-0225, and discussed documents faxed to 541-273-0206.
The site states that "effective May 1, 2003, employees and/or owners of Our-Street.com do not trade any stocks featured on this site. In fact employees and/or owners don't even short stocks period!" That policy was adopted as part of the set of principles that FinancialWire required after its initial article about Our-Street on March 17, 2003, and just prior to FinancialWire's demand for more documentation as to the site's agenda and ownership in May, 2003, when FinancialWire ceased coverage of the site's complaints.
In late April, Our-Street, squeezed out of press release distribution by the major press wire services, frantically asked FinancialWire to publish findings that Aqua Vie Beverage (OTC: AQVB) had apparently produced its own "tout sheet," without disclosing it was the publisher. Our-Street had posted a complaint against the company on April 55, but it wasn't getting the notice that "Nick Tracy" wanted.
As part of its requirements for publishing the story, FinancialWire asked Tracy to fax copies of the offense for purposes of documentation, and to assert that neither he nor others associated with Our-Street was trading in stocks of companies covered. Thus, Our-Street set its policy, but in doing so, inadvertently revealed that up until May 1, the site's proprietors were in fact trading the stocks.
Satisfied going forward, in the wee hours of May 2, FinancialWire broke the story, and the SEC halted trading in Aqua Vie's stock before the market opened.
The site then turned to other means to try to make money from its venture. It began accepting gratuities and selling "alerts" and "pre-alerts" about stocks it was about to publish, in essence, offering a paid front-runner service.
FinancialWire has received an email collected by Asiavest Investigative Services (www.agents911.com) that indicates Our-Street "does release information privately and before posting to their web site."
The agent goes on to state "we believe that the person that sent this to us was one of the principals of Our-Street or closely related to the principals. The person that sent it to us is a known shorter, he is tied to organized crime people, and he was involved with a shorting criminal enterprise."
The July 14, 2003 email message about Imaging Diagnotic Systems, Inc. (OTCBB: IMDS) sent to the individual from Tracy/Miles stated "that isn't due to hit till wedns so keep a lid on it .. thanks."
One observer notes that many of the so-called "scams" targeted by Our-Street had "significant price moves" prior to his "coverage." It isn't a leap to recognize that if there were short sellers in those companies, a scathing attack on the company wouldn't do a short seller looking to bail out of a losing position any harm if the result, a short-term stock price deflation, occurs.
The observer notes that just because the messenger is tainted doesn't mean that all of those targeted by short sellers are on the "up and up." But for those that were, the executives are left after the experience wondering "who was that masked man, and what was that all about?"
That masked man, it turns out, is no relation to Dick Tracy, and he doesn't have Sam Ketchum as a sidekick. Unmasked, is he Timothy Miles the SEC-charged fraud, the Reverend who found the meaning of life, the art connoisseur, the former stock broker and public company executive, the pumper and dumper, former Hilton Head resident now in Klamath Falls, or is he a true, abused, well-meaning, honest-to-goodness fraud-fighter just outside London? You decide.
Meanwhile, if you happen to be someone who agrees with Tracy/Miles that "Wall Street has been taken over by gangsters and terrorists in three piece suits and the cops (the SEC with its staff of 3,100) can't handle it themselves," you can do your part.
At www.voy.com/22812/, another dubious website apparently frequented by "Tracy," mostly devoted to get-rich pyramid schemes and European lassies looking for a good time in London, you can answer this ad: "Looking for a research assistant -- Nick Tracy, 18:06:47 11/04/03 Tue [1] Nick Tracy Enterprises, Ltd is looking to hire another research assistant. We are a public company watchdog and we investigate all kinds of stock fraud and manipulation. If you like research, you will absolutely love this job. London area. Contact Nick Tracy at 207-900-2080."
For up-to-the-minute news, features and links click on www.financialwire.net
FinancialWire is an independent, proprietary news service of Investrend Information, a division of Investrend Communications, Inc. It is not a press release service and receives no compensation for its news or opinions. Other divisions of Investrend, however, provide shareholder empowerment platforms such as forums, independent research and webcasting. For more information or to receive the FirstAlert daily summary of news, commentary, research reports, webcasts, events and conference calls, click on www.investrend.com/contact.asp
The FinancialWire NewsFeed is now available in multiple formats to your site or desktop, free. Click on: www.investrend.com/XmlFeeds?level=268
URL: www.financialwire.net
(C) 2004 financialwire.net, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://host.wallstreetcity.com/wsc2/Autoflag.html?Button=Get+Story&DB=SQL&SID=096r9509&S...
IF YOU ARE THINKING OF SUING US PLEASE READ THIS FIRST
If you are an attorney representing a client who wants to sue us, please click here for the most important part.
Litigation is a continuing topic when it comes to watchdog sites.
Most people love hearing good news, even when it isn't true. Likewise, they hate hearing bad news, even when it IS true and often misdirect their anger at the source of the bad news instead of its cause. As a result, when confronted with exposure in an Our-Street.com report, the direction companies and their supporters seem to gravitate is toward attacking the messenger rather than addressing the issues raised. These attacks are usually in the form of discrediting and often libelous remarks on the internet attacking our motives, our strategy and our character.
They claim we are part of a large short selling conspiracy or that we are controlled by short sellers or that, despite our disclaimer, we are short selling stocks ourselves. Of course, none of this is true but that doesn't stop them from making the accusations. We accept this as part of the cost of doing business and simply ignore it. What has been consistently and notably missing from the responses since we began our work is a detailed and substantive response from the company which refutes the facts we bring forth.
Attacks can also come in the form of litigation against us for what the companies want to claim are false and manipulative statements. They want to do this despite our sincere attempt to get all our facts straight.
On each feature page, we make a very simple and honest offer.
As always, we will gladly provide a forum for any documented and verifiable comments by the company and will promptly and sincerely apologize for any errors in our facts. Our commitment is to bring forth the truth and the facts in the matter and we encourage Xxxxx to produce whatever documents they can to clear up our concerns and the concerns of what we assume are many Xxxxx shareholders.
These are not hollow promises, as indicated by the fact that we have made every correction promptly and apologized even when we didn't feel it was entirely our mistake. Still, despite this offer, precious few have taken advantage of the opportunity to refute or correct our complaints and our reports. Still, when we discover an error, we quickly correct it and apologize without any delay.
Still, as troublesome and costly as litigation is, it also presents an interesting opportunity for Our-Street.com in that the only defense we can offer is to prove our allegations are true. Litigation gives us that opportunity through a process called "discovery". In order to prove we were accurate, we have the right to ask for and receive every company document and communication that relates to each of our allegations. If we are going to be sued for publishing false or misleading information, by God, we are going to go all out to prove that we were accurate so the requests for document production will be quite extensive.
We also are convinced that these litigations will be of great interest to the markets so, at our attorney's suggestion, we intend to keep you informed of the progress made in the case through our website.
Additionally, since we really do submit all our complaints to the SEC, exactly as we say we do, we will also be forwarding any documents obtained in the discovery process, which support our allegations, to the SEC as well. We are confident they will appreciate this added bounty as it will make their jobs just that much easier.
Of course, discovery is a two way street and they also get to ask us for information to try to prove their case. What will they discover? They will discover that we really don't short stocks. They will discover that we are the only ones who pick the stocks to research and that no one tells us which one to do next. They will discover that we really stick to the procedure as outlined in the disclaimer and that we never involve ourselves in discussions of stock prices or trading strategies. They will also discover that our subscribers never know which stocks we are reporting on next until the information has been posted to the internet on an unrestricted web page.
Finally and sadly, they also will discover that this website generates so little money, simply because we don't sell out, that there really isn't anything to gain by suing us anyway. Sorry folks, no deep pockets here. You wouldn't believe how lucrative the promotional side of this market is compared to the watchdog side. Based upon the compensation we see in these deals many of these promoters make more in a month or off one deal than we will gross this entire year.
Of course, we believe that, since we openly offer to correct any inaccuracies and to publicly apologize to the market and to the SEC when presented with the proper information, anyone who sues us without taking advantage of this is doing so out of retribution and is most likely attempting to simply harass us and will have trouble even proving merit to the litigation. Accordingly, in each instance, we intend to ask our attorneys to investigate the merits of each case with an eye toward counter suits and malicious prosecution actions.
There are better solutions than litigation for both Our-Street.com and the companies we feature. The best way to make us go away is to either show us how our allegations are false or change your ways and quit violating SEC regulations. Honest and full disclosure in your filings combined with ethical promotions makes us a thing of the past.
So, before you consider filing suit, email us and tell us what you want. If you want a retraction, we will gladly give you one and you don't have to sue us to get it. We have said that all along. Simply write us and tell us which facts we got wrong, document it and you won't believe how quickly we publish the correction. If you simply want to provide us with a statement contradicting our report, then send that to us. Chances are good we will publish that as written. Just don't expect us to retract an allegation and apologize based simply upon a cry of "DID NOT" or because you don't like people reading contradictory information about your representations. Our complaints are based upon facts in evidence. If you have additional facts, provide them and we will gladly correct our report and even our opinion when appropriate. Crow doesn't taste very good but we are certainly willing to eat it along with a nice slice of humble pie if that is called for.
On the other hand, if you just can't stand it and want to sue, go ahead. Just be ready for an extensive and probing discovery process, be ready for much of what we receive to become part of the public record as exhibits made a part of the court record and accept the fact that any relevant evidence supporting our allegations will be promptly forwarded to the SEC. Also be ready for the court of public opinion because we intend to try the case in public as much as we can. And finally know when all is said and done, should you win (which you won't), it will be a hollow victory because there isn't any water in the well and finally, if you lose, you might just find that to be the beginning and not the end of your litigation with us.
http://our-street.com/litigation2.htm#atty
Our-Street.com files complaint with SEC against Skyway Communications Holdings, Inc
Clearwater, Florida, Mar 29, 2004 (M2 PRESSWIRE via COMTEX) -- Our-Street.com, an Internet-based, public company watchdog, announced today that it filed a complaint with the Enforcement Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission against Skyway Communications Holdings, Inc. (OTC BB: SWYC). The complaint alleges possible violations of Sections 10b-5 of the Exchange Act. The report/complaint can be read in its entirety at http://www.our-street.com/feature.htm .
Our-Street.com is an internet based public company watchdog that researches companies and publishes reports and files complaints with various regulatory agencies. Previously, Our-Street.com`s complaint against Aqua Vie Beverage Corporation (OTC: AQVB) was followed by a suspension in trading and litigation by the SEC, their report on Verdisys, Inc (OTC: VDYS) was also followed by a trading suspension by the SEC and their complaint against Kingdom Ventures, Inc (OTC BB: KDMV was followed by the disclosure by the company of a formal investigation into their activities by the SEC. Additionally, two other Our-Street.com featured companies, Calypte Biomedical (OTC BB: CYPT) and US Global Nanospace, Inc (OTC BB USGA) also disclosed, subsequent to the Our-Street.com complaint, that they were informed by the SEC that inquiries had been initiated regarding their activities as well.
Note: Our-street.com is not a financial or investment advisor and is not offering stock for sale or giving investment advice. For investment advice contact a non-conflicted registered investment advisor or non-conflicted broker. The best place to get information about a company is from the SEC.
Specific information about Skyway Communications Holdings, Inc can be gotten by using this link http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=skyway+communications&CI K=&filen um=&State=&SIC=&owner=include&action=getcompany
Our-Street.com and/or their associates do not have a position in SWYC.
Our-Street.com has not been paid or compensated in any way to conduct the research and file this complaint. Our-Street.com is member supported by subscriptions but members do not choose which companies Our-Street.com selects to profile. For more information refer to our disclaimer at www.our-street.com/disclaimer.htm . Our-Street.com strives to be accurate and will promptly correct any errors in posted information. Simply email us with any corrections along with documentation.
CONTACT: Nick Tracy Enterprises, Ltd. Tel: +44 (0)20 7900 2080 Fax: +1 425 740 0645 e-mail: info@our-street.com WWW: http://www.our-street.com
M2 Communications Ltd disclaims all liability for information provided within M2 PressWIRE. Data supplied by named party/parties. Further information on M2 PressWIRE can be obtained at http://www.presswire.net on the world wide web. Inquiries to info@m2.com.
http://www.pinksheets.com/quote/news.jsp?url=fis_story.asp%3Ftextpath%3DCOMTEX%5Cmt%5C2004%5C03%5C29...
SEC SUES FREEDOM GOLF CORPORATION'S PRESIDENT, CONTROL PERSON, AND PROMOTERS IN INTERNET PUMP-AND-DUMP SCHEME
Securities and Exchange Commission v. C. Jones & Company, Carter Allen Jones, Timothy J. Miles, Gaylen P. Johnson, and Jonathan Curshen, Civil Action No. 03-WM-0636(PAC) (District of Colorado, filed April 11, 2003)
The Securities and Exchange Commission ("Commission") announced that it filed an action for injunctive relief in United States District Court in Denver, Colorado on April 11, 2003, charging four individuals with securities fraud for their participation in an alleged "pump and dump" scheme involving Freedom Golf Corporation's ("Freedom Golf") common stock. The defendants are Freedom Golf president Gaylen P. "John" Johnson; Timothy J. Miles, a principal shareholder; and two promoters, Carter Allen Jones and Jonathan Curshen. Jones' company, C. Jones & Company, also was charged.
The complaint alleges that in the fall of 1999, Miles provided a broker-dealer with false information to be filed with the National Association of Securities Dealers in order to initiate public trading of securities issued by Freedom Golf's predecessor company. The complaint also alleges that from late January through early March 2000, Miles paid two stock promoters, Jones and Curshen, to hype Freedom Golf via the Internet, telephone, and mail. Specifically, the complaint alleges that Jones arranged for the dissemination of between 25 and 35 million unsolicited "spam" e-mails touting Freedom Golf in February 2000. During the same period, the complaint continues, Johnson created baseless profit, revenue, and expense projections for Freedom Golf that Jones published on his company's Internet website, and that Curshen publicized on an Internet message board. In addition, the complaint alleges that Jones and Curshen failed to disclose the full amount that Miles was paying them to tout Freedom Golf, in violation of the federal securities laws.
The complaint further alleges that Freedom Golf's stock price and trading volume was pumped up to artificially inflated levels as a result of the false and misleading e-mails and baseless price projections. According to the complaint, during the course of this manipulation, Jones, Miles, and Curshen all sold shares of Freedom Golf stock and reaped profits of more than $500,000.
The Commission's complaint alleges that as a result of the conduct described above, C. Jones, Jones, Miles, Johnson, and Curshen violated the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws, and C. Jones, Jones, and Curshen also violated the anti-touting provisions of the federal securities laws. The Commission seeks permanent injunctions, civil money penalties, and penny stock bars against each of the defendants, and the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment interest against C. Jones, Jones, Miles, and Curshen.
In a related proceeding, the Commission instituted administrative proceedings against Freedom Golf on April 7, 2003. The proceedings will consider whether to suspend or revoke the registration of Freedom Golf's stock. For more information, see Exchange Act Release No. 47636 (April 7, 2003).
http://www.johnreedstark.com/ClassMaterials/LitigationReleases/freedomgolf.htm
The FinancialWire expose uncovering the mystery and misdeeds behind the Our-Street.com small company protagonist “Nick Tracy” on Monday, but posted Saturday at parent Investrend Information (http://www.investrendinformation.com) , was barely on the wires when the “real” website operator, Timothy J.Miles, posted a confession
April 6, 2004. (FinancialWire) The FinancialWire expose uncovering the mystery and misdeeds behind the Our-Street.com small company protagonist “Nick Tracy” on Monday, but posted Saturday at parent Investrend Information (http://www.investrendinformation.com) , was barely on the wires when the “real” website operator, Timothy J.Miles, posted a confession and acknowledgement at http://www.our-street.com/about.htm .
Among the companies targeted by Miles, who has himself been accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a fraudulent pumper-and-dumper while winning accolades from the Dow Jones (NYSE: DJ) newswire and other media, are H-Quotient (OTCBB: HQNT) and Circle Group Holdings (AMEX: CXN). As it turns out, Miles’ repertoire involved even more companies than FinancialWire described, now including, by his own admission, Applied Digital Solutions (NADSAQ ADSX) and others.
H-Quotient “blew his cover” by suing him under his real name and in Klamath Falls, Oregon, rather than London, where he had misled his short-selling “followers” and others to believe he lived.
Other companies he has now listed as having been involved with, in addition to Ballyhoo Capital Ventures, Casinovations, Inc., Global Foods Online, Inc., ICV, Inc., Pratt Wylce & Lords Ltd., Sea Shell Galleries, and Wahoo Capital Ventures, and Bionet Technologies, Inc. (OTC: BNTK), all failed, are Casino Journal Publishing (OTCBB CJPG), Redneck Foods (OTC: RDNK), Level Best Golf (OTC: LBGF), and Global Diversified (OTCBB: GDVI).
Miles also acknowledged he has operated under the guise of an ordained minister for the purposes of writing a book, and as Rev. Timothy Miles, has represented in a site at http://www.themeaningoflife.net that he has been gifted through a crystal with a text that he believes is a true “message from God,” and that he is proprietor of another quirky website at http://www.otcart.com where he combines his “knowledge” of the over the counter stock market with his special knowledge of “fine art.”
The ex-stockbroker and campaigner against “corporate evil-doers” is anything if not versatile.
After acknowledging his “mistakes” that resulted in SEC charges of fraud and corruption, and his failed efforts at running public companies and trading stocks, Miles/Tracy inexplicably stated that this background led him to believe he has the “skills necessary to conduct superior due diligence.”
In his confession and acknowledgement, Tracy/Miles stated “there is more and more speculation on the message boards about the person or people behind Our-Street.com and a lot of speculation about who controls or influences it as well.
“My name is Timothy Miles. I am in my mid 50's so I have a lot of experience to draw on as I conduct my research.
“Since the early 70's I have been involved in business management in a wide variety of industries, and almost always with companies grossing less than $100 million per year. I have been involved in turn-around situations as well as start ups and been both a consultant, a hired gun and an entrepreneur. As a result of my experiences, I have developed the ability to analyze a company, its personnel and its activities with a certain degree of accuracy.
“I have been an investor since the late 70's and in 1988 I entered the securities industry on a full time basis as a stock broker. I had a pre-existing idea of what the brokerage business was like and was shocked to discover it was nothing like I imagined it to be. I innocently walked into the offices of Power Securities, one of the more notorious penny stock brokers and was both shocked and horrified to discover what this end of the business was really like. I left there within about a month and found a more suitable firm where I could actually work for my clients and not against them.
“I discovered over time that the best way to make my clients and myself money was working with companies as they were going public and in 1993, I left the brokerage business and started Pratt, Wylce & Lords, a public company that focused on helping small companies enter the public market. Through this company we helped several companies enter the public market, among them Applied Cellular Technologies (now Applied Digital Solutions NADSAQ ADSX) and Gaming Venture Corp (now Casino Journal Publishing OTC BB CJPG). I also worked with a not so successful company, Level Best Golf LBGF.
“In 1996, I shut down the company's operations as a result of my personal failures due in large part to my inability to comply with the SEC's stringent 40 Act requirements. Organizationally wise, I had bitten off far more than I could chew and I knew it.
“Throughout this entire period, I never had a blemish on my record as a stock broker or as a consultant but it was in 1999 that I made a mistake I am not at all proud of. I was working with a company called Auric Enterprises, Inc. and had structured a 504 offering for the stock. A number of my friends wanted to invest but lived in California and Ohio, states that had not been approved for the offering. I was told that if they drove to a neighboring state like Nevada where the offering was approved, they could invest. Rather than having them do this, I made the mistake of telling them instead to put down addresses in approved states and filed these inaccurate documents with the NASD. I also was not accurate as to the relationships of some investors as well. This was wrong to do and I deeply regret having done it. I have admitted this to the SEC in testimony and stand fully accountable for my actions.
“Subsequent to these actions, Auric executed a reverse acquisition with Freedom Golf Corporation and when they became dissatisfied with their investor relations people they called me and asked me for referrals. I didn't have any but asked around and was given the names of two people who were supposed to be honest who I then referred to Freedom Golf. What followed was a significant promotion based upon false and/or misleading information and an SEC investigation,” he noted.
The SEC’s charges disagree, saying that Miles/Tracy actually paid for the scam hype, and failed at the time, as apparently he fails yet today, to divulge that fact. The SEC also said Miles/Tracy and his co-conspirators “reaped profits of more than $500,000” out of the fraud.
The case is used as "class materials" in presentations on stock fraud by John Reed Stark, Chief of the Office of Internet Enforcement in the Division of Enforcement of the SEC, at http://www.johnreedstark.com/ClassMaterials/LitigationReleases/freedomgolf.htm.
As to his other activities, he admits to having “built a website which deals with another love of mine. It is OTCart.com. I have developed a real time quotation system for limited edition art. It is very slow catching on but I remain optimistic,” and to “have built another website which is connected to a novel I am writing. I have been an ordained Christian minister since 1970 and the book is spiritual in nature. It is about the meaning of life and the website is appropriately titled www.themeaningoflife.net .
Miles / Tracy says he is “disillusioned about the corruption that continues to infect the market and those who involve themselves in it and I certainly am not proud that I found myself swept up in it to the point where I personally did things I knew were wrong.”
Other companies that Our-Street has gone after include Silverado Gold Mines, Ltd. (OTCBB: SLGLF), Epixtar Corp. (OTCBB: EPXR), Aqua Vie Beverage Corporation (OTC: AQVB), ChampionLyte Holdings, Inc (OTCBB: CPLY), BEVsystems Interenational, Inc. (OTC: BEVI), DataMeg, Inc. (OTCBB: DTMG), Kingdom Ventures, Inc. (OTCBB: KDMV), Imaging Diagnostics, Inc. (OTCBB: IMDS), SHEP Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: STLOF), EdgeTech Services, Inc (OTCBB: EDGH), Nutra Pharma Corp. (OTCBB: NPHC), Verdisys Inc. (OTC: VDYS), Calypte Biomedical Corporation (OTCBB: CYPT), Galaxy Energy Corp. (OTCBB: GAXI), PowerChannel, Inc. (OTCBB: PWRC), US Global Nanospace (OTCBB: USGA), and Universal Guardian Holdings (OTCBB: UGHO).
Of course, for those who know the history of vigilantism, the expose of the site and its proprietor, and the subsequent acknowledgement of misdeeds that are greater if not equal to those the defender against “corporate evil-doers” has alleged, is not surprising.
Neither is the fact that many of the site’s allegations have turned out to baseless, leaving Miles/Tracy with one more failed enterprise to add to his eclectic resume.
There is more and more speculation on the message boards about the person or people behind Our-Street.com and a lot of speculation about who controls or influences it as well.
As has become apparent over the past year that the supporters and, at times, the principals of the companies or transactions I have been featuring here on Our-Street.com would like to divert your attention from the allegations and substantial documentation we put forth and have you focus instead on the author and contributors and their motives instead. I have resisted discussing personnel simply because I wanted to keep the focus where it belongs, on the due diligence information we provide.
In May 2003, I stopped trading stocks entirely for that very reason. I didn't want the fact that I traded stocks to interfere with the substance of my reports. Now that my name and my past are being thrown around on the internet message boards and in emails by corporate executives and people claiming to represent ethical and independent analysis in an apparent attempt to once again divert your attention from the substance of our reports, I felt it was time to introduce myself to you and share my background with you.
My name is Timothy Miles. I am in my mid 50's so I have a lot of relevant experience to draw on as I conduct my research.
Since the early 70's I have been involved in business management in a wide variety of industries, and almost always with companies grossing less than $100 million per year. I have been involved in turn-around situations as well as start ups and been both a consultant, a hired gun and an entrepreneur. As a result of my experiences, I have developed the ability to analyze a company, its personnel and its activities with a certain degree of accuracy.
I have been an investor since the late 70's and in 1988 I entered the securities industry on a full time basis as a stock broker. I had a pre-existing idea of what the brokerage business was like and was shocked to discover it was nothing like I imagined it to be. I innocently walked into the offices of Power Securities, one of the more notorious penny stock brokers and was both shocked and horrified to discover what this end of the business was really like. I left there within about a month and found a more suitable firm where I could actually work for my clients and not against them.
I discovered over time that the best way to make my clients and myself money was working with companies as they were going public and in 1993, I left the brokerage business and started Pratt, Wylce & Lords, a public company that focused on helping small companies enter the public market. Through this company we helped several companies enter the public market, among them Applied Cellular Technologies (now Applied Digital Solutions NADSAQ ADSX) and Gaming Venture Corp (now Casino Journal Publishing OTC BB CJPG). I also worked with a not so successful company, Level Best Golf LBGF.
In 1996, I shut down the company's operations as a result of my personal failures due in large part to my inability to comply with the SEC's stringent 40 Act requirements. Organizationally wise, I had bitten off far more than I could chew and I knew it.
From 1996 through 1999 I continued working with companies wanting to enter the public market. I worked with Redneck Foods RDNK and with Global Foods (now Global Diversified GDVI).
Throughout this entire period, I never had a blemish on my record as a stock broker or as a consultant but it was in 1999 that I made a mistake I am not at all proud of. I was working with a company called Auric Enterprises, Inc. and had structured a 504 offering for the stock. A number of my friends wanted to invest but lived in California and Ohio, states that had not been approved for the offering. I was told that if they drove to a neighboring state like Nevada where the offering was approved, they could invest. Rather than having them do this, I made the mistake of telling them instead to put down addresses in approved states and filed these inaccurate documents with the NASD. I also was not accurate as to the relationships of some investors as well. This was wrong to do and I deeply regret having done it. I have admitted this to the SEC in testimony and stand fully accountable for my actions.
Subsequent to these actions, Auric executed a reverse acquisition with Freedom Golf Corporation and when they became dissatisfied with their investor relations people they called me and asked me for referrals. I didn't have any but asked around and was given the names of two people who were supposed to be honest who I then referred to Freedom Golf. What followed was a significant promotion based upon false and/or misleading information and an SEC investigation.
I was so dismayed and disillusioned at what had happened, not only at my own actions but the actions of others, that I quit the consulting business and set about rebuilding my life. I traded stocks for a while but soon discovered first that I wasn't very skilled at trading stocks and yet my knowledge of business and the markets based upon years of experience in working with emerging growth companies, in reading and preparing both financial statements and disclosure documents and in researching investments for myself, my company and my clients had given me the skills necessary to conduct superior due diligence. I also discovered that, as a result of seeing literally hundreds of pump and dump schemes over the course of my investment career, that I could ferret out these activities and document them.
My decision to start Our-Street.com was based in part on my desire to make amends for my mistake and part in the hopes that I could make an honest living doing what I do well and discovered I like to do, exposing corruption in the public market. I have come to find out that this end of the business is not nearly so profitable as pumping stocks and I could make 10 times as much as I do if I put together a site that effectively pumps a company's stock. Still, I am convinced that the work I do is important and I am committed to continuing it as long as I can.
In addition to Our-Street.com, I have built a website which deals with another love of mine. It is OTCart.com. I have developed a real time quotation system for limited edition art. It is very slow catching on but I remain optimistic.
I also have built another website which is connected to a novel I am writing. I have been an ordained Christian minister since 1970 and the book is spiritual in nature. It is about the meaning of life and the website is appropriately titled www.themeaningoflife.net. The website is not a commercial site but rather an integral part of the book and is supported entirely by me.
I will gladly go into other worthwhile and charitable projects I have been actively involved as an adult if you care to ask but feel no need to list them here. Our-Street.com's reports are self contained and stand on their merit and what I did for this cause or that one will hardly change a single fact.
Now you know who the person behind Our-Street.com is. You know my history and my qualifications. I have aired my dirty laundry in public for all to see. I am accountable for my actions and am remorseful for my failings. I have always believed the bulletin board and NASDAQ small cap markets were the breeding ground of the American Dream and the entrepreneurial spirit. I am disillusioned about the corruption that continues to infect the market and those who involve themselves in it and I certainly am not proud that I found myself swept up in it to the point where I personally did things I knew were wrong.
My agenda is exactly as I state on this website. My disclosure here hasn't changed it one bit. There never was and there isn't now a hidden one. Now that you know me, one thing is still true, the issue is not now nor was it ever who was writing these reports. The truth does not change with the person telling it. The relevant issue for discussion is the information provided in my reports and my complaints. Discuss me if you must but discussions about me will not change relevant information I have posted here nor will it effect your stock's price. And, finally if you want to discuss me, at least get the facts straight. I will respond honestly to any reasonable inquiry.
http://www.our-street.com/about.htm
Dangerous Ideas
Stanley Fish plays dumb.
Particle accelerators are very complicated. This is the main reason most people aren't allowed to play with them. Even if you have a reasonable understanding of how they work, few scientists will permit you to come in off the street and start pushing buttons. Similarly, most folks aren't allowed to tinker with nuclear submarines, 747s, hydroelectric generators, artificial hearts, space shuttles, and other complicated gizmos without verifiable proof of expertise, proficiency, maturity, etc.
I admit this can be unfair. Some folks with proper credentials, doctorates, licenses, permits, and so forth are probably less qualified in an absolute sense than a few profoundly talented laymen who just can't get through the door. And while this may be a shame in the cosmic sense, we have a society to run here. And that means we have to set up a system which keeps the sand-poundingly stupid from flooding central Kansas or irradiating Cleveland.
On the bright side, we do permit pretty much everyone to study anything. If you want to read a book about how to design, say, the Hoover Dam, you're perfectly free to do so. If you want to learn how to make a nuclear reactor, there's literally nothing stopping you except the price of a few dozen books, some schooling, and the time and energy necessary to process the information.
It's only when you want to do things outside your head that we as a society saunter-up to your garage workshop and ask "Hey, what are you doing?" If you answer, "I'm making a better mousetrap," we say "good luck," and walk away. If you answer, "I'm making a thermonuclear device to slaughter the infidels once and for all." We say, "Huh. Do you have a permit for that?"
Obviously, I'm simplifying. In fact, we ask too many people to show their permits for the stuff they do. We just institutionalize the process through regulations. And, yeah, there's some technology you can't research to your heart's content. If you post a query to a bulletin board asking how to poison the water supply of New York City, you'll probably get a visit from the FBI. At least I hope you will.
Regardless, the point remains. When it comes to technology, we understand that abstractions are harmless. Pondering a nuclear bomb never laid waste to a city.
FREEDOM UBER ALLES
Alas, when it comes to the world of ideas outside the realm of technology — politics, philosophy, cultural criticism, art, and so on — we don't just merely permit so much as actively encourage people to explore any idea they like. As a society we typically think this is wonderful because we believe in freedom of thought, speech, conscience, etc. And, if you're going to frame the issue as one of government interference versus my unadulterated right to speak, write, read, and think as I wish, then it is a wonderful thing, on the whole.
But beneath all the clichés, posturing and, breast-beating from "lovers of liberty" and civil libertarians of all parties, there's an inescapable fact. Some ideas are dangerous. If you are a reasonable person, you will concede this point — even if you disagree with me on which ideas were dangerous. My list includes those notions which constitute the cores of Nazism, Stalinism, communism, postmodernism, Maoism, relativism, scientific socialism, Hale-Boppism, running-with-scissorsism, et al. If you're on the left you might take a few of those off and add capitalism, conservatism, manifest destiny, whatever.
Or, you might avoid taking the bait in all of these cases. But even the most hyper ACLU-ers believe that the idea that there are "dangerous ideas" in the first place is itself a dangerous idea. It's similar to what the Catch-22 relativists stumble over when they insist that objective truth is impossible. Well, if it's impossible, isn't that an objective truth?
Anyway, the only argument among reasonable people is what to do about the fact that there are dangerous ideas. Many people will argue with great passion and intelligence that there is, simply, nothing to be done. Freedom, they will argue, is meaningless if we don't have the freedom to embrace bad ideas. Moreover, they will plausibly suggest, the notion that our government can wisely regulate the dissemination of ideas is batty.
To all of this I say: fine, fine. I don't agree entirely with these declarations of libertarian purity in that I am a believer in censorship rightly understood. But as a matter of practicalities I will concede the point that I don't want the feds rummaging through used book bins for philosophers they don't like any more than the next guy. So, okay: Individuals should be free to study whatever they want, period. (I am staying clear of issues like obscenity just to keep things moving, by the way.)
And, in order to cut things a bit shorter, I'll leap ahead and concede that people should be free to write and say anything they want too.
But so what? Arguments over freedom are often nothing more than a distraction from important questions. Call it a debater's trick or simply bullying, but voluptuaries of liberty often insist on framing every issue as one of individual freedom versus tyranny, oppression, the mob, conformity, whatever, because few people in this country have the courage to say that freedom isn't everything. Why I even feel compelled to offer some platitudinous ode to liberty just to preempt the torrent from readers who will tell me freedom is an absolute, uncompromisable good (even though these absolutists pay their taxes, renew their driver's licenses, keep their music down, and mow their lawns even when they don't want to).
Regardless, the fact that I am free to do something is absolutely irrelevant as to whether I should do something. I am free to eat an entire wheel of brie, for example.
IDEAS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
In the sciences, when we translate an idea to physical reality we take into account the fact that there might be tangible repercussions in the real world. If you have a "Take only pictures, leave only footprints" bumper sticker you might take this principle too far, but at least it exists.
In the world of art and humanities, however, no such principle exists. Indeed, the total lack of a principle of restraint is more often mistaken for some kind of principle. In the humanities, all ideas — except conservative ones — spurt out as if from an unmanned fire hose, spraying in every direction without a care about who gets soaked. Indeed, the only notion actively censored is the suggestion that things might be better if someone grabbed hold of the hose.
You might wonder why I'm writing all of this. So, let me exhume my lead before this whole column ends. In the latest issue of Harper's, Stanley Fish has a long defense of postmodernism, which has been under assault since September 11. The doctrine that there are no moral absolutes, it seems, is fun to play with when arguing about the president's pants or the meaning of "is." But when thousands of Americans are murdered by zealots, the demand for postmodern analysis over the last few decades all of a sudden seems like the intellectual equivalent of the tulip-bulb craze of the 17th century: a huge market built up around an amusing but essentially valueless commodity. Fish, the George Soros of the PoMo market, has been working overtime to protect his investment.
I'll leave it to others — Peter Berkowitz, for example — to take Fish's efforts head-on (though you might take a gander at my "Facts and Firemen"). But what's set me off is Fish's claim that postmodernism is simply "a rarefied form of academic talk." Fish would have people believe that postmodernism is simply what postmodernists do in their hidden English-department laboratories.
Well, not only did the virus of postmodernism escape Fish's lab, but he and his henchmen ground it up into fine particles and sent aerosolized packets of it to every magazine, newspaper, publishing house, and movie studio in America. Fish's hypocrisy is stunning. The PoMo virus has infected millions, destabilizing traditional institutions across the social landscape. And yet when confronted, he says "I'm not responsible for what happens in the real world, I'm just a lab technician." Well, this high priest of the cult of the twelve monkeys is responsible.
When Fish is on the defensive he can make postmodernism sound humble and useful. Postmodernism, he says, merely holds that people from different or opposing belief systems cannot appeal to objective truth in order to persuade each other who is right and who is wrong. "Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one," he writes. Assuming he's not being an intellectual Arafat, saying one thing in English to the American public and another thing in his "rarefied academic talk" to his minions, that actually sounds somewhat reasonable. It certainly isn't a radically destructive idea.
But whether that's the truth or just a propagandistic lie is entirely irrelevant. Fish damn well knows that millions of people think postmodernism means something very, very, very different — even if they don't know what postmodernism is. For lots of Americans, the idea that there are no objective standards of truth or morality is incredibly sophisticated and intelligent. The authors who write the clever novels, the film directors who get awards and rave reviews for blurring the lines between good and evil, the professors who claim George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are morally indistinguishable: These are the "thoughtful people" in our culture. Meanwhile, the people who talk in terms of right and wrong are ridiculed by the sophisticates.
Call it feminism, critical race theory, critical legal studies, queer theory, whatever: It's all shrapnel from the same postmodern bomb, broadly speaking. These doctrines haven't all been terrible for America, but their misapplication and over-application have. Scientists take responsibility for the damage they do. English professors take speaking fees. Conservatism, which does not fetishize the masses, understands that even an intelligent idea can have horrific consequences if let loose upon a society. The uninformed, the lazy, the affected, the ambitious, and the dumb can adopt sharp-edged ideas and use them as blunt cudgels if we are not careful. The authors of postmodernism have not been careful.
I keep thinking of the exchange in the film A Fish Called Wanda. Otto, played by Kevin Kline, is an idiot and a bully who also fancies himself an intellectual (he thinks the central message of Buddhism was "every man for himself"). Wanda, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, says to him: "To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep who could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs, but you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?"
Otto objects, "Apes don't read philosophy."
To which Wanda replies, "Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it!"
There are legions of Ottos out there who believe postmodernism means there is no truth, no right, no wrong, no good, no bad. They believe it because they either misunderstood Fish and his disciples or because they understood them all too well.
Stanley Fish knows all this. And, a few throwaway lines notwithstanding, he clearly thinks it's great. Indeed, if he didn't think so he would not devote his energies to defending postmodernism. Rather, he would, like Dr. Frankenstein, run through the village trying to make amends for the damage all of his Ottos have done.
Oh please, you have nothing to prove that statistic except more US government propaganda...
I'd like to see that photo. em
12 Marines killed in new fighting
U.S. and allied troops battling militants in five Iraqi cities
Patrick Baz / AFP-Getty Images
A U.S. missile hit a vehicle in Sadr City, a Baghdad suburb that saw clashes between U.S. troops and supporters of a radical Shiite cleric.
NBC News and news services
Updated: 6:21 p.m. ET April 06, 2004Fighting between U.S. forces and Iraqi militants spread to at least five cities Tuesday, leaving as many as 12 U.S. Marines dead and 20 others wounded in a particularly fierce firefight, U.S. military officials told NBC News.
The casualties were reported in a heavy clash Tuesday night at an Iraqi government compound in Ramadi, near the Sunni Muslim hotbed of Fallujah west of Baghdad, the officials told NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski in Washington.
A senior defense official confirmed the report, telling The Associated Press that reports from the field said dozens of Iraqis attacked a Marine position near the governor’s palace in Ramadi.
Heavy casualties were inflicted on the insurgents as well, U.S. officials said. No other details were immediately available, including who the attackers were.
Anti-U.S. militant factions also launched strikes directly on the headquarters of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Ramadi and in Kut, southeast of Baghdad, military officials told NBC News. It was not immediately clear whether the attacks were coordinated.
In all, 66 Iraqis, 13 Americans and a Ukrainian soldier died Tuesday, officials said, bringing the three-day total to more than 130 Iraqis and more than 30 coalition troops killed in the worst fighting since the war that toppled President Saddam Hussein.
Battles on two fronts
Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite Muslims loyal to a militant cleric challenged U.S.-led forces on two fronts Tuesday, mounting battles across four southern Iraqi cities and taking on U.S. Marines in Fallujah, where several columns backed by tanks met heavy fire as they tried to move in.
April 6: Marines started pushing into Fallujah Monday night in operation ‘Vigilant Resolve.’ NBC’s Tom Aspell reports.
Defense officials said that opposition forces in Fallujah had suffered “significant casualties” and that several suspects identified only as “high-value targets” had been taken into custody.
In the south, supporters of the anti-U.S. Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, rose up again Tuesday, killing 30 Iraqis and a Ukrainian soldier and wounding at least 18 coalition troops.
Al-Sadr issued a statement saying he had left the mosque in Kufa that he had been holed up in and denouncing President Bush as “the father of evil.”
An aide later told reporters that al-Sadr had moved to nearby Najaf and that the uprising would continue until coalition troops were withdrawn from populated areas and prisoners were released.
Dozens of heavily armed militiamen were outside al-Sadr’s office in a small alley near Shiism’s holiest site, the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf. The black-garbed gunmen, some carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers, crowded the narrow alley and roamed nearby streets.
There was no way to confirm reports that al-Sadr was inside.
A move from Kufa to Najaf would be unexpected. Al-Sadr is widely unpopular in Najaf, where most Shiites support older, more moderate clerics. By contrast, his al-Mahdi Army has been in virtual control of Kufa since Sunday, holding the police station and patrolling the streets.
Fallujah surrounded
The confrontation with al-Sadr — whose militia waged fierce battles with coalition troops Sunday — and the offensive against Fallujah appeared to represent a tougher approach by U.S. forces ahead of the planned handover of power to an Iraqi government on June 30.
Hundreds of Marines and Iraqi troops began ringing the city this week. As Marines moved in Tuesday night, tank guns and grenade launchers were used to eliminate rooftop sniping positions, and at least three houses were demolished in the process. Two Marines reportedly were wounded when they were fired upon.
April 6: The U.S. military said Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was its most immediate priority. NBC’s Richard Engel reports.
Today show
The military reported that four Marines were killed by hostile fire in the area Monday, bringing to five the number of Marines killed in one day. The military gave no details on the deaths, saying only that they took place in Anbar province, where Fallujah is located.
In the Khazimiya district of northern Baghdad, a U.S. soldier died after his Bradley fighting vehicle was hit by a grenade Tuesday. Two other U.S. soldiers were killed Monday when they came under attack by rocket-propelled grenade fire in separate incidents. The names of the three soldiers, all of them members of the 1st Armored Division, were not released.
The deaths in the past two days brought to at least 626 the number of Americans killed in Iraq since the war began.
A U.S. official in Washington said on condition of anonymity that all U.S. officials in Iraq, including those working for the provisional authority, had been told to remain inside their compounds since Monday because of security worries.
Al-Qaida purportedly vows more attacks in Iraq
Second front against al-Sadr
The offensive against Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, comes as the United States is taking a tougher approach against al-Sadr, who has long spoken out against the U.S. occupation and has built up his al-Mahdi Army, although he has not called for anti-U.S. violence in the past.
Fighting was reported in at least four other cities, all of them in the south:
In Nasiriyah, supporters of al-Sadr clashed Tuesday with Italian soldiers, leaving 15 Iraqis dead and 35 wounded, an Italian news agency reported. A dozen Italian soldiers reportedly were wounded.
In Amarah, where British troops are responsible for security, fighting overnight killed 15 Iraqis and wounded eight others, a coalition spokesman said.
In Kut, a Ukrainian soldier was killed and six others were wounded. Ukraine has about 1,650 troops in Iraq, the third-largest contingent among countries that did not take part in last year’s major combat operations.
South of Karbala, Polish soldiers wounded two militiamen, a local government official said.
U.S. administrators declared al-Sadr an “outlaw” Monday and announced a warrant for his arrest, suggesting they would move to arrest him soon.
Al-Sadr launched a wave of protests over the arrest of a top aide last week, sparking gunbattles Sunday between his militiamen and coalition troops in Baghdad and near Najaf that killed at least 52 Iraqis and nine coalition troops, including eight Americans.
The showdown with al-Sadr threatens to heighten tensions between the U.S. occupation and Iraq’s Shiite majority, who have largely avoided anti-U.S. violence — although al-Sadr’s popularity among Shiites is limited. U.S. officials appear to be counting on Shiites to shun al-Sadr, who is seen by many in his community as too young and fiery to lead.
Al-Sadr’s main support is among young seminary students and impoverished Shiites, who are devoted to him because of his anti-U.S. stance and the memory of his father, a religious leader who was gunned down by suspected agents of Saddam in 1999.
The arrest warrant charges al-Sadr with involvement in the murder of a rival cleric who was stabbed to death in April 2003 by a mob in a Shiite shrine in Najaf soon after Saddam’s fall.
Washingtonpost.com
Young cleric inspires uprising
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said military commanders would get more troops to quell violence before the June 30 handover date if they requested them. A senior officer in Washington said U.S. military commanders had begun studying ways they might raise the troop level in Iraq should violence spread much more widely.
Generals believe they have enough forces to handle the attacks, including the Shiite militia violence, but want to know what is available if the situation gets worse, said the officer, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.
NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
CBS Zaps Taser
By W.D. Crotty
April 6, 2004
Non-lethal weapons manufacturer Taser (Nasdaq: TASR) plunged nearly 8% yesterday after Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) CBS teased its Sunday night 60 Minutes audience with an upcoming CBS News story on the safety of Taser weapons. Obviously, the market expected bad news.
What a difference a day makes. Taser opened today up $3.24 a share. Investors seem to have discounted the story even though the piece continues tonight with the question, "Is there a 'fatal flaw?' "
In last night's installment, Taser CEO Rick Smith discussed 40 people who died in cases involving the weapons. Taser provides the dates, locations, suspect names, suspect ages, what happened at the scene, and what the medical examiner reported for each case. Clearly, the company monitors its product's use -- which helps explain the stock's positive response today.
Of course, negative publicity is nothing new for Taser. When highlighted here in February, the company had responded to a Barron's article that questioned its prospects and its $44.33 per share price (adjusted to reflect a 3-for-1 split). Surprise! Last Friday, the stock registered a new all-time high at $87.80 a share. In the last 52 weeks, it is up a stunning 5,100%.
And business is still good. According to last night's news story, the company has a 12-week backlog. That should bode well for earnings when they are reported this month. Four analysts covering the stock expect the company to earn $0.99 this year and $1.58 next year.
That works out to forward P/E of 82 (51 using next year's estimates) -- a bit rich to be a candidate for Motley Fool Hidden Gems, to be sure. But in Taser's favor, it has only 14 million shares outstanding. In a world where Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) has 5 billion shares and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) more than 10 billion, Taser is still extremely small. Good earnings will be spread across very few shares.
Those looking for growth in conventional firearms makers will be disappointed. Smith & Wesson's (AMEX: SWB) sales were up 7.6% last quarter. Sturm, Ruger's (NYSE: RGR) sales declined 8% in 2003. When it comes to growth and guns, Taser is the only game in town.
http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2004/mft04040618.htm?source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit=y&npu=y
Questions for Rice:
Name: F. Cordova
Hometown: Denver, Colorado
Would she have testifed if the media hadn't publicized her refusual?
Name: Bob Ramos
Hometown: Corpus Christi
It is now clear that certain federal employees such as the FBI in the Minneapolis/St Paul office and the Phoenix, AZ office had information that, had it been followed up, could have prevented 9/11. These people were ignored or reprimanded. Time even ran a story on one lady FBI agent.
The people in D.C. that did not take action were either promoted or reassigned. None suffered for their awful behavior. Can something tangible be done to make the D.C. folks pay for their arrogance? What concrete steps have now been taken to insure that this does not happen again?
Name: Dan Molina
Hometown: Miami, FL
If 9/11 didn't happen, would we have gone to war and invaded Iraq anyway?
Have you recommended to the president the firing of any individuals that were negligent in the intelligence services in detecting the people that carried out the suicide attacks against the U.S. and wrongly analyzed WMD in Iraq?
Name: Nan Burton
Hometown: Belmont, California
Prior to 9/11, what did you perceive as the most dire and imminent threat to the security of the United States of America?
Name: Bob
Hometown: Aurora, IL
Even if the administration had early on identified al Qaida as the primary threat to the country, and subsequently devoted the bulk of your time and resources to combatting it, could we have prevented the 9/11 attacks?
Name: Arnie Miller
Hometown: Cincinnati, OH
My question to Dr. Rice or any member of the Bush Administration would be this one: "In the run-up to 9/11 did you make ANY mistakes?" I know this sounds simplistic, but it is worth asking, given that this administration likes to portray itself as infallible and views any admission of even the slightest error as an indication of weakness.
Name: Joan F. Grenzer
Hometown: Baltimore, MD
Would it have been helpful if those in the Clinton administration who had worked on terrorism (besides Clarke), had been contacted when the threat of terrorism was growing in the late summer of 2001 for any additional input, and would this kind of contact be helpful in the future?
Name: James
Hometown: Seattle
Why did you go on so many talk shows while still resisting testifying before the commission?
Name: Rick Walther
Hometown: Rochester, NY
Do you feel the same people questioning you should be asked what they could have done better, in the defense of our country, as members of various committees charged with the defense of our country?
Name: Tim
Hometown: Mansfield, TX
Miss Rice,
Did you or did you not review the actions taken by the Clinton Administration to combat terrorism before you prepared your speech on a Missile Defense Program as being the #1 thing the U.S. should be concerned with doing? The speech was supposed to be given on September 11, 2001.
Name: L. Burleson
Hometown: Iola, KS
Why do you think that all the hype about having you appear under oath has become a circus? Do you feel like a scapegoat for other people that have more to hide?
Name: William Touchstone
Hometown: Hot Springs Village, AR
Why were relatives of Usama bin Laden permitted to fly home to Saudi Arabia the day after the 9/11 attack?
Name: Bruce
Hometown: Monument, CO
I would ask, "Why are you here? This is political theater, pure and simple. I for one, do not want to participate in this charade. I have no further questions or, more importantly, comments. You have told us in private all that we need to know to make decisions on 9/11 events."
Name: Don Halverstadt
Hometown: Huntsville, AL
When did President Bush start talking about invading Iraq?
Name: Larry Harrison
Hometown: Gresham, OR
If the CIA didn't have concrete evidence of WMD, why didn't we find out for sure before we sent troops into Iraq?
Name: Sean
Hometown: Manasquan, NJ
Ms. Rice, do you now regret your position that you would be setting precedent by testifying before this commision, when in fact, you are not setting precedent? Prior to 9/11, there was "chatter" regarding a possible Al Qaeda attack. In any of these reports, was Iraq linked in any shape or form as a clear and present danger?
Name: Christopher Willard
Hometown: Winston-Salem, NC
I would like you to ask this panel, why you are being questioned? The obvious question is not what the Bush Administration knew, or didn't know beforehand. Rather, why didn't his predecessor take a proactive course of action as President Bush has in dealing with terrorism worldwide? The real problem to me is to deal with the war on terror first, then take care of intel problems second.
Name: Jo-Anna Reilly
Hometown: Pasadena, CA
Why shouldn't you resign?
Name: Susan Baldwin
Hometown: Vista, CA
Why is she speaking at all? She is an advisor to the President and her counsel is none of our business!
Name: Teresa Lubrani
Hometown: Murrieta
Was our intelligence network crippled by the privacy acts imposed in the last 10 years. Did you or do you see any signs that the lack of response during the Clinton years gave al Qaida the momentum to finalize their act of war?
Name: C. Conrad
Hometown: Golden, Colorado
On April 2, 2004, the newspaper "The Independent" reported that a translater named Sibel Edmonds testified to the commission that information was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. As Richard Clarke suggests, Dr. Rice could have convened a meeting that included the heads of the FBI, CIA, and Mr. Clarke. Dr. Rice could have impressed upon the FBI Director that the possibility of terrorist attack an "urgent priority." Dr. Rice could have motivated the FBI to look harder and recognize that it already had information about an impending attack.
Questions: 1) Was not the NSC the only means of linking domestic intelligence obtained by the FBI with those in the CIA and White House working to prevent a foreign terrorist operation? 2) Is the failure of the NSC to detect the 9/11 attack a failure on the part of Dr. Rice, the head of the NSC? If not Dr. Rice, who in Government is more responsible for the failure to detect the 9/11 attack?
Name: Glenn Reed
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
Why did you say that no one could have predicted that someone would crash an airliner into a building when there is ample evidence that the US. knew of several plans by terrorists to do just that?
Name: Micah Douglas
Hometown: Houston, Texas
Don't you think you and the Bush admnistration owe the 9/11 family members an apology?
Name: Donae Eckert
Hometown: West New York, NJ
Why were bin Laden's family members allowed to leave the country immediately after the attacks, even while all other craft remained grounded? Who made this decision, why, and how does it serve our national security interest going forward?
Name: Willester Penn
Hometown: Covington, LA
My question to Dr. Rice would be, as National Security Advisor to the President, who would you advise the President as a bigger threat- Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden? What if the September 11, 2001 attack had never happened?
Name: Ron Nicholson, like Ms. Rice a student of Josep Korbel, Madelline Albright's father.
Hometown: Luray, VA
How has the invasion and occupation of Iraq materially improved the safety and well being of the American people? How specifically has it aided the war on terrorism? If you believe the Bush Administration deserves credit for it successes will you also accept the responsibility for its failures?
Name: Monte
Hometown: Fort Worth
How many lost lives are going to be brought back as a result of the findings in this interview? None? So why is it so important for you to testify? Oh, it is all a political move since the elections are before us. Thank you, no further questions.
Name: J. Taylor
Hometown: Sylvania, OH
If you were a family member of someone killed in one of the terrorist attacks, wouldn't you feel entitled to the testimony the 9/11 commission is seeking?
Four U.S. Marines Killed in Iraq
26 minutes ago
By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer
FALLUJAH, Iraq - U.S. troops battled Iraqi guerrillas Tuesday on the edges of Fallujah, which hundreds of Marines and Iraqi troops have surrounded in a major operation to pacify one of Iraq (news - web sites)'s most violent cities. The military reported four Marines killed in the area.
The Americans were killed by hostile fire Monday, bringing to five the number of Marines killed that day. The military did not give details on the deaths, saying only that they took place in Anbar province, where Fallujah is located.
In northern Baghdad's Khazimiya district, three U.S. soldiers were killed, all members of the 1st Armored Division.
One was killed Monday when his convoy was attacked with small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire. A second soldier died later the same day when his vehicle was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. The third died after his Bradley vehicle was hit by a grenade Tuesday. Their names were not released.
U.S. and Iraqi troops have sealed off the city of Fallujah for more than 24 hours, blocking roads and digging trenches in preparation to move in to root out insurgents after the slaying and brutal mutilation last week of four American civilians.
Scenes of Iraqis dragging the four bodies through the streets and hanging two of the charred corpses from a bridge Wednesday raised revulsion in the United States and showed the depth of anti-U.S. sentiment in the city.
Meanwhile, a radical Shiite cleric being sought by U.S. forces announced Tuesday he had left the mosque in the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, where he has been holed up for the past two days, surrounded by armed militiamen.
Muqtada al-Sadr said in a statement released by his office that the "sanctity of a glorious and esteemed mosque would be violated by scum and evil people." The Americans "will have no qualms to embark on such actions."
The statement did not say where al-Sadr had gone.
U.S. administrators on Monday declared al-Sadr an "outlaw" and announced a warrant for his arrest, suggesting they would move to arrest him soon.
The confrontation with al-Sadr — whose militia waged fierce battles with coalition troops on Sunday — and the offensive against Fallujah appeared to be a tougher approach by U.S. forces ahead of a planned June 30 handover of power to an Iraqi government.
In Fallujah, explosions and gunfire were heard from the city through the night Monday and into Tuesday morning, apparently U.S. troops shelling targets and clashing with guerrillas as Marines probed the outskirts with reconnaissance patrols.
But the bulk of the force remained on Fallujah's edges Tuesday, and there was no word whether troops had carried out raids against what officials have said is a list of suspected insurgents being targeted.
A force of Marines pushed into an industrial zone in the eastern part of the city, clashing with guerrillas. Gunmen carrying automatic weapons were seen in the streets. The military reported six Iraqis killed in fighting Monday, saying they were all guerrillas, though residents said five of them were killed when helicopters hit a residential area.
In the nearby city of Ramadi, another hotbed of guerrilla activity 24 miles west of Fallujah, U.S. troops and insurgents clashed on a downtown street. One Iraqi was killed and three wounded, doctors said.
The offensive against Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, comes as the United States is taking a tougher approach against al-Sadr, who has long spoken out against the U.S. occupation and has built up his own militia, the Al-Mahdi Army — though he has not called for anti-U.S. violence in the past.
Al-Sadr launched a wave of protests over the arrest of a top aide last week, sparking gunbattles Sunday between his militiamen and coalition troops in Baghdad and near Najaf that killed at least 52 Iraqis and nine coalition troops, including eight Americans.
Since that fighting, al-Sadr had been holed up in Kufa's main mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad, vowing to resist any move to detain him. Dozens of his militiamen were around the mosque Tuesday, searching worshippers who entered through it tall outer walls to pray.
The showdown with al-Sadr threatens to heighten tensions between the U.S. occupation and Iraq's Shiite majority, who have largely avoided anti-U.S. violence — though al-Sadr's popularity among Shiites is limited. U.S. officials appear to be counting on Shiites to shun al-Sadr, seen by many in his community as too young and fiery to lead.
In Najaf — Shiism's holiest city, near Kufa — fresh graffiti on walls praised al-Sadr, reading, "Yes to armed resistance, yes to the al-Sadr revolution" and "No, no to the Americans."
Al-Sadr's militia has appeared to control Kufa since Sunday, holding its police station and roaming the streets. Sheik Abu Mahdi al-Rubaie, a 35-year-old al-Sadr follower at the Kufa mosque, warned that any U.S. move against al-Sadr would be "a very dangerous thing."
"They will pay a heavy price. We will not allow them to enter Kufa ... We are ready to lay down our lives" for al-Sadr, he said.
Sunday's fighting was particularly fierce in Sadr City, a Shiite-majority neighborhood in Baghdad, where the eight U.S. troops were killed. Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the U.S. forces in Baghdad, called it the biggest gunbattle since the fall of the Iraqi capital a year ago.
Two explosions through the night into Tuesday in Sadr City wounded three civilians and damaged some cars and houses, an AP photographer in the area said.
After Sunday's violence, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, canceled a trip to Washington this week, a Senate aide said Monday. No reason was given for the postponement, the aide said.
A senior officer in Washington said U.S. military commanders have begun studying ways they might increase troops in Iraq should violence spread much more widely.
Generals believe they have enough forces to handle the attacks, including the Shiite militia violence, but want to know what is available if the situation gets worse, said the officer, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity.
Al-Sadr's main support is among young seminary students and impoverished Shiites, devoted to him because of his anti-U.S. stance and the memory of his father, a religious leader gunned down by suspected agents of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in 1999.
The arrest warrant against al-Sadr is on charges of involvement in the April 2003 murder of al-Khoei, who was stabbed to death by a mob in a Shiite shrine in Najaf soon after Saddam's fall, said coalition spokesman Dan Senor.
The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced its approval of the applications filed under the Bank Holding Company Act by Manulife Financial Corporation, Toronto, Canada, to become a bank holding company and acquire John Hancock Financial Services, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts, and thereby indirectly acquire First Signature Bank and Trust Company, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and by John Hancock Financial Services, Inc., to become a bank holding company and retain control of First Signature Bank and Trust Company.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/press/orders/2004/default.htm