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Bob Jones of the infamous Bob Jones U, a truly hateful human being. And Gary North who is actually big into the Rushdooney Dominionist movement, exploiting and perverting Calvinism, and Protestantism. I think he's Rushdooney's right hand man. I believe North has very strong ties to Dobson as well, but you'd have to check. Do a google search. Thanks for the references. I have bookmarked your post and will do a little digging when I have some time.
GNite.
Hey, mlsoft, I think it's supposed to be in your heart more than in the public square. But that could be cultural. Different Christian denominations and different parts of the country have different concepts of religious expression. And like I said before, I don't want religious ed to become the job of the state, the public school. Heaven forbid! Many public schools seem to have more than they can handle with the tradional 3R's. Let them stick to that. Religious ed belongs with the family and congregation. Definately not with the state.
For what it's worth, I enjoy reading and listening to the commentary of clergy and religious leaders of many denominations. I'm interested in the content more than denomination. I would welcome the commentary of evangelicals too. But all we ever seem to get from the Evangelical camp is the rantings of clowns like Falwell, North and Robertson. That's too bad because I'm sure the group has a worthwhile contribution and commentary. Southern Evangelical Christianity is a big part of our culture. Jones is the devil.
edit: "the taking away of their religious traditions and heritage by the secular liberal left."
What has the secular left taken away? For many, Christians and non-Christians alike, religion/faith is a personal matter between the individual and God. How do you take that away?
Opus Dei is not really a sect. They do have certain specific religious beliefs, but they're kind of a "club," albiet an elite club. They're influential in business and government. They keep a very low profile, and never get their hands dirty. Beyond that, I don't put much stock in the conspiracy theories, and there are many surrounding Opus Dei. As I'm sure you know, Vatican conspiracies are second only to Zionist conspiracies, but Opus Dei's roster includes some very influential people in business and government, including Scalia and others.
"why does the mainstream media always seek Robertson"
I don't know, but most people do value the commentary or informed, insightful religious leaders regardless of denomination. You're right, idiot evangelicals do get a lot of airtime. Maybe the question is why don't we hear more evangelicals calling a spade a spade when it comes to idiots like Robertson? You mention Catholic. Catholics are the first to call an idiot an idiot, and they are quick to criticize their own when warranted. Evangelicals should do the same, especially when idiots and self serving political operatives are giving the entire group a bad name.
Interesting... I recently read an article that claimed a certain group of Catholics (the Scalia cabal -- Opus Dei? bad news but very influential) were actually behind the US theocratic movement. I guess they're crafty because it's fundamentalist Protestants (Robertson, Reed types) who are falling on the sword for mincing politics and religion. The mainstream is becoming angered by the blending of religion and politics/government, and their anger directed at evangelicals, right or wrong. If the Catholic cabal theory is correct, they are masterful politicians, ie. letting others do their dirty work, and never getting their hands dirty.
'"liberal" is a well accepted theological definition.'
Well accepted by whom? Again, one does not have to share your view to be "Bible believing," and yours is not the ONLY valid interpretation. Believing that ours is the best or only way is both arrogant and egocentric.
The falsehoods and embellishments will be proven in good time. The outrage over the Iraq situation is snowballing. Eventually some truth will be known. Regardless, we can't destroy a country over an "intelligence failure." That's not good enough, and there's international law and, again, others may have had similar information, but only Bush destroyed a country over it. The whole world opposed a US strike against Iraq. Congressional D's didn't have the guts to dissent. They are culpable as well. They failed too.
"who want to belittle Bible believing Christians."
I don't think people want to belittle evangelicals any more than they want to belittle anyone else. Unfortunately, Robertson and the others make all evangelicals seem that blithering idiots. That's the perception.
The broad brush is a bad thing whenever and to whomever it is applied.
edit: As we've discussed before, it comes down to interpretation, and we are free to differ in interpretation. Based on interpretation, you believe "heaven" is an exclusive place reserved for people who share your particular Biblical interpretation. Yet the majority of "Bible believing" people, both Christian and of other Abrahamaic tradition, would argue otherwise. They too have studied Scripture.
If you choose to call that "liberal" so be it.
AMERICANS ARE RUNNING OUT OF PATIENCE WITH THEIR `WAR PRESIDENT’
Eric Margolis
Foreign Correspondent / Defense Analyst & Columnist
WASHINGTON - Who ever advised President George Bush to escape the storm of criticism he faces over Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, and the Libby CIA case by flying to Argentina for a free trade summit should be sent in chains to Guantanamo.
Bush’s venture was an embarrassing diplomatic failure and the most humiliating fiasco faced by a US president in Latin America since Richard Nixon got mobbed in 1958. Bush was left looking isolated and confused, while his nemesis, Venezuela’s boisterous merengue-marxist leader, Hugo Chavez, rallied Latinos to his side and gleefully mocked the US president.
Now, Bush has returned to Washington rent by factional warfare, growing outrage over Bush-Cheney’s defense of torture, and new polls showing a majority of Americans believe the president deceived the US into war.
The long simmering conflict between America’s national security establishment and neoconservative extremists burst into public with the criminal indictment of VP Dick Cheney’s powerful neocon chief of staff, Lewis Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame CIA case.
The FBI’s Libby investigation could produce a blizzard of embarrassing evidence of how the White House’s necon Praetorian Guard engineered the US into war. So bad is the mood in Washington, a member of CIA’s founding families calls the neocons `fifth columnists.’
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff for 16 years, publicly charged a `cabal’ of neocons had `hijacked’ US foreign policy and had driven the nation into a trumped up war - what this column has said since 2001. Wilkerson branded the Bush Administration dangerously incompetent,
The `cabal,’ claimed Wilkerson, included Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, and former Pentagon desk warrior neocons Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. These figures are the front men for a web of neocon lobbyists, think tanks, institutes and media outlets in Washington.
Gen. William Odom, former chief of the ultra secret National Security Agency, and a leading military thinker, called Bush’s Iraq adventure `the biggest disaster in the history of the US.’
Even more shockingly, Republican elder statesman, Gen Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to Bush’s father, accused Bush Jr of being `wrapped around the little finger’ of Israel’s PM Ariel Sharon.
Scowcroft has finally said aloud what no one in official Washington or the media dared to utter. His accusation helps explain much about the Bush Administration’s foreign policies and why they seem so often to damage rather than promote US interests.
While I was recently in London, leaked cabinet documents shockingly revealed that shortly before Bush invaded Iraq, he actually told PM Tony Blair he `wanted to go beyond Iraq’ by occupying Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This is the first time we have concrete evidence that two key US allies were in the White House’s crosshairs.
Meanwhile, the FBI, intensifying its war against the neocons, is investigating two senior officials of the Israel lobby, one of Washington’s most sacred cows, and a necon Pentagon analyst for passing national security secrets to Israel. Washington neocons are making frantic efforts to suppress these investigations and depict them as minor mischance rather than the beginning of a major spy scandal.
CIA is deeply split between professional officers furious national intelligence was corrupted by Cheney and his neocons to sell the Iraq war, and a minority eager to tell the White House whatever it desires. This column has reported for a decade how patriotic CIA officers were being demoted or fired for daring to oppose the lies being sold by pro-war neocons.
Moreover, Bush and Cheney now face a Republican and Pentagon revolt over their disgraceful defense of torture, and possible trouble from the Supreme Court.
`We do not torture,’ Bush insisted from Panama, which his father invaded in 1989. Of course not, Mr President. You call it `forceful interrogation.’
Meaning: being kidnapped, drugged, stripped naked, thrown into a refrigerated, lightless underground cell, starved, deprived of sleep (a favorite KGB technique) and sensory contact, covered with urine and excrement, severely beaten , anally raped, subjected to mock executions, given hideously painful electrical shocks, and strapped onto a special board and immersed in water until confessing or drowning.
This is what suspects are enduring in America’s secret, outsourced prisons around the world. Abu Ghraib’s horrors were only a foretaste. Adding to the sense of moral disgrace that hangs over Bible-Belt Republicans, they are now trying to launch their own criminal investigation of who leaked reports of secret US prisons in Eastern Europe – most likely Romania, Poland and Bulgaria - instead of demanding they be shut down at once.
Sen. John McCain, an American war hero, is leading efforts in Congress to ban torture and compel observance of the Geneva Conventions – which form part of existing American law.
When I was a US GI, we were taught the Conventions were sacred. They protected all at war, as CIA’s renowned former chief in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden, so brilliantly observed in a recent article.
But those little Torquemadas of the modern Inquisition, Bush and Cheney, who both dodged regular military service in wartime, claim the Geneva Conventions are bunk.
Bush actually threatened to veto McCain’s bill. Cheney keeps advocating torture. Even KGB would have been embarrassed. Americans will one day look back on this period with the same revulsion and shame as they do on McCarthy’s era.
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2005
The Corporate Media’s Threat to Freedom
by Mike Whitney
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 15, 2005
There is no similarity between the corporate media and a “free press.” The corporate media operates according to its structural make up, which requires it to serve the interests of ownership and maximize profits. Its top down style of management ensures that it will align itself with the political centers of power, which create the opportunity for greater prosperity. This explains why the media giants have consistently concealed the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties, supported the expansion of executive power, and paved the way for global war. After all, they are just acting in their own best interest, accommodating the political establishment to allow for more consolidation and expansion. One hand washes the other.
The cozy relationship between the administration and the media has made it nearly impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. In fact, the media is the primary instrument of state policy. Its task is to shape the public’s perception of government and to project a benign image of the US to the world beyond.
Naturally, this symbiotic relationship has intensified as the needs of the administration have increased. Now, the media crafts the storyline of American magnanimity while the US military carries out war crimes in Falluja or torture in Baghdad. It showers praise on the Dear Leader while thousands wallow in squalor in New Orleans or are cluster-bombed in Tal Afar. It waves the flags and sings the patriotic anthems that prepare the nation for war. The media has become indistinguishable from the political establishment; executing its duties in a manner that best serve the objectives of the state.
Confidence in the media has never been lower. A broad section of the public doesn’t believe anything they read in the papers nor do they see reporters as impartial observers of world events. This should be no great surprise. The model of a privately owned media ensures that the facts are massaged to suit ownership,; a practice that inevitably undermines credibility.
The marriage between the media and the state increases the danger to the public interests. This is especially true when the media becomes a marketing tool for the government, promoting its vastly unpopular wars, its attacks on the social safety net, and its vicious assault on civil liberties.
The media has become an adversary to the people it is supposed to serve. It now functions exclusively as a weapon in the imperial arsenal; exalting the state and its wartime agenda, while savaging the institutions of democracy and personal liberty. Its role as state-propagandist is conspicuous in everything from its blind devotion to the president to its obfuscation of facts that discredit the administration.
If we consider a few of the critical stories the mainstream media suppressed, we get a clearer idea of its overall agenda.
The media refused to cover the allegations of irregularities in the 2004 presidential election, dismissing the anomalies as conspiracy theories. Independent investigations have cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of the balloting, and just last week, the GAO confirmed suspicions that widespread voter fraud may have taken place. Whether or not the elections were fairly conducted is immaterial; given the suspicious results of the 2000 election, this was a story that should have been covered. Instead, it was purposely ignored to silence critics and divert attention from the dysfunctional electoral system.
The media has refused to cover the massive and devastating siege of Falluja; an assault that displaced 250,000 civilians and intentionally destroyed water lines, electrical power, sewage treatment plants, government buildings, hospitals and schools. Even now, a full year later, journalists have been kept from entering the city or photographing the largest single war crime of the ongoing conflict. And, even though news services around the world are confirming the use of banned weapons, including napalm and other “unidentified” substances during the attack, the American media refuses to give details or demand an independent investigation. It is interesting to compare the media’s silence on the carnage in Iraq to its front-page coverage of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Lavish attention has been devoted to Hariri’s death because it advances the administration’s foreign policy goals. Once again, the media is clearing the path for future imperial conflicts by building the case for war against Syria.
The media has also refused to cover the Downing Street Memo; the damning document written by a member of Tony Blair’s national security team which verified that Bush planned to “remove Saddam through military force” as early as July 2002 (even though the administration was saying that that it would “exhaust all peaceful means”) The unprovoked attack would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Even though the memo provided the first piece of irrefutable evidence that the administration deliberately manipulated the facts, no American newspaper referred to the memo for more than seven weeks after its discovery. The details of the Downing Street Memo are still unknown to many Americans, allowing Bush to continue to deny the cherry picking of pre-war intelligence. The memo proves that Bush is lying.
The media has also refused to provide any coverage of the mercenaries who were deployed to the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. This is the first time in American history that a foreign (corporate) army has carried out operations on US soil. The media made sure that no photos of these corporate warriors appeared in any of the newspapers or TV programs. The absence of coverage raises serious questions about censorship in Bush’s America.
The media refuses to provide news of the Iraq war and the devastation of Sunni heartland. Al Qaim, Husbaya, and Tal Afar have all been attacked with the same ferocity as Falluja, forcing the townspeople to flee and then destroying the water, electricity, sewage and other critical parts of the infrastructure. The Pentagon is now engaged in a scorched earth strategy knowing full well that its policy of killing journalists will keep the story from being reported. The obliteration of these cities shows that the military has abandoned the idea of achieving a political solution in Iraq. The present strategy is aimed at “destroying the resistance’s ability to wage war,” by systematically laying to waste one city after another. This is the Rumsfeld solution, but you won’t find it in the media.
The news from Iraq focuses entirely on the random acts of violence that perpetuate racial stereotypes of Islamic extremists. This provides the justification for the continuing American occupation. The media has worked in conjunction with the Pentagon to create the story of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the embodiment of a ruthless Muslim fanatic who kills simply because he “hates freedom.”
No one can categorically deny that Zarqawi may exist. The fact is, however, that there has never been a positive identification of him, nor has anyone ever provided concrete proof of his whereabouts. Reporters are responsible to provide the facts to their readers, not to promote a narrative that suits the Pentagon’s agenda.
These are just a few of the stories that the media has refused to cover because they conflict with the goals of the administration. If we look deeper we see that the Cheney Energy papers, the 9-11 “whitewash, the corporate scandals, the “Able Danger” program, and the attacks on civil liberties, have all met a similar fate. Stories that are incompatible with the aims of ownership or administration policy are usually left on the cutting room floor.
Freedom is impossible where the information systems are monopolized by private industry. Democracy requires that people have access to divergent points of view so they can form opinions free from coercive influences. The corporate model aims at uniformity in order to limit the range of debate and promote a business-friendly agenda. In America, the news has become a study in uniformity, presenting the very same topics from precisely the same perspective. This creates the impression that the facts are generally agreed upon, which is not the case. 65% of the American people do not support the media’s pro-war stance, and yet, the anti-war position is nowhere to be found on commercial TV.
The war on terror is not simply a misguided crusade against non-state actors like Al Qaida. It is a sweeping plan for global corporate domination. Managing information is vital to that effort. Knowledge is power, and there is a deliberate attempt to seize that power by controlling the sources of information. In effect, it is the privatization of the truth; standardizing information through greater media consolidation and disseminating it through its own filtering systems. Its inhibiting effects on our democracy have already been seen in the curtailing of civil liberties and the twisting of facts that led to the Iraq war. The further merging of the state and the media portend a strengthening of autocratic government and a loss of personal liberty.
The multi-headed dragon of corporate media must be confronted and defeated. Al Qaida may pose a threat to our security, but the alliance of state and media poses a clear and present danger to our freedom.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state, and can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com.
Other Recent Articles by Mike Whitney
When presidents lie
American public shouldn't be surprised by unraveling justification for war
Geov Parrish
WorkingForChange.com
11.14.05
Oh, what a tangled web we weave...
One by one, President Bush's lies are unraveling -- the lies that were used to justify talk of mushroom clouds over America, the lies that led a majority of the country to believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11. The yellowcake uranium in Niger. The weapons stories peddled by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and by Ahmad Chalabi's exile goons. The meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi operatives in Prague. The aluminum tubes for processing uranium. All these are now known to be lies, cherry-picked intelligence that had all been discredited and discarded by the CIA and State Department before being seized upon as war rationales by the eager chickenhawks of the White House Iraq Group.
Lies, all of it. Once stripped away, there remains not one shred of evidence that in 2002-03 Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed any threat whatsoever to the security of the United States. Much less an imminent threat -- the only rationale, under both American and international law, which makes permissible the short-circuiting of the diplomatic process and the launching of an unprovoked invasion. We now know all this, too late for over 2,000 American soldiers and untold scores of thousands of Iraqis.
Why are we surprised?
In modern times, this is what Presidents, Democrats as well as Republicans, do. The bigger the stakes, the bigger the lies, and there are no bigger stakes than war. They lie to Congress, they lie to the American public, they lie to the world.
In 1964, it was the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, in which LBJ parlayed a fictitious assault upon a U.S. battleship into a dramatic escalation of the war in Vietnam.
In 1990, even with the world mortified over Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the Bush 41 White House overcame fierce public and congressional resistance to war with a wholly concocted story about Iraqi soldiers pulling the plugs on the incubators of Kuwaiti babies.
In 2002-03, it was -- well, everything.
In each case, Congress, as well as the public, was kept in the dark. The fundamental checks and balances of the Constitution, which allow only Congress to declare war, were subverted.
Let this be a lesson for the next time elected leaders try to cajole a reluctant public into war. There are tremendous institutional incentives for chief executives to call the military into action. Eisenhower knew what he was talking about when he warned of the dangers of the permanent military-industrial complex. The patriotism war whips up is always good for a bump in the poll numbers and a pass from an uncritical media. A lot of people make a lot of money from war, and a lot of other people -- people that don't matter to the leaders -- suffer. Power is seductive, and the people who crave power enough to want the most powerful job in the world are invariably never satisfied. They always want more. It's a story as old as humankind.
After the fall of Saigon, something called the "Vietnam Syndrome" set in, a very healthy response in which citizens and leaders were wary of committing troops to another foreign war. Then Ronald Reagan came along, and invaded Grenada, and waged covert wars in Central America, and people forgot.
Perhaps, given how catastrophic the invasion of Iraq has been -- for Iraqis, for the American military, for the federal budget, and for America's moral standing in the world -- there will come to be a similar "Iraq Syndrome." But we're not there yet. Powerful people, particularly in and around the Bush White House, continue to peddle war as the answer of first resort for a variety of diplomatic conflicts, from Syria to Iran to North Korea to Venezuela and even to China. They would be easy to dismiss as Strangelovian lunatics, had it not proven so ridiculously easy to sell wars in the past.
All you have to do is lie. Once you're in -- as we saw in Vietnam, and are seeing again in Iraq -- no matter how badly it goes, even the war's critics will be reluctant to call the whole thing off.
The anger of Democrats (and a few Republicans) over the recent revelations of the lies of George W. Bush and the White House Iraq Group is completely justified. There is no greater betrayal to our nation than the misuse of its military, and no greater moral sin than ordering up a policy which effectively ensures the murder of thousands.
But Democrats like John Kerry and John Edwards, who are only now slowly coming around to criticizing the war, have themselves to blame as well. History and common sense told us at the time that there was a high probability the White House was lying. Such Democrats -- and Republicans -- owed it to themselves, their party, their constituents, and their country to question and investigate White House claims far more closely than they did.
The lies of George W. Bush's White House are, in my opinion, an impeachable offense. I've said so publicly for two and a half years.
But if there is no "Iraq Syndrome" -- if Democrats as well as Republicans seize upon these misdeeds but then continue to call for the casual projection of American military power anywhere and everywhere in the world -- then the lives lost in Iraq really will have been in vain.
It's up to us to learn the lesson. See more in the Geov Parrish archives.
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Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly, In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the daily Straight Shot for WorkingForChange. He can be reached by email at geovlp@earthlink.net -- please indicate whether your comments may be used on WorkingForChange in an upcoming "letters" column.
The bigger the stakes, the bigger the lies.
(c) Working Assets Online. All rights reserved.
Starved, tortured prisoners found in Iraqi cell
Last Updated Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:54:58 EST
CBC News
Iraq is investigating the discovery of more than 170 prisoners in a government bunker in Baghdad where many were found starved, beaten and tortured.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari talks to journalists during a press conference in Baghdad. (AP photo)
Iraqi officials made the announcement Tuesday, two days after U.S. troops surrounded the Interior Ministry compound where the detainees were being held in an underground cell.
Neither the U.S. military nor the Iraqi government would comment on whether the American forces found the cell.
"I was informed that there were 173 detainees held at an Interior Ministry prison and they appear to be malnourished," Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told reporters on Tuesday.
"There is also some talk that they were subjected to some kind of torture."
The prime minister said all the detainees had been moved to a different detention centre and were receiving medical care.
The U.S. military isn't saying anything about the case, referring all questions to the Interior Ministry.
Al-Jaafari said he ordered a high-level investigation into allegations that ministry officials tortured and abused the prisoners, who were suspected of being insurgents.
'Some had their skin peeled off'
The deputy interior minister was more explicit, saying he was stunned by the prisoners' treatment.
"I've never seen such a situation like this during the past two years in Baghdad; this is the worst," Hussein Kamal told CNN.
"I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies."
Kamal told Reuters news agency that the treatment was "totally unacceptable."
"It is denounced by the minister and everyone in Iraq."
Government repeatedly told about abuse, critics
A leading Sunni politician and Amnesty International questioned the Shia-led government's claims that it was unaware of the alleged abuse.
The head of the country's biggest Sunni political party, Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, told the Associated Press that people had repeatedly complained about abuse and torture at ministry detention centres, including the one in the scandal.
Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic party, said he had spoken to al-Jaafari and other government officials about the allegations.
He said he was brushed off and told the prisoners – all Sunni Muslims – were part of the regime of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Most insurgents in the country are Sunni Muslims, who were dominant under Hussein even though they form the minority in Iraq.
Amnesty International said there have been many reports that Iraqi detainees were being abused and tortured by police and Interior Ministry security forces.
An Amnesty spokeswoman urged al-Jaafari to expand his investigation to include all allegations of abuse at detention centres.
Tide Turning in GOP Senators' War View
Bipartisan Amendment Is Rebuff to Bush
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 16, 2005; Page A06
For the past three years, President Bush has set the course on U.S. policy in Iraq, and Republicans in Congress -- and many Democrats, too -- have dutifully followed his lead. Yesterday the Senate, responding to growing public frustration with the administration's war policy, signaled that those days are coming to an end.
The rebuff to the White House was muffled in the modulated language of a bipartisan amendment, but the message could not have been more clear. With their constituents increasingly unhappy with the U.S. mission in Iraq, Democrats and now Republicans are demanding that the administration show that it has a strategy to turn the conflict over to the Iraqis and eventually bring U.S. troops home.
"I think this is a clear sign that Republicans are walking away from the president, that they're no longer willing to tie their future and political standing to the president and his policy on Iraq," said Ivo H. Daalder a Clinton administration official now at the Brookings Institution. "They found this was the easy way out -- an implicit rebuke, not an explicit rebuke. But this was a rebuke."
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) declined in an interview to call the Senate-approved amendment, which he co-sponsored, a repudiation of the White House. Instead, he said, it shores up the administration's arguments. He noted that the National Security Council staff had been shown the language in advance and was given the opportunity to critique it.
But Warner also said senators were "not unmindful" of widespread unease in public opinion about the war. Calling the next 120 days critical to success, he said the United States must do all it can to prevent Iraq from fracturing into civil war. But he added that the Senate vote was a "strong message to Iraqi people and the Iraqi government that you have got to come to grip with your internal problems. . . . It's a signal to the Iraqis that we mean business."
The jolt to the White House came just as the administration was attempting to beat back perceptions that the president misled the country before the war by overstating the strength of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. That fight pits Democrats against Republicans.
En route to Asia on Monday, the president delivered another riposte to his critics, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld joined in yesterday, quoting statements from the late 1990s by President Bill Clinton and others in his administration about the threat posed by Iraq.
If the fight over prewar intelligence has become a proxy battle over the question of whether it was right or wrong to go to war, yesterday's Senate debate moved the issue to another arena, to the question of whether the U.S. strategy to stabilize Iraq is working and what is the best way to end the occupation there.
James M. Lindsay, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Senate action "doesn't change much in terms of the substance of American policy, but it clearly does signal a change in the parameters of the political debate. . . . It says the American political debate has now shifted to how to get out of Iraq."
There are still significant differences between the two parties on this second question, and sizable differences within the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, prominent Democrats, including Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and former Senate Democratic leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.), have proposed far more explicit plans to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq. Others, such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), remain strong supporters of the war. But the vote yesterday showed that Republicans are growing nervous.
Yesterday's action came on a pair of amendments offered to the defense authorization bill. The Democratic amendment, sponsored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.) and many others, stated that 2006 should be a year of "significant transition" to Iraqi sovereignty, with Iraqi forces taking responsibility for their country's security. It mandated quarterly reports to Congress by the administration on progress toward that goal, and an estimated timetable for the eventual redeployment of U.S. forces. That amendment lost on a 58 to 40 vote.
The Republican amendment, co-sponsored by Warner and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), embraced the bulk of the Democratic amendment but removed what the White House and some Republicans saw as the most odious language, the requirement for the administration to establish an estimated timetable for withdrawal. With that change, the amendment sailed through on a vote of 79 to 19.
It would have been easy for Republicans to defeat the Democratic amendment and leave it at that, but given the state of public opinion and the opposition to Bush's policies, Republicans needed a vehicle to show constituents that they understand the public's frustration and to signal to the White House that they expect more than statements of optimism about the pace of a conflict in which American troops are dying almost every day.
White House communications director Nicole Wallace said the administration was not bothered by the day's events. "The Senate endorsed administration policy, which is a conditions-based withdrawal in Iraq. It also exposed a divide in the Democratic Party," she said.
Lieberman, one of five Democrats who oppose the Levin amendment, said he hoped the bipartisan vote would help diminish some of the partisanship that has surrounded the debate over Iraq of late. His goal, he said, is to maintain public support for the mission, but he said the administration must do more to bolster confidence in its strategy.
"This resolution does, on a bipartisan basis, say to the White House and the Pentagon, one, we want you to set out in more clarity what your plan is for success; and two, we want to be more involved with you in pursuing our mission in Iraq to a successful completion," he said.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) called the amendment's request for quarterly reports by the administration on its strategy "an almost meaningless requirement," and said that, had the Democratic amendment passed, it would have been perceived as a vote by Congress to begin a hasty withdrawal -- an interpretation that Levin vigorously rejected.
The amendment by the Senate faces an uncertain future. But as political symbolism, the action yesterday showed the determination of the Senate to demand more from the administration. It also underscored how much elected officials are worried about public anxiety over the war. "That is where the public is," Lindsay said, "and the senators were making sure they were on the right side of the political debate.
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"I would argue that the percentage of American citizens that are Bible believing...is much smaller than you think"
And I would argue the number is much greater, and that number would include non-Christians as well as Christians, but ours is a fundamental difference in definition.
The theocrats have gained considerable political influence because politicians fear their influence with a large percentage of the electorate. Politicians are whores to the electoral majority. We all know that. I just had a hard time believing that the majority of evangelicals mindlessly followed very vocal (loud mouthed) fools like Robertson, etc. It's unfortunate that fools like Robertson are giving the entire group a bad name. They really are. For a lot of people, when they hear the word "evangelical," they think Robertson or Falwell, gross intolerance, hatred of gays, women (so-called feminists), etc. A cultural ignorance, I guess.
Conservatives Wave "Bye" to Manufacturing Jobs
November 12, 2005
http://www.newshounds.us/2005/11/12/conservatives_wave_bye_to_manufacturing_jobs.php#more
Fox News Channel has a message for all you blue collar workers out there worried about losing your jobs to overseas competition: Tough luck.
Neil Cavuto, on his "Cavuto on Business" show Saturday (November 12, 2005), interviewed John Stossel, the co-host of ABC-TV's "20/20" program and author of Give Me a Break, on the topic of manufacturing jobs going overseas.
Sending jobs overseas creates new jobs, Stossel said, because when a company saves money by exporting jobs, it has more money to do new things.
Cavuto asked Stossel, "People say manufacturing jobs are leaving. What do you say?"
"Bye!" said Stossel, waving at the camera. "There's nothing wonderful about manufacturing jobs. I think if you look at what we want for our kids, that should answer the question. We don't want them working in a factory where the work is underpaid, I mean, is very hard, it may be uncomfortable. ... We want them taking jobs as engineers, as biologists. We think the services jobs are good for our kids. I think it's great if people in other countries want to manufacture things and we can just import it and pay for it with our service jobs."
Stossel brushed aside Cavuto's question about whether countries that do not make things lose their dominance. "Where's the evidence. We can trade for the goods we need," he said. Stossel added that we need not worry about bad relations arising with the nations we import from because we can just switch to someone else.
Cavuto did a lackluster job of interviewing Stossel. He never pressed him on any point, such as whether running a negative trade balance as the U.S. does is good for the nation in the long run. Nor did he force Stossel to really deal with the issue of relations with trading partners on which we are dependent for manufactured goods. I think that's because Cavuto basically agreed with Stossel and knew that Fox News Channel's position is the same. Manufacturing workers usually are represented by unions. Get rid of the manufacturing jobs and you get rid of the unions and that will make business happy.
Later in the show, guest Jonathan Hoenig, capitalistpig.com, predicted that General Motors Corp. would "go belly-up by the spring of 2006." Cavuto asked him if that would bring a bailout of the kind that helped Chrysler remain in business for 20-some years before merging with Daimler.
"God, I hope not!" said Hoenig, living up to the name of his website.
Hoenig and Stossel showed their disdain for people who work with their hands. Stossel says we don't want our kids doing these jobs because they might be "uncomfortable." What about the people who are doing those jobs now? What about their hopes for their kids? A lot of factory workers are a little too old to retrain for those jobs as biologists. Engineering jobs? You can kiss those goodbye. The engineering jobs will go where the manufacturing is. If we're not making anything, we don't need many engineers. And if they can figure out how to manufacture things overseas, they'll eventually figure out they can do the engineering over there, too, with engineers that earn a lot less than ones in this country.
In World War II, Josef Stalin looked at the shiploads of tanks, trucks, jeeps, and other materiel that Michigan was sending to the U.S.S.R. and said, "Detroit is winning the war." Michigan was the world's Arsenal of Democracy then. When that manufacturing base is gone, we won't be able to get it back overnight. Tool and die making and all the other skills that support the auto industry are not learned overnight.
How will we support our military with only service jobs? Our soldiers don't need McDonald's hamburgers overseas. They need tanks, planes, ships, helicopters, and guns. Will we let the Chinese make those for us once our manufacturing capacity is lost?
The French already have won the contract to build the next presidential helicopter. Yeah, Cavuto, the French!
The most powerful country in the world cannot even make a helicopter to take its leader to Camp David for the weekend.
If GM goes bankrupt, many other large companies will follow. They will figure out that if they go bankrupt, they can get out of union contracts, payments to their pension plans, and obligations to existing retirees. A lot of people are going to suffer. And people like Hoenig and Stossel don't give a damn.
Reported by judy at November 12, 2005 05:19 PM
Car bomb hits Karachi restaurant
At least three people were killed and 12 others wounded when a car bomb struck a fast food restaurant in Karachi, southern Pakistan.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4437708.stm
Spinning Like a Broken Record
Or, George W. back on the offensive
by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com
Buffeted by criticism from all quarters, crippled by plummeting polls and with his trustworthiness in doubt for an increasing number of Americans, President George W. Bush did on Friday what he's always done whenever his policies are questioned: he launched a stubborn frontal assault on detractors allegedly less patriotic and less protective of the homeland than himself. In doing so, he once again sounded like a broken record, scratching and skipping in garbled tones over the same old baleful dirge.
In an angry and predictable Veteran's Day speech, Bush accosted his critics as "deeply irresponsible" for questioning the rationale that led us to war in Iraq, desperately insisting that "these baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."
Yep, it's the same old nonsense we've been hearing for four years now: the country is at war, and now is not the time to question why the country is at war, because when the country is at war, any dissent is unpatriotic and harmful to the troops' morale.
Yet perhaps the troops' morale in Iraq is less affected by antiwar protesters in America than by, say, getting shafted out of body armor and bonuses and armored Humvees by the Pentagon. Citing military sources who say the Army is "on the verge of snapping," Bob Herbert recently discussed the effects that the "bring 'em on" president's wars have had on the soldiers:
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=8020
CHRISTIANS AREN'T PERFECT
EASILY KEPT ON THE POLITICAL PLANTATION
By: Bob Strodtbeck
Organized and aggressive Christian involvement in American politics over the last 30 years has resulted in more centralized power, elected officials that are more opened to "support" from corporate business entities, powerful individuals who rely on deceit and vindictiveness as political strategies, election campaigns that focus on little more than personal attacks, fiscal profligacy, and a foreign policy that has earned an international reputation for arrogance and warmongering.
One wonders to what amoral depths American government would have sunk if candidates Christians had supported were not in power.
The mass of Christians whose votes catapulted the Republican Party to America's pinnacle of political power carry the burden of having their faith associated with Republican abuses of power. The burden is intensified since Christians were almost universally unified in their disdain for the moral lapses of Democrats in their waning days of power. Those offenses, so they claimed, were due to the secular liberal philosophies that have pervaded Democrat Party processes.
What belief system, then, carries the responsibility for encouraging the controversies engulfing the Republican led government? Supporters of the Republican regime would have Americans believe that the liberal press is behind scandals engulfing the government. "The big media's agenda in this can be discerned from the saturation coverage they gave (former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney Scooter) Libby's indictments and the short shrift given to indictments of several members of the Clinton Administration," Cal Thomas, a highly regarded Christian columnist, recently wrote. Thomas went on to compare the indictment against Libby to those during the Clinton Presidency in an obvious attempt to prove that Democrat liberals are experts in corruption. The only term lacking in Thomas' rationalization was a reference to a "vast left-wing conspiracy".
The problem with Thomas' assessment comes from a review that Pat Buchanan, no liberal he, gave to the process that indicted Libby. Wrote Buchanan, "In contrast to Congress, Pat Fitzgerald came to Washington and did the job he was assigned to do. He carried out his mandate, but refused to go beyond it. He indicted for what he believed were violations of law, not violations of ethics - and only on the charges he believed he could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. We need more public servants with this kind of conscience - and conscientiousness."
Buchanan, by the way, has been credited with declaring a culture war in his speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention when he said that the coming contest between former President George H.W. Bush and then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was an, "election...about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself."
Who, then, is right about the nature of problems facing officials who have climbed to power with the help of Christian political support? Or is it more reasonable to wonder if Christians can actually be misled to support politicians who will abuse their power and fall to the temptations that infect government with corruption?
American government has become dominated by a handful of centrally located political celebrities who can escape any direct scrutiny by their constituents. This detachment from those who give them their jobs allows them the freedom to be what they want and claim to be what their supporters desire. Job security for them demands little more than a routine "tickling of the ears" on regular elections cycles.
America, however, needs models of integrity and humility. These are qualities that are proven through intimate observations of individual lives, not noble claims from campaign speeches. Many Christians have forgotten this notion as they have blindly trusted America's top political party to protect and preserve their interests. Recent political polls that seem to suggest that the Republican leaders cannot even protect and preserve the best interests of the Republican Party only compound insult with injury for conservative Christian voters.
The GOP catapulted to political majorities throughout America with promises of reducing the influence of the federal government in our daily lives, restoring fiscal responsibility to government, and removing corruption and spin doctoring from the political process. More than a decade of their control has proven these promises empty. This does not mean the goals are not achievable. It does mean that a political organization clearly devoted to absorbing power unto its centrally organized leadership is highly unlikely to pursue them with any urgency or forthrightness.
This suggestion leaves Christian activists with an interesting dilemma: Do they act on their own to reestablish the principles and virtues that they believe can restore stability to this nation and its communities, or do they pass that responsibility on to a national political organization with a record of violating those principles?
From here the question does not seem too difficult to answer.
"Published originally at EtherZone.com
THE EMPEROR HAS NO BRAINS
IT IS TIME TO PULL THE PLUG
By: David Brownlow
We are no longer able to hide from the obvious fact that something is very, very wrong with our President. His inability to admit, learn from, or even comprehend his mistakes has become pathologic. This anomaly is now seriously affecting his capacity to lead our nation.
As we observe President Bush sink further into an advanced stage of delusion and denial, we need to understand that we are dealing with a mentally unstable – and therefore an extremely dangerous - man. Our continued failure to deal with this situation has left our nation in a position of grave and imminent danger.
Too much is at stake to let our personal feelings or partisan politics get in the way of doing what needs to be done. It is time to remove President Bush from office. Members of the U.S. Congress should do their duty by beginning the impeachment proceedings immediately.
That analysis may sound harsh, but just look at how bad things have gotten. The President’s recent speeches are riddled with statements that could only have been made by a man who is rapidly losing his grip on reality. Case in point: During a Veterans Day speech at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, the President demonstrated he has absolutely no idea why our men and women are still dying in Iraq. Bush said:
"As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."
Now seriously, does anyone on this earth other than George Bush really believe the Iraqi people are a "ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life?" If the President actually believes that, in light of all the evidence to the contrary, then his mental condition is worse than we thought.
The Iraqi people are not our enemies. (Or at least they weren’t before we turned most of their country into a Depleted Uranium nuclear wasteland) Even their former dictator, who was a genuine moron, was smart enough to know that threatening to attack us would be suicide. Then there is the Iraqi army, which our guys tore through in a couple days, barely even slowing down on the way to Baghdad. And we are to believe the President when he says the Iraqis are a "ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life?" What a completely ludicrous thought!
For the President of the United States to believe something so absurdly wrong means he is living in a kind of alternate reality. That is not a very comforting thought considering he is already talking the same kind of pre-Iraqi war "imminent threat" propaganda when referring to Iran and Syria. Somebody needs to stop that man before he decides to invade some other hapless country.
The President went on in the same speech to say:
"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."
The "history of how the war began" is no longer in dispute, and to claim otherwise is "deeply irresponsible," if not completely nuts. In the months leading up to the invasion, our leaders went on a campaign of fearmongering using evidence (much of it received from Iranian CIA double agents) that we now know to be false. High-level Bush administration officials, as well as the President himself, repeated over and over again the outrageous notion that Iraq posed an imminent threat to America. This propaganda campaign quite literally scared our nation into going off to war.
We have proven that every accusation made against Iraq was wrong. Iraq never posed a threat to America and had nothing to do with 9/11. They did not even have a functioning army! Everything we were told about the imminent Iraqi threat was based on completely false information - and it had been from day one.
That is the history of the war. It is well-documented and cannot be denied. No one needs to "rewrite" anything.
It is quite alarming that the President is still trying to deny the truth of how we got ourselves into the Iraqi quagmire. Clearly, there was a lot of false information disseminated by his administration before and after the invasion. But, does this mean the President is lying to us? Maybe, as many of his defenders are saying, the President actually believes what he has been saying.
OK. So let’s give President Bush the benefit of the doubt when he says he believed that the pre-war WMD and imminent danger stories were true, and that he had no intention of misleading this nation into war. Let’s take him at his word now when he says he still believes the war is justified – even to the point of authorizing secret CIA torture camps. Let us not dispute that he believes the history of the war is the honorable one he portrays. Let’s believe him when he says he is convinced that staying in Iraq is central to the war on terror.
The fact is however, it would be better for our country if Bush had lied. If the President actually believes everything that has come across his teleprompter lately, then this is far worse than simply having another lying President. Liars we can deal with. Crazy Presidents we cannot.
We are faced with a situation where there are few ways to explain away George Bush’s increasingly odd behavior. He seems to have gone off into a fantasyland at exactly the moment in history when we need a man at the helm who can understand what a terrible blunder we made by invading Iraq.
We need a leader who is willing to admit that we have no business invading a county that never posed a threat to us. We need a leader who is prepared to make it right by apologizing to the Iraqi people (and the world) for the illegal invasion, and offering to pay the Iraqis for all the things we broke and all the people we killed. We need a leader who understands that the only way to support our troops is to bring them home from Iraq – immediately!
It has become clear that George Bush is incapable of doing what it takes to lead this nation, and we need to pull the plug. It is time to impeach President George W. Bush. And while the Congress is putting together the details of Bush’s exit package, they need to clean out the rest of the rats nest by giving Dick Cheney his walking papers as well.
"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
Building a New "Movement":
The Downing Street Memos
By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
June 14, 2005
Not just because many of my relatives got wiped out in the Holocaust, or because my wife is Bavarian, but, like so many others around the world, I am ineluctably drawn to the Hitler period in Germany. How could this have happened -- 6 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others herded into camps and slaughtered? More than 50 million killed on all sides in World War II? It's too much for the mind to comprehend.
And yet, I know that given the right set of circumstances, shameful atrocities could, and in many instances did, happen in our own country (to African slaves, to Native Americans, to Japanese-Americans, et al). Fold in the current rise of anti-rational thought and militarist leadership in Bush America, symbolized best perhaps by the fact that torture is now officially sanctioned U.S. policy, and America would seem ripe for even worse excursions into the shadow world. (For one such descent down that dark rabbit hole, see the quick chronology below of how the Bush Administration deceived and lied its way into the Iraq War, as verified by the DSM, the Downing Streets Memos.)
Probably the most instructive book I've read in recent years along these lines, about how easy it is for a nation to slide into totalitarianism, is "Defying Hitler" by the Christian German writer Sebastian Haffner; as a young man in the 1930s, Haffner watched the Nazis slowly, steadily slice away at long-held freedoms until one day, all Germans awoke to find themselves living in a brutal police-state.
Being someone deeply moved and influenced by the successful non-violent activism of Jesus, Gandhi, King, Chavez, Day and others, I always wondered what might have happened in Germany, and thus in modern global history, if a strong and widely based non-violent movement had existed there in the early-'30s.
Non-violent civil disobedience worked for the American suffragettes in the early decades of the 20th Century, it worked for Mahatma Gandhi in the anti-colonial campaign in India in the '30s and '40s, it worked for Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement in America in the '50s and '60s, it worked for Cesar Chavez organizing a grape strike and boycott in California in the '60s and '70s, it worked for so many recent non-violent "peoples' revolutions" that forced corrupt or illegitimately-elected rulers around the world to resign -- could it have worked in '30s Germany in turning that nation away from its imperialist, self-destructive future?
And could it work today in our own country, given the regime and problems we face as we slide more and more into a unique kind of American fascism under Bush&Co., where government works in concert with corporations (Mussolini's definition of the F-word) and a non-rational, mostly religious, fundamentalism?
COULD HITLER HAVE BEEN STOPPED EARLY?
We will never know how successful a massive non-violent civil disobedience movement might have been in stopping Hitler in his tracks if it had confronted him early and often in the early '30s, led by prestigious church and civil leaders. But, as we know now, if political demagogues are not confronted wisely and in time to slow down or block their violent plans, social and military and ethical disaster is often the result.
Within a few years in Germany, for example, the Nazis were rounding up the few outspoken religious and political figures and throwing them into concentration camps. By the time the White Rose Society, led by those saintly young students Sophie and Hans Scholl, began circulating their anti-Nazi leaflets and posters, it was much too late. It took a World War that led to those 50 million+ deaths, to settle the matter.
That's why German Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous quote is so poignant and instructive:
"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist -- so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat -- so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist -- so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew -- so I didn't speak up. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to speak up for me."
After 9/11, and the beginnings of police-state law-enforcement in America (including the secret arrests and hidden incarcerations of U.S. citizens), it was time to update the Niemöller quote to our own reality; here was my humble attempt.
"First, they came for the terrorist suspects, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a terrorist suspect. Then they came for the foreigners, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a foreigner. Then they came for the Arab-Americans, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Arab-American. Then they came for the radical dissenters, and I didn't speak up because I was just an ordinary troubled citizen. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM HISTORY
Please don't misunderstand. I am not saying that America in 2005 is Germany in 1933, or that Bush is Hitler. But unless one chooses to learn from history, one risks repeating or imitating it, or at least aspects of it, and that's the instructive lesson we have to take from the comparisons to European fascism.
Clearly, the situation in America is different. There is a functioning Opposition Party, for one thing, which picked up 50% of the votes (or probably more than 50%; we just can't be sure, given our easy-to-manipulate voting system) in the two most recent presidential elections. And, although the Bush forces control two branches of government, the Executive and Legislative, their hold on the Judiciary is not complete -- which is why the fighting gets so tenacious about their nominees for the Appellate and Supreme Courts.
What Bush&Co. have going for them, under the twisted strategies of Karl Rove, is a masterful use of the Big Lie Technique, and their firm hold on huge swatches of the American mass-media, especially talk-radio, cable commentary, small-city/rural newspapers, and the fundamentalist TV and word-of-mouth networks. In short, Bushevik spin and propaganda is effectively presented.
And they face a fairly disorganized and/or silenced opposition -- in Congress, in mainline churches, in academia, mainstream pundits, etc. -- which permits them constantly to set the agenda and batter their way through to victory on issue after issue, especially as their more civil opponents have still not figured out how to play defense against the Bush brand of smash-mouth politics. (The Democrats now are better in fighting back than they were during Bush's first term, but seem these days to engage fully only on highly specific issues.)
THE OPPORTUNITIES OF DRY ROT
Consider: President Richard Nixon looked impregnable after his landslide re-election victory in 1972. But years of non-violent anti-war resistance, often in the streets, may have weakened the middle-class electoral foundations upon which his administration rested. Certainly, the strength of that resistance led to over-reaching on the part of a Nixon Administration infected by paranoia so strong that it helped engender the Democratic Party headquarters break-in at the Watergate. The fallout from that "third-rate burglary" led to the discovery of the crimes known as the "White House Horrors" -- the unconstitutional police-state felonies and the attempts to cover them up -- and eventually to Nixon's resignation in the face of an imminent impeachment trial.
As in Nixon's case, the foundations upon which the Bush Administration rests are dry-rotted. All seems secure on the surface -- after all, as has been noted, the Busheviks control both houses of Congress, much of the Judiciary, most of the mass-media -- but, in truth, they are extremely insecure and vulnerable. A healthy majority of the citizenry believes the Bush apparatus lied the country into a war that has led, and continues to lead, to tens of thousands of deaths and maimings. Many in the world fear America's power but few respect their leaders. Their actions have brought America into disrepute, into a target for more terrorism, into turning environmental law-writing over to the polluting industries, into humongous debt, into cutting and weakening popular social programs and required infrastructure maintenance, etc.
So one is led to wonder: Is it too late for a mass-based non-violent opposition, one composed of individuals willing to put themselves in legal jeopardy with civil disobedience, that could help bring down the morally-illegitimate Bush Administration? I think the objective conditions right now indicate a window of opportunity to do so. But several things would have to happen.
BUILDING A "MOVEMENT" COALITION
1. A united Democratic Party would have to stand tall and take the consequences for their courage in openly and forthrightly opposing each and every one of the Bush Administration's dangerous, reckless policies and behaviors. An active alternative party, perhaps the Greens in alliance with a new entity, would have to present itself as a possible and electable option for voters if the Democrats wimp out again. (As always, the key here is an honest election, with hand-counted paper ballots, not trusting our current corruptible voting and vote-counting systems.)
2. The leading anti-war organizations -- now segmented into separate, sectarian groups such as ANSWER, Not in My Name, United for Peace, et al. -- would have to unite in building a massive umbrella coalition with but one goal in mind: regime-change at the top. The recently-born After Downing Street umbrella organization demonstrates how quickly an effective coalition can be built from the ground up; it now has 125 groups participating, with the aim being to generate impeachment hearings on the Iraq War scandals.
In the '60s and early-'70s, we had built ourselves a "Movement" -- the term derived from the Civil Rights Movement of the previous decade -- which could mobilize millions of supporters into the streets. The so-called Moratorium alliances of groups fighting for justice and peace, especially to end the Vietnam War, frightened the Nixon and LBJ administrations into over-reacting.
Not all of the new "Movement" protests will have to be in the streets -- the internet has opened up so many other avenues for protest these days -- but imagine, for example, the impact a "Million Americans for Impeachment" march would have in the nation's capital, with respected religious and political and academic leaders involved, with thousands of them willing to be arrested in non-violent, massive sit-ins -- based in love and hope -- in order to end this immoral war and change the way America is being misruled.
3. As this new "Movement" is built, it would need, and want, to reach out to the millions of disaffected independents and moderate Republicans who are appalled at the hijacking of the GOP by extremist elements. These independents and moderate Republicans are reachable, but sincere attempts have to be made to bring them into the fold. The bigger the tent, the bigger the influence. For example, they (and anti-war military officers) should be included, along with progressive leaders, at the head of any Million-Person March or other major initiatives.
PROOFS OF SCANDAL IN THE DSM
It's not clear what all the unifying principles and themes could be that would energize this new Movement. Big issues might include the draft and Social Security. But one would think that maybe the Iraq War would serve as the centerpoint, especially given the revelations of the Downing Street Memos, which verify what many of us have been asserting for years about how Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/et al. lied and rushed the country into an unnecessary war for their own twisted, power-hungry ends.
Here's a Quick Chronology of Deception Highlights:
In January 1998, leaders of the neo-con Project for the New American Century -- a HardRight think-tank that included such key figures as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Jim Woolsey, et al. -- wrote a letter to President Clinton urging that he invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. (Clinton declined; he was going after bin Laden.) Later that year, when musing about a run for President in 2000 and how he would approach Iraq, Bush told an aide: "If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it."
The first Bush Administration cabinet meetings in January 2001, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported, focused on finding ways to attack Iraq. Later that year, Bush directed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to begin considering military options for Saddam's removal. Even after being told by his intelligence agencies that 9/11 was the work of Al Qaida and not Iraq, Rumsfeld began badgering his analysts to try to include Saddam Hussein in retaliation plans. Bush himself cornered anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke and strongly suggested that he find a way to include Saddam in the mix.
In March of 2002, Time Magazine reported, Bush told several senators visiting the White House: "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out."
In July of 2002, without going to Congress for permission, Bush took $700 million from funds Congress authorized for the Afghanistan war against Al Qaida/Taliban forces and diverted them to the coming Iraq War. Meanwhile, of course, Bush during all this time was telling the American people that he hadn't made up his mind about attacking Iraq.
The recently-revealed, top-secret Downing Street Memo, dated July 23, 2002, which talks about a just-concluded meeting between U.K. and Administration leaders at the Bush ranch in Texas, said that the "intelligence and facts" to justify the coming Iraq invasion were to be "fixed around the policy." In other words, the decision had been made to go to war by the Summer of 2002, and now they would work on finding reasons to justify that decision.
In the second top-secret Downing Street Memo, released by the Times of London just a few days ago, the briefing paper for that Blair-Bush meeting of July 23, 2002, reveals that the Brits were deeply worried about the illegality of the war action and that both the U.S. and Britain were anxious to find some legal excuse for their pending attack. They conceived of ways to lure Saddam Hussein into doing something belligerent that would make an attack more acceptable in the U.S. and U.N.; bombing runs by U.S. jets went on for months before the official invasion to try to provoke just such a response. But Saddam, aware of what game was being played, didn't react to the bait. Blair&Bush tried another ruse, this one at the United Nations: They believed Saddam would object to allowing U.N. weapons inspectors back in, and thus create a casus belli, but, surprise, the Iraqi leader said the inspectors could return.
Still, seeking those morally and legally acceptable justifications, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz later admitted that the Administration finally settled on WMD -- which they were sure would work with the American public and the U.N. And it did, despite the fact that both the Brits and the Americans were well aware that Saddam had not been active in any WMD programs in recent years, indeed that his armaments programs were weaker than those of Iran and North Korea. The preliminary work of the U.N. inspectors seemed to verify that there were no stockpiles of WMD.
The U.N. inspections were cut off abruptly. The "shock and awe" bombing and land invasion began in March of 2003, nearly one year to the date from when Bush told the senators that Saddam was a goner, "we're taking him out."
Late Flash: As we were preparing this upload, still more leaked memos surfaced on the Times of London from inside the Blair Administration, reproduced at Raw Story, which document in even more detail how nervous the Blair government felt in many ways by the U.S. tunnel-vision rush to war, and the reasons given for that war. It makes for stunning reading. See our links to some of these new memos at our Downing Street and Best Articles on the Web pages.
BUILDING OUR POLITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
So the Iraq War scandals and coverups might well provide the organizing principles for the new "Movement." But whatever the central issues turn out to be, the point is that nothing will happen unless we radically alter the way we confront the Bush Administration. They have sown fear into the body politic, including the Left and moderate middle; they have encouraged division and factional in-fighting among progressives; they have marginalized and smeared mass-media organs and spokesmen in opposition. Something has to change.
We can't count on the elections of 2006 and 2008 to bring the major changes that are required -- not just because of the time-gap between now and then, but mainly because the same three GOP-supporting corporations continue to own the proprietary software that counts the votes. (Which is why a key part of our struggle must be to return to paper ballots, hand-counted.)
After the 1964 defeat of the GOP's rightwing presidential candidate, Sen. Barry Goldwater, the HardRight began its long campaign to assume power, knowing that it would take them decades to build the required political/media/think-tank infrastructure that would lead to victory, as it did in 1980 with Reagan's election and later with Newt Gingrich's mid-'90s reign in Congress and then Bush2 in the White House in 2000.
We don't have the luxury of decades. We who want to return our country to its moral, Constitutional foundations must jump-start the process of building and enlarging our political infrastructure right now. If we don't, the forces of repression, militarism and incipient fascism will suck us all further into their shadow vortex.
The time to move, to "Movement," is now.
Copyright 2005, by Bernard Weiner
Mlsoft, I have been reading your thoughts for quite a while now, and I am certain that you, like most evangelical Christians, are a very decent person, committed to your family, faith, and life. But it is theocrats like Robertson and other vocal individuals that give evangelcals a bad rap. These theocrats seem to claim to speak for all/most evangelicals, but their adenda seems more political than religious. For example, I don't believe evangelicals are out to conquer the world with dominionism, nor do I believe the majority feel contempt for gays even if they don't approve of the lifestyle. But I am wondering why we don't hear more evangelicals (by far the largest demographic group in this country) speaking out against those who claim leadership of the group to a political end, eg. Robertson, Reed, Falwell, Jones, and we can agree to disagree on Dobson. What gives? Your thoughts? These people give evangelical Christians a bad rep, and their rhetoric tends to be very divisive. Clearly, not good for evangelicals or the country.
People love to toss around the term "bush-hater," but what exactly is a "bush-hater," and if citizens really do "hate Bush" maybe there's a reason for it?
"Bush lied, people died".
Most Americans have come to that conclusion. You are among the minority.
Sudan genocide problem for all
http://www.easternecho.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?31017
By Melissa Hawkes / Letter to the Editor
MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2005
I read many articles stating that the United States should do something to put an end to the genocide in Sudan. The United States is powerful, yet is often absent when it comes to countries that they cannot profit from, such as Sudan.
It is each American's responsibility to educate his/herself instead of relying on the media as an educational source. While the media is rich in entertainment news, it is only due to the response of each American's interest (in other words, sensationalism). If we Americans take more control of ourselves and direct our interest on things that really matter and are substantial, then maybe the media would make more effort to elaborate on important issues such as genocide.
I think it is important to also look at what other civilized countries can do, instead of always looking for the support of America. I am not saying America is right not to do anything, but I will state again; it is every single person's responsibility to be informed and to inform and to take action. If it comes to an hour of reading each night about Sudan instead of watching empty sitcom reruns, then I suppose this is a good place to start. Then, the next day, take the information with you to work and talk about it with people you know over your coffee break.
I can't imagine any parent encouraging a child to sacrifice his or her life for Cheney, and the AEI agenda. Iraq is not about national security, or US interests. It's about the interests of a small group of ideologically extreme individuals. The agenda of this ideological cabal are likely contrary to US interests and national security.
Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, "Cheney's Long Path to War,"
Newsweek, 17 November 2003
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/path.htm
Every Thursday, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have lunch together in a small dining room off the Oval Office. They eat alone; no aides are present. They have no fixed agenda, but it's a safe assumption that they often talk about intelligence--about what the United States knows, or doesn't know, about the terrorist threat.
THE PRESIDENT RESPECTS Cheney's judgment, say White House aides, and values the veep's long experience in the intelligence community (as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee in the 1980s and as secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration). As vice president, Cheney is free to roam about the various agencies, quizzing analysts and top spooks about terrorists and their global connections. "This is a very important area. It's the one the president asked me to work on ... I ask a lot of hard questions," Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert last September. "That's my job."
Of all the president's advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons." He also said, a bit optimistically, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.") After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.
Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report--widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials--that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.
Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry, deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a historian's long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically, but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate, thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon's mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.
A Cheney aide took strong exception to the notion that the vice president was at the receiving end of some kind of private pipeline for half-baked or fraudulent intelligence, or that he was somehow carrying water for the neocons or anyone else's self-serving agendas. "That's an urban myth," said this aide, who declined to be identified. Cheney has cited as his "gold standard" the National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus report put out by the entire intelligence community. And, indeed, an examination of the declassified version of the NIE reveals some pretty alarming warnings. "Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the October 2002 NIE states.
Nonetheless, it appears that Cheney has been susceptible to "cherry-picking," embracing those snippets of intelligence that support his dark prognosis while discarding others that don't. He is widely regarded in the intelligence community as an outlier, as a man who always goes for the worst-case --scenario and sometimes overlooks less alarming or at least ambiguous signs. Top intelligence officials reject the suggestion that Cheney has somehow bullied lower-level CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency analysts into telling him what he wants to hear. But they do describe the Office of the Vice President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel government that became the real power center.
Cheney, say those who know him, is in no way cynically manipulative. By all accounts, he is genuinely convinced that the threat is imminent and menacing. Professional intelligence analysts can offer measured, nuanced opinions, but policymakers, Cheney likes to say, have to decide. As he put it last July in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, "How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?" And yet Cheney seems to have rung the warning bell a little too loudly and urgently. If nothing else, his apparently exaggerated alarms over Iraq, WMD and the terror connection may make Americans slow to respond the next time he sees a wolf at the door.
What is it about Cheney’s character and background that makes him such a Cassandra? And did his powerful dirge drown out more-modulated voices in the councils of power in Washington and in effect launch America on the path to war? Cheney declined an interview request from NEWSWEEK, but interviews with his aides and a wide variety of sources in the intelligence and national-security community paint the portrait of a vice president who may be too powerful for his own good.
Cheney, say those who know him, has always had a Hobbesian view of life. The world is a dangerous place; war is the natural state of mankind; enemies lurk. The national-security state must be strong, vigilant and wary. Cheney believes that America’s military and intelligence establishments were weakened by defeat in Vietnam and the wave of scandals that followed in Watergate in the ’70s and Iran-contra in the ’80s. He did not regard as progress the rise of congressional investigating committees, special prosecutors and an increasingly adversarial, aggressive press. Cheney is a strong believer in the necessity of government secrecy as well as more broadly the need to preserve and protect the power of the executive branch.
He never delivers these views in a rant. Rather, Cheney talks in a low, arid voice, if at all. He usually waits until the end of a meeting to speak up, and then speaks so softly and cryptically, out of one side of his mouth, so that people have to lean forward to hear. (In a babble of attention-seekers, this can be a powerful way of getting heard.) Cheney rarely shows anger or alarm, but on occasion his exasperation emerges.
One such moment came at the end of the first gulf war in 1991. Cheney was secretary of Defense, and arms inspectors visiting defeated Iraq had discovered that Saddam Hussein was much closer to building a nuclear weapon than anyone had realized. Why, Cheney wondered aloud to his aides, had a steady stream of U.S. intelligence experts beaten a path to his door before the war to say that the Iraqis were at least five to 10 years away from building a bomb? Years later, in meetings of the second President Bush’s war cabinet, Cheney would return again and again to the question of how Saddam could create an entire hidden nuclear program without the CIA’s knowing much, if anything, about it.
Cheney’s suspicions—about both the strength of Iraq and the weakness of U.S. intelligence agencies—were fed after he left government. Cheney spent a considerable amount of time with the scholars and backers of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has served as a conservative government-in-waiting. Cheney was on the board of directors and his wife, Lynne, a conservative activist on social issues, still keeps an office there as a resident “fellow.” At various lunches and dinners around Washington, sponsored by AEI and other conservative organizations, Cheney came in contact with other foreign-policy hard-liners or “neoconservatives” like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. It was an article of faith in the AEI crowd that the United States had missed a chance to knock off Saddam in 1991; that Saddam was rebuilding his stockpile of WMD, and that sooner or later the Iraqi strongman would have to go. When some dissidents in northern Iraq tried to mount an insurrection with CIA backing in the mid-’90s and failed, the conservatives blamed the Clinton administration for showing weakness. Clinton’s national-security adviser, Tony Lake, had, it was alleged, “pulled the plug.”
In the late ’90s, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of one of the resistance groups, the Iraqi National Congress, began cultivating and lobbying intellectuals, journalists and political leaders in Washington. Chalabi —had a shadowy past; his family, exiled from Iraq in the late ’50s, had set up a banking empire through the Middle East that collapsed in charges of fraud in 1989. (Chalabi, who has always denied wrongdoing, has been convicted and sentenced, in absentia, by a Jordanian military court to 22 years of hard labor.) But operating out of London, the smoothly persuasive Chalabi presented himself as a democratic answer to Saddam Hussein. With a little American backing, he promised, he could rally the Iraqi people to overthrow the Butcher of Baghdad.
Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI, as the “George Washington of Iraq.” But the professionals at the State Department and at the CIA took a more skeptical view. In 1999, after Congress had passed and President Bill Clinton had signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, providing funds to support Iraqi exile groups, the U.S. government convened a conference with the INC and other opposition groups in London to discuss “regime change.” The American officials proposed bringing INC activists to America for training. Chalabi’s aides objected. Most of the likely candidates were Iraqi refugees living in various European countries. By coming to the United States, they could lose their refugee status. Some Pentagon officials shook their heads in disbelief. “You had to wonder,” said one who attended the conference, “how serious were these people. They kept telling us they wanted to risk their lives for their country. But they were afraid to risk their refugee status in Sweden?”
After the Republicans regained the White House in 2001, many of the neocons took top national-security jobs. Perle, the man closest to Chalabi, chose to stay on the outside (where he kept a lucrative lobbying practice). But Wolfowitz and Feith became, respectively, the No. 2 and No. 3 man at the Defense Department, and a former Wolfowitz aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became the vice president’s chief of staff. Once the newcomers took over, the word went out that any disparaging observations about Chalabi or the INC were no longer appreciated. “The view was, ‘If you weren’t a total INC guy, then you’re on the wrong side’,” said a Pentagon official. “It was, ‘We’re not going to trash the INC anymore and Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot who risked his life for his country’. ”
Some neocons began agitating inside the Bush administration to support some kind of insurrection, led by Chalabi, that would overthrow Saddam. In the summer of 2001, the neocons circulated a plan to support an INC-backed invasion. A senior Pentagon analyst questioned whether Iraqis would rise up to back it. “You’re thinking like the Clinton people,” a Feith aide shot back. “They planned for failure. We plan for success.” It is important to note that at this early stage, the neocons did not have the enthusiastic backing of Vice President Cheney. Just because Cheney had spent a lot of time around the Get Saddam neocons does not mean that he had become one, says an administration aide. “It’s a mistake to add up two and two and get 18,” he says. Cheney’s cautious side kept him from leaping into any potential Bay of Pigs covert actions.
What changed Cheney was not Chalabi or his friends from AEI, but the 9/11 attacks. For years Cheney had feared—and warned against—a terrorist attack on an American city. The hijacked planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon confirmed his suspicions of American vulnerability—though by no means his worst fears—that the terrorists would use a biological or nuclear weapon. “9/11 changed everything,” Cheney began saying to anyone who would listen. It was no longer enough to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement matter, Cheney believed. The United States had to find ways to act against the terrorists before they struck.
Cheney began collecting intelligence on the threat anywhere he could find it. Along with Libby, his chief of staff, the vice president began showing up at the CIA and DIA for briefings. Cheney would ask probing questions from different analysts in various agencies and then, later with his staff, connect the dots. Such an aggressive national-security role by a vice president was unusual. So was the sheer size of Cheney’s staff—about 60 people, much larger than the size of Al Gore’s. The threat from germ warfare was a particular concern of Cheney’s. After 9/11, Libby kept calling over to the Defense Department, asking what the military was doing to guard against a bio attack from crop-dusters. In July 2002, Cheney made a surprise, unpublicized visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. He wanted to question directly the public-health experts about their efforts to combat bioterrorism. If not for the traffic snarls caused by his motorcade, his visit might have remained a secret.
There was, within the administration, another office parsing through intelligence on the Iraqi and terror threat. The Office of Special Plans was so secretive at first that the director, William Luti, did not even want to mention its existence. “Don’t ever talk about this,” Luti told his staff, according to a source who attended early meetings. “If anybody asks, just say no comment.” (Luti does not recall this, but he does regret choosing such a spooky name for the office.) The Office of Special Plans has sometimes been described as an intelligence cell, along the lines of “Team B,” set up by the Ford administration in the 1970s to second-guess the CIA when conservatives believed that the intelligence community was underestimating the Soviet threat. But OSP is more properly described as a planning group—planning for war in Iraq. Some of the OSP staffers were true believers. Abe Shulsky, a defense intellectual who ran the office under Luti, was a Straussian, a student of a philosopher named Leo Strauss, who believed that ancient texts had hidden meanings that only an elite could divine. Strauss taught that philosophers needed to tell —”noble lies” to the politicians and the people.
The OSP gathered up bits and pieces of intelligence that pointed to Saddam’s WMD programs and his ties to terror groups. The OSP would prepare briefing papers for administration officials to use. The OSP also drew on reports of defectors who alleged that Saddam was hiding bio and chem weapons under hospitals and schools. Some of these defectors were provided to the intelligence community by Chalabi, who also fed them to large news organizations, like The New York Times. Vanity Fair published a few of the more lurid reports, deemed to be bogus by U.S. intelligence agencies (like one alleging that Saddam was running a terrorist-training camp, complete with a plane fuselage in which to practice hijackings). The CIA was skeptical about the motivation and credibility of these defectors, but their stories gained wide circulation.
Cheney’s staffers were in more than occasional contact with the OSP. Luti, an intense and brilliant former naval aviator who flew combat missions in the gulf war, worked in Cheney’s office before he took over OSP, and was well liked by Cheney’s staff. Luti’s office had absorbed a small, secretive intelligence-analysis shop in the Pentagon known as Team B (after the original Team B) whose research linked 9/11 to both Al Qaeda and the Iranian terror group Hizbullah. The team was particularly fascinated by the allegation that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. One of Team B’s creators—David Wurmser—now works on Cheney’s staff. Libby went to at least one briefing with Team B staffers at which they discussed Saddam’s terror connections. It would be a mistake, however, to overstate the influence of OSP on Cheney or his staff. Cheney collected information from many sources, but principally from the main intelligence agencies, the CIA and DIA. Likewise, Cheney’s aides say that they talked to Chalabi and his people about “opposition politics”—not about WMD or terrorism. (“The whole idea that we were mainlining dubious INC reports into the intelligence community is simply nonsense,” Paul Wolfowitz told NEWSWEEK.)
There has been much speculation in the press and in the intelligence community about the impact of the conspiracy theories of Laurie Mylroie on the Bush administration. A somewhat eccentric Harvard-trained political scientist, Mylroie argued (from guesswork and sketchy evidence) that the 1993 World Trade Center attack was an Iraqi intelligence operation. When AEI published an updated version of her book “Study of Revenge” two years ago, her acknowledgments cited the help of, among others, Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of State John Bolton and Libby. But Cheney aides say that the vice president has never even discussed Mylroie’s book. (“I take satisfaction in the fact that we went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein,” said Mylroie. “The rest is details.”)
Cheney is hardly the only intelligence adviser to the president. CIA Director George Tenet briefs the president every morning. But Tenet was often caught up defending his agency. Cheney feels free to criticize, and he does. “Cheney was very distrustful and remains very distrustful of the traditional intelligence establishment,” says a former White House official. “He thinks they are too cautious or too invested in their own policy concerns.” Cheney is not as “passionate” in his dissents as Wolfowitz, the leading intellectual neocon in the administration. But he carries more clout.
Cheney often teams up with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to roll over national-security adviser Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell. “OVP [Cheney’s office] and OSD [Rumsfeld’s office] turned into their own axis of evil,” grouses a former White House official, who added that Cheney and Rumsfeld shared the same strategic vision: pessimistic and dark. Some observers see a basic breakdown in the government. Rice has chosen to play more of an advisory role to the president and failed to coordinate the often warring agencies like State and Defense. “Cheney was acting as national-security adviser because of Rice’s failure to do so,” says Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
State Department staffers say that Cheney’s office pushed hard to include dubious evidence of Iraq’s terror ties in Powell’s speech to the United Nations last February. Libby fought for an inclusion of the alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Powell resisted, but Powell’s aides were impressed with Libby’s persistence. In the end, the reference to Atta was dropped, but Powell did include other examples linking Baghdad to Al Qaeda. When the State Department wanted to cut off funds to Chalabi for alleged accounting failures, Cheney backed shifting the money from the State Department to the Defense Department. It is significant, however, that Cheney ultimately did not support setting up Chalabi as a government in exile, a ploy that the State Department and CIA strongly opposed. They feared that Chalabi would proclaim himself ruler-by-fiat after an American invasion. Though Chalabi’s people often talked to Cheney’s staff, the vice president has no particular brief for the INC chief over any other democratically elected leader, says an administration official.
Accused of overstating the Iraqi threat by politicians and pundits, Cheney is publicly and privately unrepentant. He believes that Al Qaeda is determined to obtain weapons of mass destruction and use them against American civilians in their cities and homes. To ignore those warnings would be “irresponsible in the extreme,” he says in his speeches. His staffers are not unmindful of the risk of crying wolf, however, and acknowledge that if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq, the public will be much less likely to back pre-emptive wars in the future. Cheney still believes the WMD will turn up somewhere in Iraq—if they aren’t first used against us by terrorists.
With Tamara Lipper, Richard Wolffe and Roy Gutman
Martial Law
by Michael Nolan
Many folks accept, some with a sense of high probability, that the US will suffer a terrorist attack, perhaps of horrific proportions. If that happens, as General Tommy Franks and others have suggested, democracy could well fail and the US Constitution could be brought down and replaced by martial law. An attack would leave a terrified US populace, many of them so desperate for a sense of order, so lustful for revenge against the terrorists (to be identified by the War Machine, of course) that they will follow the US Government in lockstep. Nuke Iran and Syria immediately (as neocons have wanted to do for quite some time)? No problem. Arrest and intimidate anyone who dares speak out against the government? Hey, national security is at stake. Vigilantism waged against dissident “traitors”? We’re fighting for the survival of Western civilization, for God’s sake.
But that can’t happen here!
Well it can happen here. Consider the moral character of those in the White House and consider the demonstrated failure of Congress to stop them on their long march to disaster. Americans would be wise to adopt the attitude toward government leaders held by their ancestors. In 1787, citizens harbored disdainfully little trust in government. After viewing the original version of the US Constitution, they found no explicit enumerations of a citizen’s right to bear arms, to speak freely, to get a fair trial, etc. Show it to us in writing, demanded the patriots and thus, two years later, was born the Bill of Rights. They assumed, and so should we, that government leaders, unchecked, have limitless potential for harm toward the citizenry.
This is the government, after all, that runs a gulag network of CIA prison camps. These facilities were “black” (so secret that they didn’t ostensibly exist) until being outed, anonymously, to the Washington Post. One camp, fittingly, is in a former Soviet compound in Eastern Europe. Who the prisoners are, how they are interrogated or even how many make it out alive is unknown. While Dick Cheney fights tooth and nail to prevent any reining in of American brutality in the questioning of prisoners overseas, President Bush threatens to veto the John McCain anti-torture bill that passed in the Senate 90-9. If we, the people, allow government leaders to commit unnamed, unaccounted-for tortures upon those we hold in far-flung gulags – in “support” of a war that these leaders can’t explain to the American people or the world – it won’t be surprising when, in the event of domestic chaos at home, they visit like horrors upon their own citizens.
Senator Joe Lieberman, Honorary Co-Chairman of the hawkish, right-wing Committee on the Present Danger and a firm supporter of the war in Iraq, has this to say: "The fear...of federal military usurping state and local authority and, in the worst case, martial law imposed by a president has to give way to the reality of lives on the line." Senator John Warner expressed similar sentiments in a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Both men were speaking in the context of natural disasters, after the post-Katrina government rescue debacle. Since Katrina, the mention of martial law is trendy in government circles and in the media. The trouble is: it’s a short conceptual leap from the pushing of a recalcitrant homeowner out of a hurricane zone at the end of a federal bayonet, to the violent dispersal of angry crowds gathered to voice disapproval of a fascist state.
How would the neocon think tanks view martial law? Michael Ledeen, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and close and trusted White House adviser, has this to say on p. 173 of his book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago: “Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader – a dictator – willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to employ."
According to the Boston Globe, Ledeen in a 2003 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, asserted our nation’s insatiable lust for war by claiming that "All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .What we hate is not casualties but losing." Did anyone in the media ever challenge an administration spokesman to defend Ledeen’s staggeringly wrongheaded, anti-American values? Did any of the (self-described) scholars at AEI that day ask why the GD fool would say such a thing? President Bush, for his part has personally offered these congratulations to the AEI: “At the American Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds.”
The leaders of the War Machine – with their gulags, their lies, their senseless, immoral war – do not treat enemies and purported enemies terribly well. In the event of martial law, it would be naïve indeed to suspect that they would treat Americans any better. Patriots – left, right and center – should unite under the American flag to stop the War Machine today while they still can. The impeachment of Bush and Cheney is the obvious place to start. We, the people, should demand it of the US Congress, just as statesmen and citizens of their time demanded the Bill of Rights. Congress should be ordered, as well, to act responsibly and responsively and in the best interest of the sovereign Republic of the United States of America, not in the interest of neocon warmongers.
November 12, 2005
Michael Nolan [send him mail] is a freelance writer from Taunton, MA. His work recently appeared in Common Dreams and OpEdNews.com. His fiction has appeared in the Dublin Writers Workshop Electric Acorn. He is currently finishing a novel.
Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com
Cheney is evil. You can see it in his face. Cheney is the AEI's man in the Whitehouse. Lynne Cheney is a board member. Anyone who thinks Cheney or AEI serves US interests is fooling themselves.
Fighting? Maybe cultural, contemporary cultural?
They certainly have their angry population, and Israel, and the US, largely thriving populations, are easy targets for anger.
They have the one commodity the global economy is dependant upon. Without oil, prosperity would stop. Yet most Arabs live in abject poverty while the ruling class lives with unimaginable wealth. Blame is more appropriately placed with their despotic rulers than with the US. But we are not without fault. Much of the Arab hostility that we experience today is related to our self serving, oil motivated history in the region. Iran is a specific example. When it suited us we supported some of the most brutal regimes known to man. And we wonder why they hate us?
Israel is another situation. The Palestinian conflict inflames tension, but Israel is also closely allied with the US and, unlike in other mideast countries, US policy has always been favorable to Israel and it's people. The US is bashed for support of Israel, but I sometimes wonder if it's not a little like the chicken and the egg.
Reed is a dangerous man. They all are, and they have been intoxicated by the power they have achieved. I'm just hoping Americans wake up before we find ourselves living in their christian nation. It seems that Americans are becoming more aware, and they're rejecting what they see.
To small a population yet, where? Not in our urban areas. You don't think the same could happen in a the Bronx, Hoboken or Chicago?
"I believe that serving our country in the military is an honorable thing to do."
I do to, and I believe government owns the highest respect to those who serve. Inherent to respect is truthfulness, and not sending them to battle on half truths. We have to value life more than that.
I too would support my child. What other choice is there? But the thought of their risking their lives in a war built on false pretense, and for a less than truthful government is disheartening. I hope that's a decision we never have to confront.
France is burning. Tensions have only escalated elsewhere. How long before we experience our own unrest on US soil?
Students rebuffing military recruiters
More high schoolers in state opt out of lists
By Maria Sacchetti and Jenna Russell, Globe Staff | November 13, 2005
More than 5,000 high school students in five of the state's largest school districts have removed their names from military recruitment lists, a trend driven by continuing casualties in Iraq and a well-organized peace movement that has urged students to avoid contact with recruiters.
The number of students removing their names has jumped significantly over the past year, especially in school systems with many low-income and minority students, where parents and activists are growing increasingly assertive in challenging military recruiters' access to young people.
Since 2002, under the federal No Child Left Behind law, high schools have been required to provide lists of students' names, telephone numbers, and addresses to military recruiters who ask for them, as well as colleges and potential employers. Students who do not wish to be contacted -- or their parents -- notify their school districts in writing.
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2005/11/13/students_rebuffing_military_recruiters...
Knowing what we know now, would you support your daughters decision to enlist and serve in Iraq?
FOX NEWS BUYS AL-JAZEERA
'Hannity & Hussein' Among New Network's Programs
Under intense pressure from the Bush administration to sell its controversial al-Jazeera network, the nation of Qatar stunned the television industry today by agreeing to sell the broadcast company to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel.
Television insiders were taken aback that the network whose motto is "We Report - You Decide," would acquire a broadcast entity whose slogan is "Death to the Infidels." But according to Murdoch, owner of Fox parent company News Corporation, the merger was a natural because, in his words, "We took a look at their format and realized that it was almost identical to ours."
"If we really roll up our sleeves & make this merger work, we may wind up with the fairest & most balanced network mankind has ever known," Murdoch added. The media mogul said that changes to al-Jazeera's programming would be "minimal" at first: "We'll be going through their news copy & every time they call President Bush 'Satan,' we'll take out the words 'President Bush' & replace them with 'Ted Kennedy.'"
But viewers can expect much bigger changes to come, as the channel plans to drop al-Jazeera's most popular program, This Week in Jihad, in favor of a new show, Hannity & Hussein. In the words of a Fox-Jazeera press release, Hannity & Hussein will be "a lively political discussion featuring Fox personality Sean Hannity, from the right, & deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, from his prison cell."
Andy Borowitz
Wes Clark: Intelligence Was Hyped
November 12, 2005
http://www.newshounds.us/
Wesley Clark, obviously an efficient time manager, wasted none softening his statements to Kiran Chetry on Fox & Friends this morning. He wasn't about to let the FOX spinmeisters help Bush avoid responsibility again. After Chetry asked him to respond the charges Bush made against Democrats yesterday, Clark answered with total calm and conviction. "Bush has a lot to answer for. The intelligence was hyped."
Clark went on to say that Cheney's talk about mushroom clouds and Iraq's short term capability to make nuclear bombs was irresponsible adding that nobody was shown the dissenting intelligence that warned against going into Iraq before voting for the war. "Going into Iraq was a blunder", Clark stated firmly.
Chetry asked another question complaining about the Bush critics and Clark tossed it aside saying that it's inevitable that voters want accountability. " That's Democracy." He then explained that before a time for withdrawl can be set three things must be done.
1. The Iraq government and army must be stable.
2. The terrorism problem in Iraq that was caused by this war must be handled
3. The regional issues with Iran and Syria must be resolved through diplomacy.
Clark informed Chetry that we're not getting any help in Iraq because we treated everyone so badly. He made the point that we made Syria and Iran part of the problem by acting like we could do everything alone. We should have used diplomacy to make them part of the solution.
comment: I've been trying to analyze Clark's ability to counter spin. Part of it is emotional detachment allowing him to fix blame without passing judgement. He hands out the truth, defines the problem and offers a solution. Howard Dean has the same gift. Just imagine if either of them were in the White House right now?
Reported by deborah at November 12, 2005 02:52 PM
Rather than a democracy, Bush has created a terrorist hub in the center of the mideast. The region has been destabilized and the effects will be felt for years to come. All of this was predicted by military experts, but the idiot at the helm choose the advise of Cheney and a bunch of think-tank intellectuals over military and foreign policy experts. Public sentiment has turned on the Iraq war, seeing the folly for what it it, but how do we get out without leaving the region more dangerous than when we started the war? With militant Islam as it it, a more destabilized mideast threatens the world. At least Saddam was the devil we knew.
O'Reilly wasn't always a idiot. Nor was Cavuto. Both seem to have gone over the top with the propaganda effort. Who knows what goes on behind the scenes at the Fox ministry of propaganda. Some day they'll write books, and that'll make for great historical reading.
I think it's more than oped. I think they're attempting brainwashing, and for a longtime they seem to have succeeded, but nothing lasts for ever. Public sentiment has overwhelming turned against the war party, and the majority of Americans believe Bush is not honest. Where Fox goes from here remains to be seen, but you can bet they've got propaganda-meisters strategising a way to spin their way out of this. Cavuto wants us to be "good americans" and forget the past. Imagine that. That's like the serial killer saying forget the bodies, and give me another chance. A lot of people are dead due to the Bush/neocon follies. If it's about democracy, we need to hold the culprits accountable.
THEIR TERRORISM, AND OURS
NAPALM IS BACK IN STYLE
By: Justin Raimondo
The War Party is going bonkers, these days – maybe it's the indictment of Scooter Libby. Or the way the war itself is going – badly. In any case, the war's proponents seem to be in a downward spiral of what can only be described as utter craziness. Why else would this administration – or, at least, the office of the vice president – be openly pushing to exempt the CIA from U.S. laws against torture?
America, from the "shining city on a hill" to the dark dungeon of sadistic torturers. What a comedown! Abu Ghraib, we were told, was an "aberration." Now they want to make it a policy. How low can we go?
We're supposed to be spreading "democracy" and "freedom" throughout the Middle East, according to this administration and its Washington amen corner, but how is human liberty advanced by frying Iraqi civilians with incendiary phosphorous bombs [video]? http://www.rainews24.it/ran24/clips/Video/fallujah_Rainews24.wmv
If that isn't a war crime, then nothing is.
Check out the whole video, produced by the Italian station RAI, here – and you tell me if we haven't descended into barbarism.
What strikes me about the Italian video occurs in an interview with two American soldiers – witnesses to this horror – in which one of them describes his orders to kill "anything that moves" in the Fallujah free-fire zone.
What the U.S. government is doing in Iraq is precisely what Milosevic was accused of in Kovoso: targeting a population for near-extermination and dispersal, i.e., "ethnic cleansing." Fallujah, as this video proves, was "cleansed" in a phosphorescent lake of fire.
The administration and its supporters continually refer to the insurgents in Iraq as "terrorists" – but if we're using a napalm-like substance to bomb population centers like Fallujah, then what are we?
The warlords of Washington aren't exporting "democracy" – they're exporting terrorism.
Not only is this monstrous, it's incredibly stupid: is this how we're trying to build support for "democracy" in the wider Arab world? We might as well keep Karen Hughes at home. The poor woman already has an impossible job – but that video of burnt Iraqi women and children, the skin hanging off their bodies, their melted faces coagulating into a grimace of universal sorrow, makes her a moving target.
Winning hearts and minds – there's an echo of the past we hear often – was supposedly the goal of the LBJ-Nixon administrations in raining napalm and other chemical weapons, like Agent Orange, on Vietnam. But we have already lost that battle if we have to resort to burning the "liberated" people of Iraq alive.
The death visited by phosphorous bombs is an eerie one: the bombs explode and spread a lethal cloud that goes right through clothing and seeks out flesh, searing and eating it up like some airborne ghoul. We are confronted with the sight of charred skeletons, the skin dripping off the bone, with clothing still clinging to the corpses.
What kind of demonic evil justifies this – in the name of "liberty"?
The policy is not only crazed, but anyone and everyone who supports it, at this point, is dangerously deluded, and this is coming out in the recent utterances of prominent warmongers. Norman Podhoretz, for instance, is reduced to arguing, in the current Commentary, that everyone believed Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction," including many prominent Democrats, and therefore no one ought to criticize the war, because we are all equally implicated in an elaborate process of self-deception. Somehow, critics of the war who never accepted the WMD argument – like Scott Ritter, often cited in this space during the run-up to the invasion – go unmentioned in Podhoretz's screed.
Aside from being just plain wrong on the facts of the case, what kind of a loony argument is it that tries to justify a war by underscoring the incompetence of the government that started it? Only a neocon would even attempt it. They don't have much choice, though, beyond going completely silent: the only alternative is admitting that the whole thing was an outright deception, which is what the polls are telling us the majority of Americans have come to believe, anyway.
Another casualty lost to the epidemic of diminished mental powers afflicting the more voluble neocons is Christopher Hitchens, who told blogger Kris Lofgren, at the Chalabi-fest over at AEI the other day… well, let Lofgren tell it:
"Hitchens then turned the subject back to Chalabi, his good friend. I asked him if he thought Chalabi had been passing American intelligence to the Iranians. 'No,' he insisted. 'It's possible that with his training, you know, at [the University of] Chicago that with his own ability he was able to crack the codes. He is a mathematical genius. His expertise is cryptology. It is possible that he broke the codes himself.'"
Let's leave aside the complete impossibility of this scenario – Chalabi's specialty is not cryptology, but in group theory – and ignore what it says about the weird Washington-based cult the neocons have built up around the Great Embezzler. What, exactly, is Hitchens saying about Chalabi's relationship with Tehran? The vital information Chalabi is charged with passing on to the Iranians is that the Americans had broken their code and were reading their internal government communications. So Hitchens is saying Chalabi told the mullahs: your code is cracked, and I know because I'm the one who cracked it. How, exactly, does this exonerate Chalabi?
Poor Hitchens. Whatever comes out of his mouth, these days, is more the result of delirium tremens than the product of human reasoning.
Lacking any genuine moral sense, "Hitch" exhibits no remorse, no regrets, no second thoughts about having helped sire the horrors we are seeing today in Iraq. Everybody wants Chalabi to apologize – but what about our own neocons, who relentlessly pushed the wily Iraqi's fabrications as solid facts? Not a chance.
Podhoretz, too, is similarly unreflective, and not at all humbled by the catastrophic failure of the Iraq misadventure. The neocons speak abstractly, in ideological terms, about the war, referring often to "democracy" and "liberalizing" Arab society, and avoiding any discussion of concretes or costs. However, "democracy" has nothing to do with it – except insofar as the Americans and their allies can get the consent of the Shi'ite-Kurd majority to systematically kill off – and drive off – the Sunni minority. And "freedom" sure as heck has nothing to do with it – except the "freedom" of our neoconservative theoreticians to dress up mass murder in "patriotic" and even "idealistic" robes.
This ideological window-dressing, however, becomes less convincing as the true ugliness and brutality of the war is brought home to the American people. I was struck by what one of the American GIs said in the Italian video: the Fallujah operation was all about "killing Arabs" in large numbers. This, it seems to me, gets at the essential goal of the invasion and occupation of Iraq: it is a targeted mass slaughter. Its purpose is to terrorize not only the people of Iraq, but the entire region, and Muslims worldwide. Submit – or this will happen to you.
This war has become one prolonged act of state terrorism, and anyone who continues to support it – now that the full horror of American military tactics has been exposed – becomes a pro-terrorist fellow-traveler. I don't know if Dante reserved a special rung of Hell for such people, but if not, it should be fairly close to the bottom of the infernal pit.
Mass murder, torture, and a military strategy founded on unmitigated cruelty and horror – that's what this war is about. Its symbol is Lynndie England wielding a leash. Insofar as it is based on any philosophical worldview, I would look for the clue to this not in The Federalist Papers, but in the works of the Marquis de Sade. We are inflicting pain and raining clouds of death on a society, not to achieve any goal, but, I would argue, purely for the perverted pleasure of exhibiting our power.
Paul Wolfowitz famously argued in favor of attacking Iraq in the wake of 9/11 "because we can." We can, therefore we will – what would be quickly diagnosed as sociopathic behavior in an individual is the same mindset that dominates our top policymakers. This is a policy, not of "liberation," but of domination – and the main threat to liberty and peace on earth.
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Justin Raimondo is Editorial Director of AntiWar.Com. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.