Replies to post #1323 on Nothing But Politics

[sylvester80]

US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques
Posted on Sunday, April 06 @ 10:18:33 EDT
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By Liam McDougall, Glasgow Sunday Herald

Fears that Iraq's heritage will face widespread looting at the end of the Gulf war have been heightened after a group of wealthy art dealers secured a high-level meeting with the US administration.

It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US defence and state department officials prior to the start of military action to offer its assistance in preserving the country's invaluable archaeological collections.

The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq's laws as 'retentionist' and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US.



Before the Gulf war, a main strand of the ACCP's campaigning has been to persuade its government to revise the Cultural Property Implementation Act in order to minimise efforts by foreign nations to block the import into the US of objects, particularly antiques.

News of the group's meeting with the government has alarmed scientists and archaeologists who fear the ACCP is working to a hidden agenda that will see the US authorities ease restrictions on the movement of Iraqi artefacts after a coalition victory in Iraq.

Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, leading Cambridge archaeologist and director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, said: 'Iraqi antiquities legislation protects Iraq. The last thing one needs is some group of dealer-connected Americans interfering. Any change to those laws would be absolutely monstrous. '

A wave of protest has also come from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), which says any weakening of Iraq's strict antiquities laws would be 'disastrous'. President Patty Gerstenblith said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities through weakening the laws of archaeologically-rich nations and eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export. '

The ACCP has caused deep unease among archaeologists since its creation in 2001. Among its main members are collectors and lawyers with chequered histories in collecting valuable artefacts, including alleged exhibitions of Nazi loot.

They denied accusations of attempting to change Iraq's treatment of archaeological objects. Instead, they said at the January meeting they offered 'post-war technical and financial assistance', and 'conservation support'.

©2002 smg sunday newspapers ltd.

Reprinted from The Glasgow Sunday Herald:
http://www.sundayherald.com/32895

[sylvester80]

Bush administration cronies set to make a killing in post-war Iraq
Posted on Sunday, April 06 @ 10:17:18 EDT
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The chequered past of US firms in the frame

By Oliver Morgan and Ed Vulliamy, The Observer

Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, set out last week to counter accusations that $600 million worth of contracts for reconstruction in Iraq that he is to award to US companies, some with strong Republican links, were examples of cronyism.

'If you need a surgeon, a lawn service, a real estate agent or a college, you seek out the names with the reputation for quality and the ability to get the job done,' he said. Strange, then, that a front-runner is construction giant Bechtel, whose record in managing America's biggest public works project has been, by most accounts, disastrous. Only last week, Bechtel's record in managing the 'Big Dig', a £14.8bn project to burrow a highway under Boston, was criticised at a public hearing in the city.



The project dates back to 1985, when it was costed at $3.5bn. Severe complications mean it will be completed only next year, and last week's hearings were about who was to blame - the state or private contractors, led by Bechtel and New York-based Parsons Brinckerhoff.

Natsios should know all about this: in fact, he was invited to give evidence but said he was too busy 'directing the relief and construction effort in Iraq'. The reason for the invitation was that between 2000 and 2001 he was chief executive of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, the organisation with responsibility for the Big Dig.

According to Senator Robert Havern, chairman of the Massachusetts Joint Transportation Committee, it was when Natsios was Turnpike chief that the biggest rise in costs, from $10.8bn to $14.7bn, took place. Havern says: 'This is the biggest works project in the history of America, and it is the largest cost overrun of any project.' He thought some of the fault would be Bechtel's, and was surprised Bechtel was in consideration for Iraq. 'I cannot believe that he [Natsios] would not, with the knowledge he has from here, be very sceptical.'

Bechtel is a powerful company, with links to the Republican Party at the highest level going back to the 1980s, when senior executives such as George Shultz were appointed to the Reagan administration. The company put in a bid to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to Aqaba on the Red Sea, a project first mooted by Shultz at the US State Department. It would dearly like to return to Iraq.

Another company until recently in line for the $600m contract is the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, whose connections are even more impeccable --Vice- President Dick Cheney was formerly chief executive - and whose contributions more generous. It has ruled itself out of the bidding for the $600m contract, which observers say suggests it has woken up to the possible political damage. But it aims to team up with Parsons, still in the bidding, as a sub-contractor, and has a lucrative deal to tap oil well fires in Iraq. Most of all, it is poised for the main area of US spending in post-war Iraq: maintenance of the military - building houses, barracks, water systems, and operating everything from heavy equipment to mail and laundry.

When George Bush went to Congress to ask for $65.6 billion for the war, he earmarked $2.4bn for aid and reconstruction, with $17bn for other post-war costs. According to Pratap Chatterjee, of California-based CorpWatch, the Halliburton subsidiary still stands to make a killing. 'The main money is not in reconstruction; the main money is in supporting the troops. Whoever gets that money will be running all the bases for an army that is not going to leave. Around 80 per cent of the budget goes to the military, and the rest on reconstruction.'

The US garrison in Iraq will dwarf that in Afghanistan. In December 2001, KBR secured a 10-year contract from the Pentagon that enables it to run military related projects anywhere in the world, for a guaranteed profit. So far, KBR has netted $830m from the programme.

Natsios may well thank KBR for bowing out of the main construction contract. But with Halliburton's designs on other deals, his knowledge of Bechtel's Boston record, and claims that Fluor, another of the major bidders, has an unsavoury past in South Africa, his task remains complicated and controversial.

Reprinted from The Observer:
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,930562,00.html

[sylvester80]

George McGovern: 'The reason why'
Posted on Sunday, April 06 @ 10:15:07 EDT
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By George McGovern, The Nation

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (in the Crimean War)

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.

He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern.



The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly. This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)

The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address. War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.

Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others. My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration. For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.

During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider." As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him." In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not." This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.

As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.

Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.

I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.

We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.

During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.

I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.

The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?

It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen." Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated." The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never comtemplated."

I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.

The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.

But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.

George McGovern, senator from South Dakota from 1962 to 1980 and Democratic candidate for President in 1972, is the author of The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time (Simon & Schuster).

Reprinted from The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=mcgovern

[sylvester80]

Mary Riddell: 'A morally hollow victory'
Posted on Sunday, April 06 @ 10:12:55 EDT
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No amount of PR will disguise the fact that this war is an outrage against humanity

By Mary Riddell, The Observer

The showdown approaches and the propaganda war moves on. Do not linger on images of a shroud-wrapped infant with a dummy clamped between grey lips. Do not think of a mother clasping the broken bodies of her two children in the car shot up at a military checkpoint. Or, if you cannot remove them from your memory, see such killings as the necessary price of liberation.

Be mindful, as the endgame plays out, of the Home Secretary's guidelines on war coverage. Some British journalists, he complains, are reporting the conflict in a manner that lends 'moral equivalence' to the Iraqi regime and encourages a 'progressive and liberal public' to believe this distorted version. Mr Blunkett, who yesterday embellished his assertions, is doubly wrong. There is no bias, nor the slightest hint that Bush, Blair and Saddam register equally on the weighbridge of tyranny.



On the separate question of whether Iraqi acts of war are on a par with those of the coalition, the answer is also simple. Ours are sometimes worse. The spectre of chemical attack remains, but, amid Iraqi Scuds unfired and bio-weapons undiscovered, reality trumps fear. The cluster-bombing of civilians by an invading force proclaiming its superior power is an outrage against humanity and the Geneva Convention.

The Government defends their use. Clare Short's conscience has not visibly twitched. Geoff Hoon, when asked on Radio 4 to consider Iraqi mothers mourning their dead children, demonstrated the compassion of a haddock. How unsurprising that, from Basingstoke to Basra, the Whitehall psy-ops department has failed to win its PR battle.

This, politicians say, is partly the fault of a feral media. Making 'snap judgments' on the basis of television footage is dangerous, according to the Foreign Secretary of a government that invited us to judge Saddam's mindset on the basis of a plagiarised PhD thesis. The First and Second World Wars might never have been won, Jack Straw mused, if they had been covered by 24-hour news channels.

It is true that war reporting has speeded up since AD 106, the year that Trajan commissioned the column offering a picture chronicle of his Romanian campaign. The Bayeux Tapestry, many years in the making after the Norman Conquest, could not compete with any factual embroidery confected between Channel 4 News and The World Tonight .

But reporters have been embedded since Crimea and before. The Dunkirk spirit would almost certainly have withstood those images of conflict fit to be shown on Sky. In fairness, Mr Straw acknowledged the merits of front-line news and deplored delay and censorship that once 'helped governments to suppress the truth'.

They still do. Only obfuscation is harder now, in an age of scrutiny. Politicians dislike ceaseless coverage not because it masks the truth but because it exposes it. You can no longer dismiss a marketplace bombing causing many civilian deaths and tell everyone, as Mr Straw did, that it seems 'increasingly probable' that Iraq did it. Two British journalists claim to have found fragments of a US missile, and most people prefer their word to the Minister's. Wartime PR is a slippery game. It always was.

In America, in 1917, the administration grasped, for the first time, that war, like pop-up toasters, was a marketable commodity. Its salesman, Woodrow Wilson, who had run for office on a peace ticket, established a giant propaganda ministry, the US Committee for Public Information. Its mission was to persuade liberal progressives that war chimed with their ideas of a new and rational world order.

'Four-minute men' were recruited as volunteer preachers instructing their communities to shop unpatriotic neighbours as suspected spies. Citizens were warned that America might be renamed New Prussia, while Hollywood was told that no films could be exported without an undertaking to show US propaganda films alongside.

But something more fundamental was happening. According to Stuart Ewen, the social historian of spin, the CPI extinguished the Enlightenment dictum that people were essentially rational. Public opinion was for mobilising and managing. The public mind, Ewen wrote, was now seen as an entity to 'be manufactured, not reasoned with'.

The mantra, then as today, was to make the world safe for democracy. Although Wilson's war was more marketable than Bush's, the tactic of persuasion his agency devised has lasted. Almost a century on, politicians with battles to sell still seek to manipulate minds. The made-to-measure mentality is supposed to be as amnesiac and forgiving as required. It is primed never to ask, should no weapons of mass destruction be found: what was this war for?

It is meant to agree that killing 1,000 civilians and countless thousand unlamented soldiers, some as young and hopeful as dead British 'heroes', is a down payment on a better world. It is groomed to think, against all precedence, that you can bomb a nation to democracy. Just in case the corpses do not speak for themselves, Blair is dropping some more leaflets to tell Iraqis that their new-look country will not be a Pentagon across the water. Except that it most probably will, if neo-conservatives have their way.

But PR decrees that we must forget the dangers of such a move. Equally, we are supposed not to notice that Arab TV stations, a new and potent public-relations force, are inflam ing multitudes of hearts and minds with their graphic version of what the Western coalition has been up to.

We, by contrast, are invited to despise the independent al-Jazeera, condemned by Mr Blunkett as a Saddam tool, and soak up good news images. Ignore the nastiness and think instead of the brave 'rescue' of Private Jessica Lynch from the hospital ward where she was being treated with all available medical skill.

The PR campaign wants upbeat stories. It does not want curmudgeons who opposed this war because pre-emptive strikes against sovereign states run counter to law and sanity. If Baghdad falls mercifully quickly, and if there is no more terrible loss of life, the mind- management machine will decree that Bush and Blair have secured a triumph. They will be just as wrong as they were last week.

Their setbacks have been of their own devising, not manufactured by media that have dithered between triumph and disaster. And, actually, 24/7 coverage has done the Government a favour. The soap of war, with its sanitised pictures and labyrinthine storylines, should be a politician's dream. Such visual Ritalin offers a distraction from how dangerous the bigger picture may look.

Nato and the UN lie among the mangled bodies on the road to Baghdad. Ravaged cities continue to hold out against the coalition. Still, barring a catastrophic fightback by Saddam, the carnage may end soon. The PR machine decrees that, at such a point, all objectors should repent and give thanks for the wisdom of Bush and Blair.

But victory does not vindicate a misguided attack or clarify its consequences. At least we knew roughly what sort of war we were getting. Marketing the peace will be a tougher challenge. We have been sold a new world order and no one can specify what the product will be.

[e-mail]

Reprinted from The Observer:
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,930815,00.html

[sylvester80]

Paul Vitello: 'A warm hand cools quickly'
Posted on Sunday, April 06 @ 10:03:52 EDT
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By Paul Vitello, Newsday

At about 1 a.m. on March 21, soon after the start of the war, members of the House of Representatives gave our troops a warm hand in the form of a resolution commending their bravery in launching Operation Iraqi Freedom.

At 3 a.m., however, by a narrow margin, the Congress flipped the finger at the future of those same troops - in the form of a budget resolution that cut $14 billion from veterans programs over the next 10 years.

In all, 215 House members voted to cut veterans' benefits, and 212 voted against it. It was part of the huge House budget resolution for 2004, and it came up at 3 in the morning because ... to tell you the truth, I don't know why it was 3. I guess the members have a lot of work to do during the day, saluting the flag, reciting the pledge, attending funeral services for constituents killed in the war.



Anyway, the main feature of the 3 a.m. budget plan was a proposed $1.4-trillion tax cut - the backbone of the Republican vision for a future of economic health, faith-based social services, privatized national parks and prisons, and more wealth for the wealthy.

The cuts in veterans benefits would be a sort of collateral damage in the service of that objective.

Other programs that would be damaged included Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches, student loans, disability compensation, environmental protection. But in the context of the then-2-day-old war - the sandstorms, the 100-degree fighting in chemical suits, the dying - it was the veterans benefit cuts that must have caused a pause among even the most radical tax-cut loonies in the House.

House members voting in favor of this resolution - and to be completely fair about this, they were all Republicans, all beholden to the tax-cut fundamentalists who hold leadership in the House, and all pretty sure their lunacy would be checked and balanced by the Senate, which has since already passed a smaller tax cut with far fewer cuts in services - knew perfectly well they wouldn't be featured on the morning news shows that day for this, um, hypocritical and slimy mugging of veterans.

There was a war going on. Every talking head, and every front page in the country, would be all war all the time. And sure enough, the House budget resolution of March 21 has received about as much attention during these weeks as the weather on Mars.

Except among those who know war. Those who know what happens to warriors after war.

"We have a history in the military of never leaving our wounded behind," said Fred Denninger of Rocky Point, one of 15 local veterans assembled Friday by Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) for a meeting about the impact of the budget resolution on veterans benefits. "But we bring them back for what? To be thrown out of the VA hospital when they get old?"

As it stands, the House budget would cut about $1 billion in medical benefits for veterans in 2004 and tighten income eligibility requirements for veterans receiving the services that remain.

Drug benefits are cut. Disability benefits are cut.

In a speech defending a $265-billion package of service cuts that included the veterans-program cuts, Rep. Jim Nussle, the Iowa Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, denounced Democrats who opposed it for being unwilling to confront "waste and abuse in this government."

Veterans groups have organized to restore these programs of "waste and abuse" that may mean medicine for an 80-year-old World War II vet or drug treatment for a 23-year-old Iraq war veteran next year.

"Cutting already under-funded veterans programs to offset the costs of tax cuts is indefensible and callous," Edward R. Heath Sr., national commander of the Disabled American Veterans organization, said in a statement last week. The Senate already has passed budget measures that would increase some veterans benefits - measures that must be reconciled with the House bill. And so, it will probably end up in a draw.

Bishop told the veterans Friday that if they mobilize - "get your posts to send letters ... " he told them, most of them VFW and Legion post commanders - the Congress probably would not cut veterans benefits $14 billion over the next 10 years.

Well, hallelujah. Maybe it will even restore benefits in the year of the war, and then bleed them off a little at a time when there is less attention being paid. Hardly anyone notices, for example, that the VA Hospital in Northport has closed one wing after another over recent years; hardly anyone notices except people who can calibrate the loss.

"I'm one of the [Northport] VA Hospital's success stories," said Jim Vaughan, a Vietnam combat veteran who attended Friday's meeting with Bishop at the American Legion Hall in Patchogue, and who credits the VA's detoxification unit and in-patient alcoholics' treatment program with saving his life in 1989. Both units have since closed. "They still have outpatient treatment," he said. "But if you go in for detox and they discharge you at night and tell you to come back the next day ... I don't know about anyone else, but if that was me I would have headed to the nearest bar."

What do you call it when political leaders hype war at every turn, but dis the warriors when no one is watching?

They call it supporting the troops.

You also can call it supporting those very wealthy campaign contributors who paid for their tax cut and want it now, dammit, to hell with everything and everyone else.

Reprinted from Newsday:
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-livit063208858apr06,0,3773532.column

[sylvester80]

Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians
Posted on Saturday, April 05 @ 09:06:55 EST
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From CTV

OTTAWA — Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw "incredible" levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad.

Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad.

"There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla," Huguenin said in a interview by satellite telephone.

"We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening."



Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village of Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy fighting between American troops and Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the result of "bombs, projectiles."

"At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at that place . . . but it was definitely a different pattern from what we had seen in Basra or Baghdad.

"There will be investigations I am sure."

Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the flow of wounded, said Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100 wounded a day.

Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered superficial shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he said.

But the pattern in Hilla was completely different.

"In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror."

At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two days, he said -- far beyond its capacity.

"Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had to manage, that was all."

The city is no longer accessible, he added.

Red Cross staff are also concerned about what may be happening in other smaller centres south of Baghdad.

"We do not know what is going on in Najaf and Kabala. It has become physically impossible for us to reach out to those cities because the major road has become a zone of combat."

The Red Cross was able to claim one significant success this week: it played a key role in re-establishing water supplies at Basra.

Power for a water-pumping station had been accidentally knocked out in the attack on the city, leaving about a million people without water. Iraqi technicians couldn't reach the station to repair it because it was under coalition control.

The Red Cross was able to negotiate safe passage for a group of Iraqi engineers who crossed the fire line and made repairs. Basra now has 90 per cent of its normal water supply, said Huguenin.

Huguenin, a Swiss, is one of six international Red Cross workers still in Baghdad. The team includes two Canadians, Vatche Arslanian of Oromocto, N.B., and Kassandra Vartell of Calgary.

The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling for donations to help cope. The Red Cross Web site is: www.redcross.ca

Reprinted from CTV:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1049413227648_10/?hub=SpecialEvent3

[sylvester80]

US heavy-handedness baffles British soldiers
Contributed by Bucanero on Saturday, April 05 @ 09:05:50 EST
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By Daniel McGory, Australian News Interactive

THE American infantryman controlling the checkpoint on the road to Nasiriyah was clad in so much body armour he looked like Darth Vader.

Dark goggles covered most of his face, and a khaki scarf was wrapped around his nose and mouth. His M16 assault rifle was pointed at the windscreen of the car, which was clearly being driven by a young woman who had young children in the backseat.

This did not stop the young soldier from screaming at the occupants to "step out of the vehicle and move to the side of the road". How much of that muffled command the frightened woman understood was unclear, but as she hesitated and tried to comfort the youngest of her children, who was trying to clamber over the seat towards her, the infantrymen yelled even louder.



It was difficult to tell who was the more nervous. Rifles remained trained on the mother and children, who were made to stand 20m away from their car while it was searched. American patrols now appear to treat everyone as if they are suicide bombers.

British troops who have witnessed the Americans at close quarters in this war are baffled at their approach to Iraqi civilians. One captain in the Royal Marines, watching a US unit monitor a checkpoint, said: "The Americans are still behaving like invaders, not liberators. They behave as if they hate these people."

Many American troops speak as though they do.

You often hear them describe "Eye-rakis" in disparaging language. One US officer in charge of delivering humanitarian aid earlier this week likened the crush of people waiting to get hold of food and water to a pack of stray dogs.

His troops lashed at those pushing to the front with fists and rifle butts, even firing shots into the air.

When Irish Guards were nearly mobbed by a crowd trying to grab the food they were delivering to Zubayr this week, Major David Hannah urged his men to keep calm and get the people to sit down.

"They need to have their dignity respected," he said.

British commanders are appalled at how the Americans pulverise anything from afar before daring to set foot out of their armoured vehicles.

This was no better illustrated than in the first skirmish of the land war, where the American 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit was handed what should have been the easy capture of the port of Umm Qasr.

Royal Marine officers watched incredulously as their US compatriots bombed and shelled the town for five days. The experience of nearly 30 years policing Ulster has taught British forces that the only way to root out gunmen is to patrol on foot, searching house by house.

The rhetoric of US soldiers is often provocative. An American colonel, asked what the role of the Fifth Corps would be, replied: "We are going in there. We are going to root out the bad guys and kill them." His men whooped and punched the air as if they were watching a football match.

A British officer who witnessed this exchange shook his head, saying: "We are working from a different script but you won't get anyone in Whitehall to admit it."

Reprinted from Australian News Interactive:
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6230427%5E26277,00.html

[sylvester80]

Rich Procter: 'Operation Cancelled Election 2004 is in play...'
Contributed by drprocter on Saturday, April 05 @ 09:02:06 EST
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By Rich Procter

If there's one thing Bush's "brain" Karl Rove is good at, it's creating storylines that our TV Nation will gobble up. If Team Bush had just yelled, "We're going to Baghdad! Yee-Haaa!" they'd have had no chance. That's why Rove & Company developed a storyline as intricate, elaborate and suspenseful as a Jerry Bruckheimer summer blockbuster. They dropped a thousand breadcrumbs, and the "shocked and awed" media whores gobbled up every one.

The goal was to get America's mind off the abysmal economy they'd created, the festering corporate scandals in which they were eyeball-deep, and a 9-11 probe that threatened to reveal to the American people that the Bushies were at best sound asleep, and at worst criminally negligent.

The new "product," as Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card so accurately called it, was rolled out last September. First, the words "Saddam Hussein" replaced "Osama bin Laden" in every Bush speech. Stories were leaked how "concerned" Bush was about Saddam's burgeoning "nuclear program."



Bush and Blair both produced "proof" that Saddam tried to buy "significant quantities of uranium" from the African nation of Niger. At every opportunity, over and over and over again, Bush and his minions linked Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, till polls showed that half the public thought the Iraqis pulled off 9/11.

Rove and Company had gone to school on the Chinese water torture persecution of Bill Clinton. Always shovel something new at the press, make them feel lucky to get it, never let them look too hard at it, always evolve the story-line, give it "momentum," don't worry if its true or not - use the prestige of the White House, and DARE them to call you a liar. And if they do, freeze them out. (Helen Thomas, anyone?) And of course the "shock troops" in this disinformation campaign were the Wingnut-Bloviation Battalion - Rush, Bill, Sean, Ollie, etc. ad nauseum. Their job in this was to seize the White House Lying Points and inject them into the Body Politic.

Rove built the story beautifully. First Bush was "concerned." Then he was "very concerned." Then he was "shocked and appalled." Soon, we were told that Bush "couldn't sleep at night as long as Saddam was loose." He - George Bush, Chosen By God (yes, that was part of the story, doncha know) simply HAD to get rid of this madman, even when fellow "Axis of Evil" member Kim Jong Il tried to one-up the Butcher of Baghdad. When it came time to screw the UN, hose NATO and put the hammer down on Dubya Dubya Three, Bush had a Senate approval, based on the Niger nuclear story...which we now know was clumsy, obvious fake, spun out of badly forged documents.

And where are we now? Right where Karl" The Brain" Rove wants us - between Iraq and a hard place. Now we've got to support the troops no matter what! Forged documents? How can you even bring that up, you traitor! No evidence Saddam helped Osama? What are you, part of the "Hate America First" brigade, Comrade?

The reason I bring all this up is quite simple - the Bushies are starting to roll out another product, and this one is even scarier than the ginned-up "war" in Iraq. Here's an e-mail (captured by atrios.blogspot.com) from "GOPTEAMLEADER" to the faithful, about John Kerry's courageous call for "regime change" to oust the Boy King:

"Dear XXX,

Yesterday, John Kerry shocked many Americans when he called for "regime change" right here in the U.S. By comparing our commander-in-chief to Saddam Hussein's brutal regime at a time of war, Kerry showed just what he is willing to say to appeal to liberal Democrat primary voters. RNC Chairman Marc Racicot quickly responded saying, "Senator Kerry crossed a grave line when he dared to suggest the replacement of America's commander-in- chief at a time when America is at war."

Catch that last line? Kerry..."DARED SUGGEST THE REPLACEMENT OF AMERICA'S COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF AT A TIME WHEN AMERICA IS AT WAR." Do you have any doubt whatsoever that next November we'll still "be at war" with a huge occupying force in Iraq? Rumsfeld is already trying to whack the Syria/Iran hornet's nest, so we may be there too (another story-line Rove & Company are developing). North Korea? Why not?

Get ready for the wingnut Screech Monkeys to put this in play, and play it for all its worth - "We're at war! God has chosen our President to lead us! To question him is to question America itself! To suggest replacing him is treason! To mount a political campaign against him is beyond the pale! These elections must be...(wait for it...wait for it...) "postponed indefinitely!!"

If you think this is crazy, did you honestly thing the Bushies could commit the United States to a war in the Middle East in a year, using nothing but colossal nerve, mind-boggling cynicism, and a story line built out of wingnut wish dreams and media hot air?

[sylvester80]

Is Bush a textbook, clinical psychopathic sociopath?
Posted on Saturday, April 05 @ 08:59:15 EST
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Are psychopaths running our government?

By Dan "Thumb" Mather, Digby's Blog

Throughout the 90's we employed anywhere from 6-15 people at any given time. Of all the destructive traits we had to contend with the sociopath was both the most destructive and the most difficult problem employee to identify. After several near ruinous encounters with this type of employee I developed a simple test; if someone made me psycho, they were a psychopath. On the small scale that is our company this has worked fine for years but now I find this same curious effect occurring with our present administration; they're making me psycho.

Greater luminaries than I have declared this group to be Psychotic Personalities (Kurt Vonnegut recently caught flack for suggesting as much) but I wanted to know if there was any means by which to make a more serious medical diagnosis than "because they make me crazy." There is. Giles Whittell, writing for the Times On Line, interviewed Dr. Robert Hare, who, along with his colleague Dr Paul Babiak, will publish a book called Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work later this year. Hare defined psychopathy for modern scientists with an exhaustive questionnaire called the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). Introduced in 1980 it has become an internationally recognized tool for identifying psychopaths. From the article:



. . . the PCL-R revealed that psychopaths are everywhere. Most are non-violent, but all leave a trail of havoc through their families and work environments, using and abusing colleagues and loved ones, endlessly manipulating others, constantly reinventing themselves. Hare puts the average North American incidence of psychopathy at 1 per cent of the population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics, business management ... and journalism. [emphasis mine]

[...]

Hare and Babiak will also produce a new diagnostic tool based on the PCL-R but designed to help businesses to keep their recruits and senior management psychopath-free.

Enter the B-Scan. It won't be available to everyone, and it won't be free. If you are B-Scanned, it won't be you answering the questions. It will be your colleagues, grading your personal style, interpersonal relations, organizational maturity and antisocial tendencies according to 16 buzz words, none of them uplifting. They include the following: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, erratic, unreliable, unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying.

Yikes. Who isn't most of these things, at least some of the time?

I meet Dr Hare in a London hotel and find him used to such anxieties. I know, I know, he says. People read this stuff and suddenly everyone around them is a psychopath. They pick up on three or four of the characteristics and say "yeah, he's one". But it's not like that. It's a medical syndrome. You've got to have the whole package.


Not having access to the specific B-Scan test or the ability to personally interview administration colleagues I'm going to use the next best thing, a recent article in USA Today describing Bush by those close to him that can be run through the filter of The serial bully: Identifying the psychopath or sociopath in our midst.

He rarely jokes with staffers these days and occasionally startles them with sarcastic putdowns.

- is frequently sarcastic, especially in contexts where sarcasm is inappropriate and unprofessional

''He's got that steely-eyed look . . .'' says a friend who has spent time with the president since the war began.

- often reported as having an evil stare, sometimes with eyes that appear black rather than colored

He's infuriated by reporters and retired generals who publicly question the tactics of the war plan. Similar complaints continue, and some people outside the administration are pressing current Bush advisers to urge him to retool his war plan. The president's aides say he's aware of those efforts but ''discounts'' them.

- displays a compulsive need to criticize whilst simultaneously refusing to value, praise and acknowledge others, their achievements, or their existence

His history degree from Yale. . .

- often fraudulently claims qualifications, experience, titles, entitlements or affiliations which are ambiguous, misleading, or bogus

. . . makes him mindful of the importance of the moment.

- has a short-term focus and often cannot think or plan ahead more than 24 hours

He's a critic who sees himself as the aggrieved victim of the news media and second-guessers.

- feigns victimhood when held accountable, usually by . . . claiming they're the one being bullied and harassed

- presents as a false victim when outwitted

Bush, who was drilled in corporate style while earning his MBA at Harvard, prefers his days to be structured.

- is fastidious, often has an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness or orderliness

Bush has imposed an almost military discipline on himself.

- finds ritual important and comforting, and frequently indulges in ritual and ritualistic activity

He understands that he is the one person in the country, in this case really the one person in the world, who has a responsibility to protect and defend freedom.

- is selfish and acts out of self-interest, self-aggrandizement and self-preservation at all times; everything can be traced back to the self

- is convinced of their superiority and has an overbearing belief in their qualities of leadership but cannot distinguish between leadership (maturity, decisiveness, assertiveness, co-operation, trust, integrity) and bullying (immaturity, impulsiveness, aggression, manipulation, distrust, deceitfulness)

- wraps himself or herself in a flag or tradition and usurps others' objectives, thereby nurturing compliance, reverence, deference, endorsement and obeisance; however, such veneration and allegiance is divisive, being a corruption for personal power which exhibits itself through the establishment of a clique, coterie, cabal, faction, or gang



Of course this is all simply anecdotal evidence that our Commander in Chief is certifiable, but there is one more distinguishing test that Dr. Hare uses to determine if someone is indeed a psychopath:

Babiak certainly counsels caution. Being psychopathic is not a sin, let alone a ground on its own for dismissal. But underpinning the PCL-R is hard science, hard to ignore. Before he published it, Hare performed two now-famous studies which suggest that psychopaths really are different from the rest of us. In the first, subjects were told to watch a timer counting down to zero, at which point they felt a harmless but painful electric shock. Non-psychopaths showed mounting anxiety and fear. Psychopaths didn't even sweat.

Could Bush's jocular demeanor, his "Feel good" as he prepared to declare war fit this description?

In the second, the two groups had their brain activity and response time measured when asked to react to groups of letters, some forming words, some not. Words such as "rape" and "cancer" triggered mental jolts in non-psychopaths. In psychopaths they triggered precisely nothing.

In the absence of such word association games lets instead look back to the morning of 9/11/01. The president is reading to a class when one of his aids approaches and whispers to him that the WTC towers have both just been struck with hijacked airliners. The towers are burning out of control and thousand are presumed dead in the worst terrorist act ever committed on American soil. With zero visible reaction, from a man who is serially unable to hide his emotions (think smirk), the president immediately goes back to and spends the next half hour reading to the class.

People read this stuff and suddenly everyone around them is a psychopath. They pick up on three or four of the characteristics and say "yeah, he's one." But it's not like that. It's a medical syndrome. You've got to have the whole package."

[...]

Being a psychopath is not something that ordinary people aspire to, but neither does it have to involve face-eating cannibalism (Hannibal Lecter probably wasn't a psychopath at all). The central qualification is to show no conscience; to fail to empathize.

[...]

They reveled in risk, took no account of its potential cost to others or themselves, and rose to power during a time of chaos and upheaval.

Are we there yet?

Reprinted from Digby:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2003_03_30_digbysblog_archive.html#92001931