Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Dubya's So Dangerous
London Daily Mirror
22 November 2005
GEORGE W. Bush is the most powerful man in the world. He could also be the most dangerous.
Fanatical leaders like Osama bin Laden provoke terrible acts of terrorism. But President Bush has weapons of mass destruction as well as an unhinged attitude to using them.
Today the Daily Mirror reveals that he planned to bomb a TV station in a friendly Arab nation. An act that would have led to countless retaliatory attacks on Western states.
Fortunately Tony Blair was told of the insane plot and persuaded Mr Bush not to go ahead.
The president wanted to take out the main studios of the Arabic station al-Jazeera because of its coverage of insurgents and terrorism - though any good media outlet would have covered those stories if they had the access.
Mr Bush’s plan was crazy enough against a high-profile civilian target. But to make it worse, the TV station is based in Qatar, a friendly nation where the US-UK invasion of Iraq was planned.
The secret memo revealed by the Mirror casts fresh doubt on claims that other attacks on al-Jazeera were accidents. It looks like these were planned assaults on civilian targets.
We must be thankful that Tony Blair stopped Mr Bush from the attack on Qatar.
But until the White House regime changes, the world should tremble with fear at what this president might do next.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
More secession news
Seceding seldom succeeds, but Vermonters try
By Josh Burek
The Christian Science Monitor
MONTPELIER, VT. – Politics, like fall foliage, turns faster in Vermont. The state was out front opposing slavery and first to approve civil unions. And if the activists who met here last month succeed, the state will set another precedent: first to secede since 1861. No, this wasn’t a clandestine meeting of militants. It was a convention for Vermonters, held in the plush, gold-domed capitol.
And its keynote - that separating from the United States is a just remedy for the federal government’s trampling of state sovereignty - is echoing beyond the snow-capped Green Mountains.
From Hawaii to South Carolina, dozens of groups across America are promoting a similar cause. Their efforts aren’t politically popular - yet. But they are reviving one of the most passionate debates in US history: Can a state legally secede?
For the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), the group that hosted the convention, the answer is “yes.”
“If we had a right to join the Union, we certainly have a right to disband from it,” SVR founder Thomas Naylor told the assembly. In his view, Vermonters should join the cause if they:
* Say the US has lost moral authority and is unsustainable, ungovernable, and unfixable.
* Want to help take back Vermont from big business, big markets, and big government - and do so peacefully.
Other separatist groups
Naylor’s talking points aren’t unique to Vermont. Separatist groups with diverse causes share the view that the federal government has grown too big and too powerful. Many say obedience to the Constitution would restore America’s lost liberty. But some insist that the federal government long ago overstepped its constitutional powers, leaving secession as a valid recourse.
“Separatism is a Christian principle,” says Cory Burnell, president of Christian Exodus, which aims to relocate thousands of Christian constitutionalists to South Carolina to “redeem” that state’s government. “We talk about secession as potentially necessary because history has demonstrated that where one people stand up, there tends to be another people to rule over them.”
Two views of secession
Ever since the Civil War, many Americans view secession the way President Lincoln did: as an unlawful act of rebellion by the slave-holding Confederate States. Indeed, Lincoln saw it as a tyrannical threat to the principle of democracy.
But movements like SVR counter with two points. First, they argue that secession is a continuing theme from America’s formative years. And second, they say that Lincoln was not a noble savior of the Union, but a racist warmonger intent on strengthening federal authority.
To mine intellectual capital for these ideas, Yankee-based SVR has dug deep into what critics call the neo-Confederate vein of Southern ideology. The group has promoted the work of scholars affiliated with the League of the South, which advocates greater autonomy for the Southern states.
One of them, Donald Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Atlanta’s Emory University, wrote a cover story - “What Is Secession?” - for the Vermont Commons newsletter, in which he philosophically defended the principle.
The 15 states that left the Soviet Union beginning in 1991, Dr. Livingston says, show that secession can be a peaceful instrument to dissolve an empire that’s become dangerously large.
“The public corporation known as the United States is too large,” he says. “It needs to be downsized like any other corporation.”
Secession was a vital part of American history, Livingston and others say. New England, for instance, tried to secede several times, most notably in 1814 over the war with Britain. The Declaration of Independence, they insist, was a secessionist document - not a revolutionary appeal to natural rights, as other historians maintain. And the right of secession, they argue, is implied in the 10th Amendment.
“The right to coerce a state in the Union is not delegated to the federal government,” says Mr. Burnell of Christian Exodus.
Questions of legality
Today, most experts say states have no legal right to secede.
“To exercise the right of secession requires a violation of national law,” says Herman Belz, a professor of history at the University of Maryland.
That didn’t stop some frustrated voters in blue states from urging secession after President Bush won reelection last November. Nor will it stop SVR, which pledges to use all nonviolent means for Vermont to become “independent.”
In fact, the group is already thinking nationally, with founder Naylor and author Kirkpatrick Sale teaming up to form the Middlebury Institute, a think tank devoted to secession.
Observers and SVR devotees alike say it will be difficult to gain popular support. “[SVR is] very sincere, but it has absolutely no chance of happening,” says Eric Davis, a professor of political science at Vermont’s Middlebury College.
But SVR takes inspiration from the history implied in its name. Vermont was an independent republic once before, between 1777 and 1791.
Rest of the article at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1108/p01s04-uspo.html
Monday, November 14, 2005
This isn't the real America
By Jimmy Carter
39th president of the United States
IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.
These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.
At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.
Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of “preemptive war,” an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.
These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation’s tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of “You are either with us or against us!” has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.
Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.
Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.
Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment” on people in U.S. custody.
Instead of reducing America’s reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of “first use” of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.
Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation’s global environmental policies.
Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America’s working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).
I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.
As the world’s only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.
It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Statement from Sen. Ted Kennedy
November 10, 2005
Earlier this week, several of our Republican colleagues came to the Senate floor and attempted to blame individual Democratic Senators for their errors in judgment about the war in Iraq.
It was little more than a devious attempt to obscure the facts and take the focus off the real reason we went to war in Iraq. 150,000 American troops are bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq because the Bush Administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence to justify a war that America never should have fought.
As we know all too well, Iraq was not an imminent threat. It had no nuclear weapons. It had no persuasive links to Al Qaeda, no connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
But the President wrongly and repeatedly insisted that it was too dangerous to ignore the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, and his ties to Al Qaeda.
In his march to war, President Bush exaggerated the threat to the American people. It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam’s ability to provide nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda justified immediate war.
Administration officials suggested the threat from Iraq was imminent, and went to great lengths to convince the American people that it was.
At a roundtable discussion with European journalists last month, Secretary Rumsfeld deviously insisted: “I never said imminent threat.”
In fact, Secretary Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on September 18, 2002, “…Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent—that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.”
In May 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked whether we went to war “because we said WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the United States.” Fleischer responded, “Absolutely.”
What else could National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have been suggesting, other than an imminent threat—an extremely imminent threat—when she said on September 8, 2002, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
President Bush himself may not have used the word “imminent”, but he carefully chose strong and loaded words about the nature of the threat—words that the intelligence community never used—to persuade and prepare the nation to go to war against Iraq.
In the Rose Garden on October 2, 2002, as Congress was preparing to vote on authorizing the war, the President said the Iraqi regime “is a threat of unique urgency.”
In a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, President Bush Specifically invoked the danger of nuclear devastation: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
At an appearance in New Mexico on October 28, 2002, after Congress had voted to authorize war, and a week before the election, President Bush said Iraq is a “real and dangerous threat.”
At a NATO summit on November 20, 2002, President Bush said Iraq posed a “unique and urgent threat.”
In Fort Hood, Texas on January 3, 2003, President Bush called the Iraqi regime a “grave threat.”
Nuclear weapons. Mushroom cloud. Unique and urgent threat. Real and dangerous threat. Grave threat. These words were the Administration’s rallying cry for war. But they were not the words of the intelligence community, which never suggested that the threat from Saddam was imminent, or immediate, or urgent.
It was Vice President Cheney who first laid out the trumped up argument for war with Iraq to an unsuspecting public. In a speech on August 26, 2002, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he asserted: “…We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons…Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” As we now know, the intelligence community was far from certain. Yet the Vice President had been convinced.
On September 8, 2002, he was even more emphatic about Saddam. He said, “[We] do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” The intelligence community was deeply divided about the aluminum tubes, but Vice President Cheney was absolutely certain.
One month later, on the eve of the watershed vote by Congress to authorize the war, President Bush said it even more vividly. He said, “Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes…which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed…Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.”
In fact, as we now know, the intelligence community was far from convinced of any such threat. The Administration attempted to conceal that fact by classifying the information and the dissents within the intelligence community until after the war, even while making dramatic and excessive public statements about the immediacy of the danger.
In October 2002, the intelligence agencies jointly issued a National Intelligence Estimate stating that “most agencies” believed that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program after inspectors left in 1998, and that, if left unchecked, Iraq “probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”
The State Department’s intelligence bureau, however, said the “available evidence” was inadequate to support that judgment. It refused to predict when “Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon.”
About the claims of purchases of nuclear material from Africa, the State Department’s intelligence bureau said that claims of Iraq seeking to purchase nuclear material from Africa were “highly dubious.” The CIA sent two memorandums to the White House stressing strong doubts about those claims.
But the following January, in 2003, the President included the claims about Africa in his State of the Union Address, and conspicuously cited the British government as the source of that intelligence.
Information about nuclear weapons was not the only intelligence distorted by the Administration. On the question of whether Iraq was pursuing a chemical weapons program, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in September 2002 that “there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has—or will—establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.”
That same month, however, Secretary Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam has chemical weapons stockpiles.
He said, “We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction,” that Saddam “has amassed large clandestine stocks of chemical weapons.” He said that “he has stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons,” and that Iraq has “active chemical, biological and nuclear programs.” He was wrong on all counts.
Yet the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate actually quantified the size of the stockpiles, stating that “although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 metric tons of CW agents—much of it added in the last year.” In his address to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went further, calling the 100 to 500 metric ton stockpile a “conservative estimate.”
Secretary Rumsfeld made an even more explicit assertion in his interview on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on March 30, 2003. When asked about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he said, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
The Administration’s case for war based on the linkage between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda was just as misguided.
Significantly here as well, the Intelligence Estimate did not find a cooperative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. On the contrary, it stated only that such a relationship might develop in the future if Saddam was “sufficiently desperate”—in other words, if America went to war. But the estimate placed “low confidence” that, even in desperation, Saddam would give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda.
A year before the war began, senior Al Qaeda leaders themselves had rejected a link with Saddam. The New York Times reported last June that a top Al Qaeda planner and recruiter captured in March 2002 told his questioners last year that “the idea of working with Mr. Hussein’s government had been discussed among Al Qaeda leaders, but Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals.” According to the Times, an Al Qaeda chief of operations had also told interrogators that it did not work with Saddam.
Mel Goodman, a CIA analyst for 20 years, put it bluntly: “Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were enemies. Bin Laden considered and said that Saddam was the socialist infidel. These were very different kinds of individuals competing for power in their own way and Saddam Hussein made very sure that Al Qaeda couldn’t function in Iraq.”
In February 2003, investigators at the FBI told the New York Times they were baffled by the Administration’s insistence on a solid link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. One investigator said: “We’ve been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don’t think it’s there.”
But President Bush was not deterred. He was relentless in playing to America’s fears after the devastating tragedy of 9/11. He drew a clear link—and drew it repeatedly—between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
On September 25, 2002, at the White House, President Bush flatly declared: “You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.”
In his State of the Union Address in January 2003, President Bush said, “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda,” and that he could provide “lethal viruses” to a “shadowy terrorist network.”
Two weeks later, in his Saturday radio address to the nation, a month before the war began, President Bush described the ties in detail, saying, “Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks …”
He said: “Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts to work with Al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. An Al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.”
Who gave the President this information? The NIE? Scooter Libby? Chalabi?
In fact, there was no operational link and no clear and persuasive pattern of ties between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda. A 9/11 Commission Staff Statement in June of 2004, put it plainly: “Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.” The 9/11 Commission Report stated clearly that there was no “operational” connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. That fact should have been abundantly clear to the President. Iraq and Al Qaeda had diametrically opposing views of the world.
The Pentagon¹s favorite Iraqi dissident, Ahmed Chalabi, is actually proud of what happened. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi said in February 2004. “As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush Administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords, if he wants.”
What was said before does matter. The President’s words matter. The Vice President’s words matter. So do those of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and other high officials in the Administration. And they did not square with the facts.
The Intelligence Committee agreed to investigate the clear discrepancies, and it’s important that they get to the bottom of this, and find out how and why President Bush took America to war in Iraq. Americans are dying. Already more than 2000 have been killed, and more than 15,000 have been wounded.
The American people deserve the truth. It’s time for the President to stop passing the buck and for him to be held accountable.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Handwriting's on the Wall
It’s late evening, and the results are pouring in from today’s elections. What a difference a year makes.
People have finally gotten pissed off at what Bush and his cronies have been getting away with for the last 5 years. Poll after poll shows that on any area they care to poll on, from social and health policy to matters of finances and war, nobody trusts Bush and his pack of liars any more. By a margin of over 2-to-1, people now say that this country is going in the wrong direction.
‘Bout time - a lot of us have been screaming that for years. Wake up and smell the hubris, folks.
A few years ago we were respected - the sole remaining superpower, a beacon of democracy, the “light on the hill.”
Now look at us - a pathetic, staggering troll, serially menacing those who have the temerity to sit on “our” oil, who don’t follow “our” religion, who don’t toe our line.
Worst of all, it’s all self-inflicted:
The Republicans in Congress have shut out (sometimes literally) the Democrats from involvement in virtually every decision for years. They wouldn’t listen to debate, they controlled every committee, they wouldn’t allow Democrats to amend bills. They have blocked, delayed and whitewashed all serious inquiry into the workings of the Bush administration.
This rubber-stamp Congress has failed in their most important role - that of oversight - to follow up on the business of governance, thoughtfully considering all available options and advising the President on the country’s needs. This country is a republic, and Congress was designed to do the people’s business, not to do the bidding of corporations and Karl Rove. Are our elected representatives mere marionettes, dancing to the tune of Bush and Cheney?
I haven’t seen a single thing out of this Congress that hasn’t been to the benefit of the already rich and powerful. So many bills were cloaked in Orwellian names, bills that were designed to unravel the very thing they were supposedly about. Names like “Clean Skies”, “Healthy Forests” or the “Patriot Act” that repeals many of our Constitutional protections.
Bipartisanship? That must be for wimps and losers. Well, I guess it means that the flip side of that coin is we now know with complete certainty whose fault it is when things start to fall apart.
Bush and Cheney have railroaded the nation into an illegal and immoral preemptive war on the basis of a deliberate campaign of now-proven lies. They have trashed the reputation of the U.S. so badly that it may take decades for this country to be viewed as trustworthy, or even to be looked up to again.
We are now a pariah - in a recent UN vote against the use of torture, only the U.S., Israel and two tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific voted against the measure. 182 countries voted to outlaw torture. But Bush wants to “have the option.” It makes me want to puke.
They have stolen from the poor and given to the rich. They have pandered to wacko religious extremists in any way they can. They have mismanaged virtually everything they have touched. They have sold our air, water and other natural resources off to their biggest contributors, letting industry lobbyists write the new and largely unenforced rules. And they have handed the levers of government, power and no-bid guaranteed profit over to soulless corporate carpetbaggers.
It’s the Crony Channel - all cronies, all the time. With corruption for all…
They have committed so many crimes, in so many areas, it may be impossible to ever get to the bottom of it.
But then again, maybe we will…
My guess is that the Republicans in Congress will lift their faces from the trough of money and power long enough to suddenly notice that the voters are, indeed, pissed. Then many will start to break rank, fearing for their re-election chances next November. But it may be far too late.
Already, it seems that Bush’s last-minute “help” was the kiss of death in the Virginia governor’s race. And unless the congressional Republicans are willing to toss Bush’s entire budget and priorities out, they will be swept from office. If Bush has to face a Democratic House and Senate in 2007, there will be no one left to stonewall, protect and make excuses for him any more.
Chimpeachment, baby.
Payback’s a bitch…
- Bob Woods
